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8pz2xa | How do wrist pedometers (like fitbit) actually know how many steps you've taken. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you walk, every time your foot hits the ground it decelerates - going from moving to stationary very quickly. This sends a little shock wave of acceleration up your body that can be sensed anywhere. (Note: acceleration = change in velocity, whether speeding up or slowing down). The Fitbit has an accelerometer, a tiny electromechanical device that can sense acceleration and generate an electrical signal. The Fitbit looks at that signal for the strong spikes that happen on each step and counts them. It's not 100% perfect, it will miss a few steps and count a few false-steps but overall they've tuned it to be pretty accurate.",
"I've actually developed commercial products that do this, so I certainly can explain it, but keeping it at a five-year-old level is pretty hard. The other posters are somewhat correct, but there's more to it. The accelerometer in the device senses the shock that is produced when your feet hits the floor. It doesn't care about arm-swing. Now, just doing this would kinda-sorta work, but you'd get a lot of \"false positives\". Like banging your hand on a desk would give you steps, typing on a keyboard would give you steps, etc, etc. To address that, we use a filtering algorithm that removes all frequencies except the ones between about 2 and 6Hz (typical slow-walking pace to fast running), and only analyze that. Also, there's another \"algorithm\" that reduces the false positives, which is that the steps doesn't start counting until the device sees 5 (or so) steps after each other in a fixed time-span."
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8pzmet | Why can't shows like NCIS, Law and Order SVU, and Criminal Minds reference real world things? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Either to avoid it looking like a paid product placement, or to avoid the owner of the trademark complaining or even suing. For example, if a show revolves around a terrorist attack which was organized by the terrorists using, say, WhatsApp, then the makers of WhatsApp might not be too happy about their trademark being linked to criminal activities in this way.",
"They can, and do. But they charge for the privilege of having brands mentioned/displayed on their show. So whenever you see them drinking a can of coke on one of those shows, the reason you saw that is because Coke *paid* them to put that can there. To keep the value of that product placement high they are very careful not to display or mention any brands that have not paid to be on the show. That leads to stupid situations in which the show writers have no choice but to make up a word that sounds like a brand but isn't since they want to both sound relevant to the audience while still being able to charge for product placement. Some shows are notably less stringent about charging for product placement. For example, McDonalds doesn't appear to have paid anything to have the Szechuan Sauce thing placed in Rick and Morty - or to have even been aware of it until after the show aired. But the value that product placement had for McDonalds and the reason that companies are normally willing to pay for it should be obvious."
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8q07p4 | Why does an emulator run some ROMs perfectly fine but other ROMs won't even launch or are completely broken | I suddenly wanted to play LBP ^^specifically ^^2 ^^because ^^I ^^legally ^^own ^^it but couldn't find my PlayStation so I though I would try to emulate it (because why not). A couple of hours of confusion later and I find out the latest achievement for the emulator is that LBP 2 actually launches. So why is it that this game doesn't work properly but others work fine? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because the software emulator was written to emulate only some (most) of the hardware. When the rom tries to access something the emulator can't emulate, it crashes.",
"Imagine you're a fake contractor, as in you are unlicensed, uninsured and you've never studied a day in your life for anything contracting-related but you pretend to have all the certifications you need. (In my country you have all sorts of certificates for being a contractor, but I'm sure that's not the case everywhere. Pretend it is for a second.) You try to get hired for different jobs. Some people will only need their house painted, or some lamps hung. Nothing too difficult. You complete those jobs with ease and they are none the wiser. Some people will have more technically challenging jobs. Those cross-beams you put in aren't exactly secured right and the room and walls aren't level, but as long as no one looks to closely everone is happy and no one is the wiser. Some people however are very demanding of your work. They want to be involved in every step of the way, they have very specific requirements and what's worse, they seem to know a lot more about contracting than you'll ever will. You try to bluff your way through it, but it's just too complex. You'll either already wash out during the interview phase, or they'll catch you the moment they see you do something dumb or unexpected. Regardless at some point your work won't match what they expect of a genuine contractor and the whole process grinds to a halt. In this analogy, the contractor is the emulator and the clients are the game. A game is built to run on a standard set of hardware. Some games have been very optimized (or programmed in a hacky way) and thus rely heavily on the inner workings of the machine (documented or not). Others don't require that much of the system and will still be very playable even if the emulation isn't 100%. Then there's also the matter of the most popular games usually being emulated first because the most programmers want to run that game on the emulator. Most emulators are open source (this means all sorts of people from all over the work can work on it together and add contributions) and depend on the motivation of their contributors. The complete answer is a bit more nuanced than this analogy but I hopes it illustrates the big picture.",
"Good question. I’m guessing that console games are optimized for one type of hardware - their original console. Emulators can’t anticipate the different methods that the various games have utilized for optimization which can become increasingly complex from title to title. Optimization tricks often take advantage of unique behaviors directly at the hardware level, which emulators by definition can’t anticipate since the hardware they’re working with can vary widely from one system to the next. That’s why many developers either exclusively for one type of console or start with PC and then later port to consoles. That’s why a console game whose engine relies on optimization tricks at the hardware level may not even load on an emulator."
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8q1025 | What are the noises a printer makes when you first turn it on? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"ELI5: Turning a printer on is like a blind person entering a room with no memories of the room. The blind person would walk around with a cane to check the size of the room and position of furniture to know what's up. The printer checks a bunch of stuff — like the printer head position — by moving them around, because it doesn't always have special sensors for everything. It also needs to unclog the ink cartridges as they dry up quickly, and needs to take precautions to make sure there isn't paper jammed in it. It can't \"see\" what's going on so it will do these every time you turn it on to make sure the most common issues are sorted before printing. ---- More details: I took apart several cheap inkjet printers and have found out exactly what many of the noises are. To unclog the cartridges, the printer moves the cartridge to a special position above a funnel and sprays ink onto it (ink manufacturers love this feature). A pump then sucks the ink away into a simple sponge located in the bottom of the printer. The reason this is so noisy is because they save costs by only having as few motors in there as possible. The motor that drives the paper forward is the same motor that drives the funnel pump, except it runs backwards for that, so when the pump is active, the whole paper drive mechanism is also turning causing a whole lot of unnecessary noise. Another important thing printers do is reset themselves mechanically. When you turn a printer on, it has no idea where the print head is, and whether or not there is paper still halfway in it. After all, the printer could have been unplugged while in the middle of printing and it wouldn't know, so it needs to account for that possibility. Starting to print without being 100% sure that the print head is where it should be could damage the printer. So it will move the head back and forth until it hits a switch that tells it that the head is in the correct position. It will also drive the paper out until there can't possibly be any more paper stuck into it. It will do this even if there is no paper, because it's cheaper to just do this every time than to build a switch to detect whether or not there is paper there. Of course all printers are different but this type of thinking is present in all of them to some degree.",
"It's moving all of its arms inside to make sure they still work after the last time it was used. This is to make sure it doesn't try to print something if it's broken and break itself more then spray ink/toner all over the mess."
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8q18m7 | what do all the numbers on my wall outlet to usb-a/c mean? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Read where is says the output amps (e.g 1A 2A 1.5A). The higher the ampage, the faster your device will charge.",
"It will probably say something like 120-240v X A~ / 5v Y A with a dotted line parallel to a straight one. Everything before the slash is what electricity it can accept as an input. In my example, the ~ means AC, and the dotted lines symbol means DC. So the example accepts 120-240v (the two prevalent mains voltages across the world, meaning it can be used on an adapter. It accepts AC and outputs 5v DC, good for almost all mobile phones. The current is given in amps, hence X A and Y A, and since the example is stepping down voltage, it must step up current, normally allowing a small amount more at the input for power loss too.",
"USB type chargers are constant voltage power supplies. That is they have some DC voltage they are suppose to put out. A USB charger typically puts out 5V, and that's what basically all devices expect. They also have a maximum current, that is they can provide up to some specific current. Common numbers are .1A, .5A, 1A, and 2.1A. They usually don't go higher because the USB plug itself doesn't work well with higher currents. Current\\*voltage is the total power that the charger puts out. When a device connects it needs to draw a current, the exact details are a little complicated., but a phone typically acts like a resistor that would cause the wanted amount of current to be drawn at the given voltage. Anyways, higher current is better, it will get you a faster charge, standard USB chargers are always 5V. I believe some of the newer ones (like the samsung charger) go up to higher voltages (so you'll see it listed at 5-19V, 2.1A). The phones that can take the higher voltage will request it. USB-C changes the connector to something that can take over 2.1A and allows for a much wider range of voltages. Thus a USB-C charger can go up to 20V @ 5A which is enough to charge pretty much any laptop (100W). And for selecting chargers and such, the voltage must match, the current on the power supply generally must be higher than the device connected to it. Phones are a little different because they can adjust their power requirements to the charger."
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8q4pxv | What creates the sounds recorded from the planets in our solar system? How are the sounds recorded if there is no air in space for the sound waves to travel through? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It’s not actual sound waves. It’s the demodulation of radio waves generated by the sun and planets."
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8q7obo | if you light a lighter in front of a TV, why does the reflection show 4 tiny rainbows around the flame? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This is to do with, not the display itself, but the layers of diffusers that make up the backlight behind the display An LCD TV consists of a backlight and an LCD panel. The backlight's job is to produce an even spread of light across the display. You first have an array of LEDs, but those LEDs are point sources, and you don't want lots of bright dots. So the light has to be spread out. They do this with sheets of plastic etched with fine lines. These lines bend the light and spread it out - but only in one direction. If you only had one of these sheets, you'd have an array of lines, one for each LED. So instead they use many sheets, each sheet with lines at an angle to the one beneath. With enough of them, the light is spread evenly. It is these fine lines etched into plastic that produces those rainbows. Each line reflects the light of your lighter when the angle is right. You get a spot of light from each line, which makes a line of light stretching away from the reflection of the lighter. But the lines are close enough that you get interference - as the angle increases, the distance the light has to travel between scratches increases, and you find places where, for one color of light, the distance the light travels is exactly one-half wavelength, so the peaks of the light waves line up with the troughs, and cancel out. When you cancel out one color of light, then you only see the other colors. This is the same effect that gives CDs and DVDs their rainbow appearance. And this explanation is way too long."
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8q9eez | Why do some fluorescent lights flicker on and off for a short while when switched on? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A fluorescent tube is a type of electrical discharge lamp, an electrical arc has to be established between either end of the tube. In modern lights this is done electronically, which is usually a smoother less dramatic process. In older lamps, they used what was called a switch start procedure. Power would be applied, which would warm up the electrodes at either end of the lamp, and then when that is disconnected, an electrical ballast would send a blast of power across the tube in an attempt to start the arc. This might go through three or four cycles before a steady arc is established and the light begins properly working. This is why on old lamps you get the typical flick-flick-flick-ping as they light."
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8qakyf | In the picture; if each “normal brain” were normal; why do they all look different? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The brain is very complicated and performs many, many different tasks. When we're looking at scans to establish a baseline \"normal\" there are dozens of different ways to do so. For example, one might look at activity levels of certain parts of the brain and isolate them so that parts we're not interested in for whatever the purpose is don't show up on the scan. There are also variables such as activity levels based on different tasks being performed. For example, testing the ability to focus and testing empathy responses are going to produce different \"normals\" because the nature of the task is different so different parts of the brain are going to have higher levels of activity."
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8qbn9z | what does open source mean and why is it preferred in the world of tech? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yarr! Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained: 1. [ELI5: What is open source software and why is it such a big deal? ]( URL_0 ) ^(_36 comments_) 1. [ELI5: What does it mean when software is open source? How come others can't just look at the coding of closed source software? ]( URL_1 ) ^(_17 comments_) 1. [ELI5: What does \"open source\" mean when people are referring to software and programs? ]( URL_4 ) ^(_61 comments_) 1. [ELI5: What is open source software, how does it work, why is it preferable, and is it secure? ]( URL_2 ) ^(_7 comments_) 1. [ELI5: Open source vs Closed source ]( URL_3 ) ^(_3 comments_)",
"Let's say you write code for a living. When you write code (let's say in Python), what you are writing is human-readable, but it is not machine-readable. Before a computer can execute the code you've written, it has to be compiled. After it is compiled, it is not human-readable, it is only machine-readable. So when you have a copy of Windows for your home PC, you have the compiled version, not the source code, because Microsoft doesn't want you to modify Windows (for yourself, or for other people). If something is open source, that means the pre-compiled version is out there and accessible to anyone who wants to modify it for their use (usually the only requirement is that you don't try to take credit for the whole thing, just the part you changed). Open source is so that people don't have to keep re-inventing the wheel for every single project they do. They can use existing code and then make their own modifications."
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21ik6j/eli5_what_is_open_source_software_and_why_is_it/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6bwkz4/eli5_what_does_it_mean_when_software_is_open/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4rax2b/eli5_what_is_open_source_software_how_does_it/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/34kwf3/eli5_open_source_vs_closed_source/",
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8qcj0p | How can Jerryrigeverything Scatch the crap out of a fingerprint scanner on a phone and it still works flawlessly? | How do phone fingerprint scanners work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A similar technique is used in fingerprint scanners as in capacitive touch screens, but on a smaller scale, so the capacitance between the ridges of a fingerprint and the valleys of a fingerprint and the scanner surface is different, and a large array of tiny circuits measures the capacitances and converts this into a map of ridges and valleys which is essentially a fingerprint. The top surface is probably coated in a material designed to ensure the safety and longeivity of the scanner, so whilst scratching it off isn't going to ruin it immediately, its not advised."
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8qcnuo | How do polders create more land? | Yes, they don't actually create land, this land was there underneath ocean - but how exactly does it happen? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You build a large water-resistant wall around the area, and then you use pumps (often powered by windmills) to remove the water. As a draining help, if the local tides are really huge you can open floodgates in your walls when the local tide (temporary sea level) is lower than in your polder."
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8qdhae | The lean that Michael Jackson does in Smooth Criminal | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Stage magic. He's wearing special shoes with a hook that goes into a special hole on the stage floor. He wouldn't be able to do it anywhere else.",
"There is a patent for this granted to Jackson himself. There are also behind the scenes footage from the filming which shows practices they did when the technique failed and dancers just lean forward until they fall flat on their faces. Basically the heals of their shoes have some catches in them so that they can kick their heals into some pegs that extend from the floor and lock the heal into place. These pegs would be extended by stage workers just as the dancers were doing the last move before the lean. The last move is a forward shuffle of first the left foot and then the right which locks the pegs into the heals. This allows the dancers to lean forwards without falling. Next move afterwards would shuffle the heals back and release the peg which would return into the floor. It does require very good precision from both the dancers and stage workers to pull it off. It also requires very strong muscles for the dancers as they would have no other support during the lean. Even though they did use technical devices to help it was a very impressive stunt. Similar stunts have been done with the help of CGI or more complex practical effects. For example in the movie 2001 there are scenes with people transitioning to walking on floors to the walls and then the ceiling and in the matrix a similar lean were done in the famous slow motion bullet dodging scene. However none of these could have been done with the complex choreography both before and after this scene. And none could be performed on stage like the Michael Jackson did several times since."
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8qi6q8 | How do text messages "know" which mobile phone to go to? | What prevents another phone accessing my messages? How is the specific recipient device controlled? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your phone authenticates to the mobile network via it's sim card. Only after it has proven that it is the legitimate recipient, the mobile network will send the SMS to the phone. (For the transmission the data gets encrypted, so nobody else can read it)"
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8qkyeq | Why are car keys so different to normal ones? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Cars contain a little computer that talks electronically to a little chip in the fat part of the car key. That's quite expensive so normal locks don't have it."
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8qqvqc | How do the anti-theft scanners that you walk through when leaving/entering a library determine if the items you're carrying have been checked out? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are different approaches. All methods I know use an RFID system (like the NFC antenna that has been a default feature in phones since around 5 years, although usually on a different frequency and with a higher range). These labels consist of a large coil and a small computer chip. When someone walks through the security gate, they will be standing in a weak and changing electromagnetic field. A changing electromagnetic field induces a tiny amount of power in the label's coil, like at the receiving side of a transformer (actually, this is exactly what it is, a large, inefficient transformer without a metal core). This tiny amount of power is enough to run the chip for a short time. The chip then uses the coil to send a signal to a receiver at the gate (there are different transmission methods, but the basic idea of sending a signal to the gate is the same). This signal contains a specific code. Now comes the part where things can be handled differently: Method 1: The code is the same for every label, or or every label of a certain product (all \"Star Wars Episode IV\" Bluerays, for example). In this case, the register sends a \"self\\-destruct\" signal to the chip. This signal either causes the chip to burn itself out intentionally, or to set a certain option, basically causing it to ignore any outside interactions. Method 2: The labels have a serial number and the store has a central data base of those serial numbers. If an item is bought the specific serial number is deleted (\\[edit\\] or flagged as \"may pass without alarm\"). This method is relatively rare (\\[edit\\] for shops), I have so far only noticed it in one department store chain nearby. One big disadvantage of this method is the fact that an item bought in one store might trigger the alarm of another that uses the same system. An advantage is the ability to track single specific items very reliably.",
"There is a small metal strip placed in the spine of the books. This strip is demagnetized by the librarian when you check it out (you’ll see them run the spine of te book across the machine). If the book hasn’t been demagnetized it is detected by the gates at the door."
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8qsxmb | How does watching a footage of video games doesn't require as much graphical resources as playing the game itself? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There is a huge difference between taking an existing image, scaling it up to the displayed resolution (essentially a few matrix operations), and displaying that as compared to computing the locations of certain models, applying texture images onto those models, and drawing that scene from the perspective of a camera at an arbitrary point. The latter is a lot more complex, and the graphics card can do a lot of the required calculations.",
"It's the difference between showing someone a painting you already made. (watching footage) And actually having to make the painting (playing the game). When you play a video game the computer needs to \"render\" the image. It actually has to **make** the image. Which requires a ton of math. The image you are seeing where you playing literally *didn't exist* before you saw it. When you watch a video your computer doesn't make the image. It just loads it from somewhere. Now, hypothetically we could make a video game that's also just a bunch of images stored somewhere. But to do that would take an absolutely astronomical amount of storage space. Easily 100s of terabytes of data. And that's not practical."
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8qu40n | How does emergency call work on cellphones even if they dont get any signal from their carriers? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because any carrier will support a 911 call, even if you are not on the network. If the phone is unable to reach any carrier, it will fail.",
"Generally, a emergency call can use *any* carriers signal. So even if you don't have a signal, another carrier might, and you're allowed to use that signal to place emergency calls",
"You nailed it in your question \"don't get any signal from their carriers.\" As long as there's *any* carrier at all within range, an emergency call can use that. All phones are set to be able to make calls on whatever available network there is for emergency numbers. It's only if you're seriously out in the sticks and there's no network coverage at all that an emergency call won't get through.",
"In the US, and presumably others, cell towers are required to accept any emergency call from any compatible phone, even if that phone is not authorized to communicate on that tower's network (ie, a phone with a T-mobile SIM communicating with a tower operated by Verizon). Because of this, situations can arise where a phone is able to make an emergency call even if it can not make normal calls or data connections as long as any compatible tower can be reached, but no towers from the phone's network are reachable."
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8qu50u | Why do websites (especially when viewed on a smartphone) often load in the text immediatly, and then when you start reading they proceed to remove the text again until everything else has finished loading in? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"This is known as a FOUC - Flash Of Unstylized Content. URL_0 Text loads exceedingly fast. The rest of the pretty website takes much longer.",
"I don't recall seeing what you're describe, but it sound like what's happening is after the text is loaded it's loading the stylesheet. The stylesheet tells it the text should be a particular font, but that font isn't loaded so the text briefly disappears until the font and any other required assets are done loading.",
"First you have to understand that you are loading many different things: - a document that contains the content of the page will load first this is mainly text and markup. After in you will get : - images - stylesheets which give indications on how to display colors, fonts, position of page elements, etc - JavaScript files that make everything dynamic. For example indicating how the page should change when you click a button. The final result is all of those working together. Websites nowadays have become very large and have many files that don't necessarily all load fast. Since the text always gets there first you will see it shifting around, disappearing or changing as a bunch of styles and scripts manipulate it. It could take a couple seconds until you see the final result."
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8qwu2u | How does making a professional song happen? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"From my understanding this is what happens: 1. A producer creates a backing track 2. A ghost writer will write lyrics according to the backing track 3. The producer and ghost writer sell the song to a singer like Ariana Grande or Beyonce. 4. The singer will sing the lyrics to the song at the studio until they achieve an \"ideal\" take. 5. The producer will then use effects in post-production to make the song sound \"perfect\" by using things like autotune, and comping (where the producer will comb through different takes and cherry pick certain moments, and take out breaths so the flow of the song is better, but becomes irrepeatable when performed live)",
"Okay, to a five year old. The idea to support the words that are sung are first ruled out (subject to change based on creative methods). Once this is done then the words are put together in a nice and simple format usually A, B, C, B etc. Next, the music boxes are decided to which the artist/ composer decides some nice chords to go along with the music/words. Layering is a very popular harmonic technique used by many artists. You hear a phrase, then another instrument is added expressing some notes made on the harmony. Then more music boxes are added to sound nice in your ears. Once a strong foundation is formed by the artist and associates, each instrument is captured on its own and at the same time as a large 'jam' session with some very powerful noise recievers. Then smart people work on the seperate sounds until everything is balanced and sounds perfect. Once it sounds perfect and the smart people are done lots of money is spread around to many people who help make it. In a lot of recent cases music has been a large industry where many people work hard to make a small group very popular and valuable.",
"The recording part. After the writing is done studio space is found by the producer. A band is chosen either from a shortlist the singer has worked with before or session musicians. Either way at this nosebleed level of fame the musicians are top notch and eagerly sought after in general. Schedules become deal breakers In studio the musicians fall into line pretty quick after maybe some quick arrangement suggestions. They are pros. It’s the producers and singers show. They run through the songs, Play with arrangements and rework lyrics to get the Sound They Want. The studio itself is pretty swank as studios go. Acoustics, engineering and relax/chill space The unsung hero of this is the recording engineer(s). They setup all the mics in the studio, choose mics, getting as much sound on to the digital recordings of all the various tracks. This is very important and not trivial. Note. Instruments are mic’ed through the speaker cabinet, not the instrument usually. They want the sound as it’s head. This is mic’ing is complicated. Different instruments, amps, rooms will take different mics. And then there is mic amplifier choice... Once all is wrapped up in studio a what could be quite intense process happens next somewhere else which is mixing. The producer, artist and a different engineer get together and start stitching what was recorded together into the final track Decisions from the mundane like which instrument goes on the left and right tracks to “studio tricks” are made and tried. Adding delay, loops and reverb (and auto tune) to the tracks. Effects are added And so many many combos to try. A modern pop track is a many, many layered melange of studio effects with the original recordings. This is why it sounds so “well put together”. Time, effort and money. Skill in front of and across from the musicians. Then it’s done and presented to the label. If they like it it’s send off for production and digital distribution Distribution is a whole other ball of string someone else can do"
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8r14oo | Why do different cables give different charging speed with the same charger? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because the charger has a maximum power output, but whether it can actually achieve that output depends on the cable. Edit: To be clear because re-reading this it isn't obvious, **the resistance is a fixed property of the cable**, and the better cables have a lower resistance. Have you ever heard of Ohm's Law? What that states is that Voltage divided by Resistance equals Current. You can switch that around to work out whatever you like. Voltage / Resistance = Current Voltage / Current = Resistance Current x Resistance = Voltage If your charger is 5 volts, like most normal USB stuff is, and if its a reasonably fast charger, which can put out 2 amps, if you work that out, it means the resistance for that to work can be 2.5 ohms, anything that or less, fine, anything more and it'll start to slow things down. That really isn't a lot. If the cable is bad quality, then that resistance will be higher. If it's actually say 5 ohms rather than two and a half, you work out out the other way. You can say Voltage divided by Resistance gives you the maximum current. They all relate to one another. In that case, Voltage of 5 volts, divided by resistance of 5 ohms, now gives you 1 amp of currrent maximum. Your cheapo cable on its own has now halved the charging current your charger can put out. Watts is overall power, and you get it by multiplying together the voltage and the current. So your charger can give out 5 volts at 2 amps, so 10 watts, but because of your bad quality cable, its now 5 volts at 1 amp, giving you 5 watts. Half the available power, twice the charging time. Moral is, buy decent quality cables."
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8r4xtr | What is the goddamn point of these mobile sites that constantly jump back up to the top as it loads? Shouldn't they only care about ad views? Is it engagement numbers? Who clicks ads? Like seriously. Don't they know people leave when this happens? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I like the ones that ask if you want to sign up as soon as it opens. How the F@#k would I know! I don't even know if I'm on the right page. Or the big ass \"we use cookies! Accept or die!\" pop up. I leave or ignore."
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8r5xrk | How come rechargable batteries like in our phones don't "overcharge" when left in the charger at 100%? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's a circuit in the phone which monitors the battery voltage. When it reaches the goal, it cuts off charging any more.",
"Whem you plug your phone in, a couple of active devices in the phone monitor the voltage of the battery and modify the current going in, and when they detect the battery voltage is at its highest point, they disconnect the battery from its supply"
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8r619m | How could an additional source of light make the light from my phone or TV easier on my eyes? | I was told through all of my upbringing whenever I sat in a dark room with the TV on or later years when i was on my phone, that I should turn on the light. Why would a brighter surrounding make the screens light easier on my eyes? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If the room is overwhelmingly dark, except for the TV, then your pupils will be wide open to let lots of light in. If the room is relatively bright, your pupils will be smaller and thus let less light in. The idea is that this lets less \"harmful\" TV light in, although TVs themselves shouldn't give off too much harmful light anyway. This IS a totally valid idea when it comes to crappy sunglasses: If you wear sunglasses that are \"just\" dark but don't actually block the (harmful) UV light from the sun, then you are actually doing more damage to your eyes than if you didn't wear the sunglasses in the first place.",
"Your eyes will adapt to a dark environment by having dilated pupils which gives a narrow depth of field. This makes focussing critical, makes your eyes work harder to focus, and exaggerates the effects of any long- or short-sightedness. Also, the TV will be much brighter than its surroundings which will give it a washed-out appearance."
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8r7w7t | Why is that one french fry green? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Potatoes skin can process chlorophyll if left to see the sunlight. That piece of the potato did, and turned green like other plants. Note: not all potatoes species do this. Only the lightly skinned and colored ones.",
"Potatoes grow underground and are shielded from sunlight — usually. Sometimes, parts emerge above ground, and those sections turn green as chlorophyll develops. And for this to happen, the light need not be natural light. Most green potatoes don’t make it to the stores That said, on occasion, a green-tinted potato may find its way into a potato chip factory and, eventually, a slice thereof may sneak into a bag of chips. You'll sometimes hear people say it's dangerous to eat one, but that's not exactly true, as one would have to eat about 10-20 or so green potatoes in a day to fall ill. A medium-sized potato yields about 36 chips, it’s safe to say that if you ate 360-720 potato chips in a day, you’re going to get somewhat sick, even if the chips aren’t of the green variety. And, of course, unless you purposefully made them yourself, you’re not going to encounter that many green potato chips perhaps even in your lifetime, let alone in a single day. So if you come across an occasional green chip, odds are you’re fine eating it.",
"Potatoes grow underground, but if they happen to poke out into the sunlight, they get a potato version of a sunburn, and they turn green. They're still fine to eat, though."
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8raln3 | How is paper/cardboard recycled and why are most recycled paper products usually brown and more coarse than virgin paper? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Turn old paper/carboard to mush. Make mush into shape. Dry. Shape again and its recycled paper. Some recycled paper are brown, some are like virgins. Add bleach and color to make virgin.",
"Recycled paper is made by people who are advocates for using recycled paper, they tend to be pro-environment folks. To make paper white takes very strong chemicals, and pro-environment folks aren't big on that sort of thing. Making very fine grain paper makes the paper fibers less useful to recycle. Coarse grain paper, like newsprint and cardboard, can be recycled more times. Getting people to accept and use coarser grained paper products improves the recycling chain and pro-environment folks like that too. On the other hand, people who sell virgin paper, or paper that's not easily recyclable, emphasize how white and smooth it is. These folks don't want users to \"settle\" for recycled paper, because it's bad for their business.",
"Recycling paper tends to shorten the lengths of the fibres it's comprised of. As well as having fillers like clays, high quality paper is made with fresh, long cellulose. Each time it's pulped a fraction of the fibers will be broken. As the average length goes down, so does the properties of the paper. Factors like tear strength and flexibility vs thickness contribute to the quality, so recycled pulp tends to be used for things like cardboard, kitchen towel, toilet paper and suchlike."
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8raytt | What is transactional memory architecture? How is it possible that it would be so much faster than normal memory? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Today, when more than one piece of software is running concurrently, there is a slow and formal process they go through to avoid both changing the same bit of data at the same time. Transactional memory provides a feature in hardware to prevent this happening, so the software threads can skip the complex coordination dance. URL_0"
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8rcz38 | How do pirates crack game? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It depends on the game, or rather what type of DRM (anti-piracy software) the game is using. In the old days, all you had to do to crack a game was figure out how CD keys were created for it and then make you own the same way. Later on, companies started connecting their singleplayer offline games to online servers, so you had to figure out what the game and servers said to each other and copy it.",
"A few years ago this was really easy. Basically, whenever the game started there was a short check in the code whether the CD was inserted. The check (in pseudo code) looks like this: \"if CD is not inserted: stop program\". As a pirate you'd try to find out where exactly in the code this part is located (for example using a debugger) and then you replace the \"if not\" code with an \"if\". A simple analogy would be to see a mathematical term \"a - b = 3\" and adding a horizontal line in the minus to make it a plus. This changes the term completely without adding any additional symbols. This means that the game now exits when a CD is inserted instead of when it's out. Nowadays it's a bit more complicated, as companies started adding additional checks, sometimes even checking whether the application has been tempered with. In the end it's just a lot of \"if\" checks, so you basically only have to find all of them and change them."
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8rfp9r | How Fiber optic cable is run in a neighborhood | How are Fiber optics physically run in a residential neighborhood? Are they set up like phone lines, where you have a main trunk line going to a cabinet and then every residence connected to that cabinet gets their own dedicated line? Or is Fiber run completely differently? Edit: I should probably specify i'm asking about Fiber to the home deployments. Not Hybrid fiber networks | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most residential fiber deployments (at least, the ones I'm familiar with) use a Passive Optical Network (PON). In broad terms, yes, it's similar to copper networks where the main fiber is run to a cabinet in the neighborhood, with more individual fiber strands run from that cabinet to the individual residences underground or on poles. The \"Passive\" part is the main difference: the cabinet contains optical beam splitters, basically prisms, which split the light signal from a single upstream fiber strand and sends copies of it down several downstream fibers to the optical network terminal (ONT) in each house. There may be another passive splitter on a pole or in a hand-hole closer to the house, splitting a single fiber down into even more individual fibers that go to individual subscribers."
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8rfxpp | If TVs can make a 24fps movie look like 60fps, why can't computers do the same for games? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A movie is pre-rendered, while a game is usually rendered in real time. Doing t in real time is more strenuous on a computer.",
"If you're playing a movie, your TV can just read the next 10 frames ahead of time and \"fill in the blanks\" between them with some smart blurring type stuff. If you're playing a videogame, your computer/console can't know what the next frame will look like, because it all depends on how you control the game. The next frame will be completely different if you run left instead of standing still, or tilt your camera up, or zoom in, or open a menu. It's making it all up on the fly. So it can't guess what comes between this frame and the next. As soon as it knows what the next frame is, it'll just show you that frame and start working on calculating the next one.",
"You could create fake frames for a game like you can for tv but it would make the game feel terrible since they are interactive and the players input are being determined each frame. Even a single fake frame can feel off to a human and turning 30fps into 60fps would be unplayable."
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8ri3bl | Why do SSDs and SD cards run out of rewrite cycles in a few years, while internal device memory doesent? | Had two solid memory banks die on me, while phones and gaming consoles work near-flawlessly. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If by \"internal device memory\" you mean the device's RAM chips, then those can become faulty, too. Anyone who's worked in a computer repair shop will be aware of a utility called MEMTEST86 which does extensive tests (often taking many hours to run) to confirm that a machine's RAM is able to store the correct values. However to properly answer your question: RAM technology and SSD technology are completely different devices. RAM is still much, much faster than SSD, but can't retain information without being constantly supplied with electricity. In simple terms, the RAM consists of a vast number of **capacitors** each of which hold an electrical charge, but only for a short period of time which is why they need to be continually refreshed with a constant stream of electricity. SSDs, on the other hand, generally use a type of **transistor** to store the information. This acts like a tiny switch, so once it's set to 1 or 0 it retains that setting even without a constant application of power. So the TLDR is that they're completely different technologies, which is why the failure-mode (and speed) of RAM and SSD differ so wildly.",
"Regular RAM(DRAM) store the data in the charge of a capacitor it can be charge and discharged directly and the operation does not result in any wear. Flash memory store information in a Floating-gate transistor. The important part is the floating gate. It is not directly connected to anything so charge on the floating gate stay there. It is good because you can store informations. It is also a problem because how you you remove or add charge so you can store information? The answer is you have higher voltage the charge can pass trough the isolation around the floating gate. The problem is that the high voltage damage the isolation and over time is start to conduct so the charge is no longer isolated and will discharged so you can store information and the memory cell fail. So RAM operate at a apropriate low voltage so it does not damage the chip. Flash need to operate at a higher voltage to store and erase the data, The problem is that it damage the chip over time but is nessecery for the operation. It is important to notice that it is writing and erasing that is destructive not reading. This can happen faster the the number of write cycles so extra bits of data is stored so you can recover the information if a few Floating-gate transistor has gone bad. You also have extra block available so if a block fail so it can be used a spare block is used instead. Spare areas like that also exist on hard drives. Disk also use over-provisioning in combination with wear leveling. That is a drive that is marketed as 120 GB is likely in reality 128 GB. So if you write to a single location on the disk you done use a single cell but the is might be a different cell each time so each cell have as low amount of write cycles. The extra 8 GB are used so you always have another unused cell to stor the data in. So the quality of the chips in the memory and the mount of wear leveling that is possible might not be the same in the SSD you used in a computer then in the other devices. You also write a lot more on a computer then on a phone or a game console. Phones are designed for flash memory storage so they are hopefully designed with memory limits on mind compare to a computer that is no. The wear might be high on a pc because was designed for hard drives. So thing like defragmentering a SSD or a swap file on the mighr be a cause problem.",
"Solid state memory does have a limited number of rewrites, but it's such a high number and the way the firmware moves around frequently rewritten files means it will be decades of normal use before they fail. If you've had a solid state drive fail after 'a few years', that's because it was defective, not because of it's normal lifetime being used up. edit - exception to this, if it's an old old ass SSD, then the technology was not as good back then and the maximum rewrites were lower."
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8rjswj | Why does movie or animation rendering take hours in a high end PC, that movie companies hire separate group to do separate pieces of a scene, whereas, Games are rendered frame by frame smoothly at 60FPS in our PC and Consoles. | Please forgive me if this is a stupid question. I dont know anything about animation and game developing. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Animated movies are rendered at much higher resolutions, and to put it simply, are way, WAY higher quality than any \"AAA\" game on the market right now. That's why they take longer to render.",
"For movies people will generally use render engines that actually simulate the behavior of light. They will cast millions of light rays into the scene, then calculate the way they interact with the various objects in it. This can take a very long time, but yields extremely accurate and realistic results (assuming, of course, the scene and materials have been set up correctly). Basically, games get around this by cheating. They either use extremely simplified, less mathematically complex methods of calculating lighting that yield what are considered to be acceptable results, or they just fake things outright.",
"Also, if you’re rendering an image on a pc then the pc sends 64 “rays” per pixel to calculate the light and shading of the image and just make it look realistic. It’s called ray tracing. It also has to render things you can’t see and things far off in the distance are rendered to same quality as close things, just “in case” you see them. Whereas when you play a game, it not only can fake the definition using tricks to do with maps and textures, but it also renders what it needs and forget what it doesn’t. This is why you have render distances on games because if the game rendered every single object in the world it would be slow. But it also doesn’t do it so intensely as an image render on a pc."
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8rk0ly | How does a stethoscope amplify noise to such an extreme? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The noise your body makes (heartbeat, breathing, the blood in your veins) creates vibrations. These vibrations are picked up by the diaphragm of the stethoscope. The tube that connects the diaphragm and the earbuds amplifies the sound because the rubber material causes the sound waves to reflect and thus amplifying them.",
"They don't amplify like an amplifier would. There is no energy added. That would require a circuit and power supply. They direct the sound down a tube and into the ear. The large diaphragm causes pressure waves to sound louder when they hit the smaller diaphragm that is your eardrum. Edit: they also are conducting sound into the diaphragm by contact which is better than through air. You can use a screwdriver as a stethoscope when trying to locate the source of a noise. URL_0"
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8rmmn5 | How does somebody "own" a domain and who decides who owns which domain? As well, there must be an infinite number of domain names. What stops anyone from claiming them all? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You have to register the domains you want to own, which is more like a lease because you only control it for a finite amount of time. After the time runs up you have to renew it or it becomes first come first serve. Most people aren't going to hang on to a domain name and keep throwing money at it unless it's making money. Pretty much all the good non-trademarked .com and .net domains are already taken up but before the start of the .com burst lots of people did register a bunch of names in hopes of a company want to buy it. People even squatted on trademarked names hoping the company would pay them lots of money for them which usually resulted in the company's legal team sending the owner a scary letter.",
"> How does somebody \"own\" a domain and they pay a fee with a domain registrar for that TLD (top level domain) > who decides who owns which domain? ICANN controls the overall system > there must be an infinite number of domain names. no, but there are a LOT of possible ones > What stops anyone from claiming them all? it would be EXPENSIVE. The cheapest unclaimed domains typically run $7/year. Some, depending on the TLD, are much more expensive. And the ones already in use are of course not available. But there are domain squatters in place who buy up domains that are similar to popular ones and just run ads on them in hopes of making a profit from people who mis-type a domain",
"So the internet is managed by companies and entities usually referred to as registrars. There’s the TLDs (Top Level Domain) which is the last portion of the domain name before the uri field (ex. .com, .net, .org, etc). now there is a WhoIs database that is maintained by some Internet entity but you can register a domain name with them as long as it is not already in use. The TLDs have database entries of all the domain names registered under their domain. As to your second question, when a request from your browser is “sent out to the internet” it is bouncing from server to server trying to find the mapping of that domain to some server IP address. It is therefore key to the internet that your domain is registered with large DNS networks otherwise it doesn’t matter if you claim a domain or not. It’s pretty much about what everyone else thinks that domain name belongs to and who is willing to regulate it"
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8rntum | How do my electric guitar's pickups, together with my amp, create their sound? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Magnets. In simplest terms, the magnets in the pickups “pick up” disturbances in the magnetic field surrounding it, the capacitors and other electronics turn it into an electronic signal that is pushed through the amp which “amplifies” the signal into the speaker and our ears. In more complex terms The basic science behind pickup function is Faraday’s Law of Induction. It states that a changing magnetic field causes an electric field to be set up in a nearby wire, causing a current to flow if the wire is part of a closed circuit (a loop of wire for example). Since Faraday’s Law tells us we need a changing magnetic field to make an electric current, how does the magnetic field from the static permanent magnets change? That’s where the string comes into play. See, the string is made of nickel and steel (iron+carbon), materials that are ferromagnetic. That is, a magnet attracts guitar strings. When this ferromagnetic metal vibrates in the magnetic field of the pickup, that disturbs the field which also crosses through the coil. That changing magnetic field makes a current flow that tracks the vibration of the string, and we have a working pickup!",
"Pickups have been covered. The amp has three stages, the preamp, tone stack, and power amp. The preamp is a voltage amplifier, it is designed to provide a proportional increase in energy to the signal. That proportion is called the *gain*. In theory, if you have a signal of voltage V and a gain of G, the output of the preamp should be G×V. The preamp however has a voltage supply though, and cannot amplify more than that. Once the value of G×V reaches the supply voltage it \"clips\" and the tops of the waveform are sliced off. This creates distortion. More gain, more clipping, more distortion. But it's more complex than that, because that kind of clipping sounds like shit. As it happens most pres are designed to be *nonlinear*, and in general that means that it takes less to amplify the signal the same amount as it's level gets higher. This smoothes out the clipping, and makes it sound \"warmer.\" There's other nuance here too, for example in a tube preamp it's a little easier for electrons to flow from grid to plate as the signal approaches it's peak which causes more distortion, whereas at the corresponding null (because signals are AC) there isn't this effect. That causes assymetric distortion and it's a big impact on the \"warmth\" of the tone by creating even harmonics (such as the first and second octave of the note you're playing). Since the distortion is a function of both gain and input level, the output of the pickups is an important factor in the tone of the signal after the pre. After the preamp is the tone stack, which is (usually) a passive RC (resistor-capacitor) network. The classic designs are based on approximations where turning the high knob mostly affects the highs, turning the mid mostly affects the mids, and the bass knob mostly affects the bass. In reality turning one knob affects all parts of the spectrum, which is why dialing in a tone is so finicky. After the preamp and tone stack is the power amp. Solid state power amps have (usually) three stages, a differential preamp, a fixed gain voltage amp, and a current amp (power = voltage × current). The differential preamp amplifies the difference of two signals, this is used for negative feedback for the gain control which is more power efficient and doesn't affect output impedance of the amplifier. A tube power amp has two stages, a phase splitter and the power tubes (usually tetrodes or pentodes, not triodes). The gain of the power amp is usually fixed, the volume control is a voltage divider to the input of the phase splitter. The phase splitter takes the input and spits out two signals, one is the positive half of the signal and the other is the negative half. These are then sent to the power tubes in a \"push-pull\" configuration, where one power tube \"pushes\" the positive part of the waveform into the output, the other then \"pulls\" it back using the negative half of the waveform. The output is coupled through a step down transformer that converts voltage into current while preserving power and matches the impedance of the output speaker to ensure maximum power transfer and efficiency. Power tube saturation is often desirable, because slightly clipping the power tubes sounds dope. The issue is it only happens when they start running close to max output (aka, fucking loudly). This is why passive attenuators exist, they match impedance with the speakers while dissipating excess power from the tubes so they can run hot but quiet-ish. Lastly is the cab. Most cabs are \"open back\" meaning the speaker is exposed. This has a negative impact on bass perfomance, but that can be desirable for guitar tone. Driver choice also has an impact on tone, as does the angle of which you listen to the cab (try pointing it at your ears once in awhile, notice the high frequency boost). Driver frequency response is a factor of many things, from the materials used to the number of coil windings to the way it's mounted to the cab. One last thing to mention is impedance! Impedance is not just a single number, it's a \"nominal\" measurement and in reality it varies with frequency. The consequence of this is \"tone suck\" at the input of an amp or when you roll-off the volume on your guitar. The output impedance of the guitar (function of the pups, tone circuit, and volume pot) has an impact on tone unless it is somehow buffered before the preamp, such as by a clean boost, buffered bypass, or overdrive pedal. This is not a bad thing, for example very high output impedance pups can get a wide range of tones just rawdogging the amp with a volume pot adjustment and using that variance can create very dynamic playing.",
"Electric guitars create their well-known \"powerful\" sound by using an effect called **clipping** (otherwise known as drive, overdrive, boost, fuzz, earrape, oversampling, and a lot of other names). Basically, let's say the audio signal to your speakers can only go to 1 MW max. That means, any wave (remember; sound is a wave) signal that you send through the wire has to be less than 1 MW. But, what clipping does, is it takes your wave, and amplifies it well *beyond* 1 MW. What does this do? It just takes the wave and essentially flattens every part that is above the 1 MW threshold; \"clipping\" the peaks of the wave.",
"string is metal, metal moves, magnet near metal, metal moves magnet, magnet moves electrons in another string, electrons move to amp, amp + wall socket electricity = lots of electrons moving, lots of electrons move another magnet, that moving magnet is the speaker and makes sound"
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8ro9i8 | How can my headphone jack tell the difference between my car's aux cord and my headphones? | When I plug my aux cord into my phone, it usually goes to full volume. However, the phone almost always stays at about half volume when my earbuds are connected. Can my phone detect the difference between the two? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yes, through difference in “impedance”. The aux port on your stereo probably has an input impedance of about 1000 ohms. Your earbuds are about 20-25 ohms. The stereo has a high input impedance because it doesn’t need to load down the source because it has its own amplifiers, Your earbuds need all the juice they can get, though",
"EDIT 2, ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: Thank you so much for my first ever Reddit gold, stranger. You guys in the comments have all been awesome. < 3 Your phone can \"feel\" how hard it has to push and pull against what's plugged into the aux jack. It moves the speaker in your headphones out with a push of electrons and then it pulls back to pull it in. Do this fast or slow and you have a frequency, and do it in very specific timing and you're vibrating just like someone's vocal cords, or the string on an instrument, or a combination of those. Aux in your car is different like they said. See, instead of talking directly to a tiny easy to push speaker in headphones your car has really big intimidating speakers and your phone is really apprehensive about a job that big. So instead it talks to a middle manager in the stereo called an amplifier who listens to your phone and they and their friends in the stereo do the job of pushing and pulling themselves, making things really really easy on your phone. There's basically no pushing and pulling happening at all! Your phone keeps track of how hard it is to push or pull something so it doesn't hurt itself or do something really rude like shout in an amplifier's ear because they're friends and friends don't do that. Nowadays phones are clever enough that they remember how loud that pushing and pulling should be for those two friends instead of forgetting every time it changes. It's important to note that the volume (amplitude) of the pushing and pulling is different than how hard it is to do the work. Think pushing and pulling two boxes the same size the same distance at the same speed, but one box is empty and the other is full of rocks. Someone watching wouldn't know it, but your arms sure feel the difference! The phone's the same way pushing and pulling that signal through the wire. Hope that helps~ EDIT: Some have clarified that the phone is not measuring impedance and I'm here to say you're absolutely right! Top comment has a somewhat half right answer. If you liked my ELI5 above be ready for something more like an ELI12 below. So, impedance is the friction, the squeeze, the resistance to a flow of electricity. Specifically when you're pushing and pulling back and forth instead of going one way all the time. You've probably heard something along the lines of batteries are DC and your house is AC at some point in your life. This gets somewhat complicated so we're going to do the subject a disservice by leaving it really simple and saying DC only cares about how much resistance, or friction if we're using a pushing boxes across the floor metaphor, in that circuit or pathway to it's destination. Impedance is more complicated, it's that friction on the floor but it's also invisible things that interfere and slow us down. Radio, magnetic fields, it's hard to really give a good basic explanation that really illustrates what our push and pull signal are going to go through but we'll say some environments are windy in the place you're pushing the box. Sometimes it's at your back, your front, or your side and that can all have an impact on what your pushing and pulling looks like so you need to work hard to make sure that the receiver of your signal sees what you want them to. This extra work, and the work in general, is the load. The load is a measurement of how much power it's taking to do the thing you're trying to do. A really rough road that rubs on your box a lot and high winds and you're working really hard. A really slick road and no wind and you're flying that box across the ground with ease. Now, we don't really have the measuring instruments to say exactly how rough the winds and road are, but we do know how much power we're putting in to work. That's load monitoring. We could probably make a really good guess what the impedance of our environment is now that we know how far and how fast to shift the box around as well as how much power we're putting in to do it but we don't need to. We can continue to leave that variable unknown because all we need are the other two. For the budding engineers: We'll assume we're converting our impedance to equivalent resistance because it makes the demonstration easier. Load monitoring is not finding R in V=IR, rather it's monitoring our circuit for I. Now, obviously, we could calculate R since we now monitor and know V and I at any given time but there's really no need to. We don't need to monitor R so long as we have a threshold for I to prevent damage in case of a short. Which we really need to do, because a TRS stereo mini connector shorts the output lines every time it's pulled in or pushed out. That's that really obnoxious *crackle, pop!* that happens when you pull the jack that goes to your speakers. So now, since we have a bunch of really cool integrated circuits that have started to cost pennies to put in phones we don't just shunt a shorted load. We monitor it and have a couple thresholds, a short condition that tells the phone to cut power to the amp and pause playback because the headphones were removed/inserted, a value range associated with being connected directly to an amp, and a value range associated with being connected to headphones.",
"Devices can also tell the difference between two and three stripe plugs. If you have two sets of earbuds, and one of them has a microphone, the plugs will have different numbers of stripes and devices will react differently. For more details: URL_0",
"When you plug in headphones, there's always going to be some resistance (technically \"impedance\") caused by having to move speakers. An aux jack doesn't have magnets & speakers in there, it just needs to move a little voltage into another amplifier, so it'd be fairly simple to detect the vastly lower impedance and adjust behavior.",
"So all of the explanations I have been seeing \"difference between *impedance\"*. For the people who doesn't know what this is, imagine connecting a garden hose. A low *impedance* would be like a big nozzle to connect to, lots of water gets through, you can use this to water your garden (earphones). A high *impedance* would be a really small nozzle, very little water gets through, you only need a bit to rinse your hands. You'll wash your hands properly in a sink later with more water (car amplifier). That's how I teach the actual kids about it. Edit: a bit of grammar",
"One connector is a tip / ring / sleeve (aux cable for your car - stereo output), the other is tip / ring / ring / sleeve connector that has a microphone input. When your phone detects that microphone connector, it dims the audio.",
"Your car aux cord is likely a 2 ring headphone jack and your headphone is a 3 ring jack. 2 rings is for left and right audio and 3 rings is for the added mic capability. So, the phone can tell between the two sources. If you plug in headphones without a Mic be prepared to get blasted.",
"Here’s a real ELI5 explanation.. When you connect something to the headphone jack, the phone has to “push” signal through the wire. When your car aux cord is connected, it’s a whole lot easier to push the signal through. With headphones, it’s harder to push the signal through, so it knows to lower the volume.",
"I want to get in on this question and piggyback, recently my phone only works with my car's aux when it is also plugged into the charger. What gives? The jack seems to work fine with headphones.",
"Omg can i make my phone somehow go straight to full volume when i plug in the aux cord? I have it hooked to my car via some converter and everytime i get in the car i have to manually adjust the volume from my phone. I'm in and out of the car all day for work and it's a hassle to do constantly",
"Two ways to do this, and it will depend on the phone manufacturer: 2 ways: 1) High/Low impedance sensors in the audio chip: When pushing electricity through anything, there is a name for how \"hard\" it is for the source to push the signal through. For AC sources like audio, it's called Impedance and DC sources the equivalent is resistance. Headphones/Earphones generally don't have any amplifiers in them to boost the signal to a lhuman listenable volume unless they're very expensive. Hence, the phone has to work harder to send that signal through. This is called high impedance. Car audio systems have internal amplifiers built in and make it very easy for the phone to send the signal through. This is called low impedance. 2) Audio jack rings: If your headphones have a mic, you have a third black ring on your headphone jack (RIGHT-LEFT-MIC). For your AUX cord, you've got 2(RIGHT-LEFT). Both jacks have a ground too but that's not important here. Since there is a physical difference in the AUX cords, your phone can tell the difference in what you're plugging in. That's literally it. More than likely, 2 is what is going on here. Reason being that a physical sensor is way cheaper than having an actual AC ohmeter (impedance measurement meter) circuit in the audio chip of the phone. It's probably like 0.001¢ cheaper but when you are selling hundreds of millions of devices, it makes a big dent in the budget."
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8rp9ng | How does cache and virtual memory reduces memory latency? | I'm trying to wrap my head around it but most explanations are a bit too long winded. How does it actually reduce it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A single CPU cycle on a modern 3.0 GHz CPU is about .3 nanoseconds long. Normal system RAM can transfer data to the CPU at around 40GB/s with about a 50 nanosecond latency. Whenever the CPU is waiting on getting data from RAM, it can't do much (modern systems have some tricks to work around this we can ignore them for now). That's 150 cycles of being useless. Cache RAM is a small amount of *very fast* memory - like 900GB/s - built directly into the CPU that has *very low* latency (as low as 5ns). If the CPU can pull data from cache instead of waiting on main memory, you *greatly* improve system performance by not wasting as much time doing nothing. Why not make everything cache RAM? It's ridiculously expensive and must be built directly onto the CPU to get those ridiculous performance levels. To put this in context, a modern PC is going to have 8-16GB of main RAM while a high-end i7 has under 512 *kilobytes* of L1 cache (the fastest), about 1.5MB of L2 cache (slightly slow but still fast) and 12MB of L3 cache (way slower but still better than RAM). ---- Virtual memory solves the other side of the problem - it moves data from fast system RAM to slow hard drives to make up for the fact that system RAM is a limited resource. It doesn't directly speed most things but it can potentially move unused data out of system RAM, freeing up RAM for applications & OS processes that actually need it & speed those up."
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8rpph6 | When you charge a device from your car, is it pretty much "free" energy? If not, how much does it cost compared to plugging it in at home? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"No. It comes from your car battery. The cost just comes from your gas bill rather than your electricity bill. In fact, considering that cars are less efficient than giant power plants burning coal, you are spending *more*. But even so, the costs of charging your phone will be in the dollars per year, so it won't matter much.",
"When you charge your phone in a gas powered car, it uses electricity from the car’s generator or it’s battery (which is also charged by the generator). Putting load on the generator makes it resist movement a bit more which in turn means your engine has to do more work and uses slightly more gas. I don’t have numbers but since there’s several steps involved where energy is also lost as heat, it’s probably less efficient than charging from your home’s electricity and also more expensive.",
"I don't know about costs, but there's no such thing as \"free\" energy. That electric charge is coming out of the fuel in your tank via the alternator."
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8rqzms | What stops browsers from going back a page? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There’s a type of website called a “single page application” where you never actually go to a different page when clicking a link but the website reload new data on the fly and shows you new content. YouTube does that, Facebook too, things like Google Docs would be near impossible without this. Sometimes it’s necessary to change how your browser’s history works and if the application doesn’t handle this perfectly (which is often the case) the “back” button might seem broken. It’s a really hard problem to solve and sadly many companies don’t invest the time and effort to really get it right. Source: I’ve been a web developer for over a decade. I got a lot of grey hair because of this. :)"
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8rtlky | Why do sounds like the letter "S", "ts" and drums/cymbals sound extra static-y on the radio, even on clear stations? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They contain high-frequency components. Radio stations use 10-15 KHz audio bandwith. This is quite sufficient to transmit low and midrange sounds, and even most \"high\" frequency pitches that humans can perceive. But some sounds contain high frequency components in the 15-20 KHz range, and radio transmitters/receivers are simply not made to handle them well (or at all).",
"Can't speak for normal radio, but if you're talking about XM-Sirius Radio, it's because they are data compressed. XM-Sirius uses digital signals to send the audio to your car. They only have a certain amount of signal bandwidth to use and this has to get split up between all their channels. In order to have a higher number of channels, they use a smaller bandwidth per channel. The amount of bandwidth they use is not enough to send the audio in its normal quality. They have to re-encode it a lower quality in order to make it fit in the bandwidth for each channel."
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8rwg25 | How exactly did the rotors on the Wehrmacht Enigma work? | Hi. I'm trying to understand how the Enigma machine worked - specifically, the Wehrmacht one. The one with the five possible rotors. I've looked on a lot of sites but I'm still confused. I get the plugboard. I get the reflector. But I don't get rotors. How did they get the rotors to move? How exactly do the notches make the rotors move? Can you explain the stepping mechanism? I'm confused as to how the rotors worked. I hope this isn't too vague. I would really appreciate some help! I think it's really interesting and I'd like to learn more about it so I can create my own program to do the same thing as the Enigma. Thank you! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I hope you get to read this. Look for a YouTube channel named singingbanana the guy is a matematician and he has an awesome explanation on how the enigma machine works. Found the link for you (wanted to watch it again) URL_0"
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8rwhlv | why is it that when audio/videos are sped up, they sound higher-pitched or chipmunk-like? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"All sound is a wave. Think about a stereotypical sine wave. It has a wavelength (distance from peak to peak) and a frequency (how many peaks per second). Higher frequency sounds sound higher pitch to us. So when you take something at one frequency and speed it up, it’s now a higher frequency and therefore higher pitch.",
"The compression of the sound waves in terms of length creates a higher pitch. For a shitty visual, an audio file at normal playback speed might look like: . . . . . . While the same audio file played at a higher speed would look more like: ...... So the wavelength shortens, and the pitch rises. Edit: Hopefully that looks better."
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8rxir7 | How do regulators really know if my system stores sensitive data? | Is it going to be okay if my system didn't provide a mean to read them? Would anyone know? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The idea is that, if an organization is handling sensitive data, it should know who has it & where it's put and they need to have policies in place to ensure the safety of that data. Maybe you'll get audited but it's unlikely but *if you do end up losing data*, you're going to get double-fucked if it turns out you weren't taking proper steps to protect the data. Turns out that lots of people get away with breaking a lot of laws."
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8rxn9e | Powerline Adapters | I've been looking at powerline adapters, the plugs that plug in to a normal socket and can give out internet I cannot work out how they work, if you've got power going through the wiring how can you also send internet data? Or do i have it completely wrong? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Powerline adapters use a very weak signal with a very high frequency on top of the 50/60 Hz AC current. This signal is completely filtered out and ignored by all devices other than those specifically designed to pick it up. As a real world analogy, imagine someone engraving a text in small writing into a concrete road. Cars wouldn't even notice the writing, but you can still read if you know where to look."
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8rzk2d | Why do ballpoint pens sometimes stop working where you’re trying to write, but continue working perfectly fine on other parts of the paper? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Ballpoint pens are pretty neat. They are literally a ball at the point of the pen that rotates. As it spins 1 side puts ink on the paper and the other side gets covered in ink on the inside of the pen. Because of this, if there isn't enough friction on your writing surface the ball won't rotate, which means it won't get more ink. That's why pushing hard usually works, as it increases friction and gets the ball rolling again. As you write you make an indent in the paper, the more you write over the same spot the less friction you're going to get as less of the paper will be pushing back on the pen. When you move to a new area you will have an increase in friction as you indent more of the paper.",
"I think that when you write you leave a trail of sweat and dirt on the paper and when the pen passes over it slides. Maybe not enough friction for the ball to roll? I've asked myself also.",
"Ballpoint pens rely on the ball tip rolling to let the ink flow onto the paper as you write. If there’s stuff on the paper, like wax or oil (like from your skin), it can prevent the ball from rolling, giving you those dead spaces. Then, when you move to a clean(er) part of the paper, it clears the gunk off and starts rolling again."
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8s0agj | How my Phone knows when im using the knuckles instead of fingers? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This is speculation, since I can't find any 'how this works' detail from a bunch of googling: When you touch the screen with a fingertip, it's 'squishier' than touching it with a knuckle. There's more surface area in contact with it, and it doesn't bump the phone as suddenly. So the phone (probably) tells the difference between them by seeing how hard it's been bumped, and how quick the contact was. It might be possible to 'fool' the detection by tapping quickly with a small part of your fingertip. It's powered by [FingerSense]( URL_0 ) - software by a company called Qeexo. They're pretty light on actual details, but since they insist it uses Machine Learning and it's software-only (no fancy stuff added to the phone to make it work), then that leads me to assume they're just taking information from the screen + gyro/accelerometer built into the phone already.",
"Another possibility aside from u/Alix1723 and u/CrazedMagician is resistivity. Phone touch screens have a very fine mesh-like criss-cross of nearly microscopic wires [for lack of a better word] that constantly carry a low-voltage current. Touching the screen with your finger changes the amount of current flowing through both an up/down section, AND a left/right section. The software in the phone assumes this is a finger or stylus and responds accordingly. The tip of your finger is usually softer and has a larger surface area than a knuckle, and this impacts the amount of change AND the number of 'wires' being changed. If the software is sensitive enough, it should be able to determine the difference. Tangentially, this is why a fingernail only sometimes works, and the point of a pen or a rubber pencil eraser usually does not work. They either don't change the current at all, or they change it in the wrong way. A stylus or touch-screen specific pen-tip WILL work however, as they are made with materials that mimic the electrical properties of your finger. This is also why a calloused finger or a dehydrated finger may not work [too little impact on the current], and why rain drops on the screen [too much or too many changes] may make everything screwy on some phones."
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8s3535 | How does a laser printer work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It uses a laser to statically charge a drum which then attracts the toner in what ever formation the laser has drawn. This is then pressed onto the paper. Each colour is added in turn using this process to build up the colour picture. Then finally it uses heat to bond the toner to the paper... or it may heat after each colour, I can't remember, but that is basically how it works."
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8s42n6 | How is outer-space relevant in modern warfare, what would space combat look like? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's where satellites are, and satellites are the backbone of modern communications and photo-reconnaissance technology. The GPS satellites, for example, allow the US military to guide vehicles and weapons to anywhere on the globe with a tiny margin of error. That's a *HUGE* advantage in a fight. Reconnaissance satellites orbit constantly and collect images of whatever the owner of the satellite wants pictures of. Being able to shoot down, damage, or confuse your enemy's satellites seriously limits his ability to gather information. As for space combat, at the moment it looks a lot like slinging missiles (or potentially laser beams) at your enemy's satellites/unmanned spacecraft to disable or destroy them. We're a few lifetimes away from spaceship dogfights.",
"*Outer* space isn't relevant at all. Earth orbit is however. Earth orbit is full of satellites; communication satellites, spy satellites, weather satellites, GPS satellites, etc. These satellites are critical to controlling a military operation on the opposite side of the globe. Space warfare would likely look like a lot of missiles being launched at these satellites. The US does have a couple of classified projects in space. It's entirely possible that we've already got some kind of kill drone in orbit, to engage, destroy, and/or capture enemy satellites.",
"A large mass dropped from space can release as much energy as a nuke without radiation. The ability to take down satellites of your rivals would be very desirable in war time.",
"Space-based resources like satellites are used for communications (coordinating between friendly forces) and taking pictures. Modern day \"space combat\" would be focused on trying to disable or destroy satellites (maybe electronically with hacking or physically with missiles)."
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8s6a2p | What is the actual purpose of having a United States Space Force? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I think the idea is to split the responsibility for space off of the Air Force, much like how NASA was split off for civilian aerospace work. The Air Force actually spends more on space operations than NASA (moreso if you include agencies like the NRO). Putting that as it's own organization would, in theory, let them focus on the core mission better. Not really sure I agree with it, since most of the best ideas come from the cross-pollination of different fields, and trying to silo space completely will, I think, be more harmful than helpful."
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8s6hmh | What stops a website from using my credit card and taking all my money? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because it's a crime and they will be charged. More importantly, the credit card company will not work with them again."
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8s79tf | How does radio stations measure the number of listeners? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Survey companies like Nielsen give out special receivers to a small sample of people that track what stations they are listening to. From that they can estimate what everyone is listening to.",
"The amount of engagement a station receives gives a lot of insight in how many listeners there are. Say you know that 1% of listeners typically call up, if you receive 100 calls after asking a question you could estimate that you have 10,000 listeners. That kind of data is useful for pricing advertisement slots, bragging rights is just a bonus. Edit: bad maths Edit 2: the estimates for listener engagement are fairly accurate these days because of how long radio has been around. And because of the advertisement angle there is a financial incentive for them to be as accurate as possible."
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8s7zsb | What is a hydraulic press actually used for? Other than clickbait videos | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Kitchen sinks. The metal ones, that seem to be made out of a single piece of metal that just happens to be the shape of a sink? That is most likely a single piece of metal which was squeezed into shape by a hydraulic press. The drain gets cut out at the same time. The drain cover can even be cut at the same time. Of course the same principle can be applied to any number of other objects.",
"Squishing things It can be used for shaping sheet metal into stuff like kitchen sinks(mentioned below), car body panels, or any other thin metal shape. They're also used for \"reshaping\" cars and garbage in car crushers and trash compactors. They can be used for punching holes out of thick material to make a metal grate They can also be used to squeeze metal through a die to shape it. Kids will squeeze play-doh through shapes to create things, aluminum extrusions are made the same way except with hot aluminum instead of play-doh and with a > 2,500 ton hydraulic press instead of a thumb. Anything where you need a squishing force, a hydraulic press can help.",
"Used for all sorts of automotive stuff, pressing bearings on or off of a shaft, pressing fittings and pulleys into place, etc. they even have presses that will crush old oil filters and paint cans and stuff like that. On a large scale, almost all the body panels on a car are pressed into shape.",
"My dad uses one to make OSB Sterling board. Basically, gather a bunch of wood chips, apply heat and (massive) pressure, boom - a nice piece of sterling board.",
"Skateboards, they are used to press the 7 ply maple veneers together with the epoxy. This makes the blank which then is shaped into a skateboard deck.",
"Depends on what attachments you have; you could cut sheet metal. Bend sheet metal. Stamp sheet metal. Crush clickbait objects in videos. For example: With a V block and a bevel blade, you could bend - gutters, - power/electrical boxes. - pipe brackets. - fencing. - what ever with a straight edge.",
"Broaching keyways in gears, pressing gears on and off of shafts, pressing bearings into place, forming sheet metal, etc.",
"Worked for an oil company once. A great many things required metal being heated and pressed into/onto other metal. Pressing bearings was common.",
"Retail stores use them to compress cardboard into bails for recycling. And compressing trash into trailer length dumpsters.",
"Deforming metal, or pushing 2 things together that you don't want pulled apart. They'll take a pin that is a little bit bigger than a hole in a block of metal, and press the pin into the metal. Or they'll use hydraulics to stamp sheetmetal for a curved shape, like the hood of a car.",
"I used one to make rubber rings: - have big rubber sheet - Put a metal shape on the sheet - \"Press X to use\" - all day, everyday, one summer."
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8s82n1 | Why does the same TV commercial sometimes run back to back? Isnt that an inefficient use of ad dollars? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Friend of mine works for ITV (UK channel) and I asked her this question (among others) a while back. Apparently it is just human error in queuing up the ads. She had never seen an order come in for back-to-back of the same ad although she often had side-by-side ads for the same company with similar-but-different products. Her example was a cleaning product, the first ad was for a kitchen cleaning product and the next ad was for a bathroom cleaning product. The ads \"complemented\" each other apparently. If not side-by-side they often went for a next-but-one approach so you have a different ad in between the two related ads. I realised advertising is a strange world. Not to mention an expensive one! Apparently a 20-30 second ad during prime time shows such as Coronation Street (big soap opera in the UK) you are talking like £10k to £30k!!",
"This is what I know from a job I had, and what was explained to me. I worked for a newspaper that owned a tv and radio station. It may be a \"make-good\". When an ad is paid for by an advertiser the station has an obligation to run all the ads or commercials the advertiser paid for. If for some scheduling reason the ad or commercial can't run at its scheduled time, it's run as soon as possible. Sometimes it's back to back in the same program break.",
"I work as a Master Control Operator for a tv station and when I notice a back to back commercial that’s the same and I have some control, I’ll move it around. Usually it is human error. However, when segmenting nationally syndicated shows with their own set of commercials sometimes they will play the same 15 or 30 second commercial throughout the program many times and there’s not much I can do. One time a 30 minutes children’s educational program had the same Colgate commercial with a country music singer 12 times throughout the run. I think it must have been a make good as a previous poster said but damn if nothing else I wouldn’t buy it on principle.",
"I am working in a local tv studio. And the broadcast program is arcaic. It is the least user friendly program ever. And so it is easier to make mistakes"
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8s857l | Now that people can pay to get YouTube Premium and avoid ads, how does YouTube pay creators? Does it check the ones you, as a Premium user, watch and treat them as if you were a normal user or are we going to see a decrease in YouTubers' revenue? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A portion of what you pay YouTube gets split between the creators of the videos you watch depending on how much time you spend on each. It's supposedly vastly more profitable for creators of long videos, while very short ones might see a net loss."
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8s9pkl | How can we automatically tell when a practical effect is a tiny model in closeup? | Watching [old scifi tv show]; we see an interior shot of a spaceship, exterior shot of a tiny toy rocket landing, interior of a spaceship again. How can I tell the model is only about 5 inches tall? What about the image is tipping off my subconcious that it's looking at a closeup of something small vs a distance shot of something big? How can I easily distinguish between a 5 inch model vs. a 12 foot model vs. cgi? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Lack of detail on the small model is a good giveaway. You may also be noticing that it doesn't move with the momentum you'd expect out of a large massive object.",
"Lights, shadow, depth of field all works a little differently on small scale models. Look around you and everything you look at in the room will look pretty crisp. But if you hold a small coin in front of your eye and focus on the details, everything else will unfocus. On top of that, especially in older movies, the miniatures are often just lower detail, cheap materials and such. You might just see something flex, vibrate or bounce that shouldn't. Even if you don't consciously notice, it will break the illusion. That said, I doubt you've noticed every miniature that ever passed your eyes in a movie."
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8scrn2 | what’s the difference between the web and the internet? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The internet is all of the interconnected networks and includes stuff like game servers, business networks, and file-sharing services like torrents. The Web is a subset of the internet where you see websites in your browser and primarily navigate through the use of hyperlinks. It does not include all internet activities though."
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8sdbsr | How do speedometers work? | How do they know a car is there? How do they know exactly how fast it's going? Edit: I mean the speedometer the police use. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They measure how fast your tyres are turning and turn that into a speed. That's why if you change the size of your tyres your speedometer needs to be reconfigured because it'll show the wrong speed otherwise.",
"It's very easy to measure speed: all you need is 2 spots, and the time it took the car to travel between them. Because speed = distance (between the spots) / time. So: - Radar reflects off your car, and the cop's radar gun will shoot two shots of it, measure where your car was at the first shot, and how much closer it was at the second shot, divided by the time between the shots. - Magnetic rectangles buried in the asphalt - if it's just one, it's counting how many cars pass by, if it's two, they can measure how long it takes a car to go from the first to the second, and thus measure the speed of the car. - Speed checked by airplane: they look at the white markings on the road, and start a timer to see how long it will take your car to go from the first marking to the second marking."
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8sdy21 | Why are spam bots and emails still used, despite how glitchy and obvious they are? Are people still falling for these things? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They’re glitchy on purpose. Scammers don’t want tech savvy people bothering them and messing with their scams, because they know those people could rat them out. If you make your email sketchy, only uninformed people will answer, and those are more likely to be suckers",
"I don't mean this as a criticism, but you must be pretty young. I'm 37 and I still think like you. How could anyone fall for this shit? Unfortunately, if you spend any time at all around older people who use computers, you'll get it. It makes me sick how often I have to tell my boss and his wife not to listen to their little scare tactics. If you think that's bad, you'd be shocked at how bad scams are on landline phone numbers. Once they know you're not a business, you're inundated non-stop with scam calls. It's really sad, but the answer is, these scams work on the gullible now and then, and on the elderly all the time."
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8sef7y | What exactly does a phone carrier selling you location data mean? | I've been seeing articles about how a US senator endorsed that the 4 major US carriers stop selling customer location data to data brokers and I'm confused at what it means really. What kind of data are they selling? How deep does it go? Do they have access to information other than my location? Is the location exact or just what cell towers I ping from? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Any data your phone is capable of recording. Went on Amazon and put extra large dildos in your cart then remove them? You must be in the market for extra large dildos and are still searching Dildos 'r Us is having a sale today. You're visiting your friend and he's shopping for gifts but he doesn't know what to get you. Perhaps we should show him an ad for dildos on your profile. Calling a woman that's not your wife while your wife's phone is nowhere near you while you are home at odd hours? Your wife's divorce lawyer might be interested in your phone company's meta data that they keep.",
"Depending on your cell phone, location data can be exact GPS coordinates correlated against time. It can be enough to tell where you live, where you work, shop, eat, where you go for entertainment, where you go to church, if you've been to a doctor's office recently, etc. Combine that with your browsing history, and it gets even creepier. It would also not surprise me if phones are used to eavesdrop on nearby conversations and mine them for advertising keywords.",
"Also I think they can use the data to create convincing fake profiles of people, for whatever use they need.",
"You go to a restaurant every Friday because you like the lamb, but it’s a hiding place for ISIS. Now your on a list. Or today it’s cool to go to the church of what’s happening now but some group feels those guys are on the edge of crazy. It may not be cool tomorrow. Personally I don’t think it’s anyone’s business where I am or what I’m doing."
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8sm8wi | are there any legitimate uses for caller ID spoofing? | I get a ton of spam calls with spoofed local numbers. Is there any legitimate reason phone companies allow this to happen? If not why can’t they simply block this from being possible? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Companies often use it for outside calls. For example they could have all callbacks route to the sales desk. They could also use it in combination with a call routing service so calls in and out could appear as the same national number when it really redirects to your local branch office. Fraudulent use tends to far outweigh either of those in how common it is though."
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8sn0lb | How do they pressurize bottles before the cap gets put on? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Depends. With beer it goes into the bottles flat but they add yeast. The yeast its the starches in the beer and burps out gas. That's what makes it fizzy and gives the bottle pressure. With sodas(I'm assuming on this one), they make it fizzy before and then add it into the bottle. Once the bottle is closed, some of the fizz comes out of the soda but can't escape the bottle, so it becomes pressurized."
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8snorb | How do 'safe' nuclear reactors have a catastrophic meltdown? | Many times I have come across news, articles, comments relating to global warming say that nuclear is a safe (and "impossible to explode"). What was different about Chernobyl and Fukushima? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Chernobyl was an outdated kind of reactor being intentionally operated in a state that it should never have been in. Fukushima was a perfect storm (literally and figuratively) to exploit the design flaws in the *site* (not the reactors themselves).",
"Whoever tells you nuclear is completely safe is obviously confused, since there have been fatal accidents. Like any extremely concentrated power source, a nuclear reactor is a dangerous object if mishandled. Chernobyl was a victim of operator error, and Fukushima was a victim of a tsunami larger than the highest it was designed to handle. Newer designs for the next generation are much safer than current designs. But you'd still die if you jumped into the core, for example; and a major mess would happen if a giant bomb were dropped on one.",
"Nuclear reactors have so many safeguards and backups that in the case of anything going slightly awry, it can be taken back into control. It is basically impossible for a modern nuclear reactor to suddenly explode or just decide to meltdown. In short, they don't explode unless someone decides to throw caution off the bridge on the way to work or you just get very, VERY unlucky. The reason why Chernobyl went nuclear (pun intended) was because the reactor was no where near well designed. The reactor had many issues, and was not really a \"safe\" reactor. During a test, Something happened to cause the reactor's output to plummet, and when they tried bringing the output back up, the temps skyrocketed, and the emergency shutdown that should have activated didn't, causing the ensuing disaster. Fukushima, on the other hand, had everything that could go wrong, go wrong. The basement flooded, disabling their emergency generators. Backup generators that were up on a hill also flooded, disabling them as well. Only two generators ever functioned. Thankfully, only 3 of the 6 reactors were operating, but the ensuing meltdown was quite violent in some cases. Reactors 1 and 3 exploded because of a reaction between the water and the zirconium-alloy cladding of the fuel rods. Reactor 2 had corium (molten nuclear fuel) within.",
"Nothing is 100% perfect, but both Fukushima and Chernobyl were old nuclear power plants that did not have the kinds of safety features and design elements as plants and reactors being built today. New reactor and plant designs have incorporated decades of experience and design knowledge that simply didn't exist in the 60's and 70's. Furthermore, the type of reactor used in Chernobyl was an inherently flawed and unsafe design, and the Fukushima plant had design flaws in the site that allowed the tsunami to be as destructive as it was.",
"The same reason 'safe' airplanes crash: * Sometimes, over decades, things happen that the designers of the reactors and the safety procedures did not foresee. * Pepole make mistakes, especially when they're tired, and they stop being 100% vigilant when nothing dangerous has happened for a long time. * People are greedy, stupid, and irresponsible, and they skirt safety regulations to save money, or just because they're lazy. * These factors can combine to defeat pretty much any safety design."
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8soj9w | How in the world do scientists image atoms | What I'm talking about is like how they imaged the stop motion film [A Boy and His Atom]( URL_0 ). I'm still confused on how they image only the CO molecules and not copper atoms that they were situated on. My understanding is that there is a layer of electrons obscuring the view of the copper atoms, but I'm not sure if this is what's happening. Also, how in the world do they make an image using electrons? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Imagine that you are working in a shipyard. You have a crane that can be positioned at every point in the yard with a high degree of accuracy. Now imagine that you have a large magnet attached to your crane. You lower this down and perform a sweep over the shipyard; if there are any magnetic objects that are scattered about the yard, by carefully monitoring the movement of your crane, you could construct a 2 dimensional map of where the magnetic items were in the shipyard. A similar technique is employed here. A tip is moved with a high degree of accuracy over all points in a plane, and by carefully measuring the current flowing through the tip, you can measure what the surface of a material looks like. The analogy is obviously not perfect, but hopefully gives you a rough idea of how it might work. Note that there are other ways of seeing individual atoms, but perhaps none that are as conceptually digestible.",
"The method used here is called \"scanning tunnelling microscopy\" (STM). You basically scan the surface with a tip while applying a small voltage and measure the tunnel current at each spot. The tip is moved by applying a voltage to a so-called piezoelectric crystal. That's a material that expands or contracts when voltage is applied to it. With this method you can position the tip with sub-angstrom (one angstrom is similar to the diameter of an atom) accuray. What you see here is a copper surface with CO adsorbed on it. Copper is a metal and the electrons form a somewhat homogeneous \"electron gas\" at the surface of the metal. Imaging the individual copper atoms at a clean surface is actually quite hard because the structure is so homogeneous. It's not like there is a layer of electrons obscuring the \"view\" (though that is not really the correct term because STM is not an optical method) of the copper atoms, more like these eletrons are part of the copper atoms because the atom is just the nucleus with a bunch of eletrons around it. The only part of the atom that you can actually image with this method is the electron clouds. The surface that you see *is* made of copper atoms. If you look closely, there are a few darker round spots in the surface where copper atoms are missing. What you also see in the video are these wave-like structures around the CO atoms. These are caused by distortions in the electron gas induced by the adsorbed CO molecules that are sticking out of the surface.",
"To use an analogy from optical microscopy, the copper surface is simply out of focus. In constant height mode, the STM probe will scan in 2D without moving in the Z axis. This is useful for fast imaging if you know beforehand if your target is homogeneous or say, the exact height of what you are trying to image, These CO features happen to all be one molecule tall. The probe height is adjusted to resolve every CO molecule in detail. Everything else higher or lower will not be imaged properly and look blurred out or even flat. In constant current mode the probe will scan everything and essentially follow the contours of the whole field. This will get you properly resolved textures of the Cu substrate."
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8sownz | What is the differences between those car "models"; roadster, spyder, convertible and cabriolet? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A roadster, spider, or spyder (all the same thing) was originally a two-seat, open-topped sports car. The term is often used for closed-top two-seaters with sporty styling or high performance models of small cars. Convertible and cabriolet are the same thing. A car with a folding top. Cabriolet is more often used in Europe.",
"None of these are set in stone, may be swapped around for marketing reasons but generally used as: Roadster= English topless or optional removable top. Spyder= Italian topless or optional removable top. Convertable= English removable top. Cabriolet= French removable top (only very rarely hard). **MISSING** Targa= Italian removable top (almost always soft)."
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8spid7 | How is color added to very old films? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"A long time ago they used to hand paint every single slide on the film strips. This is why the colors sometimes look blotchy or weird. They also used to dye entire segments of the film one color so a whole scene would be tinted red or purple or something to evoke a certain mood. As far as adding color to black and white films now, there are various computer methods that take a lot of painstaking work. Im sure there will soon be some deep machine learning algorithms that add color to old pictures at least, if not film."
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8srbnh | Why is army camouflage pixelated when that’s the polar opposite design of any natural environment that you would be trying to blend in with?? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Apparently, it takes twice as long to notice a person in digital camouflage than it does the old camo pattern. See URL_0 , especially [this photo]( URL_1 ) As one expert says, large blotchy patterns work best for long distances and small patterns work best up close. Digital camo uses both.",
"The designs of camouflage uniforms are made to break up the person's shape. Human brain are really good at recognising an outline, so the design tries to fooll that by creating many different lines across the person's body, hoping that some of these will line up with parts of the background, and the person trying to see the soldier will see them as part of the background.",
"Its intended to make you blurry. That makes your brain ignore it as out of focus. If it was sharp then it would be way way more obvious where they were. Your brain notices edges really well, so you want clothes that don’t have ‘edges’ in the color.",
"Pixilated camo helps for a very specific way of disguising,hiding, and blending. The way I remeber it has something to do with larger distances and how our brain understands visual stuff. Answer: So, essentially, pixilated camo blends better at certain distances(longer usually I think) than other types of camo because of our brains way of understanding vision."
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8sre4f | How can the source code of a game be lost while the game itself is still playable? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When a game is created, it is a hodge-podge of code and assets and all. The code portion of that is the source. When the game is bundled up, all of that is wrapped up in a package and the code is scrambled and altered in a way where the system can still read it, but it's not something that be easily reverse engineered, to prevent people from getting to that source code which is the result of thousands of man hours of work and research and can contain very valuable resources the company wishes to retain control over. Releasing the game is sort of like baking a cake and without the source code, you have to piece together the ingredients and recipe without any help. It's not *impossible* to do, but it's very arduous and in most cases, not worth the effort.",
"it's like the exact recipe being lost and all you've got is the cake you can work out rough basic ingredients, but all the specifics like order things were added and how long whisked and how long baked are all gone the code programmers write is compiled (baked) into the final runnable program. information is lost in that process, so you can't perfectly \"run it backwards\" to recover the recipe"
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8srgkd | Would Filing Down The Barrel Of A Gun Remove The Ability To Trace A Bullet Fired From A Gun Back To That Specific Gun? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"No because the file itself would leave marks in the barrel that are unique and would hence be traceable to any bullet fired from the gun. If the Barrel were polished to remove all marks then the bullet would tumble when it exits the barrel. The bullet would not be accurate and while it may not have marks from the barrel it would probably be unique in that regards and hence also traceable since no other gun would have a polished barrel.....",
"Bullets are usually traced back to the gun that shot them through rifling - grooves in the barrel that keep bullets flying straight after they are fired. As the rifling spins the bullet, trace marks on the are made, matching the rifling pattern. Barrels without rifling, called smoothbore, (Almost exclusively in shotguns) are much more difficult, if not impossible, to trace back. If no identifying patterns were left on the pellets or slug, there is no markings to match up. Filing a rifled barrel down smooth would likely leave imperfections in the barrel that might still be traceable, not to mention drastically reduce weapon accuracy. Other parts to shotgun rounds, wadding and casing in particular, can be traced back to the gun that fired them. But I won't get into detail on these."
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8sus7x | - How do they edit live sports so quickly as to get the replays and slow motion from multiple angles? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's a whole team of people operating EVS machines (basically big hard drives that record all cameras at once, synced to the same timecode). They have controls which make it quick and easy to select multiple camera angles and adjust the playback speed, then put them together to make a clip. An assistant director (AD) oversees this team and relays to the main director which clip he should take to air. An experienced EVS op can put that together in a matter of seconds. Edit: This is an EVS controller URL_0",
"Most broadcast companies have a source feed going to multiple work stations. One is for a direct live broadcast feed. It will usually be minimally touched by software and hardware so that it can be aired as quickly as possible. A second feed will go to a robust system intended to be able to quickly cut and edited (replay slow-mo) then fed back to the main unit switch for broadcast. I will add that in some cases for major events they will actually time delay the whole event by upwards of a minute to give them time to make sure the best camera angle was chosen, and to hide anything that shouldn't be aired (looking at you Justin Timberlake and Janet.)",
"Source: did this in college. There’s the Director, he’s looking at screens of all the cameras. ‘Ready camera 3, go camera 3.’ The editor (me) hits the camera 3 btn, Jumbotron shows camera 3. Graphics etc all get loaded up on top as well in the same way. Another editor, ‘replay editor’ or RP (also me or my coworker) is controlling replay. Replay is a deck that is constantly recording. RP hits a button to indicate ‘in’ point, like if a fast break happens RP hits the button, then if a turnover happens he hits again; Anytime there might be something cool coming up he hits it. If Producer says “ready replay go replay” then RP is on… He has a scrubber knob that goes to the last in point and then he can turn the knob to control the replay speed… So a slamdunk can be Slowed down, paused, reversed… It’s basically RP’s time to shine. My university I went to happened to be doing really well in sports when I was there so Coca-Cola gave a bunch of money for the Jumbotron and the replay truck, it was one of the most fun jobs I’ve ever had.",
"[Here's]( URL_0 ) an awesome mini documentary about how it all works. Totally worth the 13 minutes. tr;dl: tons of cameras, computers, and people.",
"URL_0 Not mainstream sports, but this gives a good idea of what a production team does on game day. A lot of teamwork goes into making the production.",
"By having a whole team of technicians doing realtime (within 7seconds) and by the producer doing realtime planning and feed switching.",
"All the camera feeds (or select in the case of some trucks) go into what's called an EVS machine. This machine records every camera feed and allows the team to literally rewind the play to make high lights. All the cameras are synced and it allows the operator to set an in point to start the first replay and go back to the same point on a different camera angle. This is the most watered down explanation I got Source: replay op for sports",
"The machine I used for replay is easy to work once you get used to it. You can have preset lengths, so if you hit the “out” key it will save the last 6 seconds, or the last 3 seconds, whatever you need. It depends on the sport. Plus keys have shortcuts for tagging/naming them so you know what each piece of footage is, who it’s of, and what they’re doing. It’s all done very quickly. It’s fun!",
"Check out this video of my friend operating a repaly system (called EVS) for a hockey game. It'll give you an idea of how it all works. [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )",
"These kinds of things have mobile IT server rooms. I've seen what they do for things like the Olympics and it is impressive. They have to plan for basics like power, bandwidth, and security (because, Russia) in places that don't have that. It is totally cool to roll up with power, bandwidth, and capacity to support 250 servers.",
"Here is an Australian Rules Football broadcast from 1996, so when it wasn't all digital just yet. Basically one bloke looking at 4-6 screens at once and cutting between cameras when he thinks he should, while feeding player names to the commentators so they can talk about what just happened if they were unable to see it clearly from the commentary box. Replays would have taken ~30 seconds to set up which someone else would feed to him so he could add them into the broadcast. URL_1 It is part of a 45min video documentary made by a year 12 student: URL_0",
"You have a computer (EVS) which records each camera and a controller (LSM) which selects, rewinds and plays the different recordings. This setup will most often have a main output (program output) and a secondary channel to find the next angle (preview output). When something happens and you want to show a replay of that event you do the following: 1. Select the first angle you want to show, lets call them input A, B, C or D. 2. There's a wheel you can rotate on the LSM to rewind the recording back to when you want to start the playback. 3. When you're where you want to be, you announce to the director that you're ready to play. Whenever the director wants you to play back the event you use a lever/T-bar to select what speed you want the replay to be. It will often be somwhere between 12,5 & #37; and 100 & #37; based on how many images per second the camera sends and the EVS is recording. By moving the lever you automatically start playing from the current time in the program output. 4. While playing, or before, you press a button to select the preview output. Once selected you select the second angle and turn the wheel to get to where you want it to start from. 5. When you're done playing from the first angle on the program output you press a button (\"take\") to change the program and the preview output. (This can change by cutting, dissolving or wiping.) What was in the preview monitor is now what's playing on the program ouput. 6. Repeat as many times as needed and based on how many camera angles you have by changing what's in the preview monitor by selecting a new input and scrubbing in time and pressing \"take\". All this has to happen within 5-15 seconds based on the play. You can also save and mark different points in time for future replays.",
"Ahh! Plenty of people have already beat me to this, but this is the first Eli5 I’ve ever actually been able to answer! Looks like that degree payed off after all"
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8sv4vq | how do computers retain memory data even when you turn it off or unplug it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Hard drive storage is pretty simple to explain. Thinking of a magnetic platter as a panel of toggle switches (like the ones you use to turn lights on and off), a hard drive can switch individual switches, and read the state of those switches later. The position of those switches does not need electricity to maintain, but work has to be done to flip a switch. Solid state drives, using non-volatile flash memory, follow a similar overall concept, just with a vastly different technology.",
"/u/TehWildMan_ already answered your question for hard drives (long-term storage). If you're talking about RAM (the short-term memory that keeps the state of the operating system and programs), then there are two tricks that the computer can use. The first trick is called stand-by. You're right about memory... it needs power to keep the information. So stand-by turns off power to everything except the tiny bit for the memory, and the memory can keep it's information until the next time you turn on your computer, and you're right back where you were. Of course, this doesn't work if you unplug the computer (and remove its battery). The second trick is called hibernation. RAM is really fast. Hard drives are really slow. That's why computers keep files on hard drives, but the stuff it's actually using in RAM. But there's no reason it can't put the stuff it's using on the hard drive. And that's what hibernation does: it takes everything in RAM and puts it in one big file on the hard drive, then shuts down the computer. Now the computer doesn't need any power at all. The next time you turn it on, it reads that file back into the memory, and you're right back where you were. Stand-by is fast, hibernation is slow. Stand-by needs a tiny bit of power, hibernation doesn't need any. Edit: said \"computers\" where I meant to say \"programs.\" :P"
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8svpoe | How are computer or phone components increasing their processing power so much almost every two three years? How close are we to reaching the peak or seeing a massive improvement? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The key lies in the size you need to accurately \"place\" parts onto a chip. Since semiconductive chips have been used we've been following something called \"Moore's Law\" quite well, it states that every few years the amount of transistors in a chip will double. Unfortunately, there has been a steady decline in how fast the amount doubles over the last decade or so, the advantages we get each generation over the last now are laughable compared to what was being achieved in the 90s and early 2000s. We are currently at 10nm and soon we will be dealing with sizes of atoms. It's pretty clear that soon we will need new technology for chips. EDIT: minor errors",
"The main problem with processor speeds is heat generation. By reducing the size of transistors and other circuit components, manufacturers can reduce the electric resistance and therefore the heat that is dissipated. We've hit the plateau of Moore's law already a few years back. Processor clock rates have been stuck around 2-5 GHz for about 10 years now. At the current scale (~ 10 nanometers, about the size of a few Silicon atoms!) it has become nearly impossible to improve. Therefore manufacturers are switching towards multicore processors. While servers already had 10-20 core chips for a while, most consumer systems only had 2 or 4. Now Intel and AMD are bringing 8, 12, 16, 32(!) core chips to high performance consumers. Short disclaimer: only adapted software really benefits from that much cores and power. That's mostly multimediamedia or engineering rendering. Microsoft Office or Chrome won't run any faster, so don't worry if your new pc only has 2 or 4 cores.",
"The main ways speed are / have been increasing are through speed, core count, size, and efficiency for the most. Clock speed used to be a big way to increase speed but we hit limits for that on silicon a long time ago (around 4 to 5 ghz is where most processors tap out). Increasing core count can only help so much because not all work loads can be done in a parallel fashion. It's mainly been shrinking the manufacturing process so that they can literally fit more stuff into the same size area and or creating more efficient architecture designs that can do more work with less clock cycles like a car getting better gas mileage. It's currently a big debate on if we are approaching a peak. You can only make the manufacturing process so small before you start to run into issues with the physics of how a cpu works (namely quantum tunneling). So in the somewhat near future there's gonna have to be some big changes on how processors are made in order to continue the constant march of progress we have enjoyed for so many years."
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8sz5ez | Why do soap operas look differently than any other TV show? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Frame rate Films and most TV shows are filmed on... film. You'd get 24fps from them Soap operas are usually cheaply made, so they don't bother with film, they record directly to video (a video tape, or digital video). You can get frame rates of up to 50 or 60fps usually"
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8t01ov | How can video games that have been in development for 6-7 years have graphics that are up to or beyond todays standards? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When I developed games a two years ago, I was in charge of developing the \"logic\" without any visual assets (only using Unity built-in squares and spheres). Once this part is done, we 'skin' the game using real assets. I have no idea how is this done (or possible) in big companies developing AAA games. The /r/Simulated may make my idea clearer.",
"The up to date visuals are created using the technology of the last few years. There will be cutting edge tech that can generate better visuals, but the games that use it are still in development.",
"You can develop for super fast overclocked mega pcs, then by the time you release technology has advanced and its playable on regular pcs, or you can drop in better graphics towards the end of the dev process (higher res textures etc) that slowed the game to a crawl on the pcs of the time but work later. Everquest 2 for example had extreme graphics settings that rendered about 1 frame every 5 seconds on a top end pc - that was for future proofing."
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8t15fm | What is the benefit of a 'three lens' camera on a phone? What does each lens actually do? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The cameras in phones are too small to fit zoom mechanics in there so one way to achieve different focal lengths (wide angle, normal and telephoto) is to just put three entire lens/camera assemblies in there."
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8t2s7z | How do phones work? | I know sound is turned into electric signals which are transmitted through cables. But I need it deconstructed much more than that. From an ancient person’s perspective, sound can only eminate from something that physically caused it. A tree falling will create the sound of a tree falling. But it breaks the rules of logic when an electronic device can replicate all these sounds even though there’s no corresponding physical cause. How can my phone or TV for that matter store, replay, or immediately transmit these sounds? And if the answer is it’s reduced to electronic signals, then how are these signals able to replicate millions of different utterances and sounds? What is the process of the sound being digitized and delivered crystal clear to someone else living thousands of miles away? And for that matter, how did humans ever stumble upon the thought that this might work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We can convert audible sound to electric signals because we understand the relationship between sound and Alternating Current - they are both waves, and while not the same physically, can be represented in the same way. Allow me to elucidate - Sound travels through the air by pushing molecules in a direction, and then pulling them back in the opposite direction. As one layer of molecules pushes forward, they cause other molecules to move forward in the same direction. As those first molecules move back to fill the void caused by their original movement, they also start pulling the second molecules back to their original position. This is a basic description of a sound \"wave\". Alternating Current (AC) works in much the same way, only moving electrons instead of air molecules. And, like increasing air pressure can help move things that are not air, changing the direction and amount of current can also move things that are not electrons. In this case, we are using current to push and pull on a speaker base, which is attached to a fabric (or other material) cone. As the amount and direction of current changes, it causes the base to vibrate at a certain frequency, which in turn, causes the cone to vibrate at that frequency, this causes the air around the cone to vibrate at that frequency, and then we hear that as sound. A microphone is the same thing, just in reverse. When we record sounds to be replayed later, either digitally or on analog, we are telling the player how strong to push the current, and how fast to change its direction back and forth. Higher current means louder, more changing means higher frequency. For more information, look up Lorentz Force, and know that we use that phenomena on metal speaker bases to move the cones. Here is a good place to start for your specific question: URL_0"
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8t4nge | In videogames, why are some games defined as Role Playing Games (RPG's) and why are others not? I mean, aren't almost all videogames RPG's? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because not all games include role playing. None of Age of Empires, XCOM, Sims etc. have you role playing. Some games have very minor role playing elements, such as Dark Souls, but it's very small.",
"If you're just going by the naïve interpretation of RPG as \"I'm playing a role\" (i.e. anything other than yourself) sure. But the term is in gaming generally involves acting out that role through a narrative experience, with character development, and often includes (albeit not necessarily) other aspects such as quests, exploration, classes or class-like development, and elements borrowed from tabletop gaming ala D & D. I will say the definitions can be somewhat fuzzy. But generally speaking, even though I am playing the role of BJ Blaskowitz in Wolfenstein, it typically wouldn't be classified as an RPG due to features such as its linear nature, non-player involvement in character development (you don't have much input into how BJ grows), and limited development as a character itself (you don't gain much in the way of further abilities, although you do to some extent, so debatable).",
"This is a bit of a legacy from when video games weren't a thing. Back in the 60's and 70's, the best \"nerdy\" entertainment outside of fantasy novels was miniature wargaming. If you've ever heard of \"Warhammer\", much the same thing: plastic/resin/metal miniatures moved around and dice rolled for unit-on-unit combat. Then in the late 70s, two game designers thought that their tabletop wargame, Chainmail, might be better suited to players rolling for/controlling individual models, rather than a whole squad/platoon/army, and thus Dungeons and Dragons was born. Rather than command an army, you were *playing* the *role* of a particular hero. Hence, RPGs were a separation from wargames, as both were classifications of tabletop games. In the early eras of video games, many of the what would now be called \"indie\" game developers would adapt things they knew from their tabletop RPGs, and the name carried over to describe games that were like computerized D & D. Back then, processing & storage resources were limited, so if you wanted things like story and character progression, you had to sacrifice things like graphics. Nowadays, you can get all that character progression and story into a game that is packed with graphics. Now, this is a great history lesson, but we still don't have a real definition: What made D & D stand out from the other games of the time was the idea of taking a game about skirmishes in a war, and making it about the individual characters, and their progression and development, and the stories surrounding them. So for a game to be an RPG, you need to have the main focus of the game's events be the player character, and have one of the main ways that the character interacts with the game world be one of making impactful decisions that change both the game world and the character's development in meaningful ways."
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8t5krp | how is porting your phone number to a different cellphone company profitable for them? | Wireless phone companies seem to offer lots of incentives to get you to switch and bring your number. What’s the benefit to them? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Mainly because it just isn't up to them. In the US the law 47 U.S.C. § 251(b)(2) in the Telecommunication Act of 1996 requires that they make the numbers portable. So even if they wanted to hold the number hostage in order to retain customers they legally cannot.",
"It gives them an easy metric to see who is coming to them from what carrier. It's also good for sales because it makes the process easier for the customer, since they don't have to tell everyone their new number.",
"The biggest barrier to somebody switching providers is having to let everybody know about a new phone number/fear of missing important calls. So if you can easily move your number — they used to be assigned to particular carriers and weren’t portable — then they can more easily lure you to their service. Especially if there are incentives to get you to pull the trigger. Because nice you have switched, you aren’t likely to switch again for a few years and the marginal cost of serving an additional customer vs the revenue generated is big. Let’s say they get $100/mo from you... their actual marginal costs to service one more customer might only be $5."
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8t7bxj | The flaw in Clipper Chip LEAF encryption | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Below is an explanation of the flaw itself, but it is important to understand the element which was a key escrow system. Clipper chips were going to be given a unique encryption key at the time they were being installed in phones or other devices. They manufacturer would store the keys for later and provide the key to law enforcement, if the investigating agency had met the legal criteria to spy on someone. URL_0 Blaze discovered a mega design flaw in the technological \"backdoor\" of Clipper: the Law Enforcement Access Field (LEAF). The LEAF contains an encoded copy of the \"session key\" that can be used to read encrypted data. With information held in separate top-secret digital vaults by two government agencies, law enforcement should be able to decode the session key. Bottom line: corrupt the LEAF and cops can forget about unscrambling a Clipper-encoded communication of any kind. The LEAF is protected by a 16-bit checksum, which is a kind of self-checking mathematical equation. But hold on, Blaze warns: any random sequence of 16 bits has a 1-in-65,000 shot at passing that checksum test. Generating that many numbers is a simple hack for even a pedestrian programmer. Blaze found it possible to generate a seemingly valid, yet \"rogue\" checksum in about 42 minutes. Blaze's method means law enforcement officials can't tell if they have a valid or bogus LEAF. tldr: Matt Blaze realized that the 16 bit hash could be beaten fairly easily by brute force attacks. Law enforcement has no way of knowing if a chip has been compromised. Therefore, we cannot assume that any given clipper chip is reliable. Clipper chip was also heavily critcized because the \"skipjack\" algorithim designed for the chips was immediately classified by the NSA, thus no one in the industry could evaluate it's security. There were also multiple other arguments against it that had nothing to do with technical flaws."
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8t83ki | Why do electric tooth brushes vibrate slowly when on low power instead of running normally then suddenly shutting off? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They use a simple electromagnetic motor, which means that when the electricity goes through it then it pushes a magnet attached to the part of your brush that’s vibrating. Now the battery provides the electricity, but as the chemical reaction that is happening inside the battery starts slowing down it doesn’t stop all at once, rather it slowly peters out, like a fire does. So the motor still gets pushed, but not as fast. This keeps going until the battery just isn’t pushing the electricity enough to start the motor at all and your toothbrush is dead."
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8taa5a | How do you program a self driving car to do this or that? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It’s a popular misconception that AI programmers can even begin to deal with ethical problems in self driving cars. The answer is NO, they do not program choices into driving (hit the woman with baby or hit the 5 people on sidewalk). Bottom line is that self driving vehicles are programmed to stop and slow down given what is in front of them. If a baby crosses the street in front of the car, the only “decision” the car makes is “obstacle detected. Slam on brakes, downshift, stop” Anything else you’ve heard on the subject is pure fantasy.",
"> I just read about some debate on what the car should do in terms of the trolley-problem The answer to this, is that the self-driving car should plan far enough ahead so that it doesn't get into a situation where this is even a possibility. Nevertheless, I understand that this is not the core of your question. The bit you're really asking about is: > But don't neural nets and all that stuff work by learning themselves? Not quite, no. Neural networks are given a desired output that they're supposed to achieve. They learn themselves the best way of achieving that output, but the it's entirely down to the human programmers what the desired output is.",
"The vast amount if not all of the incidents are not caused by what you think of a decision. \"I saw the obstable and chose not to slam on the brakes\" but either I didn't see the obstacle because my sensors we're blocked I made a mistake in recognizing the obstacle because it was something I didn't recognize (semi trailer on bright sky background) I couldn't see the obstable because it's pitch black and dark obstacle was crossing into my path where I wasn't expecting (Uber death) I didn't recognize the obstacle because I was told to follow the official approved lines of the road but those lines led me to a abruptt obstacle. (Tesla crash into lane split) But anyway, people also seem to misunderstand what AI neural networks learning is and expectations. AI, just like humans, learn from training and mistakes. How many high school kids have accidents because they don't have years of experience? Why do we expect AI to do it perfectly when it doesn't have experience? Look at this example of neural learning. It's an AI plaing super Mario by learning the positive and negative outcomes of its actions. URL_0 How many times did a Mario die in order for the AI to learn to be perfect?"
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8tcqkx | Why can’t our devices simultaneously connect to 2 WiFi networks to provide an even faster internet connection? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Fundamentally there is only the hardware available to talk on one frequency at a time. It can be adjusted to hop between channels but at any given time it needs to be on only one. Conceptually you could use two sets of antennas and associated hardware to communicate over two separate channels at the same time, but you would need to use the same router to coordinate the transmission of information otherwise you would just be duplicating your effort. At this point we are proposing a heavily modified device on both ends of the process and it probably isn't even helpful because it is rarely the limiting factor in connection speed anyway.",
"Because 99.9% of consumers don’t want devices which are more expensive, bulkier, heavier and have shorter battery life.",
"In general the limiting factor is not the amout of wi-fis you connect to that governs your Speed but the quality of said wi-fi and the transfer rate your device can handle.",
"Depending on what you mean by fast, this is possible, but it’s not terribly useful in practice. The ELI5 is that you could have Hulu and Netflix both running, and make each one use a different WiFi connection and this would sort of get you what you want. You would have a harder time making Netflix alone use both, and would probably require some changes by the Netflix engineers. There are other techniques for getting a faster connection (plugging in a wired connection) but most of the time WiFi is fast enough.",
"It has to do with all of the layers of technology necessary for networks to work. When an application calls to the Transport layer, that is usually bound to a single Physical layer device - in this case, a wireless network interface. So, even though you have multiple network connections, your web browser or whatever is only using one of them at a time. Think of it as filling several buckets of water, but each bucket can only be filled by one spigot. Adding another spigot doesn't do much to help any given bucket get filled. Now, there are devices called multiplexers and demultiplexers. These devices consolidate and coordinate traffic such that multiple physical connections can be consolidated into one. However, there is some overhead in doing this that most likely makes the overall connection speed even slower in some cases."
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8tdk19 | when my phone is connected to my cars audio system via Bluetooth, how does the person talking not hear themself through my speakers? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your car stereo uses active echo cancellation. It know what signal it's sending out of the speakers so it compares the signal it's picking up on the mic to the signal it's send out the speakers and tries to remove anything that is the same in both. This is the same technology that works on your cell phone and on modern table stop speaker phones.",
"It seems that some people in the comments are mixing up two technologies. Acoustic Echo Cancellation is the technology that the OP is referring to. This records the incoming audio before it's played from the speakers, and then removes the *echo* after the microphone picks it up before sending it back to the other party. Active Noise Cancellation is the technology used in noise-cancelling headphones. This uses a microphone to pick up background noise and then plays back the inverted sound which effectively cancels it out for the listener.",
"I often hear myself echoed back during phone calls at work, it is awful. So difficult to concentrate. I don't know what causes it, but it certainly happens.",
"I'm in customer service, we can tell when you're using car audio. There's a bad echo and loud background noise. We have to patiently ask you to repeat everything and often say it's hard to hear you. When you switch to your headset or handset, we usually say OMG I can hear you now! I just wish my older co-workers would realize that shouting into their microphones doesn't help them hear better. Every day... \"I CAN'T HEAR YOU\" OMG Karen the microphone is 2 inches from your mouth, you need to adjust the volume in your ear, not your voice... Also, if you're using car audio in the parking lot, everyone can hear everything from outside, Tammy.",
"One piece of advice for bluetooth users... when you go to your mechanics shop to have some work done, make sure you turn off the bluetooth on your phone. Countless times I've been working on a car and been inadvertently listening to someone's entire telephone conversation over their car stereo.",
"If you own a Tesla Model 3 then every person you hear will complain that they can hear themselves. Can confirm."
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8tg9zn | Performance difference between a smartphone SoC, a mobile processor like in laptops and in desktop processors running at same clock speeds | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Clock speed doesn't really mean anything directly about the performance of a particular processor. You can imagine it as something like RPM for an engine; just knowing how many cycles occur per second doesn't tell you what gets done per cycle. A motorcycle engine at 2000 RPM will do much less than a tugboat engine at 1000 RPM. For a specific processor type the clock speed is an indication of performance compared to other processors of that same type, but when comparing mobile processors to desktop ones the metric just doesn't apply. The desktop ones can get more done per cycle."
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8thlg5 | How do speed detectors work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are multiple different types of speed detectors. The three common ones are Radar, LIDAR and cameras. Radar works by sending out radio waves at fixed intervals that hit a car, and the difference in time taken to get to the car and back can calculate the speed of the car. It also takes advantage of something called the Doppler Effect, which is what causes emergency vehicle sirens to switch pitch when driving towards you vs away from you. LIDAR works basically the same as radar, but using lasers instead of radio waves. Traffic enforcement cameras work by having sensors in the ground (usually) that tells you how long it takes for a car to go from one point to another.",
"The speed guns emit high frequency energy that bounce off the target and return to the gun. Since EM waves propagate through the air at a fixed rate, it's just a matter of computing the amount of time for a \"round trip\" to the target and back. This approach works great for determining distance to objects, but since vehicles are also moving the physics become a _little_ but more complicated. Notably, you have to consider something called the _Doppler Effect_ where the rate at which waves return to the gun also changes over time (because the vehicle is either getting closer or further away)."
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8thvw6 | How does the 'back' option on a browser know exactly where to scroll down to, even though the URL is the same as before? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The browser simply stores the last scroll location in memory so even if a new request is sent (it may well just load a locally cached version depending on settings/browser) it can jump straight to it."
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8ti6vd | What is Raspberry Pi? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Think of it as a small pc. You can plug a screen, a keyboard, a mouse and some sd card. Aaaaand, here you go, you have a small pc. It is mostly used for small/medium scaled applications on robotics or computer vision. Also, it is commonly used to teach children about programming and basic computer skills. Another advantage of raspberry pi is gpio (general purpose input/output) which can be thought as a dock for several gadgets or sensors to connect to pi. (Like arduino)"
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8tievc | how my Wi-Fi is super fast at loading HD movies but really slow at loading a low quality Gif? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not the speed of the connection, it's the speed of the things on either side. With movies your computer is connected to several servers, all of them sending parts of the film to you. Then your computer will start playing the movie when it only has a few seconds already downloaded. This is what buffering refers to. Gifs are usually sent from just one server, and your computer will only play them once it has the full file.",
"GIFs were a terrible format 10 years ago too, but it has just been the case that they were the lowest common denominator for a long long time; anything could display them. They are space inefficient and pretty bad on your CPU as well. The thing is though, that for the last two or three years, basically every browser and device used on the modern web can support the direct playback of h264 and VP8/9 encoded files. These are much smaller files, even at significantly better quality, and they are designed to be streamed, meaning that full quality playback can begin without the entire file being downloaded. GIFs probably would have been largely replaced sooner, except that h264 is surrounded by patent hullabaloo and VP8/9 acceleration (this means you have a chip that only handles one thing) is uncommon. If you want to learn more: URL_1 URL_0",
"Video compression is very complex. GIF: Each frame is like its own picture.. so if a GIF is 10 seconds long, that's like 15 frames per second x 10 seconds = 150 actual pictures downloaded. Compressed Video: First full frame (picture) is downloaded. Each consecutive frame is **based** off that first full frame. Whatever **changes** in the next frame, that's the **only** information downloaded, not the whole frame. It's a lot more complicated than that, but that is why videos are a lot more space friendly than GIF's.",
"It probably has nothing to do with your wi-fi. Big streaming services tend to pay a lot to locate servers close to big markets to ensure faster speeds and less congestion. Some website that hosts gifs probably doesn't do this and there may be a lot of people trying to access data or you may be pretty remote from the server.",
"In addition to everyone else's comments about multiple servers sending parts of the stream, gif frames are also usually far larger than mp4 frames or other content. Compression ratios of a large gif to mp4 can be 80 to 90% file reduction, and any hiccup delays the playback.",
"There are lots of good answers here, and as you might be gathering it's a combination of things rather than one bullet. But there's one I haven't seen posted yet: TCP vs UDP - two different internet transmission protocols Basically, streaming services are sent to you via a UDP connection, which is more-or-less \"catch it if you got it, but if not keep playing ball.\" This is why you'll see streaming sometimes skip over a half-second or stutter -- it's because your device didn't catch the the entire transmission, but kept playing even with the hole punched out. TCP (more likely to be used to transmit a .GIF) on the other hand likes to verify that you got the whole thing. This takes a longer time since both your computer and the server are talking to each other a lot more rather than it would with your computer just listening like it does in UDP. I hope that's a decent ELI5 of it.",
"Animated GIFs are technically a video format, as they do use parts of previous frame to construct the current one. They're best used for short flat animations, like pieces of old Disney cartoons. Anything with shadows and color gradations increases the size astronomically as the format now has no perfectly identical pieces of previous frames to re-use, such as blocks of flat-colored dresses or sky, etc. Far as compression goes, GIF is as primitive as it gets. Even the MPEG-1 format, old as time, was incredibly sophisticated compared to a GIF. It split the image into pieces and attempted to recognize and track re-usable ones. You could fit a movie on two CDs with MPEG-1 format (it was called a VideoCD and was on par with good clean VHS in quality). MPEG-2 was more advanced than MPEG-1, and was used primarily in DVDs. Then we had DIVX and XVID, which put MPEG-2 to shame and enabling the pirate scene to rip a typical movie into 700mb at 640x*** resolution. Then H.264 came along. Now a 350mb TV show episode could be compressed into 200mb with a noticeable increase in quality. H.265 and VP9 are the current leading edge, 25-50% more size-efficient than H.264. It's insane how advanced video encoding has become, the algorithms for recognizing reusable parts of the image bordering on artificial intelligence. But all of it started with super simple algorithms of trying to reuse parts of the previous frame, like you see in the ancient, bloated GIF."
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8tif2l | Since magnetic north is not the same direction as true north, when and how did navigators figure this out, how did they compensate, and does the advent of GPS navigation render the magnetic compass completely obsolete? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> Since magnetic north is not the same direction as true north, when and how did navigators figure this out Quoting Wikipedia here: > The first expedition to reach the North Magnetic Pole was led by James Clark Ross, who found it at Cape Adelaide on the Boothia Peninsula on June 1, 1831. Roald Amundsen found the North Magnetic Pole in a slightly different location in 1903. The third observation was by Canadian government scientists Paul Serson and Jack Clark, of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, who found the pole at Allen Lake on Prince of Wales Island in 1947. Navigators use a number of different tools. A sextant can be used to determine latitude by looking at stars, specifically Polaris. When explorers found the magnetic North Pole they found that their compasses spun because they couldn't find north. But a sextant measurement would have shown they weren't at true north or ~~0 degrees~~ 90 degrees latitude. But navigators knew there was a deviation between compasses and true north for a while before that. > how did they compensate, Once Magnetic north was discovered they could adjust, maps will often have the declination adjustment written on them that tells you how to adjust your compass to point to true north. But navigating up north is still a challenge because of it. Markers like Polaris are unaffected by magnetic north. Which doesn't really help when you have constant daylight during parts of the year. > and does the advent of GPS navigation render the magnetic compass completely obsolete? No, compasses are still widely in use and navigators and soldiers for example are still widely instructed on their use. A compass is tiny and doesn't need batteries so it's still a very useful tool.",
"Magnetic compasses work rather well when there is no electricity. Also you can handcraft a magnetic compass really easily.",
"Pilot here. True North and Magnetic North and the differences between them are as important today to navigators as they were previously to the invention of GPS. The reason for this is that the majority of charts, regardless of whether or not they are air, marine charts, or just plain old maps, are plotted and drawn to true north. They include a magnetic variance guide to help you calculate your bearing using a magnetic compass which will always point to Magnetic North. That magnetic variance guide will tell you how much to add or remove from your bearing depending on what your trying to do so that your always moving aligned to true North. Most GPS systems can be calibrated to use bearings based on Magnetic or True North and it's a simple flick in the settings. The majority use magnetic by default though. The main reason being is that the charts the GPS system uses (If any) can auto calibrate to the method of compass calibration you prefer so it's no big deal but if your GPS system suddenly fails or you don't use a GPS system that has a visual chart capability, you don't have to keep performing the calculations to recalibrate your heading and you can refer back to your route card, particularly if you suddenly need to start using your good old magnetic compass. Most pilots will tell you that GPS is probably the best thing ever invented since sliced bread. The simple wonder of knowing your true ground speed at a glance is unbelievably helpful, never mind it tells you where you are too! However pilots still train to navigate using the good old fashioned magnetic compass, a chart and a handheld flight computer as well as radio based aids because you never know! This means being able to understand and calculate the variance between true and magnetic North is as important as ever. The magnetic North pole moves. All the time. This means that your map from 10 years ago will be out of date and useless for navigating using a bearing, even if nothing has hardly changed on the ground because the North pole will have moved and therefore the magnetic variance will have changed, thus making the one printed on the chart useless. It also means that every so many years, runways have to have a new number painted on them because they get their numbers from the magnetic bearing they face (So runway 23 will be facing 230 degrees, etc). I believe it was the discovery by mariners finding themselves going astray that first tipped us off to the fact that the magnetic north pole and the true north pole varied wildly."
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8tii2b | why does it take a full minute for a modem/router to re-establish an internet connection after being unplugged? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It has to figure out the best frequency with the closest exchange point (the box down the road usually), if you're not on fibre, it needs to measure the speed of the packets (data) and the amount of packets it can send at that speed through your cable. It will be competing against your neighbours demand, and the distance you are comparable to your neighbour. Plus routers provided by internet service providers are usually pretty limp when it comes to processing power. Edit: there's also options it needs to compare and decide, whether you will have adsl (asynchronous subscriber line, or dsl, none asynchronous sending and receiving. There are many factors it needs to calculate. Firewall options, dns options, etc. Sorry I can't explain any simpler. It's a complex system and has many factors."
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8tim4k | How do speakers create the sounds of certain instruments (drums, guitar, etc.) without actually having the physical elements of each of those instruments? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A sound is just a vibration of air. A drum beat or a guitar cord are just combinations of certain air vibrations. A speaker can sound like a guitar or a drum because it can make the same air vibrations as those instruments.",
"This is my first ELI5 so sorry if I ramble... Sound is caused by waves of air pressure that is then picked up by our ears. When a drum is banged or a guitar is strummed it creates disturbances in the air. These disturbances are not too dissimilar to dropping a pebble in a pond, causing the water to ripple out from where the pebble makes contact. The sound waves (like the ripples) oscillate with two main characteristics: frequency (how fast they oscillate) and amplitude (the distance between the minimum and maximum peaks of the oscillation). If you look at the waveform of a simple, pure tone oscillation, it looks like a mathematical sine function, with a periodic frequency and an amplitude. The sound of any instrument can be decomposed into the addition of multiple sine and cosine functions, which describes how the air pressure changes over time. Microphones and speakers work by converting sound to and from electrical signals. The electrical signal uses voltage levels to represent air pressure, describing the equivalent amplitudes and frequencies as they change over time. Essentially, the same information as the instrument being played live can be captured in electrical form. This can also be converted into a digital signal for storage or digital signal processing (e.g. reverb and equalisation). The recording process captures the frequency content of the instrument. Also captured is the frequency characteristics of the environment and the equipment used to do the recording. The inverse process is to reproduce the waves of air pressure that sound like the recorded instrument by feeding the previously captured electrical signal to a speaker. The speaker has a cone that oscillates in response to an electrical signal, creating pressure differences in the air in front of the cone that spread out like ripples in a pond towards your ear.",
"It's just sound wave manipulation, different waves of sound create different sounds, they are just mimicking the real sound with electronic pulses."
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8tim5q | What's the difference among Rasterization, Ray Casting and Ray Tracing ? | It's hard to understand using those fancy words like incident light, monte-carlo, etc. Can someone explained the easiest way ? and what's the connection of all those methods ? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You have lots of triangles (that you want to display) and a virtual screen (a rectangle and a cone in which it looks, as if the camera were in the scene) on which you want to project them and a pixel screen (made of pixels) that you need to pick a value for each pixel. **Rasterization** You go on each triangle, and you project the corners of the triangle on the virtual screen with some math (projective geometry). That is a little bit costly (4d matrix multiplication), but you only do that for each corner of each triangle. Then you have the position of the 3 corners of the triangle on the pixel screen. You then need to rasterize: those 3 points have texture coordinates, so you at least know where in the texture are the 3 corners. You then take the texture, rotate it and reshape it on your pixel screen until the 3 corner of the triangle on your pixel screen are aligned with the 3 corners of the triangle on the texture. You cut out the piece of the texture that contains the triangle, and paste it where the triangle would be on the pixel screen. Because the texture got stretched you have to do some interpolation (bilinear filtering, etc...). The cost is proportional to the number of triangle, and is only a little bit affected by the screen resolution. There are multiple problems: - If you have two triangles one is behind the other, you will draw twice all the pixels. you only keep the pixel from the triangle that is closer to you (Z-buffer), but you still do the work twice. - The borders of your triangles are jagged as it is hard to know if a pixel is in the triangle or out. You can do some smoothing on those, that is anti-aliasing. - You have to handle every triangles (including the ones behind you) and then see that they do not touch the screen at all. (we have techniques to mitigate this where we only look at triangles that are in the field of view) - Transparency is hard to handle (you can't just do an average of the color of overlapping transparent triangles, you have to do it in the right order) **Ray Casting** It is almost the exact reverse of rasterization: you start from the virtual screen, and you project a ray, starting from each pixel of the screen, until it intersect with a triangle. You will do the projective mapping on each pixel, then compute the intersection with any triangle, and once you find the correct triangle you have to compute the color of that pixel. The cost is directly correlated to the number of pixels in the screen and you need a really cheap way of finding the first triangle that intersect a ray (we have some good algorithm for that). In the end, it is more expensive than rasterization but it will, by design, ignore the triangles that are out of the field of view. You can use it to continue after the first triangle it hit, to take a little bit of the color of the next one, etc... This is useful to handle the border of the triangle cleanly (less jagged) and to handle transparency correctly. **Ray Tracing** Same idea as ray casting except once you hit a triangle you reflect on it and go into a different direction. The number of reflection you allow is the \"depth\" of your ray tracing. A depth of 1 is ray casting, a depth of > 6 is usually considered as good approximation of global illumination (which would be infinite depth)."
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8tj7vy | How can different web browsers claim to run faster than others if the internet speed is fixed? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you're browsing web pages with few images you generally are impacted by the speed of your network connection, you're instead seeing delays due to how fast/slow your web browser can render the page it was just sent instructions for. Javascript has seen a huge increase over the last couple decades, so much that many pages now exclusively load content via Javascript calls. This means that the speed with which the web browser can handle javascript is extremely important in how quickly it appears to respond to your actions.",
"They are talking about the software programming code that runs the browser. Not the speed of internet downloads. So an example of it being faster would be something like starting up the bookmarks menu would load faster than on the other browser.",
"It doesn't download faster. It provides interaction faster. How many milliseconds it takes from one click to show the next page. How quickly the images load. How quickly the active scripts that run on the page to provide intelligent interaction like loading data, animation, dynamically loading, populating and aligning content",
"Pretend the web page is a brick house, and your browser is the contractor building the house. The data for the webpage doesn't arrive as a steady stream. Instead, it's like bricks arriving for your house as pallets of bricks. This happens for a few reasons, but among them it helps your computer verify the data to make sure all the \"bricks\" that are supposed to be there are there. In computing, this is called \"packets\" of data. Your browser/contractor has to double check the pallet to make sure all the bricks are there and unpack the pallet, then put the bricks together to make a tiny chunk of the house, then order the next set of bricks. That all takes time. No matter how fast the supplier can get a pallet of bricks to the build site (your computer), the contractor has to take their own time to process them. Now, you want to use the same brick supplier regardless of which contractor you go with. The pallets of bricks will arrive at the same rate. What's different is how quickly your contractor unpacks the pallets and puts them into a house shape. That can depend on a lot of things, like how efficiently the contractor uses the resources available, and how many resources they take. A contractor might be notorious for using a *lot* of guys (looking at you, Chrome), which gets the job done, sure, but there are only so many workers to go around. If they're busy unpacking the pallets of bricks, they can't be, say, putting in your driveway. So even if it works, it's not doing it efficiently. Other contractors (browsers) may just not have good practices (code) in place, so building the house takes longer than it normally should. The pallets will arrive in the same amount of time as soon as the contractor requests it, but the contractor can't request the next set of bricks until they've used the last one. So even with a fast brick supplier (or fast ISP), a slow browser won't be able to process them and build the house as fast as the brick supplier can drop them off. On the other hand, a particularly slow ISP is like the brick company delivering really slowly: your contractor/browser has to wait for them to arrive, and it can only go as fast as the bricks are arriving."
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8tl3cg | How was the first computer program or software created? Wouldn't you need a program to create software for another program? | I'm not a programmer but I am interested in it. Did they use physical logic gates or what ever you need to create a program physically? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Early computer either used physical connectors and switches like ENIAC or used punched card/punched tape. The punched tape system had been used long before electronic computers was introduced first with mechanical looms in the 18th century and later in telegraphy. Punched card as information carrier and for information processing was common in electro mechanical tabulating machine from the late 19th century. So storing and using digital information from information processing is a pre computer invention and was quite common before computers.",
"You don't need a program to create another program. You can physically switch a transistor from 0 to 1 (which represent physical state: 0 means \"no voltage\"and 1 means \"voltage\") and it technically can be called a program. A very useless one, but still a program. Computer only \"sees\" a string of commands: 00101011010010011111000011100... You're basically telling electricity where it needs to go by switching transistors on / of (opening or blocking path) So electricity just goes from the first transistor to the next, to the next, to the next... You are basically moving electricity through physical components in a logical way to do what you need. For example, you apply voltage to the first transistor to set its state to 1, then electricity goes through the logic gate to the next transistor and depending on it's state, it will go one direction or another, and then it goes to the third one, and so on. If you do it properly you will be able to lead the electricity to memory and back to the needed place in processor and perform some operation, for example to make your screen white, you basically tell computer to turn each pixel's voltage to 100%. So you give it an instruction on how to do it - string of 1 and 0 and your job is to give it such a string that would lead electricity through processor and memory to each pixel of the monitor and set the needed state. Since writing instructions manually for each operation is practically impossible, we've built programs on top of programs on top of programs...etc, so that we abstract ourselves from low level operations. We're basically replacing thousands of low level operations with one command and then replacing thousands of those commands with another command. This made programming much simpler and faster."
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8tlrhw | How can a file be compressed into something smaller but still contain all the information it needs to work properly? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Imagine you make a model car out of Lego. The car looks awesome and you want to send it to your friend who lives quite far away from you so your going to have to use the mail. Now sure you can parcel the whole thing up and send it to him but hey, that's going to be a big and heavy parcel and will cost you a lot to mail it. Also it might get damaged. But then you hit on an idea. Your friend has his own lego, why not just mail him the instructions on how to build his own car. So you mail him one of every piece of lego that he needs with a note saying \"You need 2 of these\" and \"7 of these\" along with instructions on how to put them all together. Suddenly your parcel is a heck of a lot lighter and smaller. But then you remember that your friends Lego collection is not as extensive as yours and he might not have all the pieces. So you also mail him more of the parts that you know he does not have in his own collection. Your parcel gets a bit bigger and heavier, but nowhere near as heavy as sending the whole car. Your friend receives your package, puts together the car using his own Lego from your instructions and subsidises it with the pieces you sent him. This is essentially what lossless compression is. It drops the data that is redundant and tells the compression software to replicate it using a set of instructions that is smaller than actually including the data. Anything that can't be replicated using an instruction set gets included which is why a file can only be compressed so far using lossless compression. It get's way more complex than that of course but this is the most simple way to describe it at ELI5 level.",
"How compression works, to my understanding is it removes repetitive bits of information and adds a sort of tag to them. For example the compressed version of 'a a a a a b b b' would be something like '5a 3b'.",
"The first thing you need to realize is that a file isn't a picture, it's a set of *instructions* on how to draw a picture. At a very simple level a file like a Bitmap looks something like this Sky.bmp Picture is 100 pixels wide x 100 pixels tall using 24bit color. Pixel 1,1 is 255,0,0 (red) Pixel 1,2 is 255,0,0 (red) ... etc Compression is a method storing information more efficiently. So for instance instead of storing instructions to make the first 10 pixels red individually, you can replace it with code like: Pixels 1,1 > 1,10 are 255,0,0 (red) The instructions still can produce the picture, but now they take up less space.",
"When you compress a file, something like: `the fat cat sat on the mat and the fat cat made that mat flat ` is converted to something like: `1='the ',2='at ':1f2c2s2on 1m2and 1f2c2made th2m2fl2` which takes up less space. Then when you uncompress that file, the 1s are replaced with 'the ' and the 2s are replaced with 'at ' and the original text can be read."
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8tmblf | How come when you have spotty cell service, turning your phone on and off airplane mode gives you better service? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It forces your phone to reconnect to the closest/best towers. Your phone caches which towers it usually connects to and continues to connect to them. Restarting the phone or resetting the communication settings (toggling airplane mode, settings - > general - > reset - > reset network settings (iPhone), etc) does the same thing.",
"Not always, but many times this will cause your phone to resend a signal to find the closest cell tower. Spotty service is frequently the result of being \"locked\" on the wrong tower. I am sure someone will give you a more scientific explanation, but here it is in layman's terms."
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8tmjjw | Back in the day you had to refresh a website to get an update but nowadays you don't have to. How does it work? | I remember in the 90s you had to refresh a webpage to get an updated information (new message on a vBulletin forum (remember those?!), fresh news article etc.). Then I remember only a certain element could have been refreshed (let's say a chat window embedded in the main page) and not the whole site. Nowadays (for quite some time now) you can get messages, pop-ups, push notifications and other stuff (they can also go away immediately if you deleted or viewed them) on your webpage without doing anything. How? It resembles magic really. Similar question: How does my browser (Chrome) knows when to restart a webpage if it failed to load the first time because I had no connection? Immediately after I go online it refreshes by itself. Thanks! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This particular technology is called AJAX, which is more of a set-method-of-doing-things which evolved overtime. Basically it's a series of function calls that allow a Javascript script running on your browser to make a call to a website and get new information. AJAX has been around for a while, with Microsoft adding support to its browser in 1998, but more recently it's become easier to use, more reliable and a web of libraries and experience let programmers easily implement it. RE: similar question: I'm pretty sure Chrome just has hooks into your networking interface, when the interface connects Chrome detects the change and immediately tries to load up. Not really a new technology either, just a cool feature that someone thought up and programmed.",
"Originally a webpage was a HTML file with in it text and links to various images. That was it, nothing could be changed, everything was hardcoded. Then Style Sheets were invented which allowed the hardcodingness of things like colour, style and visibility to change. Then Javascript was invented and the webpage was able to interact a little more with you and by dealing with the style sheet definitions it could turn off and on various parts. All these three things evolved further, Javascript was able to run in the background, perform data requests from remote services and update the HTML code. That updating of the HTML code in the browser page based on data from remote services is what you are talking about: Asynchronous changes of the data."
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8tmnae | Why can't phones record horizontal/widescreen/landscape data and just give you the option of viewing aspect later on when sharing or posting? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The sensors are rectangular, with the long edge aligned with the long edge of the phone. They could still do what you suggest but the number of effective megapixels would drop by more than half, reducing quality substantially. There's nothing stopping you from cropping and rotating your photos and videos afterwards if you want, though it's much more work than if the phone did it for you, and requires software you might not have, particularly for video."
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8tmxlt | What is abstraction in programming? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Taking something complex, and hiding the hard parts behind a simpler interface. Like.. a car has a steering wheel, which abstracts away all the steering mechanisms. You don't have to know how the steering rack works to steer a car.",
"I think complex things are best explained via analogies, so here goes: You (the object) are arranging to meet a blind date and are deciding what to tell them so that they can recognize you in the restaurant. You decide to include the information about where you will be located, your height, hair color, and the color of your jacket. This is all data that will help the procedure (your date finding you) work smoothly. You should include all that information. On the other hand, there are a lot of bits of information about you that aren't relevant to this situation: your social security number, your admiration for obscure films, and what you took to \"show and tell\" in fifth grade are all irrelevant to this particular situation because they won't help your date find you. However, since entities may have any number of abstractions, you may get to use them in another procedure in the future",
"Computer programming is a lot easier when you compartmentalize things. Consider this bit of Python code that opens a file for writing: outfile = open('output.txt', 'w') That looks pretty simple, right? But there is a *lot* going on under the hood. We're making a syscall to the operating system, which may involve checking and updating the file system, checking and updating file lock tables, handling or throwing exceptions if anything goes wrong, and more. Each of *those* steps can be broken down into further steps, each of which has even more steps, and pretty soon we're gonna be writing an entire book about what happens when you open a file. That's just considering the software, of course. What about the hardware? What's going on in the CPU, the motherboard, in RAM, in your hard drive when all of this is happening? All of those details have been *abstracted* because while they're very important, and they have to happen, most of the time you just need to know that they did happen, without necessarily caring how they happened. The code doesn't need to check whether you have a hard drive or solid-state drive, it doesn't need to check which drivers you have installed, it doesn't need to check which version of the filesystem you're running... it just needs to know that you're opening a file. Abstraction helps us to get more done by focusing on just a few things at a time. As long as each component does what it's supposed to, you don't necessarily need to know about the internal workings of that component. You just need to know what it does."
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8toh1k | How is sound recorded in the grooves of a vinyl record? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Sound is vibrations in air ( or any other medium ) Vibrations are picked up by a diaphragm which causes needle to move up and down in the same way to produce the sound frequency wave. Two channels are cut out each side at 45 degrees to each other to produce a stereo recording.",
"The changes in the grooves are *analogous* to the changes in air pressure they represent. Just like the iron filings on cellophane tape, the changes in the magnetic field around it are analogous to the changes in air pressure. That's why it's called \"analog\" storage media. Pressure changes move a microphone which induce a changing voltage/current analogous to the change, that is then converted into a magnetic field that is stored in tape, which is then used to drive a needle that engraves the same changes as grooves in the master negative that is used to press the vinyl copies. It's all just changes of energy into different analogs."
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8tq7p7 | How is a big open-world video game (like GTA 5) made? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Everyone is giving you detailed descriptions, but the truth is, the workflow differs greatly between studios and development teams. Some tend to rely on touched-up or even ingame procedural generation while others prefer to have it mostly handmade by designers, some place important locations on the map and fill in the blank while others start from one end and moving from there, etc. There is no single approach here to describe.",
"For Spider-Man 2 (2004), we at Treyarch had not made an open-world game before. The way we did it was to lay out the map first - as /u/CptCap wrote, you can't place missions on an empty map. We laid out an approximation of all of Manhattan using [3DS Max]( URL_0 ) (at the time we were a Max shop, not a Maya shop), both terrain and buildings. We would export this to a format that the game engine would use, and export again each time we needed to. The artists creating props (rocks, trees, fences, hot dog carts) would place them appropriately, and I do not remember where this occurred in the data pipeline, but I don't think it would have been in Max; it would have been in our exported format. Populating the map went parcel by parcel, in a big grid of parcels - so several environment artists would work on parcels C21, C22, and C23 for a while, while several adjacent parcels remained gray boxes (placeholder buildings, no props probably, everything looks gray) for months because they hadn't been reached yet. Different teams approach this differently; some teams want to complete 1 parcel absolutely to completion and polish before moving on to the next parcel; other teams want to do a first pass on all the parcels in the game, then a second pass, then a third pass until they're done. The former has the 'beautiful corner' advantage of having the parcel go through the entire art pipeline, from the crude gray-box depiction of a building to the last little light glint by the visual effects artists; and the team gets to validate all their time estimates and get a better understanding of how long it really takes to complete a bit of the map; and maybe change the pipeline if part of it sucks. You asked about how they kept track of rocks, buildings, and pedestrians - on SM2 I believe these were parcel-by-parcel, so there would be a file on the disc called \"C21\" or whatever, and this file would contain a data blob listing locations of rocks and buildings within the C21 parcel; and when the player headed toward C21, that file would be loaded and the renderer would start drawing the buildings as appropriate. (At the same time, parcel C16, far behind the player, would be discarded from memory to make room.) I don't remember (and probably never knew) any technical details of how to optimally store this. Pedestrians were placed procedurally as you approached a parcel, and the pedestrian system would create or destroy the pedestrians as needed, and adjusted their velocity about 30 times a second (or maybe 15). In the end the SM2 world team replaced all the Max buildings with a Lego-like representation and then with even simpler representations, where there was a building base, a building 'middle' which had its textures repeat upward, and then a building crown. Separate from this there were about 50 landmark buildings that were bespoke objects placed in the city. For missions, the designers and world team would decide on good places for the missions, taking into account the campaign, and build the internal spaces (like the Mysterio boss mission) if needed, or variants on external things if that was needed (like the Mysterio Statue of Liberty mission). The designers would then use the CHUCK scripting language and Max to build the missions. As always, some designers were more art oriented and others were more code oriented, and their missions were built accordingly. Some designers wrote top-down missions where they said \"It would be awesome to play a Mysterio mission around the Statue of Liberty\" and others wrote bottom-up missions where they said \"It would be awesome to constrict the player's movement to test their swinging skills - how about an indoor theater that's on fire?\" Bill Dugan Executive Producer, Spider-Man 2 (2004)",
"> The missions for the game’s campaign or the map itself? You can't place the missions on an empty map. Big open worlds are usually made in layers. The terrain is made first, then frozen. Buildings and roads are placed afterwards (using placeholder assets at first) and frozen too. Once the big stuff has been placed detail is added over time. [edit] Missions may be *written* in advance, and usually are, but when it comes to putting it all together in the engine and shipping the game, the big stuff usually goes first.",
"Noclip recently put out a video about Bethesda and the making of Fallout 76. They talk about how they start with the map first, decide what areas they definitely want to include and where, then fill in the gaps from there. URL_0 ( Edited for proper credit, thanks /u/eggsaladbob )",
"Basic game building steps (once the idea is all \"polished\"): You create and tweak controls (running jumping driving shooting flying etc.) then you put this doll that doesn't look like a character yet into empty space with floor and a lot of cubes to jump onto and test the controls. Then you start making the environment - someone draws out a top down plan of the city/map and places cubes instead of future buildings. Throw in a character/car with the controls you made previously into this city of blocks and test out out how each road plays, see if scale of buildings are ok etc. Once you have this draft - you start slowly replacing white cubes with buildings and characters that are made by artists. But with just that world feels a bit too empty - you make a lot of NPCs that are visual modifications of the same character and you make them walk around and instead of placing them one by one - you randomly generate areas you want them to spawn at with random visual features. After that you need to give the game goal or a story, in gta it's missions, so you add some NPCs that player can talk to and go explore new places. Introduce reward - currency, make the currency useful to upgrade your character (buy guns, etc). And you almost have a game. You still go through Optimization process that makes the game run smoother on computers for example loading entire map on a computer would take forever, instead only the area that player is in loads for him.",
"Basically they start with the engine and like in any other company someone is working on the Level Design, someone for the story and they have to communicate what they need. Someone is building the characters, someone is there for the Buildings. And then there is someone who plans all that.",
"Rockstar Games makes their open-world games differently. Once the general outlay of the world map is constructed, every designer gets their own little square within the map, and has /complete/ freedom to design the buildings/parks/lots or whatever their own way. They also make thousands of photographs of the city the game is based on (for instance, Los Angeles for GTA V), hence the extreme alikeness of some parts of the cities.",
"You're asking where they start, but the true answer to this question is \"they're made with time.\" The full-time team is known to have been over 350 people, working for 2 years. That comes out to, rough round math, 1.4 million man hours. And that's probably low. In the most broad terms, writers, environment designers and programmers have lots of meetings to figure shit out. Mostly, it's the written story (not the writers) at the core, and then everyone builds to suit around that.",
"You will always see reused assets in any open world game. Things like furniture or specific plant life. Once the main shape of the world and locations have been designed. Someone just goes through a list of stuff and places items in appropriate places. Generally theyll have a large variety so it never looks like copy and paste, but if you look hard enough, you'll see the same couch or dead tree or rubble pile a few times all over the map.",
"There is a Noclip documentary on youtube about the building of another large open world for the witcher 3 - check it out",
"There are tools for this (one such tool being Gaia and GeNa for the Unity engine). I have to imagine in games as large and detailed as Final Fantasy XV, Assassin's Creed: Origins and GTA5 they didn't place every single tree, bush, rock and shrubbery. The terrain itself is probably unlikely to be entirely by hand. I was staring at the terrain in FFXV in awe for a bit, thinking how they made this -- and then just picturing the code for the procedural object generation. The land may be created as a rough prototype early on, or they may use something like [perlin noise]( URL_0 ) to generate the terrain at large, or some other method of procedural generation (see below). It may resemble something only vaguely like the finished product, with untextured roads, incredibly smooth terrain (few gaps, few details, like someone took a smooth brush over everything). This is used as the prototype to say \"this is the map and how it flows\". Here they don't care about the details because how the map makes the player move around is more important. Making those details takes a long ass time and it'd be pointless to put them in, and keep updating them, until the map flow is acceptable and final (mostly). For GTA 5 in particular, they may use real locations as the basis for their procedural generation. There are a lot of ways to do this. Gaia in particular uses \"stamps\" of pre-made terrain and combines them by blending. Then detail is added over time, like ridges in terrain, spikiness, more elevation changes, and then they hit it with procedural object generation and manually adjust. If it's done entirely procedurally, they don't even need to add detail, just finish with object generation (trees, plants, rocks, etc.). Buildings are probably done almost completely manually. That isn't really a solved problem like large-scale terrain. You give the procedural generator \"fitness\" rules, such as what kind of elevation a particular tree might spawn, how close to water, on what kind of grass, near rocks, the angle (flat or mountain edge), etc.. It decides from there how likely a specific tree is to spawn at every given spot of the map and places them by itself. The level editor people might then go in and manually adjust things to make specific set pieces. Source: limited experience with procedural map generation.",
"I recently watched this video that was put out on Vimeo that shows how Ubisoft used the software package \"Houdini\" to make the open world map for Far Cry 5. This might help you answer what you're looking for: URL_0",
"In GTAV's case it took about 1,000 people working nearly 5 years. Massive open world games that focus on emergent gameplay are notoriously difficult to make. Games like DayZ require a special custom engine to function and can't be made with standard game engines such as Unreal 4 engine because they are so massive. So the developers not only have to make the game but program the engine as well. In DayZ's case the development is iterative, the team is more than 10x smaller than the GTAV development team. Each team of developers will work on a mechanic or a project, implement it into an internal build, when they think the mechanic is ready they will roll it out onto a testing build. From there they will collect data on the mechanic, gathering info about balance, bugs. Etc. Depending on priorities regarding the importance of the mechanic or the severity of the bugs fine tuning and such could happen sooner or later. As for the map itself, there is a team of environmental artists who's jobs are to work on the map. Recently for example they added flowing waterways, and a massive series of hiking trails based on the Czech hiking trail system. They're now working on implementing denser, fuller clouds. Since the map is so massive (over 225 sq. Km) the environmental artists have plenty of work to do.",
"Specifically with GTA V, Rockstar already had parts of the map developed prior to the game. This is because both titles by the developer; LA Noire and Midnight Club Los Angeles take place in LA, California, where Los Santos is meant to mirror.",
"One byte at a time! Okay, puns aside, it does get broken down into tiny chunks. So some people will focus on making 3d models and structures. Some people will focus on importing those structures and hooking them into the physics engine. Some people will add in interactivity. Or it will get broken up so that each person has total control over a small part of the map and lead developers have the responsibility of patching it all together. Everybody will have the same code uaing a Git service like GitHub or Bitbucket. And so forth. It's a ton of people working on small pieces together until it's done.",
"You start with a rough drawn map (pen and paper or on photoshop) . Then you move to a grey block map in the engine. And you keep developing it until it is where you want it. The beauty is that you can always change the map pretty easily to fit your missions. If there is a building in the way, you can delete it, rotate it, etc etc. In a game like GTA, you will get missions that use the open world, and other more scripted missions will just load you in to a new instance that has been laid out for the mission. Usually you won't be able to get back in to that area after it is done. For example, the mission on the roof of the FBI building. GTA is a specific example because of its open world, most games will design the mission and then the map.",
"I have a degree in game design and even though I've got no real experience outside of school, I have a bit of insight. * A lot of things are designed in parallel. If the story writers and quest designers see a cool location on the map, they'll build a quest around it. On the other hand, if the story writers and quest designers need a quest to happen, the map designers will create a location for it. * Things like pedestrians in GTA are pulled from a pool of different 3D models. Their appearance on the map is almost entire random, being controlled by a set of parameters that determines how many can be in one space at any given time. Since your character only occupies so much of the map, not every pedestrian is present on the map at the same time. Rather, they preload or \"pop-in\" as you enter certain areas. * Rocks and other environmental features are usually added as permanent objects, being part of the map themselves. Since they never have to move and can't be destroyed, map builders generally place these things wherever it makes sense, making sure not to over saturate the map with them. * Buildings usually follow a city plan. Just like real cities are planned out, so were all the cities in GTA. Of course, inspiration from real life cities is taken into consideration. That's why downtown has giant sky scrapers, the suburbs have nice houses, the desert is full of old shacks and trailer parks.",
"I don't know how GTA 5 was designed, but [this documentary]( URL_0 ) about how The Witcher 3 was made and designed is really impressive. They mention quests, people, village, outfits, speech, and everything else that makes a village alive.",
"It really depends on the game. For a game like GTA, where driving is a central point of gameplay, the process would logically be to block out the general terrain, then decide where the main setpeices will be, such as major cities or towns. Next you would put the road network in place to join them all up. Following that, you would likely look to the script and figure out what locations you will need for key story points and place those around the map. Finally, the empty space can be filled in pretty much however you like. For a game like GTA V, there was more than likely a lot of location scouting around LA and southern California for inspiration on incidental items to include. Likewise if you were making a game set in a Tokyo-like city, you would look at features in the real world to inform your design choices for incidental decorations. For a game like Dark Souls, the reverse is likely true. You would create a set of themed \"zones\" the story needs to take place in, then figure out how to connect them together in a somewhat logical way. On the other hand, for a game like Assassin's Creed, they did a ton of research of historical maps and almost entirely recreated historical cities, then figured out creative ways to use the real environment to fit their story. Ultimately, there is no \"correct\" way to do it. For the most recent game I worked on, we used data from an audio file to create a noise map which we then applied to a terrain mesh. Then we just looked for areas where the topography looked cool and built our scenery around those. Kind of like how you see a big randomly generated cliff in Minecraft and think \"hey! A massive dwarf fort would look awesome carved into that!\".",
"The game world is made first. Things like the skybox, the water, fog, things like that. Maybe atmospheric sounds as well. Then they add the terrain, and depending on whether or not they're using more advanced techniques, may have to manually texturize their terrain, which is essentially just painting. Then from there they add in rock clusters, larger foliage (including grass), smaller lakes and rivers and such. Then from there they usually already have a plan in place for where there main cities and other landmarks are going to be, so they start carving out those areas more, before they begin placing down assets. For cities and such they would begin with the roads (although they would probably add the sidewalks later depending on how they're done). Then they'd add in the big buildings (the upper floors of most bigger buildings are non existent in a lot of video games so they don't have to worry about them too much), then they add in the smaller buildings, and then the various clutter; Litter, lamp posts and garbage cans, stationary vehicles, etc. After they get all of the static assets placed things get a little more complicated. For things like civilian traffic both pedestrian and vehicular they would probably use some sort of complex system which automatically figures out where to spawn each civilian and which route they're going to take. For most AI Navigation systems they use something called a \"Navmesh\" which allows AI Controllers to find the world around them. So this needs to be created first. (But a lot of AAA game dev companies probably can just generate the majority of the navmesh layer and then fine tune it as they need to. Or they may have completely different techniques I'm not sure). I should also mention that all of these objects (Buildings, Sewer Systems, Cars, People) have sounds attached to them that will trigger at the right moments in time, as well as in some cases have a looping ambient noise. Missions are probably created using a customized Mission Editor which allows them to easily set up cut scenes and various transitions, without having to go in and manually configure the placement of the cameras, and code every single transition of the scene. Cut Scenes are just done by turning you (what you see from your point of view) into a camera object, which has various animations applied to it based on what they want it to track in the scene. Your characters are controlled the same way as AI would be, or in some cases they are actually given specially Motion Capture rendered animations but I personally detest this approach. Let me know if there was anything I left out."
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