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ke8n1k | - What happens when my device is fully charged? | What happens when my device is fully charged? where does the charge send it’s power? Does the phone slowly let it go and charge back up? has plagued my mind forever! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The charge controller in the phone stops charging the battery and just chills with the power supply connected and not doing anything.",
"The current that the phone draws from the wall/USB charger is reduced to only supply power that the device uses. The energy being taken from the source is reduced to whatever the phone needs in the moment, and nothing more. When you unplug the phone, it switches back to draining the battery."
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kenjgx | How did people teach the first code to machines before code existed? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The first big computers did not execute code from storage as we see it today, the very early ones were \"hard wired\" meaning that the hardware was wired to do only one thing, no code required, you program it by connecting relays together in specific ways. Later ones used long strips of cardboard with holes in them that would get fed through a reader. The presence of a hole in the punch card will be detected by the reader and will cause the computer to do something. These were also limited in what they could do. For instance, you could have a computer that can do nothing but solve equation systems and is hard wired to do that, you can then use the punch cards to feed it the numbers you want it to solve. Newer processors execute something we call \"assembly code\" which is sort of a modern version of the punch cards. They are small and simple operations such as add 2 numbers together, compare 2 numbers to see which is bigger, take this number and add 1 to it, go to this particular spot in the code, etc... Code like python or c++ isnt really executed by the cpu, it's a human readable/understandable translation for assembly code, what a compiler does is take the code text and convert it to assembly code which is directly executable by the cpu but quite difficult to write. For instance, to make the computer do something simple like \"if a > b then b = b +1\" in assembly would require many lines of code that can't be understood by just glancing at it quickly like a python program would be. Assembly programs end up having a loooooot of small detailed lines instead of less more concise one What happened is that people figured out easier ways for humans to tell computers what they want it to do such as the languages we all know and love today. They then wrote compilers in assembly code that can take those new languages and translate them to assembly which allows for the complex programs we see today",
"Wire connections, from plug to plug. This was done manually. Google ENIAC for more information.",
"Assembly Assembly can translate directly to signals received by the chip. This can be as simple as flipping switches for the values. When the signals match a certain value, the chip performs a certain function. What the chip does exactly depends on the instruction set architecture and the implementation."
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keolct | How do online petitions work? Are they effective? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A bunch of people \"sign\" a petition asking for X thing to happen, by basically upvoting it. Then the person they are attempting to get a response from either responds to it, or they don't. In general they're not effective. URL_0 for example has had very successful petitions that either get completely ignored, or gets a response of basically \"no, we won't be doing that\". The problem is that it takes 2 seconds to sign an online petition, and things that require low effort often don't correlate to a strong conviction/willingness to back it up. Politicians are only scared into action by things that might cost them votes, and companies are only scared of things that could cost them money."
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keqhcw | Why do camera’s and other technology dictate how big of an SD card you could use? | I recently bought a dash cam and it says the biggest sd card it will take is 32gb, why is that, why can’t it be whatever you want? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The technology of the Secure Digital (SD) format has changed a number of times over the years, similar to how there’s several kinds of USBs too. Originally, there was SDSC (Secure Digital Standard Capacity) which maxed out at 2 GB. Then came SDHC (High Capacity) which could go to 32 GB. Then SDXC(extended capacity) which could hold up to 2 TB. And now there’s SDUC (Ultra Capacity) that goes up to 128 TB. Each format is backwards compatible, but devices designed for SDHC can’t talk to SDXC or SDUC cards properly enough to use their extra capacity."
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keqywi | Why are there different terminal emulators? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The same reason there are different text editors. They all have different features. The shell itself can be the same, but what of I want to change my text size, color, etc? What about multiple windows, tabs, etc? What about the look. and feel of the window itself, does it match the OS, can it have different themes? This is all up to the terminal emulator and not the shell it’s using."
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kevi92 | Why does an internet connection suddenly become weak and then the other day normal again? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Vast possible reasons. - network overload - one node being temporarily taken down or out of reach (maintenance, roadworks, damage) - isp in partial maintenance - your own modem malfunctioning/overheating/busy with firmware operations for wireless signals: - rain or heavy humidity - someone downloading something massive in the background",
"Your Internet connection is not guaranteed in any way. At your end, the wifi is a shared medium - you're sharing the airwaves with EVERYTHING on 2.4Ghz or 5GHz (depending on the age of your router). If there's someone with a phone with Wifi on, they're interfering with you. Wifi doorbells. Neighbours wifi networks. Wifi cameras. Even things like microwaves, bluetooth, the damn walls, everything interferes (same way that if you tune to any random frequency, you'll hear static - 2.4GHz etc. has static and interference from everything nearby, just the same). Your kids upstairs sharing the connection? What about their phones? Even when working perfectly, in a \"green-field\" environment, a rule of thumb is that wifi is about 20 times slower than the cable that plugs into it. Then it likely uses ordinary telephone lines for the last \"half-mile\" as they call it - those things wound round your house, extended, folded, cut into, under floorboards, etc. that then go out of the house (likely by a 40-year-old master socket) to the street, then down the street, to a box, then sharing that box with ALL your neighbours. Those cables are all subject to water, interference, winds, all kinds of problems. That will make your speed vary, unless you have FTTH (quite uncommon). If you have FTTC, they call it \"fibre\" but it's only fibre to your street, not to your house. Then the fibre that DOES end up eventually taking your entire neighbourhood connection - that's a fixed, guaranteed, very-well-defined speed, called a leased line (like many businesses use). But notice... shared. So if your neighbours crank up the Internet to watch that sporting event... your connection slows. Then back at the ISP, there may well be further bottlenecks, aggregations of connections, and that all costs, so it's mostly done on a \"best-effort\" basis. i.e. they'll try to make it fair for everyone, but that's about all they can do. On top of that... the intervening connections from that network/ISP out to the wider world have all the same problems. And then it all ends up at someone's datacentre or server, which has all the same problems again. Servers aren't magically \"unlimited\" in their speed, capacity or connection. Generally datacentres still sell 100Mbps connections to dedicated servers, though gigabit is more usual. But if that website/service has a thousand people online at any one time... they all get only a megabit because they're sharing it. Big places have to have HUGE shared connections at their end. And then you have side-issues which appear to make the connection slower but in actual fact have nothing to do with your connection speed - everything from placebo and issues with your computer to local DNS issues and latency (which may slow the initial connection lookup but once established the connection goes at full speed... browsing will feel like a snail, but the line is doing everything asked of it as fast as it possibly can, but because of the issue, you're not asking \"fast enough\" to see that). There are SO MANY factors that it's often amazing that it works at all.",
"Take a road, if it's empty, you can drive on it without problems, no other drivers, no traffic jam. Now add more and more cars. Until the road permits it (number of lanes, size, etc) you will go smoothly, but a certain point you start to go slower because there are too many cars. Same for internet, you are connected to an antenna. The more the users, the more the problems.",
"Using cable internet service providers(ISP), there is a box within streets inside communities. This box is where the internet is spread to all the houses, apartments, etc. Two things happen; 1. The houses closest to the box using that ISP will have priority connection, therefore they will receive the signal before anyone else. 2. The more people accessing the internet at a time will slow the connection more and more. This is why there is that up to speed everyone advertises. Some companies have dedicated connections that go to the individual house rather than through a community access.",
"What kind of Internet connection are you talking about? via Bluetooth, WiFi 4 5 or 6, 3G, 4G, 5G, fiber optic cables, patch cable (aka. Lan Cable), DSL, Coax, USB cable, lightning cable, or any other enterprise/industrial cable?",
"All of the answers I've seen so far are good, just one more thing I have noticed that not many people mention is the importance of upload capacity. Upload capacity is required to be able to download. As your device is downloading content, it is costantly sending receipt confirmation messages. If these messages don't get thru, the sender just keeps retrying the same data. Most ISPs will have an upload speed that is 5-20% of your download speed which is normally plenty but with the movement of things in the cloud this has become an issue for myself and some of my customers on poor connections. I've noticed that my phone backing up photos when I get home will max out my ATT u-verse 1 megabit upload for a good 20-30 minutes and render the connection unusable. If you are trying to video call or stream video to facebook or youtube you potentially DDOS yourself. 1-5 meg upload can very easily be saturated with a video stream and render your 10-100 meg download pipe useless.",
"Contention. It applies to pretty much all residential ISPs. Essentially you are sharing your bandwidth with others. If they all decide to download cyberpunk 2077 at the same time, your ISP isn't likely to be able to give all of you that 300mbit you might be paying for. In addition to that, routers at your ISP can get overloaded as well and start dropping packets, or a technician could have made a mistake configuring equipment/performing an upgrade or migration to another piece of network kit etc. Take my ISP, they serve millions of customers and have millions of users on 500mbit packages. At some point all your traffic is mixed with everyone elses traffic in the ISPs network and sent out over various links. But the ISP themselves won't have enough links or enough bandwidth to give millions of customers 500mbit at the exact same time. If you are using WiFi you'll have the additional problem of interference from other people also using WiFi and other objects that might use the same frequency (e.g. 2.4GHz is used for microwave ovens, radio controlled cars/planes etc)."
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kezorc | How is Gasoline made from oil? | I searched and I have not been able to find the answer to this. What is done to crude oil to refine it into gasoline? I wasn't sure what category would be better chemistry or earth science. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Basically it is boiled in a distillation column. Oil is a mixture of chemicals, and a distillation column basically heats something at different, increasing temperatures and collects the different substances that boil at those temperatures."
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kf2p1r | How do circuits work? (protons, electrons) | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"An electrical circuit is just electrons moving from one place to another (usually the same place they started). Components connected to the circuit can make use of this flow of electrons (also known as electricity) to do work.",
"The protons in a solid conductor are pretty well locked in place, so they don't matter much to an electrical circuit. The electrons do all the moving. What a battery or power supply does is pump out electrons from its negative terminal, and suck them back up into its positive terminal. So when you connect a power supply to a circuit, electrons start running around the loop, out of the negative, around through the wiring and back into the positive. It's basically like making a loop out of pipe or hose, and connecting a water pump to it. I can do more detail if you want - or is that all you wanted?"
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kf7wfp | Why do LED headlamps have a red light? | Title is self explanatory. I just bought a headlamp from Energizer and was just wondering why they put in a red light mode? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Red light does not ruin your night vision. You have rod cells and cone cells. Cone cells detect color. Rod cells are for night vision, and they do not detect red light as well. This means that they are not saturated by red light, and so they don't require \"regeneration\" time after the light turns off.",
"Greetings from /r/flashlight. As others have already said, the usual motivation has to do with preserving dark adaptation. Another reason some people ask for it is that it doesn't attract insects as readily as white light. Most, but not all flashlight nerds prefer an extremely low white light over red for preserving dark adaptation. In particular, I prefer to have a mode under 0.25 candela, which means under 0.25 lux on an object a meter away. That's approximately the illuminance of the full moon on a clear night.",
"Red light is useful if you need a bit of illumination to do something like reading a map but still maintain your night vision so you can move around when it is dark with no flashlight. It is a very cheap feature to add so it is quite common. The red color filter had been used for a long time for military use when you want to have your eyes adjusted to the night and still see something like a map. & #x200B; The human eye has three types of cones used for color vision and one type of rod that is more light-sensitive but produces a black and white image.s If you look at [human eye spectra sensitivity]( URL_0 ) you can see the black line for the rods and color lines for the three types of cones. The rods overlap the least with the curve of the red cone. So a high wavelength red will stimulate the red cones but not the rods. & #x200B; It will also be harder to see a red light at a distance compared to other colors of light because the very light-sensitive rods are bad at detecting it."
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kf8bkp | Why do CPUs and GPUs need fans and intricate cooling apparatuses, and where is the heat coming from? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Electrical resistance. They get hot for the same reason the heating elements in an oven do. However, there is an additional factor involved. Calculation is, on a fundamental level, a form of work. You're flipping physical bits from one to zero and back, and that has a cost. In this case, that cost is expressed in the form of waste heat. Entropy will always have its price. You need to cool them down both because they could get so hot the circuit boards melt, and because increasing the local temperature increases the minimum amount of energy necessary to flip a bit. The computer will get slower at higher temperatures, so keeping it cool is also keeping it functional.",
"The heat is generated by the semiconductors housed in the CPU/GPU chip itself. They're not 100% efficient, so some of the power they consume is expelled as waste heat. If that heat is not dissipated by a heatsink+fan, the semiconductors will eventually melt/burn, rendering the CPU/GPU useless.",
"Microprocessors use electricity to do logic operations. In order to indicate a zero or a one current is being passed through the circuit and controlling transistors that control other circuits. When you pass current through the silicon transistors and wires they do generate heat. This is what causes CPUs and GPUs to use power and generate heat. The issue is that when silicon heats up it changes physical properties and the circuits will not work as intended any more. So you need to cool down the silicon chip to make it work. The simplest way to do this is to have a giant aluminium or copper block on top of the silicon which conducts heat very well so it will be transferred to the surrounding air. The more surface area the block have the more air it will contact and the more heat it can transfer away. However it does not take long before the natural air currents is not able to get rid of the hot air and bring inn new cold air. The heat sink does not work if it is just sitting there in hot air. So you use a fan to force the warm air away and be replaced by cold air."
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kfd82k | How exactly does it work when a movie is remastered to 4K when sometime may have been made over a decade ago? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Old school film cameras had a ridiculously high resolution. Cheap cinema projectors never displayed them at anywhere near their full potential, but the original master recordings are easily capable of modern high resolution. So they just got the original masters and transfer to digital format."
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kfdd8s | DNS Trust Anchors/Keys - How does it work? Should I be using DNSSEC? What are the pros/cons? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your question is not ELI5 and honestly I don't think there's an ELI5 that will ever cover this, in any case I'll give it a go. DNSSEC applies public key cryptography to validate resolved queries. This does not hide the content of the request, it merely guarantees that the request was serviced by a trusted resolver. If you are a downstream resolver, then you depend on upstream resolvers and you need to be able to trust that they are who they say they are. DNSSEC provides this trust. The major draw back of DNSSEC is that it complicates everything, it slows everything down a little bit, and it introduces new dependencies on other zone operators. You may get it wrong, another zone operator may get it wrong, either way you're not resolving queries and it's hard to figure out why. It takes more expertise to get it right and keep it working. Another problem is that only about 30% of zone operators say they are using DNSSEC today. So, even if you implement it, you may have done so for no reason since one of the zone operators you're relying on has not. Do you need DNSSEC? That's hard to say. From a security perspective, it's better than not having it and if everyone implements it then the whole system becomes much more secure. I would suggest that if you're a DNS provider, you should definitely be figuring this out and implementing it. If you're just doing an internal DNS caching server for your own company or something like that, maybe you don't care so much, or maybe you hire a consultant/contractor to figure it out for you."
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kfdjv3 | How Archaeologists date pottery | I watch a lot of shows like Time Team and whenever the archaeologists find shards of pottery, they hurriedly show the piece to an expert who then proudly proclaims that it is 12th Century Italian. I was wondering how they are able to be so certain about date and origin. I mean logically they should be able to tell the difference between a Roman terracotta pot and grandma’s fiesta-ware and should be able to give a range of time. But since a lot of pottery objects use the same material and shape, shouldn’t dating be cloudy? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Different methods but pottery goes in and out of fashion and as the methods change they give the pottery's unique property's. Just did a dig in lancaster pa and found a peace of thin back glaze stoneware. After finding it i was able to instantly date it because it matches the definition of jackfield ware. The pottery was only produced from 1740 to 1780."
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kfffel | How did people of the past discover the SI unit meters? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They didn't \"discover\" it--a metre is an entirely arbitrary unit of distance that was made up many years ago. As said by deep\\_sea2 it was originally defined as a fraction of the Earth's circumference--nowadays it's defined in terms of the speed of light in a vacuum, because that's a natural quantity which is fixed and invariable.",
"You dont really \"discover\" units, you just define them. They have no special physical meaning. The difficult part is to make sure everyone can use the same units. This was solved by having standardized measurement tools. Essentially, you took some arbitrary weight, say this is \"one pound\", and distribute weights with exactly the same mass. Later people noticed that this might be bad, because the weight you use as reference could change over time or be lost. So they expressed units with physical constants (which nevet change), such as X times the weight of a special atom, etc.",
"The metre was first defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle. The modern metre is essentially the same distance, but determined by other an other method."
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kfl0ja | How come when something is left on the TV for too long it sort of “burns” into it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Depends on the type of TV. In case of OLED or plasma, each pixel consists of 3 individual lights (red, green and blue can make all colors, FYI).As with a \"normal\" lamp, it will have a limited lifespan, over which it slowly gets dimmer. If a bright image is displayed for a long time, those lights will wear down, and become dimmer, leaving a shadow of worn down, dimmer lights. The same idea applies to CRT's, where the phosphors will decay during usage. LCD's, on the other hand, are a bit different. They work by having filters that only allow light of one certain polarization (essentially, the direction in which light waves wobble) through. If you have a horizontal filter in front of a vertical filter, no light will pass through, which is the case in inactive LCD pixels. There is a layer of liquid crystal in between those polarizers, which can rotate the polarization direction of light that passes through it. A TV can make the liquid crystal rotate the polarization by putting an electric field over the LC, making it sort of curl into itself. If this electric field is applied for too long without any change, the LC can \"remember\" that shape, in the same way a rolled up cable will tend to stay in a spiral. This causes those pixels to contain a shadow of what was left on the screen. TL;DR: Lights fade over time, and electric spiral-ey things stay bent."
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kfnwe3 | How can someone wealthy and high-profile make it so there is not a single photo available of them online? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Is an advisor to a government bureaucracy really a “position of national recognition” though? There’s *thousands* of lobbyists and advisory people in DC, and you probably can’t name any of them. People who grew up before the age of social media and haven’t taken newsworthy life paths don’t exist online. There may have been one or two old photos on webpages of universities and corporations that he can request be removed, and then you’re gone.",
"He's really just a university professor who kept a low profile and has a low profile (mind you high importance) job in the White House. Hundreds of people work in the WH and you haven't heard of most of them. Naturally, the photos of him probably exist, but he was never the center of focus so people might not realize it's him in the background.",
"URL_0 There are also services that you can pay to delete your online presence, & keep checking to see if anyone has added you online ( & delete that).",
"Like other replies have said, that particular person has probably kept a low profile. It's not that they scrubbed their pictures from the Internet, it's just that there were few or no pictures to begin with. Hypothetically speaking, if a person wanted to keep their picture off the Internet they would have to assert their rights. What rights exist depend on the jurisdiction, and how successful a person is at asserting them depends on their legal team. But broadly you're talking about [personality rights]( URL_0 ) and [privacy rights]( URL_1 ) possibly mixed in with some [intellectual property rights]( URL_2 ) if e.g the person registered their face and likeness as a trademark. All of those are balanced against the rights of the organisation or person publishing the image. And they all depend on the jurisdiction and legal team too. A wealthy and high-profile person has the same rights as everyone else but more capability to assert them. And more capability to avoid having their picture taken in instances where a photographer has 'superior' rights, e.g in public."
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kfovts | If we have strong enough encryption algorithms that would take 100s of years to crack, why do major cyber attacks continue to happen? | Shouldn’t government agencies and Fortune 500 companies have everything behind this “impenetrable” encryption wall? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your information security is only as strong as your weakest link, and in the case of these most recent attacks... That weak link is humans. People are idiots and don't take security measures seriously. They are too lazy to pick a strong password because they don't want to have to learn how to re-type their passwords.",
"1. Because the encryption algorithm is strong if used properly, but the programmers who added the algorithm to the Fortune 500 software made mistakes which introduced vulnerabilities. 2. Because Karen from HR likes to click on links in her emails which tell her to just enter her password to view pictures of kittens. 3. Because Greg from IT likes to download neat tools he found on the internet, but he installs them on networked computers and thinks viruses only happen to people like Karen.",
"> Shouldn’t government agencies and Fortune 500 companies have everything behind this “impenetrable” encryption wall? You can encrypt your hard drives and traffic all you want, if you 1. fall for a fishing attempt, 2. fall victim to a software exploit, 3. get beaten by an intruder until you reveal your password, 4. are legally obligated by a government to reveal secret information your encryption is worth nothing. It's not a panacea. You also have to follow every other security guideline there is, or any weak link will provide an attack vector for an attacker.",
"Encryption is only a part of the story. Most data breaches are a result of human error (e.g. Weak, easily guessed passwords, default passwords not being updated, social engineering / Phishing attacks where your password or user info is surrendered unknowingly to scammers etc.). Case in point... URL_0"
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kfrzay | Why is it that a fresh install of a Linux distro consumes way less RAM than a fresh install of Windows 10? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most Linux builds are going to be lighter than Windows because they don't ship with built-in compatibility for millions of devices, they aren't running a bunch of background services that you may or may not need, and Windows generally also does more to preload resources for various programs so that you have faster launch times. Even the most user friendly Linux builds generally require some assembly after you install in order to get the right software and drivers for your system; Windows is already running tasks to identify and connect whatever you have to make it easier for you."
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kfssp5 | What is HTTP/2 & how is different from HTTP/1.x? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Http2 supports streaming content, binary framing instead of text, and multiplexing connections to both sides can send at any time, nonblocking. It also supports pushing data directly to the client. It's like comparing morse code on a single wire to dialup internet. We fake binary data by sending characters on HTTP1 and say \"read this as binary\". It also allows us to load multiple things at once on a single TCP connection instead of requesting a single html/png and then another after while waiting for the first to end, or using multiple connections as our previous workaround for blocking requests."
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kftrnc | How is it that phones differentiate between fingers touching the screen and material objects? | So yeah, in my immense procrastination efforts for my exam, I was sitting with my pen and poking it at my phone. Why is it that when I try to operate my phone with a pen it will not work, but when doing it with my fingers it works seamlessly? How does the phone know that it is human fingers operating the screen and why is that only way the phone can be operated? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Explanation: Your fingers conduct electricity and are capable of completing an electrical circuit at the point of contact. Certain objects can also do this, but many do not, hence why wearing certain kinds of gloves, for instance, won't manipulate the screen, while others will. The screen is programmed to respond to this completed circuit in certain ways depending on where exactly it's completed, hence how you can select a button on the homepage and have it go to a specific app. The phone isn't doing anything to actively discern a finger from an object; it's just electrical conduction. Edit: Wording and fleshing out a full explanation.",
"Phone screens use a specific kind of touchscreen technology known as capacitive touch. This is great for phone screens for two reasons. One reason is that it does not rely on pressure - pushing harder does not change the signal, and even the gentlest touch can be detected with ease. The other reason is that it *can* tell the difference between fleshy things, metallic things, and other things. Capacitive touch works by creating and destroying an electric field in front of the screen; moving electrons into and out of each pixel over and over again really fast. Nearby conductive objects can make it easier to move these electrons in and out, causing more of them to flow. More conductive/bigger objects make more of a difference. So, placing your phone screen near metal allows a large amount, placing it near water allows a medium amount, and placing it near wood allows basically no more than the normal small amount. Of these three profiles, most objects are either 'a lot of extra flow' or 'almost no extra flow', with only a few things being 'a medium amount'. Things like slightly salty water, or flesh. So, your phone screen only responds to things which allow this medium amount of flow."
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kfwfxl | Why does the youtube algorithm not recommend me similar Videos to those I am watching for almost 10 years but those i click on in 1 night when I’m drunken | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"YouTube’s (or any company’s) aim is to keep you on their platform for as long as possible at a time. The algorithm that YouTube has developed recognises the patterns and behaviours of users and will suggest videos that it thinks the user will click on. Over time the algorithm has adapted to the general behaviour of users and recognises that if one off topic video is watched, that same user will usually end up watching more videos on the same topic. Thus keeping you watching for longer."
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kg144n | I heard that putting magnets near your/a phone is bad for it. If so why? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They probably won't. Magnets will mess up magnetic storage media, like hard disk drives, tapes, and floppy disks. But your smartphone doesn't use magnetic storage media, it uses solid-state memory which is unaffected by magnets. There probably won't be any effect on any other component either.",
"It's not. Magnets are bad for two types of electronics, neither of which are in a phone. Magnetic storage, like a hard drive in a computer or a cassette tape. The data is stored as a bunch of little magnets, and a large magnet can flip them, destroying your data. Cathode ray tube (CRT) TVs and monitors. These are the big, heavy, old displays with a curved glass screen. They work by beaming a bunch of electrons at the inside of the glass. The electrons are aimed with a magnet, so putting a magnet near them distorts the picture. Your phone uses solid state memory and an LCD or LED display. Either way, magnets aren't involved, so a magnet won't interfere."
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kg26dt | How does a team of different artists keep their art consistent? | For instance, in Cyberpunk 2077 [they had dozens of artists working on the cityscape.]( URL_0 ) Yet it all meshes together perfectly, from a layperson's view. In terms of colors, shapes, and lighting. * \-I assume they would do something like making sure they use the same color palette. But how many colors would that be? 5, or 50? * \-Do programs like Photoshop or Illustrator have collaborative tools to accomplish consistency? Thank you | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well when they say \"a team\" they mean multiple people doing different jobs. Some people make the scenes. Some people make the lighting. Some people animate the characters, so on and so forth. Within those smaller groups they break down individual parts to individual people. For instance only one person is responsible for animating the body of a single main character. One person is responsible for animating the face of that character. Each step of the way they mesh the individual works together and see if they work. If they don't the fix the problems. What keeps everything in line stylistically on a larger scale is 2 fold. 1) everyone works from the same game engine so they have the same set of tools and \"universe\" to build their game in. No one can stray outside of what the engine can do. 2) project leads meeting with team leads meeting with...etc. etc. A whole lot of bureaucracy where they check each other's work. When done right with an experienced team and good leaders it runs smoothly, but when done wrong....well we've all seen bad or ugly games.",
"I'm pretty sure they have one artist's vision of the art, and the art describes his art style and what he accentuates and so forth, and comes up with designs for characters and different angles. In terms of landscapes, it's all straightforward techniques, and colors. They have guides on what shades of colors to use and how certain things should look. Also, they're professionals who are able to mimic other artist's styles pretty easily once they understand the principles behind them."
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kg4cjc | What exactly happened with this Solar Winds hack, and how worried should I be/what should I know about this? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You know how you automatically get windows updates and they install on your computer without you really doing anything, and you don't mind because they're from Microsoft so you trust them? Imagine if a bad actor could impersonate Microsoft, and they write a piece of malicious software that does bad things to your computer, but crucially, they able to \"sign\" it with a secret code that is only meant to be known to Microsoft, in effect identifying it as a legitimate file. The bad guys then shove that malicious software on an update server, and your computer automatically goes off, fetches it, and installs it. Now there's usually a strict process in place to check that these files come from the expected source before they're installed, but remember, the bad guys have found a way to impersonate Microsoft and your computer can't tell the difference so it ends up being run! In this case it wasn't Microsoft, I was just using familiarity with Windows Update to preface the story. Instead it happened to a company called SolarWinds that provides high end security and monitoring software to a _lot_ of companies and government agencies, including top secret (and above) government agencies. So all these companies and agencies found themselves infected by this malicious software which had been sitting on their networks, undetected for *ages*, except all this time the software had been reporting back to the bad guys that it was ready to be used. When the software told the bad guys they had infected certain networks, they activated a second phase of the malicious software which allowed them to execute remote commands on it, usually with high level administrator privileges, enabling them to do almost anything within the network. This let them to extract valuable information, spy on communications, as well as install lots of other back doors into the system so they could maintain a foothold. Even once the malicious software was identified, there is no way of knowing how many other backdoors have been placed in the compromised networks, so companies and agencies are being instructed to effectively firebomb their networks. Burn them completely to the ground and rebuild from scratch. But it's too late.... someone out there has had undetected access to a lot of very, very sensitive information, and has likely copied all of it... and right now, although the government has suspicions it's Russia, no-one knows for sure, at least who is able to say so publicly. In short, it is catastrophic."
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kg4fvq | How exactly does the reduced framerate of the animated film "Into the Spiderverse" make the animation so much better to look at? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Each frame stays on the screen twice as long, so every frame makes more of an impression on the viewer. Mentally, it’s easier to process everything because it’s slower. Also, the movement, especially in action sequences, feels a bit more exaggerated and powerful. There’s an old film editing trick to make punches seem more powerful... you remove the frame right before the impact so that the hand “jumps” the last few inches. Psychologically, it makes a big difference to the viewer. That’s kind of like what the action sequences are like since the motion is only half as smooth as it would’ve been at s 24 FPS."
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kg7jls | When you restart a PC, does it completely "shut down"? If it does, what tells it to power up again? If it doesn't, why does it behave like it has been shut down? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"ELI5 answer When you restart a PC, it does not shut down completely. Someone used a metaphor for a chef so I'll use that too. Shutting down completely would be like if the chef cleaned up and went home. Holding the power button down to shut down faster would be like if the chef didn't clean up and just left a mess and went home. Restarting the computer is telling the chef to clean up everything and then set everything back up without him leaving the building. So, it's not totally \"shut off\" in that sense because the chef is still there to set things back up, and he knew that was the plan in advance!",
"There is additional story on software side of things. For shutdown, Windows, for example, uses hibernation (save to disk) for a lot of kernel code instead of tearing it down, to speed-up next startup. But for restart Windows makes complete teardown and rebuild of all kernel structures, because you usually request restart for updates and configurations, it's not a part of normal operation. [More info]( URL_0 )",
"No, restart and shutdown are different and there are separate power level commands implemented by each. When restarting your computer doesn't shut down first. When the computer is shutdown, the OS will send a shutdown command to the BIOS using the appropriate driver, the BIOS will then send a command to attached devices to place them in a safe working mode, hard drives will park their read write heads to avoid damage. Once the devices report ready and everything is made safe the BIOS will send a signal to the power supply to terminate power to most attached devices and enter standby power mode. Even when shutdown ATX and above will maintain a standby power to the motherboard when plugged in. This allows external devices to power on the machine. Flicking the switch or removing the power cord will remove all power but the power supply itself remains charged with residual current so never open it up. During a restart devices such as the hard drive will not park and will continue to be active, certain POST operations may be skipped. There is a special ATX power signal used to move from standby to full power. The cases switch is wired into a molex connector onto the motherboard, when you press the switch it operates the pins that generate this power signal.",
"Every CPU has a start up routine. Similar to a chef setting up his kitchen before he starts cooking (cleaning, placing the pots & pans & ingredients in the right location etc.) then he starts cooking. The reset button just tells the CPU to start that routine. So to compare, let’s say the chef was in the middle of making pasta, but got a reset. He would clean his kitchen and start cooking from scratch again. Well, what is the difference between an intitial boot and a reset? It is nothing. The list of activities that a CPU needs to do before it can start executing other programs is defined at a certain address. Let’s say $0000. When the computer is turned on, it is hardwired to start following instructions from address $0000 onwards. During the execution of code, the processor keeps track where he is (same as following steps in a receipe) with a counter called a ‘program counter’. What the reset button is pressed, it writes $0000 to the program counter making the CPU think it was just turned on.",
"So I understand how the physical power button works on old PC's to turn a computer on -- it actually made a physical connection to enable power. But on a MacBook for example, you hold down the power key on the keyboard for a few seconds, which is totally different. I assume that whenever the laptop is even slightly charged, or always when it's plugged in, some part of it is always on \"a little bit\" to detect pressing the power key?",
"On Windows 10 you have to hold shift when you click shut down to do a full shutdown. Otherwise it \"turns off\" but caches everything so it can boot up faster the next time.",
"I've always wondered this, especially when I set my phone to turn itself off at a certain time and it knows what the time is to turn itself back on. It must obviously not be completely off to keep track of time. Thanks for asking this!",
"Change computer to analog, for a 5 year old. **Turn your computer on:** show up to school, get your books and supplies out. Student is a computer, the teacher is giving it directions. **Put your computer to sleep:** go to recess or lunch. You leave your books and supplies out, the teacher turns off the lights in the classroom, but you haven't put anything away yet. You can pick up where you left off without losing your place or any work that's unfinished. **Hibernating your computer:** you go home for the night and safely organize your work at your desk, bookmark your book, and put it away. The books are not out of the desk, but they are bookmarked so you can find your place quickly. **Shutting down your computer:** You close all of your books and put everything away safely and neatly. You have to find and open everything manually to find where you left off the previous day. It takes the longest, but you start fresh and don't have a lot of clutter right away. **Restarting your computer:** the teacher tells you to pack everything up neatly, wash your desk, and then get everything back out. You never leave the room. **Power outage:** the teacher walks around and throws everything on your desk in a box. Some of it might fall on the floor, but most of it is in the box. most of your work is still there, but it might take you longer to organize it all and start up again. A little more in-depth: Windows 10 for most users combines sleep, hibernation, and shutdown. There's still different sleep states, but those system buttons behave similarly. If you ever look at *system uptime* in Windows 10, it might show its been running for months. That's because when you shut it down, it's actually hibernating. Restarting closes all of the program that's running, tells the motherboard to stay powered on, and then naturally begins running those programs again. The computer never powers off, but it does terminate every piece of code that is being processed. Between those two piece of information, and with my experience in IT, ever since like 2005 era computing, restarting is VERY different than shutdown and manually turning it back on.",
"The basic operations necessary to operate an operating system are stored in bios(the chip for Binary Input Output System). The operating system when tells that it wants to restart, the bios changes it's order of operations from clean up the cache, shutting down, ànd the restart, and reload the OS etc.",
"There are many subsystems inside your PC. Some have smarts to do things on their own. Using the shutdown gracefully prepares the most of PC for a loss of power. Then the motherboard signals the power supply to cut power. The power supply goes into a low power mode and waits for the power button in the case it be pushed. A restart is all of that, except instead of the motherboard signaling the power supply to cut power, the motherboard just starts a normal start sequence. It’s virtually the same thing. But sometimes you do have to shutdown, flip the physical switch on the power supply and unplug when you need a true full power loss to clear some low level caches or some cranky hardware. By this point you are usually following some advice on the web.",
"It does completely shut down when you turn it off, but that doesn't mean what you think it means. Part of the machine distributes power to the rest of the machine--call it the \"power supply\". That bit has the power switch on it (or wired to it). Whenever you plug the machine in, there is power going through that power supply, so it's only really off when unplugged. Part of the machine is always waiting for that power switch to be pressed and when it is, it activates a set of instructions that start everything else up again. While most of the machine is powered off, the machine is \"shut down\" but it's never completely without some powered components unless it's unplugged. And that's all the explanation you need at age 5.",
"The motherboard of a pc is always on if it is plugged in, it listens for commands on various interfaces in order to know when to power on or power off",
"great question , i will try to eli5 this as best as I can. im sorry if I fail :(. so what happens when you press the start up button on a computer , 2 pins get short circuited on your motherboard to signal the computer to switch on. you can literally take a key ( or coin or any metal object ) and find those 2 pins and short them to turn on the computer. now a startup is like a to-do list for the computer. the cpu has to prepare the set of instructions which alow it to run and boot up your operating system. sorry this is taking so long. but we are nearly at the end. a restart is exactly like a shutdown but with an added instruction to \"short those 2 pins\" or in laymans terms, an added instruction to the shutdown sequence to promptly turn the computer back on! I hope I helped, this is the first time I could answer something here. EDIT: I forgot to add this. there are also dedicated reset pins on the motherboard. most pc cases have a reset button next to the power button. this reset button is hooked up to the \"reset pins\" on the motherboard. this button allows you to again \"short those reset pins\" and force the pc to restart, one thing we shouldnt forget here is that none of the much needed set of instructions which are needed to perform safe restarts/shutdowns are being started when pressing the physical reset button on a pc case so using it routinely is not recommended. hope this helped.",
"##Note **Shutting Down Doesn’t Fully Shut Down Windows 10 (But Restarting Does)** URL_0",
"There is a component in the computer called ROM (Read only Memory) which is always on (even when the computer is shutdown and the power is disconnected) - it is possible because of a special battery attached to it. This ROM recieves a signal when you switch on the computer and this communicates the first ever instruction required for the computer to start doing everything else.",
"A computer powersupply is actually two powersupply in one box. You have the main powersupply, which power your PC. It provide normally the -12, 3.3, 5 and 12V at 400-1000W or sometime even more if the guy that built the pc was crazy! This one is switched on and off by the motherboard. You also have a secondary powersupply. This one is a way smaller one that deliver 5V at 1-3A only. Some phone chargers can actually provide more power than most of them! That is 5-15W only. Most are in the 1-2A range, so 5-10W. This one is always on. If the powersupply is plugged in the wall and the switch on the back of the powersupply is on (if it even exists) then that one is on. Ever saw that always on green led on the motherboard? Well, it is there to say \"Hey! Don't forget to disconnect the power before going any maintenance because there is still power here!!!\" Now... That 5V always on, called 5V Standby, shortened to 5VSTB, also power a microcontroller and some other part of the motherboard. When you select restart in windows, what actually happen is that windows send a signal to that microcontroller to reset everything. Some computer will not shutdown, some like mine does. So, what actually happen is that the microcontroller get the \"reset\" signal, turn off the powersupply, wait a second or two, then turn it back on. The same microcontroller is often the one that manage the power button on the front of your case. When you press on it, that microcontroller get a signal, and can take a few actions: * if the computer is off, turn it on. * if the computer is on, and the bios setting is set to delay, then send a signal to the OS to shut down NOW. Else turn off the power. * If the computer is on and the button is held for more than 4 seconds, then turn off the power. Take note that this can cause data corruption so don't do that unless the computer is frozen. It is also the equivalent of pulling the plug off the wall. Now, remember I said something about some that just reset? Well, instead of shutting off and on the power, another way is to actually issue a reset to most controllers in the computers. There is basically a wire that connect those chips together, and when you send the signal (usually that wire get grounded to reset), the chip should return to it's powered on state and lose all the data and state it was currently at. Magic word: should. See, sometime the electronics crash in some weird way, and the chip can't reset it for some reason to a default state. This can be by design (aka this shouln't happen so let's not put the circuit to reset it), by design flaw (the circuit is there, but a 'bug' exists that make it not work proprelly), or sometime it is because the chip itself is damaged (but can still work flawlessly in most cases) or some part can have been skipped on purpose (the programmer just need to send some command to reset the values). For the last one, surprise, some programmers don't do what they must do, and skip over the \"Those default values are not reset\" part of the datasheet thru created a software bug that cause it to then misbehave. The last one is why they are sometime doing the power reset instead: it do not soft reset, but hard reset. This ensure that everything is always resetted, all the time, no matter what crashed and how. As a side note, when the computer goes into standby, the main powersupply is turned off, and the standby one is what power the ram and some other stuff with important volatile data. The rest is saved to disk or just reinitialised when it get powered on again. This is why it wake up so fast when in standby: everything is still loaded in ram. All it need to do is reinitialise the video card and the like. But all of your opened programs are still in memory. The computer still use a tiny bit of power, a few watts. Lose the power and you lose everything that was opened. The downside is that it take time to dump the ram content to disk, which may be significant if you have lots of ram and a mechanical hard drive. Hard drives are SLOW! For completeness, hybernation is simmilar to standby, except that it dump the content of the ram on the disk then shut off the computer. At power on it reload the content into ram and reinit the hardware.The computer basically take no power. Also, microsoft also made an hybrid mode. It hybernate, but do not shut down the computer (it put it in standby). If you turn it back on, it behave like in standby, but if it lose power then it behave like in hybernation. Kinda the best of both world. The downside is: it take some time to dump the ram content to the disk at standby time, same as in hybernation mode."
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kg7q13 | how do piracy bugs in video games work? | I was watching a WatchMojo video talking about the different video games that put a bug in their code that work essentially mess up the game for or call out anyone who downloaded it illegally (graphics mess up, unable to complete the game, etc). But how does the initial code for the legitimate game “change” (I guess?) and activate the bug for someone who pirated the game? Or am I wrong and the developers just made two versions? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They utilize some verification method to check if the game is a legitimate copy, inside that method they can set a variable to true/false then create code paths later in the game that depend on that variable. For example: isLegitimate = false if (GameVerificationMethod() == successful) isLegitimate = true < bunch of regular game code > if (isLegitimate) SpawnEssentialNPC() If the GameVerificationMethod fails (or never runs) because a video game cracker blocked it from running, isLegitimate is set to false and the essential NPC is never spawned. Obviously this can be defeated but it takes more time than old games that just checked at install time for a legitimate copy (via a CD key or something). The game can also make multiple calls throughout the code to the verification method, and cracking a game is typically done in assembly which can be hard to read, and therefore hard to find every call to the method and/or the variable(s) used to signify the game is legitimate. Generally speaking, DRM implemented in this way can't defeat piracy, all it can do is slow it down more than older methods did."
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kg8iyl | For games that are in development for long stretches of time (like cyberpunk - 8yrs), how do developers deal with advancing technology? | Or are games like Cyberpunk or Red Dead just made with early-mid 2010’s tech? Edit: to clarify, development didn’t actually start 8 years ago, but rather the game was announced 8 years ago. Thanks to the commenters for letting me know! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They just keep updating the graphics and other bits to match. Which is why cyberpunk doesn't run properly on the older consoles despite having been originally intended for them.",
"Cyberpunk was into pre-production stages until mid/late 2016, when CDPR finished with the last bit of content for TW3. Active development started there.",
"At this point, technology doesn't actually change very much. The industry has seen enormous changes, but currently nothing like that is happening. Take for instance that in the times of NES consoles and such everything was sprite based. Everything had to be made from little 2D blocks of a fixed size. When 3D was introduced all of that had to be completely thrown out -- the way you do the graphics is different, the way the world works is different, the way controls work are different. So definitely, at times like that, it was hard to keep up. If you spent years polishing up your old school 2D game, you might have found that by release day 3D had exploded and your stuff now looked old, and redoing everything for 3D would be impossible without starting from scratch. But we seem to be mostly done with this kind of thing. The most similar thing to that going on today is VR, which while not that different from 3D games does have its own peculiarities and requirements that can be challenging to adapt to. But it's still much less jarring than the shift to 3D was. Also, console hardware is far less \"special\" -- modern consoles are pretty much standard PCs, rather than the extremely specialized devices they used to be with various weird and very manufacturer specific hardware. Other than VR, which as far as I know Cyberpunk doesn't use, we're mostly adding incremental improvements: faster CPUs, faster video cards, faster storage, plus optional features like raytracing. Those are easy to adapt to. Make bigger textures, more complex assets, fill the world with more people, etc.",
"Its like if you have a forest and an axe but new tech is out and now you know you can spend a few days making a chainsaw. Do you take the time to make a chainsaw? Would it help cut down more trees than the axe? Even though it cuts twice as fast it also breaks if not cared for. Now i have to conduct maintenance for a few days a week to keep it working. in the end i work less hours cutting and cut less trees. I spend more hours working on the thing that cuts trees now. Sometimes it just better to keep using the axe. So it really depends on if you need trees today or a bunch tomorrow. Same with code. do we need to update all this or will it work as is? Some things must be updated. Some things no. worker gloves and eye protection are great updates even for axemen. but the chainsaw might just be a pretty luxury. The game Kenshi has a really interesting development cycle that would be relevant to your question. iirc a small team made the game over a ten year period and the engine they used is as such very dated. Somewhere there is an article about that game and your question. The devs had to push the limits of the engine they had etc... great game but its interface was very old style. havent played cyberpunk yet as im waiting on the dust to settle. chainsaws are legit better than axe though.",
"One thing to note, as someone mentioned, it wasn't actively being developed, software wise, for eight years. Any program, but games especially, start with pre-production, which is story boarding, deciding the market you want to push to, etc. After that it's completely possible for a game to sit, not being worked on at all for years (this generally will depend on how big the studio is/if the team tasked with it is busy) After that it'll go into active development, and be there for anywhere from 2-5 years (could be longer, but that's a generalization). As for during this time, other people have answered it more in depth Tl;dr it wasn't in development for 8 years, more like 4 (if what another redditor said is correct)",
"I actually asked my friend who works in game dev this same question the other day! She told me that for a big-budget AAA game like Cyberpunk that's developed on a proprietary engine, the engine and they code they write for it are specifically designed in such a way that they can continue to do rolling updates throughout the development process without needing to re-write too much code. Game devs also get the specs for new hardware before it's announced to the public, so the Cyberpunk devs were able to build their engine for the PS5 before the PS5 even officially \"existed.\" She also told me that for smaller or indie games that are developed on non-proprietary engines like Unity, it's more common that the game *is* technologically behind the times, just like you said here; but apparently it's not too difficult to update your code to keep up with rolling tech updates if that's something that's important to you, so some studios do put in the extra effort to keep their games as up to date as possible throughout development.",
"Cyberpunk wasn't in development for 8 years. It was maybe announced 8 or so years ago but development didn't actually start until after The Witcher 3 blood and wine DLC so the game was only in development for the better part of 4 years, but to answer your question: Compared to the leap in changes from the early 2000s to now, the leap from say 2012-now is very small in terms of any new groundbreaking technologies. Apart from perhaps VR and Nvidias RTX technology there are very little significant changes been made in the past 8 years, sure lighting, shadows, textures, AI, environments are all better now because modern hardware can handle it but overall not a lot has changed in the past decade. Anything new or different that has to be implemented will be implemented via the game code or engine tools as development continues and most changes are of little significance that game code or tools can be updated as needed and do not pose any real hindrance to the development of the game. There are so many people working on AAA titles that there are always people on hand to make any changes that need to be implemented so development can continue as normal and not cause any delays."
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kg9y2r | How does digital artists tie their rare art to the NFT tokens? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's essentially like creating a digital \"print\" of your artwork, then encrypting it so that it cannot be copied, and only opened by the person with the key. Here are proper instructions on how to get it done. URL_0"
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kgae5s | Why do phone cameras always zoom in when switched to video? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That is most likely the image stabilization. The camera itself still records the same image, but the camera software focuses on a certain point of the image and keeps that steady, despite your hand moving. That means that the edges get cut of while constantly rotating and moving the image to keeps that focus point in the the same place. By zooming in, you can’t see those changing edges and it looks like a regular image. If you look up stabilized videos, you’ll see the edges move to see what really happens outside of the image.",
"They use software-based stabilising to remove judder from your hands shaking. If you imagine a small judder that causes the frame to jump left then right, you can stabilise this by offsetting the frame in the opposite direction. Of course this would lead to a black bar over the opposite edge where the frame has moved, so to cover this possibility it is zoomed in slightly. The whole frame is captured but only the \"middle\" is saved."
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kgfns1 | Has gun design plateaued? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Does striker-fired mean anything to you? How about double stacked magazines? How many polymer 1911s do you see out there? Lots of improvements in the field, such as less moving parts and simplicity in design overall."
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kgft4r | What are “Website Cookies” and why are they everywhere these days? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A \"cookie\" is a small file that a website places on your computer to store information for later use. Like if you go to the McDonalds website, they might use a \"cookie\" to remember what city you live in so the website can check that cookie and know to default to showing you your local restaurant's hours and specials. But, some websites use cookies to track a lot of information about the user, and can sell that information to others. Some folks didn't like that idea, they don't think that a company should get to make money off of them without their knowledge. Recently, the European Union passed laws so that any website that does business in Europe needs to be very open about if they use cookies, so pretty much every website now has to warn people if they use cookies, since everyone wants to legally be able to have their website used in Europe."
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kgjss6 | how do iPhone "Measure" app works so well while I'm constantly moving my hand? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I think It maps the surrounding, creates a digital reconstruction and then outputs the distance you asked for from that model. It uses the stereo-image from the cameras and the information about movement from the accelerometer to determine what it sees and where it is."
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kgldz9 | Why is turning off my PC from the plug bad? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Its the difference between getting knocked out and going to sleep. When you go to sleep you take actions, like laying down and slowly slipping into sleep. When you get knocked out, you can only hope you dont fall too hard.",
"Turning off a computer with the the shutdown command or with the power button is like asking the computer to please finish what it's doing, and then turn off when it's ready. Edit: Expanding on why it's bad to cut the power: Computers are often busy doing important tasks in the background, and yanking the power without notice doesn't give it the chance to finish those tasks. If those tasks are stopped in the middle of working on them, it can cause damage to data in the places where it was working.",
"Computers have memory (RAM) and storage (disk). Memory is really fast. But it's also expensive, and it loses all its data when it's powered off. Storage is cheap and keeps data around forever. The main problem is that it's quite slow. When a program tells the OS \"I want to write this data to disk,\" the OS will put the data into a memory area called a *buffer*. Then the OS will let the program continue doing its thing. The benefit of doing it this way is you don't make the program wait on the disk. As long as the program doesn't fill up the buffer, *the program acts as if the disk is as fast as memory*. But now you have a problem. Programs are usually written to assume that when they hand off data to the OS, the data does actually get written to disk. When this assumption fails, a program gets really confused, especially if only *parts* of the data were written to disk. When you shut down the computer by clicking the on-screen button provided by the OS, the OS will shut the system down in an orderly way. It'll keep everything powered until all the data in its buffers has been written to the actual physical disk. When you pull the plug, you take away power from the memory before the OS has a chance to save the data in its buffers. Depending on exactly what your computer was doing, pulling the plug may cause no harm whatsoever, or only minor inconvenience. However, if an important program has important data in the buffers, or the OS is updating parts of itself, unplugging at the wrong time can result in loss of important data, or even a system that won't start at all."
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kgojmc | Why does the volume of the radio in the car raise itself when you start going faster? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This is a deliberate design feature on newer cars. It's supposed to account for increased noise from the engine, road, and air resistance. My car actually overcorrects a little bit and I wish I could adjust it, but it's a nice thought."
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kgoxmt | What's the difference between 3G, 4G, 5G and LTE? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"3G, 4G, and 5G are different generations of mobile phone radio technology. Each one has faster data transmission. The hardware and radio band and waveform are different for each. LTE is an advanced version of 3G that’s nearly comparable to 4G but not technically the same. There’s also AT & T’s “5Ge”, which is 4G and compete BS.",
"The 'G' started out meaning 'generation'. 3G was the third generation technology for cell phones to connect to the internet (more specifically, how cell phones connected to cell towers in order to connect to the internet). At that point, the technology was all relatively similar for each carrier, in terms of speed, and the major carriers all did a major rollout of a new technology all at once, so it was third generation (or '3G') for all of them. After that, things get fuzzy. Verizon had a 4th generation technology they called LTE. AT & T was working on LTE, but they also had an improved version of their previous 3G technology called HSPA+ (HSPA was their original 3G technology). HSPA+ was a significant upgrade in terms of speed, so AT & T marketed that as '4G', then Verizon had to market their 4th generation technology as 'LTE' instead of just '4G' in order to separate it from AT & T's HSPA+. AT & T also rolled out LTE technology, but they didn't call it '5G' (probably because Verizon was already marketing their 4G LTE, so it would be weird if AT & T started calling LTE '5G' when Verizon was calling it '4G'). After that, 5G is pretty much the same thing- It's whatever is after LTE because LTE was the latest big technology marketed as 4G, and cell service providers will market whatever they want as 5G because the vast majority of consumers have no idea what any of the \"G's\" mean anyway :)"
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kgploo | How does a microphone work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In simple terms a microphone has a pice of thin material(diaphram) much like your eardrum, and that material has a magnet attached to it with a coil of wire wrapped around the magnet. When the compression waves that we interpret as sound impact the thin material it vibrates, causing the magnet to vibrate along with it. Magnets moving through a coil of wire can create an electrical current, and by boosting this electrical current (amplifier) and playing applying it in reverse to a larger diaphragm-coil-magnet setup(speaker) you get the same preassure waves and thus create the same sound. Essentially at the most basic level speakers and microphones are the same thing, on is just small and sensitive for recording the sounds and the other large and robust for reproducing them. You can record sound with a speaker albeit with poor quality, and you can play sounds(not recomended) through a microphone.",
"Different types of mics use variations on the same essential mechanism, similar to how your ear works. Sound waves make a thing inside the mic vibrate, which generates electrical signals, which are sent to a sound system. A dynamic mic uses a diaphragm whose vibrations move a magnetic coil. Condenser mics use a pair of charged plates which alter capacitance as the front plate vibrates. Electret mics are another form of condenser mic that use a different technique to charge the plates."
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kgrxvb | Why are solar panels blue instead of black that absorb light? | I know this is kinda dumb question, im just really curious why | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are two types of solar panels. One is black (monocrystalline) and the other is blue (polycrystalline). The blue ones are less efficient as you suspected, but are easier and cheaper to make.",
"I don't think this question was answered sufficiently (or correctly) so I will add to it. It certainly is not a dumb question and is actually a huge field of solar panel development. Firstly, both commenters are quite wrong by saying the blue panels are multicrystalline (MC). It is an understandable mistake though as you see the blue color more often with MC panels these days. The blue color is from an antireflective coating that is applied to the panels. Thats a little ironic since silicon is naturally black. It looks like this: URL_0 Though it is black, it is also very shiny like a mirror and will reflect away all the light you want to absorb. This is why they add the blue anti-reflective coating to it. Only a little bit of blue is able to bounce off this coating so much more light enters the panel. More recent panels have better coatings that do *not* reflect blue light leaving the panels black. This black coating is put on all new panels because less reflections mean more power. We do not use MC panels much now because even though they are cheap we have learned how to make Monocrystalline (MONO) panels much cheaper than before and they are more efficient too. So both MC and MONO panels were blue in the past but we don't make MC any more and we also use a better black coating. Any other questions followup?",
"It doesn't really matter. Light is characterised by its wavelength, for example visible light has wavelengths in the range of a few hundreds nanometers. Red light is at one edge of the visible range (longest wavelength) while violet is at the other (shortest wavelength), with all other colours in between. The Sun emits light over an even wider range of wavelengths, but with varying intensity (it peaks in the visible range, which is why our eyes evolved to work in that range). For reasons which are too complicated to explain in an ELI5 post, solar panels can only efficiently use light within a rather narrow wavelength interval which depends on the material the panel is made out of. For silicon solar panels, the most common type, this interval is close to the one where solar emission is at its peak, which is good, however a large part of the solar spectrum goes essentially to waste. So it doesn't really matter if the panel isn't black, it still wouldn't be able to use those extra wavelengths it would pick up. The thing is that polycrystalline silicon solar panels (the blue ones you're referring to) are what's called \"1st generation solar panels\". Research-wise, we're up to the 3rd or even 4th generation according to some. Despite their lower performance, 1st generation panels are still the only ones with some degree of commercial success. Why? Because silicon is dirt cheap, extremely common, non-toxic, an inert and very stable compound and silicon manufacturing is extremely mature because our entire electronic technology is based off it. So basically any marginal improvements cannot compete with the fact that you could just use more cheap p-Si panels to do the same job."
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kgtl2n | Why do the refresh rates on computer monitors seem to always be 144hz or a multiple of 60? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"TV broadcasts in the US are 60Hz, so monitor refresh rates are usually something that divides nicely into this. The 144Hz thing is because people took displays that were 120Hz and overclocked them to get the highest possible refresh rate with that hardware. 20% over was more or less as high as the panels could go before crapping out. Seeing the market, some display manufacturers did “factory overclocked” displays with 144 Hz, and it became a standard. (Very few companies make the actual display panels - most simply buy a panel from one of the few manufacturers and configure them with a display controller). The reason for 60Hz TV broadcasts is that AC current in the US is 60Hz. This means that traditional light bulbs actually vary their brightness at 60Hz, so if you try to film something at another refresh rates, you get an uneven brightness over time.",
"It's due to historical content. 60Hz was the US broadcast standard because in the US, electricity is nominally 110VAC 60Hz so we want a multiple of 60Hz to prevent flickering. There's a huge amount of \"made for TV\" content that was recorded in 60Hz. (Actually, 59.94 Hz in the NTSC color system). In the US, 60Hz is still standard for broadcast and YouTube also has a lot of 60Hz (60 fps) content. 24Hz was the \"de facto\" standard for movies. This number isn't good or bad -- it was a compromise rate due to the technology available in the early days of motion pictures. Even today the vast majority of movies are still shot at 24Hz. 120Hz is a sweet spot for TVs and monitors because 120 is a whole multiple of both 60 and 24. That way 60Hz and 24Hz content can be shown on a 120Hz display without worrying about weird artifacts. 144Hz monitors were introduced to get a little extra performance for competitive gaming. 144 is still a multiple of 24 so most movies can also be easily rendered without artifacts. But without some fancy processing or rate matching, 60Hz content can look bad on a 144Hz monitor (choppy / stuttering, \"tearing\", etc.) So 144Hz is a compromise of sorts, favoring gaming over some broadcast TV / YouTube content."
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kgu1x6 | If my password manager can detect and save passwords from apps/sites, how can I be sure other apps won't do the same thing? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You can't, generally. Any program you install can do just about everything you can. As such, the main methods of defence against apps misbehaving are a) don't install things if it can be avoided, and b) use open source software where possible. We live in an era where there are various patchwork fixes to most glaring dangers, like, antivirus software, that protect user just enough from consequences of their own actions that the whole world won't go down in flames, but I do recommend anyone trying to take a step back and just take steps protecting their devices on their own. Don't run code you haven't checked yourself, or have some other reason to trust. Meaning, open source software if possible, and that only if you cannot avoid installing the app.",
"You can't. At very minimum your operating system and keyboard of choice can see anything you type or paste (anywhere). Any anti virus app. Probably your browser or individual app that you're using. Plus anything else you allow overlay privileges - e.g screen readers, password managers, scraping apps.",
"Browsers and phones have security blocks in place to prevent programs and extensions from accessing things they shouldn't. Pay attention to the permissions of things you install. Chrome extensions will say things like \"can see and change data on any site you visit.\" For phone apps like LastPass you have to explicitly give them accessibility permission to see and keep track of text inputs in other apps. That being said, keyloggers and other spyware can keep track of these things regardless of permissions because they exploit the system."
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kgvr3e | Why does emulating xbox and playstation games require a very good hardware? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The general rule of thumb is that the hardware needs to be 10 times as powerful as the system you're trying to emulate.",
"Games developed for consoles are programmed to take advantage of the very specific hardware those consoles use. So using other hardware requires a brute-force approach. Emulation programs try their best to adjust to different hardware, but the weird programming workarounds for the hardware they were designed for originally makes the process very intensive. To put it another way: a carriage that requires 4 horses to pull will require much more than a 4 horsepower engine to pull at the same speed*. *(I realize that horses generally have a power potential of higher than 1 Horsepower, but this is ELI5.)"
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kgvshu | how we know we can trust the web browser with our usernames and passwords? | The browser sees all the logins we make, with websites, usernames, and passwords in plain text. How do we know it isn’t remembering them and sending them back to the mother ship? It’s possible someone would inspect the code of open source browsers and make a noise if they found something, but even then most people don’t build from source, so there’s no need for the source to be the same as the downloaded app. 2FA makes it less of a problem, but there are still plenty of juicy pickings for the evil browser. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This is actually a pretty good question. Bottom line is, you can’t. Most browsers are closed source, so you can’t “know”. But there are security researchers who are always watching what software and how it communicates looking for unexpected behavior. There’s also the risk to the company. If one instance were confirmed of the software doing something like that, it could totally ruin the whole company.",
"You don't. In fact browser hijacking (either by installing spyware into a browser like chrome or firefox or by installing a nearly identical browser that's malicious) is a very common kind of cyber attack. You know when people download something sketchy and it gives them a weird toolbar? Or when searching it always used yahoo despite the settings being set to google? Both are good examples of common browser highjacks",
"Browsers are one of those things that gets implicit trust because you have to trust something. It's the same with your computer's OS. At the end of the day, we HAVE to do stuff to function. To make your fears worse, browsers are openly collecting people's passwords, and I think Chrome even allows you to sync your passwords across browsers, meaning that yes, passwords get sent back to google. However, there's another part of risk analysis that I think you'll find reassuring. What would a browser have to gain or lose by exploiting your passwords? Well, if they're a major browser, or if they're actually trying to be one, what they have to lose is sooo much higher than what they have to gain. If they got caught, they'd be so deep in lawsuits from both individuals and companies that... well... I'd be surprised if a single dollar survived. It would also be such a PR nightmare that the entire company would just be done. No business with even a 64/th of a braincell in their management would be willing to send important information through or to that company's hosted email ever again. used that company's service for load balancing? NOT ANYMORE! Content hosting? Well that's not happening. Company blogs? NOPE! All of that goes poof! Contracts canceled, other companies contracted in and all old programs pretty much treated as malware style DONE. And the PR nightmare? In all honesty, I'd expect a complete purge. And for what? Money that the banks would immediately move to recover because the activity would look suspicious as all > !censored! < ? A major browser couldn't get away with very much before services and sites react. Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla are NOT gonna play around with your passwords, not because they can't, but because the cost of doing so is so dangerously high. Passwords are no joke, and if people thought browsers were abusing them... I would not want to be involved in cleaning up that mess.",
"As others have said, you can't. Taking it a step further, it's probably safe to assume that all of your password's have been compromised. The only thing you can trust in is the fact that you aren't important enough for those who are harvesting the info to use it. If you aren't rich and famous enough to be blackmailed or doing work important enough that a nation-state would want to steal it, there's little risk."
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kgw3go | What is Perlin noise? | I've just heard about this stuff, and somehow it is used both for generating randomised numbers and also in 3d graphics for movies and video games. As well as various other things. I'm a bit mind blown and confused | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It’s a way of generating “random” gradients that are still relatively controlled. This makes lots of random-ish natural things look more realistic: fireballs, forests, landscapes, plants, etc. You don’t want true random for that type of stuff, like TV static, because in the real world they obey physics/biology/etc. and that limits how much and how fast things can vary. Perlin noise is a relatively simple computer algorithm to generate a gradient in however many dimensions you need (2D, 3D, etc.) that looks random but is also nicely smooth and has the same scale across the features so it looks realistic.",
"Coherent noise generates smoothly varying randomness in n dimensions. Multiple copies of it at different frequencies can be combined in different ways to produce a wide variety of effects, particularly for terrain or texture generation. Actual \"Perlin\" noise is an older formula for coherent noise, which produces a lot of 45 and 90 degree bias. I recommend using a \"Simplex\" type noise instead. OpenSimplex and OpenSimplex2(S) are some algorithms I've put out there so that people can avoid IP claims while using them."
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kgw7f4 | How do network monitoring systems like SolarWinds work? | ELI5: How do network monitoring systems like SolarWinds work? What is network monitoring? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Let's say you have a company intranet. All your workers' computers are hooked to it, and it's not connected to the Internet. You have lots of servers with websites of proprietary company information, and everything is cool. But, all those workers wish they could watch cat videos on YouTube. You don't just want to connect your company to the Internet, because there are lots of evildoers on the Internet. But the employees complain and complain about their lack of cat videos, and eventually the company gets a new CIO who decides to connect to the Internet. The company could just reprogram all those internal websites to check credentials, but that would cost a lot and was a big reason the former CIO didn't want to connect, no matter how great cat videos are. Along comes a company that says \"Just buy our box and put it on your network. We'll implement 'single sign on' two-factor identity services for all your workers, and you just add the same tiny bit of code to all your servers to check for our identity token. It will be seamless, and you'll be super secure\". Maybe you take heart that the US Government has required everybody to implement TFA, and this company has 400+ Fortune 500 customers. The New CIO buys the box, hooks it up, and everything is cool except the company that makes the box gets hacked and now the evildoers have unfettered access to all your company systems with no records of a break-in or even a logon. Too bad, cat videos are cool but the New CIO gets executed in the parking lot at dawn. A cautionary tale."
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kgx5ze | How certain are we that wireless headphones (Bluetooth) are safe for long term use? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"gghryig"
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"text": [
"Bluetooth uses radio waves to transmit signal. Radios have been around since the 1890's and we have yet to identify any health issues related to exposure to the wavelengths used. Not much is certain."
],
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4
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kh0n0p | - Why do we notice a misspelling AFTER sending a text and not before, even when we proofread it once or twice? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggiqbww",
"ggidxsk"
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"text": [
"I have noticed that while in the program I'm using (email, text, word, whatever) if I look at it too long, my brain anticipates what is expected but not what's actually there. If I copy it into a different program, or change the font style or color, my brain thinks it's something new and I can pick up the mistakes. Usually, the screen you type in looks different than the screen you view in, so once you've sent it and look again, your brain is seeing it \"fresh\".",
"There are many reasons. One is that we focus on the meaning as a whole. So our brain see's a word and even if it's spelled wrong the meaning is still conveyed so it continues, it's basically looking in the wrong place. This is why people train and study how to proofread, how to detach the meaning from the text and see the spelling errors separate from the meaning."
],
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5,
3
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kh1pq5 | Why do the ‘Network’ or ‘Internet’ status LED’s on a router keep blinking randomly, even though the connection is perfectly stable? | Apart from the other Wireless LED’s, the one titled ‘Internet’ and having a globe next to/ under it always keeps blinking in an entirely random sequence. Is it somehow related to the data being transmitted through the cable? Or is it related to the bandwidth usage at that specific time? Or is the Internet really just that unstable, and it’s not that noticeable irl? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggik22w",
"ggika8e",
"ggip4uy",
"ggirt83"
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"text": [
"Even when idling, your router is constantly exchanging signals with the internet. It is my understanding that the blinks you refer to are single packages being sent or received. the pattern can be whatever the maker chooses, but it's not the internet connection turning on and off, and usually it won't be an off LED indicating failure to connect but a red LED. Think of it as the doorbell to your router, except it's always sending and receiving signals",
"The blinking is normally showing traffic and activity, not stability. So if you're watching a video, or loading a web page, the page comes down from the Internet to your pc and as it goes through the router, the Internet light will flash, and then the network port light might flash, or the WiFi light will.",
"As others have said, activity (packets on the wire) usually cause the LEDs to blink. In absence of traffic, there exists keepalive signals that cause the LEDs to blink. The keepalives are NOT packets, (they are link pulses,) at least for Ethernet.",
"Also, why don't they have a switch to dim them? Those things at super annoying at night"
],
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25,
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kh2for | How do computers delete data? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggiomt2",
"ggipiet"
],
"text": [
"Nothing is truly deleted. 1s and 0s are rearranged. This is how data can be recovered. When you uninstall something, the physical area (sector) on your storage device is tagged as open for writing new data to. If that sector hasn't actually been rewritten, the data is still there.",
"The operating system and the hdd/ssd talk to each other and have a list of the locations that hold valid data. This lets us know where we can write new data and not overwrite anything important. When we delete data we tell the OS that we don't care about this data any more, so it updates this list of valid locations. This doesn't actually remove any data that's on the drive immediately. But this location is now valid to write to, so over time the old data will be destroyed as new data is written over it. Interestingly, 'deleted' data can be recovered from old drives if you are skilled enough. And in some cases, you can even recover data from hard drives that has been overwritten in some circumstances, although I don't believe that is the case for SSDs."
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7,
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kh4fdv | How does e-Ink actually work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggj2cwm"
],
"text": [
"You make millions of tiny bubbles that act sort of like pixels, like a sheet of microscopic bubble wrap. Now you fill every bubble with fluid and some charged black ink particles all suspended in it. Then you lay a grid of electrically-conducting material underneath it the sheet of bubbles, aligning with the little pixel capsules. Now it's just applying electricity. If you send a negative charge to one little square on your electrical grid, it'll attract all the black particles down inside that bubble, and let the fluid up to replace the space, so you'll see a blank space. But send a positive charge to the pixel on your tiny electrical grid and it'll repel the black ink particles in the bubble, pressing them up against the screen. Now you have what looks like a filled-in black pixel from on top. The little things stay charged until they get a different charge (well, they fade very very slowly, over weeks usually), so that's why epaper stays showing the same thing even when you turn it off, until you send them new charges. That is also why epaper displays are \"slow\" to change and respond, because there are literally tiny physical bits of black ink that have to move through a liquid every time the computer tells the \"pixel\" to change. (There are fancier versions that use two grids, one on each side, and even black and \"white\" ink to move around because that way it can respond faster, but that's more complex to explain and works the same way.)"
],
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6
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kh7m1s | How are cyber hackers identified? | Reading about the recent solarwinds security breach has made me wonder how these cyber hackers are identified. The hack has been described as sophisticated and extensive, if a cyber hacker is this good my intuition leads me to believe that the hacker would be able to hide their trail or mask their identity. How are they identified? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggjmp5t"
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"text": [
"There's a number of ways to trace the source of an attack. I'll give a few examples. 1. The hackers take credit for it. Hackers are often vain and leave telltale calling cards in the systems they hacked just for kicks. Or they release the information they stole on the web and that gets linked to them. 2. Hackers always leave traces. More sophisticated networks use Firewalls and Logging solutions that aren't so easy to wipe. So the hackers attack can be traced back using their source IP (although that's easy to mask) 3. Reverse engineering the tools and malware that they used. Being computer programs these tools often have finger prints in them that can trace them back to their original coder. 4. Reverse engineering the botnets / CnC (Command and control). Malware these days often \"phones home\" sending information to a CNC. In the Solarwinds hack they identified several websites being used. Who purchased these URLs and where they point can be reverse engineered, as that also leaves traces. 5. Finger prints on other systems. Computer software these days is often interlinked with other systems, often 3rd party ones and cloud services that themselves have there own logging. Cloudflare for example was able to provide a great deal of information about the hack because it had logs + analytics that referred to the compromised websites in the CnC because those websites were accessed through the Cloudflare services at some point. While Office 365 is being used more and more for it's email and file sharing functions in business and it has logging that's completely isolated from corporate networks. So information such as emails, login attempts, etc might be available to be analyzed. Really what it boils down to is it's basically impossible to cover your tracks completely, and even 1 mistake will lead investigators to you. But in this case the hackers don't really care since they are likely Russian and therefore effectively untouchable."
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kh93dq | How do EMP’s work? | I am aware the an EMP is an Electro Magnet Pulse and that it disables electronics, but I am unaware how it messes with electronic objects. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggjvlw2"
],
"text": [
"It's a pulse of magnetism. This induces currents in wires it moves past, using the dynamo effect. These currents are not what the circuit is designed for, and high currents can easily harm delicate electronics."
],
"score": [
12
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khc3ds | . How does the mobile phones calculates or reads the battery percentage as I think batteries are just a small biscuit of chemicals like Li-ion, Li-polymer or soemthing else. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggkcr57"
],
"text": [
"A battery is like a balloon. You charge it up like you’d fill a balloon with air. When it’s full, it’s at a higher pressure than before. Then when it’s being used, the air escapes and the pressure decreases over time. Eventually the balloon is empty of all its air and its pressure is at 0. A battery uses voltage instead of pressure. You can measure the voltage and get a general idea of the remaining capacity. A fully charged lithium ion cell is at around 4.2V, and when fully discharged, is at around 3V."
],
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8
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khc8xf | How does file compression/zipping works? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"ggkdv38",
"ggkeboi"
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"text": [
"Files are just long strings of numbers, fundamentally. A lot of those numbers are repeated. What compression algorithms do is they basically take bits of these files and they convert them from raw numbers to instructions, kind of like a paint by numbers. So instead of saying 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1, a compressed file will instead say \"eight 1s in a row\". Only on a much larger scale. Because this is how compression works, how much the file can be compressed is a good measure of how repetitive the file is. The more it can be compressed, the more repetitive it is. To use song lyrics as an example, the song [Around the World]( URL_0 ) can be compressed to a file that basically says \"Around the World, 200 times in a row\". To demonstrate this, I just copy-pasted the lyrics into a text file, which has a size of 2.52kb. Put it in a Zip file, and its size falls to just 182b - 93% of the file size has been removed, and that's remembering that some of that file size is the uncompressed information describing the type of the file and how to uncompress it.",
"> I've been curious about zip files recently and how they can compress, say 10 GB of data into 6-7 GB, without losing quality. How does it work? How may times does \"E\" appear in your comment? 9 times. How many times does \"Z\" appear? 1 time. There's 26 letters. So at the very least, we would need five bits to represent them all, as that gives 32 combinations. \"A\" could be 00001, binary 1. \"Z\" would be 11010, that being 26 in binary. \"E\" would 00101, 5 in binary. However, as we've seen in your comment, some letters are a LOT more common than others. We can actually reduce the bits for common data, and increase it for rare data. E could instead be represented by say 010, and Z be 1100101010. (I made these up, they might not work). The file size would be smaller, as shrinking the size to represent E at the expense of Z makes for a shorter file. Using the same amount of bits for Z as E is incredibly inefficient. The same works for any type of data. You can lossless code anything. With a photo for example, it would involve finding similar colour regions. A photo that is entirely white doesn't need to say it is white for every one of the couple million pixels, you can just say they are all white. With a video, it involves only stating which pixels change with each frame, rather than stating then all again. If a person walks in front of a static background, you don't need to store the background over and over, just once. Even with completely abstract data where these is no immediately obvious pattern for a human to see, there's algorithms to find more efficient coding. A zip file is an algorithm that works on any type of data. However, it's effectiveness depends mostly on how much duplicate and inefficient data was in the file to begin with. Sometimes it's massive, sometimes it's barely anything. There's lossy compression too. This is where data is lost and the stored result is close enough. Most commonly seen in a .jpeg image. You can visually see where the algorithm has lumped a bunch of similar pixels into one blob."
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khd8ni | In firearms, what’s the difference between flint lock, cap lock and percussion? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggkjnga",
"ggkjvg6"
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"text": [
"All these weapons work in a similar way. You load gunpower into the muzzle with a ball/bullet on top. Then, you find a way to ignite that gunpower and propel the ball. There are different ways to ignite that power. A flintlock uses a piece of flint as an igniter. Pulling the trigger releases the spring loaded cock with a pieces of flint attached. The cocks scrapes the flint against a steel backing plate, called the frizzen, which creates a park. When the frizzen is hit, it folds backward and uncovers the pan, which also contains power. This sparks ignite the powder in the exposed frizzen pan. This ignited power then ignites the powder in the muzzle and fires the weapon. A cap lock/percussion cap are parts of the same system. Instead of scraping a flint against a frizzen, the weapons creates an ignition by exploding a cap. The cap contains chemical that explode when exposed to friction (those chemicals are called fulminates). When the cock of the weapons slams down on the cap, it causes the friction which explodes the chemical. The explosion then ignites the power in the muzzle and fires the weapons. An older type of firing mechanism is called the matchlock. This is one is fairly simple. It used a slow burning match (a piece of rope). When you fired the weapon, the cock dipped the match into the priming power, which would then ignite the muzzle power. Another older system is the wheellock. Similar to the flintlock, a wheellock creates sparks. However, instead of a flint hitting a steel frizzen, the sparks were created in the rotation of the wheel mechanism—the mechanism is similar to a modern cigarette lighter.",
"The difference is in how they ignite the gunpowder in the chamber. A flintlock use a piece of flint that they strike against a piece of steel creating sparks. This then ignites some gunpowder in a pan, still on the outside of the gun. There is a small hole from the pan into the chamber. As the gunpowder in the pan burns it heats up the gunpowder in the chamber through this hole igniting it. A cap lock is a later invention where they use a special percussion cap which is filled with a primer powder that detonates when you hit it with a hammer. So instead of a pan you have a nib to place the percussion cap on with the hole through to the chamber and instead of a flint there is a hammer head. When cartridges came out the percussion cap were placed at the base of the cartridge instead of outside the chamber. In order to hit the percussion cap inside the chamber a fireing pin were installed, either mounted in the hole using springs or mounted to the hammer. In addition to flint lock and cap lock there were also match lock that used a slow burning fuse that they would ignite the gunpowder in the pan and wheel lock where they would use a spinning wheel touching a flint to generate the spark."
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khdrnn | What exactly does defragmenting a Windows PC’s hard drive do, and how is it beneficial to the system? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggknr2l",
"ggkl8qq"
],
"text": [
"Mac's don't need to be defragmented. It comes down to how the files are stored. Windows likes to write files right next to each other. Then if a file grows it has to be split up (because it's sandwiched by 2 other files). This can cause slow reading since the drive has to find multiple parts of the file. Think of it like taking notes on a sheet of paper. If you write single spaced and really close together it's hard to go back and add in more information. Other operating systems don't put the files so close together. They're much more spread out on the disk. This means when a file needs to expand it usually has plenty of room to do so. Going back to the notes analogy, this is like double spacing so you can make future edits to your notes.",
"This applies to a hard drive. When your disk is fragmented it means that your data is all over the place. See the hard drive as a storage room. You are looking for tools and those tools arent together. One is on the top shelf the other one is on the bottom one etc. If you defragment your disk you sort all the data and put them together in 1 place. So your storage room is sorted and data is easy for find. As for macs. I donno. I dont think they even got a hard drive. Prob just ssd"
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khe1o7 | how did the WWII Enigma Machine work and how did they break it? | i've always wondered about this but all of the articles that try to explain it completely fly over my head, especially since i have no background in coding/cryptography/whatever subject it is. any kind soul willing to simplify it a bit? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggkms7l",
"gglna7q",
"ggkvift"
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"text": [
"*I have left out some details, like the reflector and the Kriegsmarine's extra wheels, plus a dozen things that I'm sure I've forgotten. If you have questions or think I've left out something interesting, please ask and I'll do my best.* **How to use an Enigma machine** The Enigma machine looked like a typewriter, but with a bunch of letter lights on the top. Once it was set up (I'll get to that in a minute) what would happen is you'd press a key on the keyboard, and one of the letters on the top would light up. So if your message was RESUPPLY AT POSITION BRAVO TOMORROW NOON, you'd type R-E-S-U-P-P-L-Y and the lights on top would go A-X-G-K-D-Y-E-I. Your Morse code guy sends AXGKDYEI to your friend. Your friend goes to their Enigma machine, sets it up the same way as yours, types in A-X-G-K-D-Y-E-I and on top, the letters that light up are R-E-S-U-P-P-L-Y. So you put in uncoded messages (what the pros call 'plain text') and coded messages ('cypher text') comes out - or, if you type in cypher text, the original plain text comes out. **How the machine's guts worked (superficially)** Inside the guts of the machine, there were three wheels, like the ones in an odometer, which each had 26 contacts on each side. Each wheel connected incoming letters to other different letters, so a 'C' on one side might be converted to an 'L' on the other side, and so on. So each wheel performed one shuffling on the text. You could put those three wheels in in any order you wanted, so there were six possible shuffling combinations (123, 132, 213, 231, 312 or 321) that they could use on any given day. When you sat down to start work for the day, you'd have instructions that would say \"today, the wheel sequence is 2-3-1\". In addition to that, there was a plugboard on the front of the machine which had the whole alphabet on it, and they had a bunch of cables they could connect that would each perform an additional letter-swap. Typically they'd use 6 cables, but there was no reason they couldn't have more or fewer. So your daily instructions would also say \"connect plugs A-R, G-S, Z-P, Y-B, J-M and E-D\". Now, all that is bad enough. But it gets worse. Remember how I likened the wheels to an odometer? They really worked like one. Whenever you typed in a letter, the far right wheel would advance by 1/26 of a turn, which would change the shuffling connections for the next letter. And whenever the third wheel had made a full rotation, like an odometer, it would cause the *middle* wheel to advance one step so you'd continue to get fresh shuffling combinations. And if the middle wheel went all the way around, the left wheel would advance once. This meant that unless you typed an absurdly long message, which they never did, every single letter was produced by a unique shuffling, different from every other one in the message. AND, the wheels didn't always start at the same place. You could see a three-letter combination showing on the top of the machine that told you the wheels' positions, and the last part of your daily instructions would be \"set the wheels to EVK\", or whatever. So, as you can imagine, this was nightmarishly good crypto and nobody could touch it for several long, scary years. **How the good guys (specifically, Poland) cracked it** What finally happened was an embittered German named Hans-Thilo Schmidt, who was badly in debt and worked in the German cypher bureau, sold some secrets. He couldn't actually get an Enigma machine, or the wheels, or even the wiring diagrams for the wheels, but he got some technical data about the machine and...even with that, the French weren't able to make any progress. It wasn't enough. The Brits couldn't either. But a Polish mathematician named Marian Rejewski (ra-YEV-ski) worked some holy-shit mathematical magic on the tiny bits of info Schmidt had smuggled out, and found a way to deduce the wheel wirings, sight unseen. With that, they were able to crack a few Enigma messages. Soon after, Germany invaded Poland, and as their country was getting crushed, Polish intelligence agents managed to sneak their findings out to France and then England, where it pulled their code-breaking teams out of pretty much total despair. \"You...cracked it? It's **crackable!?!**\" **What happened after that** Germany made some improvements to their procedure during the war, and each time Enigma decrypts would dry up for days or weeks. But the \"Poland did it, we can do it again\" attitude persisted and the allies were always able to catch back up. There were some crucial weaknesses in German signaling procedures which helped a lot. What happened in The Imitation Game, where stations kept signing off with HEIL HITLER, wasn't a major thing as far as I know, but what did happen was fairly similar. Some weather stations would begin each message with their station code, or would include predictable information (nice day? weather messages will probably have 'clear' in them somewhere). Also, some messages were double-encrypted and in that case it was standard procedure to start the message with the crypto key...repeated twice. Repetition is one of the best things you can give a code-breaker to help them understand your crypto. So the Bletchley Park team started out with those tools, with which they were able to occasionally crack a message, but it wasn't consistent enough or fast enough. Poland had built some rudimentary devices that each handled some of the work of a brute-force attack, and now Alan Turing et al built a mechanical computer that (with its search narrowed by known biases in German signals) was able to brute-force Enigma encryption most of the time. This was an intelligence coup so massive that the allies had to be careful to not overuse it; they were worried Germany might come up with some even-nastier crypto system if they thought Enigma had been compromised.",
"Numberphile did two fairly didactic videos about [how Enigma works]( URL_0 ) and [how it was solved]( URL_1 ).",
"Not here to answer this since another redditor already has a good post on it, but just FYI, if you ever find yourself in England, there's a full scale reconstructed Enigma-decoder, the Bombe machine, in Bletchley Park that you can still \"operate\" and it's well worth the visit. The original Bombes were dismantled after the war for obvious reasons, but they found the blueprints and about 4 decades later reconstructed it. When we visited, there was hardly anyone else in the Bombe room so we pretty much had the machine to ourselves and just \"operating\" it brought chills. Absolutely thrilling experience. Oh and Bletchley in general is fascinating and well put together. Would recommend going first thing in the morning and budgeting a whole day for it, if you're a history buff."
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khfzof | How does "Learn 'x' while sleeping" work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggkvkyg"
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"text": [
"It doesn't. Your brain doesn't register any new information while you are asleep. However, while you can't *actively* learn something during sleep, it is still good for learning new stuff. Sleep helps the brain get rid of waste, make your short-term memories long-term and strengthen the connections between neurons."
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khgczt | why do library apps have due dates for digital books? | If you download your local library app here in the states; you can check out a vast amount of books/movies/music. Why do they have a due date if you get a book? It is digital. It isn’t hurting anyone if it’s “checked out”. If you don’t finish it before your date you have to recheck it out and lose your place in the book. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggkwi1y",
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"text": [
"Because books are protected by copyright. So the library can't just give away \"free books\": it would be a crime. The library is allowed to lend a limited number of digital copies of a book: digital books are treated like kind of physical books by the law. So the library needs you to return it in order to give it to someone else.",
"The libraries are bound by contracts with the publishers of those books - they can only loan out a certain number of copies at a time, so just like regular books, they have to keep the loans to a specified time, so someone else can check out the digital copy. One thing I have seen that you can do if your book loan is nearing its due date: put your device into Airplane mode. The digital copy is still released back to the library for re-lending on its due date, but as long as your device is off-line, it does not \"expire\" from your device. (I have not tried this, but I have heard it mentioned, and it seems like it could work)."
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kho3ng | Why do some websites create a quiet buzzing noise in some speakers? | For me this is only the case for very few websites (far above 90% of the cases i recognise are on wikipedia). It is very quiet and i am sure a lot of people (esspecially above a certain age) wouldn't even hear it. Those Websites don't have any videos or anything else going and also it does not happen with any browser either. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggmf033"
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"text": [
"Probably your graphic card is adding static to your computer and your soundcard takes it. Are these webs mainly white or have bright colours? Try browsing images in different apps to see if happens there too."
],
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3
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kho7ea | Do individual gas stations set their own prices or is it all controlled by head office? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Generally they set their own, but corporate gas stations may define the markup. For example. Two gas stations run by the same corporate office may be charged a different price for their gas from the distributor as one station is farther away from the refinery. The closer station gets the gas for $1.25/gallon, the farther station gets it for $1.28/gallon. The corporate office may set the markup to $.20 regardless of the original cost of the gas making the costs $1.45/gallon and $1.48/gallon respectively.",
"Worked as a GM and DM for a Gas Station change for a few years. Pricing was largely determined by corporate, but based on field research. Me and my team were responsible for surveying stations within a few miles of the store at least twice a day to provide market data. We would enter these numbers into a web portal and about an hour later, we would get a request to change the pricing as specified. We did have the ability to change the prices at the store level, if need be. Doing so would flag corporate, who always had a fit about it, unless we had valid reasoning. Pre-DM days for me, this always required DM and RM approval, or else you were in for some shit. Had one store near me lose a few employees for changing prices during an overnight shift."
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13,
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khpnio | If camera lenses are circular, why are pictures/videos rectangular? Is there extra parts of the photo we cant see? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggmdw6k",
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"text": [
"The sensor that is inside the camera is square/rectangular. That is what is seen in your viewfinder. You can go into different types of sensors, but they’re all square/rectangular. The lenses being circular help with grip to zoom/focus",
"The lenses are circular, but the sensors and film in the camera are square. You could, in theory, have round sensors inside the camera but that seems kind of weird and not standard.",
"Film, and now the digital sensor are normally rectangular. This is because human technology likes nice orderly squares to make mass production easy. Lenses throw what's called an \"image circle\". This is bigger than the sensor, so yes, there are curved edges and corners of the image projected inside your camera that don't hit the sensor/film, and so they aren't recorded.",
"The shape of a lens does not actually change the shape of the image much. We could cut a lens down into a square, and it would still produce a circular image (or rather, an image which becomes blurrier as you get further from the center). This is because of what lenses do - they sort incoming light based on the direction that it moves in. The physical shape of the sorter just determines what incoming light it is able to catch, but the direction of the incoming light is more or less the same. However, like the round-pizza-wedge-slice-square-box question of old, it comes down to manufacturing methods and benefits. The way that lenses are made essentially requires them to start off as circles. The way that camera sensors are made essentially requires them to be rectangular (or at least, it's much less wasteful that way). Certainly, you could cut a lens into a rectangle, but it would just waste the extra glass and be a fairly difficult process. Meanwhile, that extra material of the lens allows it to capture more light and so make for a better image."
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khppwg | How do developers create multi-platform games that look completely the same? Do they start from scratch for each platform? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggmeayt"
],
"text": [
"They make games that run on a game engine. The game engine serves as a translation layer and is what is made to fit on each platform. The game will therefore look relatively the same with certain features available if the platform supports it. If this isn’t done correctly or not well tested then it can lead to problems such as those that plague Cyberpunk 2077"
],
"score": [
10
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khrc6o | What technical reasons would a game released in 2020 and aimed at high-end PCs have to struggle with save files that are larger than 8 MB? That seems like an awfully paltry file size nowadays. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggmoryn"
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"text": [
"It has nothing to do with high-end PCs or being aimed for them. It's a software issue, a guess that comes to mind is that in their testing they never had save files that big, and believed that there isn't enough data to store to warrant needing to address a file potentially that big."
],
"score": [
8
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khrpa3 | What keeps you from playing a game you refunded but still have downloaded? (referring to STEAM) | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggmq7r1",
"ggmql8o",
"ggmqzdn"
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"text": [
"It's DRM-blocked. You have the files on your hard drive, but you can't launch the game. You need a crack to do so and at this point it's the same as piracy",
"Games you download through Steam are programmed to check with Steam every time they run. Steam then checks your account and says, yes u/chilidoggo owns this game and can play it. This is why you can only be logged into one computer at a time, or if you uninstall Steam you lose access to the games (try it sometime if you don't believe me), even if the files are still on your computer. This is what's called \"Digital Rights Management\" or DRM. It prevents piracy. It's why you have to install a launcher for any PC game, like the Epic Game Store for Fortnite, or URL_0 for Blizzard games. There are DRM-Free storefronts (GOG is the big one), but they are becoming more rare for obvious reasons. Without DRM, there's nothing stopping me from copying a game and just giving it to all my friends. Now, people who pirate (steal) games, have easy access to the files (anyone who has the game can copy/paste them to wherever), but need a way to 'crack' them open to get past the authentication process. So once they've done this (it's sometimes very difficult), they have a 'crack' file along with the game file. There's more details there, but I'm not personally familiar with them.",
"Simply put, this is why DRM (Digital Rights Management) exists. Steam implements a DRM system designed to check if you have a valid license to run the game, and prevent you from running it if you do not. If you get a refund for the game, your license will be invalidated, and Steam will no longer allow you to run the game. Some games sold on Steam do not implement the Steam DRM system, meaning you can download them, get a refund, and continue to play them (but you won't be able to re-download them if you delete them). There are people out there who work to remove or disable the DRM system, allowing people to play games they haven't paid for. In response, some games implement systems that check to see that the game code (including the DRM code) has not been modified. This is known as an \"anti-tamper\" system, and its job is to ensure that the DRM code works properly."
],
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"Battle.net"
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khxie6 | How does 3D printing work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggnraah"
],
"text": [
"Like a fine-tipped glue gun aimed by a highly precise robot, building the object in question in layer upon layer but instead of melting glue it’s melting plastic."
],
"score": [
4
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khynfh | Could someone explain how Amazon's and other like online Superstores are able to carry out one day delivery or even a few hours automatically? | Like is it done by a software which performs calculations with the delivery address, warehouse address and driver availability or something? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggny8qb",
"ggo0l8v"
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"text": [
"Order goes to which ever regional hub that is closest to the destination. All automated. AI, queries inventories of its gigantic infrastructure than queries backlog and available carriers. Once fc is picked the order is dropped into that facilities pick system. Depending on the facility 3k to 70k packages are processed an hour.",
"They have big warehouses around the country that have most items but near most major cities they have small warehouses that hold the most popular items for that city for one day delivery like video games that were just released etc. probably some algorithm chooses what items get staged in those warehouses based on size, profit margin, local trends maybe some forecasting."
],
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6,
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khzsjn | [Netflix, PrimeVideos, Hotstar, etc.] Why does rewinding back, and forwarding again from where you rewinded the video, need to be buffered again? | If you rewind a video on any of these platforms from, say 5:20 to 2:35. Considering you've already watched that part of the video, so it's already buffered, so it should already be in the cache/cookies. But if you again jump forward to, say 4:46, the preloaded portion of the seek bar resets to 4:46 along with the current seekbar position (which should be at 5:20, since you've already watched), and it again starts to buffer. So I lose the already downloaded portion entirely from 2:35 to 5:20. Why? I think YouTube is one of the exceptions here, that I know of. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggo3z7e",
"ggo5stx"
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"text": [
"Part of the answer is that the people who own the content REALLY don't want \"streamers\" to be able to easily keep the media they stream. So the amount of the video file that your device keeps in memory is as little as possible for smooth playback, and the parts of the file you have already watched get dropped fairly quickly.",
"Streaming works by buffering a small portion of the visual and audio data at a time. Data that is currently being shown, data that is going to be show soon, and data that has just been shown are stored in the device. A few seconds after the data is shown, it’s deleted from the device to make room for new data. There’s some benefits to this - streaming is very technology independent. It can work on devices with high memory, low memory, and everything inbetween so long as the internet connection works well. It also helps prevent pirating because the entire media is never downloaded on the device all at once. This system also means that if the position of streamed media is changed significantly, data has to rebuffer. A large enough change means all of the data is wiped and reloaded for the new position. When done abruptly, this can take some time. This is further exacerbate when the internet connection is poor or the internet connection is being used for other functions simultaneously."
],
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5,
3
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ki2fn3 | What slows down computers and phones over time and why won't a memory clear restore them to their former glory? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggohww8"
],
"text": [
"The hardware does not get worse, slowdowns happen because of software changes or just your own expectations causing a placebo effect. If you continue to update software then new versions are harder to run. This is because new computers have excess power to be able to run these more difficult programs. People who write the programs want to include new features and these new features require more work from the computer. For mobile devices, it could be different. Manufacturers have more control over the OS and can intentionally slow them down. Also, due to the power restrictions of using an old battery, it is possible that processing power must be limited to prevent energy problems. I believe the iPhone did this."
],
"score": [
8
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ki4qip | Any people good with tech. What's the difference between I3 I5 I7 etc, and the 'gen' number ie. 10th gen, 9th gen etc. Same thing or not? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggov9dt",
"ggosgpe",
"ggorx21"
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"text": [
"So ‘I’ followed by number is more the performance band while the gen is to indicate how recent. So I3 will always be lower than I5 but an 8th gen I3 isn’t as good as it’s 10th gen counterpart?",
"In general i9s are more powerful than i7s which are more powerful than i5s which are more powerful than i3s. There used to be fairly specific features unique to some and not others but over time the boundaries have blurred away to nothingness. In practice the additional \"power\" on offer may be entirely useless to you, depending on what you do and how you use your computer. & #x200B; The generations tend to improve performance across the board, though not evenly. As a result, it's entirely possible for an i3 of a later generation to be faster than an i5 or even i7 from a previous generation. Sometimes the generational leaps \"only\" provide power improvements (useful for laptops, less useful for desktops) without offering much in the way of speed improvements. & #x200B; If all of this sounds like it might make it difficult to appraise what's best for you, you aren't alone. My advice, if you're looking to buy a new machine, is to work out your main use case - gaming, productivity, web browsing etc - and find relevant benchmarks for a range of processors. See which ones excel and which ones fall a bit flat. Then look at their cost and work out the sweet spot where you get the most bang for your buck within your budget. Don't bother looking at the generation or the product number, because it's irrelevant. (The only exception to this is if you're buying a laptop - not only do you rarely get much choice over the specific processor within a given laptop, but also generations become more important because of their typical energy improvements - but in these cases, you'll need to do a bit of research on the specific model you're looking at \\*anyway\\*, wherein you should find the battery info you need.)",
"I3/i5/i7 are effectively model numbers. The generation is the version number. So, if you have an i3 generation 10 processor, it's the i3 model, and the generation indicates that this is the 10th available version of this model."
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ki5k6m | How do Image editing programms improve the sharpness of an image? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggoyt81"
],
"text": [
"There aren't any pixels missing. A 10MP image always has that many pixels. Focus is usually the main issue, however, every picture is inherently a little less sharp than it could be due to the process of taking a picture (too convoluted for an ELI5) Sharpening an image modifies the existing pixels so that there is a greater difference between the neighbouring ones where there already was a notable difference, making the perceived picture sharper. The methods of doing so vary. One interesting methods is unsharp mask, which counterintuitively increases the sharpness. [ URL_1 ]( URL_0 ) The fun of this is if you have an image editor that supports layers, you can apply an unsharp mask manually."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsharp_masking",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsharp\\_masking"
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| [
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kiaibt | if blu-ray disk only has the capacity to store 25gb how can ps4 and Xbox games be 50+ gb? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggpo6p9",
"ggpqu80",
"ggpo4m0",
"ggpoux1"
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"text": [
"Dual layer blu ray discs have approximately twice the capacity of single layer discs, and if I am not mistaken, the standard allows triple and maybe quad layer discs.",
"It's 25 GB per layer. You can have two layers in a disk. The same trick was used with DVDs to give 5 and 9 GB versions. There are now disks available with 3 and 4 layers going up to 128 GB per disk, but they're not nearly as common.",
"Because you download most of the data needed to run the game when you first insert the disc.",
"A BD50 disc is actually pretty common now and you can also find BDXL that have a 100gb capacity to them (although much more expensive). So they do have the capacity for most games now, but there could also be compression of various assets that then get stored on the console in either memory or HDD space."
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kibawo | why do old (black and white) movies apear to play faster than modern ones? | So when you watch an old movie it seems like its in 1.25 speed or higher, or at least thats what i observed, why is this? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggpth2w",
"ggpu5bn"
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"text": [
"URL_0 > I assume you are talking about older 8MM films. They were shot at 18 frames per second, which is slower than the current video standard of 30fps or film at 24 fps. So when the older film is played back on equipement designed for faster frame rates it appears to speed up.",
"Two reasons: 1) speed at which the film was fed into the camera when filming: old time movies were hand cranked. This means someone had to turn a crank manually to feed the film into the camera. This means that no matter how well trained they were, there would be some fluctuations in speed at which the film went through the camera, changing the speed at which the people on film were moving. No one can move their arm at exactly the same speed for hours when filming. In later days the speed at which the film was fed into the camera when filming became fixed so the problem was eliminated. But to compensate for the varying speed is time consuming because you have to painstakingly review all footage and adjust from moment to moment. 2) film speeds used to not be standardized so that there were different speeds for the film, when viewing it in a theater, to be run through the projector. It’s been standardized now of course, but back then a film might have been designed to be shown at a different number of frames per second than modern projection equipment uses, so the entire film is sped up, for example Source: Peter Jackson’s documentary portion of the film *They Shall Not Grow Old*. He talks about what they had to do so World War One footage he had would look more natural to modern eyes. Every clip had a different frame rate and they had to adjust everything to get normal human movement speed."
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1qphaz/why_does_old_film_seem_sped_up/cdf594a?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3"
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kicy2m | How does a computer hack “look” Russian or Chinese or whatever? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggq6pwb",
"ggqh6ud"
],
"text": [
"I could give you a stack of books without giving you the authors. And you could, could by reading the books, examining and comparing the writing patterns, style, formatting of chapters (etc. Etc.) figure out which books are from the same author. For hacks it works the same way. The methods used, the resources, the way hacks are written, the ways hacks are executed. The resemblance to previous hacks. The bits of log that are recovered the logs that were wiped, patterns. They get researched and compared to other hacks. This is digital forensics.",
"It doesn't. Also, the other answers talking about IP, and \"patterns\" are wrong. Hackers aren't serial killers, they don't have a \"signature move\". Either the security breach is so hard to exploit, that is basically unique and new, or is a well known stuff that could've been done by any hacker. & #x200B; What actually happens is this: Country A detects some suspicious thing trying to access some server with sensitive information. They are enemies with country B, and C, they trace the origin of the attack, and is a Anonymous Proxy server located in B, and they can't go any further without assistance from the manager of said server, or the country B. So, country A says that their servers were attacked, and it was probably hackers from country B. Other situation that can happen, is if something really suspicious happen with the routing (e.g. [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )) Keep in mind that the majority of the claims from OTAN countries, mainly US, accusing China of perpetrating attacks against them, are fabricated to make those countries look bad in the eyes of the public. Also, I'm not including cyber-attacks made by small private groups that look to get money/data (e.g. Ransomwares, databreach of large sites). Those are attacks that are relatively easier to pinpoint the origin."
],
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14,
4
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"text_urls": [
[],
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"https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6AI4HJ20101119"
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kie2e4 | Why are large batteries just many small ones connected together? | I recently saw a video where a garage is making an electric car. They ended up using thousands of AA batteries all strung together. Also, I saw a photo of a D battery without the case: just 4 smaller batteries tied together! Why aren't large batteries larger? Why must they be composed of many smaller batteries? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggqalsp",
"ggqahzm",
"ggqitbn"
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"text": [
"Batteries use a chemical reaction to produce a voltage. The voltage produced is almost entirely the result of the chemicals used. Using more of those chemicals doesn't get you a higher voltage So in order to get a higher voltage you need to make multiple batteries and string them together. D batteries should/can be a single battery tho because those still just 1.6 volts. Are you thinking of those big lantern batteries?",
"> Also, I saw a photo of a D battery without the case: just 4 smaller batteries tied together! This doesn't have to be the case. In fact, for D cells, I suspect it isn't the case. What you're probably thinking of is a [6v lantern battery]( URL_0 ), which is indeed simply four D cell batteries wired together. As for the reason, why should they be? Smaller batteries exist, and wiring them together in such a way is easier than making an entirely new form factor. In the case of the dudes with the electric car, it was probably as much to prove that they could.",
"Imagine you're using a spring to store energy. When you compress the spring all the way it pushes back *really* hard. When the spring is halfway sprung, though, it's not pushing as hard. When it's nearly all sprung, it barely pushes at all. That's a problem because you need the spring to provide as constant a pressure as possible so your spring powered thing runs correctly. Think about a toy car powered by the spring - it'll go really fast at first, but then slow way down. It would be better if the car moved at a constant speed the whole time. You can regulate the output somewhat, but you can only make the spring push less hard than it wants to, you can't make them push harder. Similarly with batteries, they produce a high voltage when they're fully charged, but the voltage drops as you use them. Devices need a pretty constant voltage to work well. So what if instead of one long spring, you use a bunch of short springs together? They will still drop in \"spring voltage\" as they're used, but the difference between a fully charged short spring and a fully empty short spring is a lot less than the difference between a charged and empty long spring, right? So, too, with batteries you can have one big battery to produce a lot of charge, but either it'll have to have too much voltage when it's full or too little when it's almost empty. Instead, use a bunch of smaller batteries together so you get the charge you need but they all stay within the same smaller range of full and empty."
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kif1ek | Why are people in family portraits and photos from the 18th / 19th century so serious? | If you take a look, most of them are not smiling. Why is that? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggqgzo0",
"ggqga0n"
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"text": [
"A few reasons: - It was a time consuming process, and it is easier to hold a serious expression perfectly still for long periods of time (any movement would ruin the picture) - It was viewed similar to having your portrait painted, so people adopted similar tone and expression. Portraits were serious, so so were photographs - It was expensive (at the time) so the average person might only get their picture taken a few times in their life. As with most rare events, people took it seriously.",
"Photography in that time was a lengthy process due to the chemistry being used. You had to stand still for minutes at a time, and grinning that whole time was both painful and socially embarrassing."
],
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kij16i | how something like "the library of babel" could even exist ? | the library of babel is a website that have every possible written book that existed and doesn't exist yet ,it have trillions and trillions of random generated books but i didn't understand how it is possible to make such a thing ? making Quadrillions and trillions of books i mean what computer that can handle doing this ? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggr4942",
"ggr4b5c"
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"text": [
"That website is actually cleverly coded. It doesn't actually have everything stored. It generates pages based on searches.",
"The computer did not generate all of them. The pages are generated on the fly using a deterministic algorithm given the chamber, wall, shelf, and volume."
],
"score": [
9,
7
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kip4g2 | What determines the range of Bluetooth devices? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggs4he6",
"ggs7kw9"
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"text": [
"The power available to each of the devices to send the signal is the principal factor. Both linked devices need to communicate in two directions, so one high powered and one low powered device are limited to the range of the least powerful. Interference from other signals in the same frequency is also a factor.",
"The link budget determines the range of all telecommunications. URL_0 There's a simple equation here that accounts for the transmitter power, antennas, loss of signal due to distance and interference. There are rules of thumb to account for signal loss at material boundaries (walls and floors) when this can't be measured."
],
"score": [
5,
3
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"text_urls": [
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"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_budget"
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| [
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kiye40 | How the heck do school computers take forever to start up and my one is instant? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggtizhw",
"ggtjuih",
"ggtj9e1",
"ggtk74w",
"ggtn13w"
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"text": [
"Schools have to buy lots of computers without much money, so they buy cheap computers. Cheap computers are slow. No one on Reddit can tell you anything specific about your particular computer without seeing it.",
"Your computer is probably using an SSD for storage. SSDs are really fast which allows the CPU to quickly get the data it needs to start up. Your school computers are either really cheap, really old, or more likely both. They probably are using hard drives which have a physical spinning disk and a reading arm (basically a very high tech record player). These things are sloooooow compared to SSDs. You have to wait for the arm to move into the right position and for the disk to spin into the right orientation before you can actually get the data you need.",
"Schools usually operate on shoestring budgets. Many of them furnish their computer labs with refurbished machines either donated to them or purchased at government surplus auctions, meaning when they get them, they're already four or five years old. Add in all the management software and other bloatware admin needs to put on them to stop the kiddies from doing bad things, and you've got a recipe for a bad time.",
"In addition to being low quality, they also have to load and transfer every file that every student who logs on has in their folders. I worked for IT at my college and we had to frequently wipe and reload all the data because all the info caches got so bogged down.",
"SSD v. HHD - you likely boot from an SSD, which is much faster than booting from an HDD. Security software/network software - you just boot and go, the school computer likely has to load and connect to network and security systems and load software you likely don't. Budget - the school systems are likely sourced for cost, not speed (especially not boot speed)."
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kizakd | If cinematic trailers for games look so good why are full-length animated movies with similar quality not so common? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggtqp9x"
],
"text": [
"In a sense, they kind of already do; Superhero movies, for instance, are often entirely CGI save for the actors and maybe a few set pieces and props. Everything else is 'animated'. As for why they don't use that to create people, well; why spend months overworking your animators to produce a photorealistic Henry Cavill when you can just hire Henry Cavill?"
],
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9
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|
kizfyk | How does the speed at which I press a key in a digital piano changes the sound volume? | In regular pianos I think that there is a hammer that strikes the strings, but how does it work in a digital keyboard? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggtrp6i",
"gguo8t0"
],
"text": [
"There are pressure sensitive switches under or behind the keys. The feedback from these switches tells the processor to play back the piano sound at a quieter volume. Most will actually play back a different recording, as the timbre of a gently pressed key is slightly different.",
"This is called a velocity-sensitive keyboard. This is implemented by having two switches per key, positioned so that one of them closes a bit later than the other during the travel of the key. You can see some pictures of such a system on [this page]( URL_0 ). When you hit the key harder, it moves faster, and the delay between the two switches closing is reduced. The CPU then uses that information about key travel speed to alter the sound being played."
],
"score": [
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
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"http://www.openmusiclabs.com/learning/digital/input-matrix-scanning/keyboard/index.html"
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| [
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|
kj3aw9 | why is signal strength displayed as negative decibels, for example "- 50 dB"? | I see such measurement everywhere - cellphone antenass, router strength, etc. Shouldn't signal strength be displayed as a positive number? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggudz56"
],
"text": [
"* Decibels are a relative measurement. * They need some sort of reference. * When you are talking about broadcast signals, you use the full strength broadcast level as the reference. * Naturally any broadcast signal will lose some strength on its way to the receiver. * So when we measure that level at the receiver, it will naturally be less than the full-strength reference, so the measurement is negative."
],
"score": [
12
],
"text_urls": [
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| [
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|
kj7h5e | Those Tesla Charging stations... are they free? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggv4d1w",
"ggv4hmn"
],
"text": [
"Some are free, some you pay for. I believe most electric vehicles have options for charging from a regular 120v 20A outlet if needed, just takes longer to charge.",
"Supercharging has been included with some Teslas as a perk. For those that it wasn’t you would pay to charge. You can also charge non Tesla there for a charge as well."
],
"score": [
4,
4
],
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| [
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kj96pp | When you delete an app on your phone to free up space for any task why do you sometimes not have enough space to perform that task or redownload the app you just deleted? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggvhgyv"
],
"text": [
"When you delete something on your phone it doesn’t actually empty all the space right away, just makes it stop showing up, and the empty storage might also be scattered around a bit. Restarting your phone should sort everything out"
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
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| [
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|
|
kjauuv | why electronic devices slow down with time | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggvp1ox"
],
"text": [
"1. As computer hardware gets faster, software tends to adapt to use this better hardware. Old hardware gets left behind and newer software isn't well optimized for use on older hardware. 2. Hardware deterioration from heat cycles. Computers can heat and cool down many times over it's lifespan. This is one of the biggest factors in the computer not performing as it did when brand new. A combination of these two can make old computers feel sluggish."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
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| [
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|
|
kjch7k | how come if you record a high quality video and take a frame out of it to use as photo it becomes low quality? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggvx5o7"
],
"text": [
"Because when you watch it with the other photos closely next to eachother it blends in with the other photos but a single picture is in movement and looks blurry."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
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| [
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|
|
kjkv7i | how does a CPU work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggx9bar",
"ggx8w9d"
],
"text": [
"CPUs can be sort of likened to digital and ridiculously tiny versions of relay logic. Inside is pretty much millions and millions of switches, and everything a computer does is boiled down to mathematics that can be run through these switches, using binary (0s and 1s, off and on). For example, let's add 1 + 2. 1 for the computer might be represented as 0001 (this is knocking off tons of 0s at the beginning to simplify it) and 2 is represented as 0010. Mash those two together and you get 0011, which is representative of 3. But what about 2 + 2? 0010 + 0010? It would come out as 0100, but why? Perhaps it's easier to write it out like a math problem we've done thousands of in school. 0010 + 0010 But since we're using binary instead of base 10 like in normal math, by reaching 2 in that third column there it reverts to 0 and carries a 1 to the next column to the left. Sort of like how in 25 + 15 The two 5s would equal 10, so the 0 goes at the bottom in the answer part and 1 gets carried over to the other column and makes that column add up to 4, so the answer we get is 40. And CPUs can do the math, really really REAAALLLLY fast.",
"The book Code does a really nice job of building up from the absolute basics (a switch) to a full CPU. [Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software: Petzold, Charles: 4708364241393: URL_0 : Books]( URL_1 ) But, like /u/berael said, a CPU has only a few basic functions: basic math (all you really need is \"add\"), get a value out of memory, put a value in memory, compare two values for which one is bigger. The program tells the CPU what order to do these basic operations and, if you do enough of them \\*really\\* fast, you get Myst or Firefox or iTunes."
],
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"Amazon.com",
"https://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Software/dp/0735611319"
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| [
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|
|
kjln06 | people and/or companies that "sell people's data", what does that mean exactly? like what exactly are they selling, and who's buying it and what do they do with it after purchase? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggxd665"
],
"text": [
"Your data includes: products you’ve looked at or bought online. Websites you’ve visited. Where you live, work, eat. Physical stores you’ve visited. How much you make. Who you pay your mortgage to. Who you are related to and your friend groups. What type of car you drive. What kind of pizza you want, the route you take to work. Companies that want to sell you stuff want this data. By knowing more about you they can craft messages more likely to induce you to buy their products. Political campaigns want this data to know how to market their candidate to you. Employers want it to know how likely you are to be a good employee. Insurance companies want to know if you are engaged in risky behavior. .. and certain governments, like China, want to know if you are going to be a problem."
],
"score": [
8
],
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| [
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|
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kjqbo1 | the return function in programming | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggy7iwp",
"ggy7f1i"
],
"text": [
"Say you tell someone to go take a look in the fridge. If that was a function, its return would be them telling you what's inside the fridge after looking. If the function had no return, they'd still go look in the fridge, but wouldn't tell you anything. Not every function has to have a return. If your instruction was \"go put this pickle jar in the fridge\" instead, you wouldn't *need* them to come back and tell you anything.",
"In programming functions typically take an input, do something using the input, then output a result. You use the return keyword to output the result. The return keyword also, no matter where you put it, stops the execution of the function and allows the execution of the program to exit the function. So you can put it in the middle of the function and the execution of that function will cease and return to wherever the function was called. It looks like this is how it functions in Lua and is the same in most programming languages. Edit: And it's not a function, it's a keyword in the grammar of the programming language."
],
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12,
4
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|
|
kjr2nd | how do advertisements(pictures and video) have the power to load and play at almost any internet or wifi speed but the actual picture or video you want to see buffers to the point where I lose interest in the whole thing and skip it | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggydcxq"
],
"text": [
"The image you want is located on the site's server, as you'd expect. Advertisements, on the other hand, are loaded from third-party servers, usually a network of them spread over a wide area. Knowing that their ads will load independently of the stuff you're actually looking for, advertisers put a lot of effort into making their ads load as fast as possible so you can see them as soon/long as possible. As such, they'll send you an ad from whatever server of theirs is physically closest and they'll pay for higher bandwidth from their ISP, usually fast enough to outperform a small websites own servers."
],
"score": [
8
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| [
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|
|
kjrf53 | How do hydrogen fuel cells work? | I recently saw Canadian Pacific Railway is building a prototype hydrogen fuel cell powered locomotive. I understand how electrolysis separates oxygen from hydrogen molecules, but how do actual fuel cells work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggydj55"
],
"text": [
"Basically, it burns hydrogen and oxygen (which creates water), but it does so through a special membrane that will allow hydrogen's nucleus (a single proton and maybe some neutrons) to pass through, but not the hydrogen's electron. This creates a charge imbalance, which is released through a connected wire, creating a current. That current is captured and used as power."
],
"score": [
7
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| [
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|
kjs82x | How did they do transparent Marley in the Christmas Carol from 1938¿ | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggyiyde",
"ggyiyzm",
"ggz7r6n"
],
"text": [
"There’s a theater truck called “Pepper’s Ghost” that is used to create transparent phantoms in a live stage environment. It’s currently rather famously used in Disney’s Haunted Mansion ride. What you do is have the stage area and then angle a sheet of transparent glass between the stage and the audience. Then you have a second staging area beneath the audience out of sight. You have the person or object that you want to appear transparent on the stage in this second area and light them up very brightly. The reflection of the phantom will be visible in the otherwise invisible glass in front of the stage, and if you like the angles up properly, the reflection will appear to be standing on the stage in front of the audience: a live transparent ghost.",
"I think they use a piece of glass at a certain angle to create the effect. That’s how the do it in The Haunted Mansion at Disney World.",
"I had a very clear look at Marley's ghost footage in the 1938 trailer: it is without a doubt a double exposure. I familiar with using Peppers ghost having used this in haunted houses and in live theater and opera.. and this is NOT what was used. I can tell because of the movement (frame jumps from minor camera movement are different from the foreground vs background)"
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kjslu3 | Why does the power come back on for a few seconds after the power goes out? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggymmlw",
"ggyw4co"
],
"text": [
"There are automated breakers on power lines that will retry a couple times If a tree branch falls and briefly bridges the power lines then the breaker will trip removing power, but then a couple seconds later it'll try again and let power back through, if it doesn't trip again then you just see power blink and return. If there's a sustained fault you may see power blink 3 times and then stay off By quickly turning off and automatically retrying the power grid can make it through minor faults without getting damaged (the breaker protects it) and without needing someone to come out and flip the breaker if the fault quickly clears",
"The thing with high voltage power lines is that they have a tendency to go out for faults that were there, but are gone again just a few seconds later. Regulations differ in different places, but the general idea is that the power line must be without power really fast when a fault occurs. 100 milliseconds kind of fast. And that is difficult, because the breaker itself needs 50-75 of those milliseconds just to physically move; the monitoring electronics need to act before they have enough data to have the full picture of what type of fault they are reacting to. A really flimsy tree branch seldom stays on the power line. The blast when it hits the line is often enough to toss it off the power line again. But it's also enough for the controlling electronics to be able to tell that there was something short circuiting the line, and the breaker gets ordered to remove power. In that case, it makes perfect sense to just wait a bit, and try to reinstate the line. And that's exactly what happens. A few seconds later, the central computer at the network operations centre orders the breaker to close again to reinstate the line. If it fails then, well, then you obviously have a real fault. Where I live, regulations allow automatic reinstatement within 30 seconds and manual remote reinstatement within 120 seconds. After two reinstatements (one automatic and one ordered by the operator) and 120 seconds, and the line is still not up, regulations demand manual inspection; the line may not be reinstated until staff is at location and looks for a fault. Why? Well. Theoretically, there could be a car stuck in a fallen power line. Whoever is in that car would certainly not want the power to come back on again and again and again. Or, that tree could have been a thick one that does not fall off again when the line is reinstated. If you then repeatedly try to reinstate the line, you'll eventually make the tree catch fire. And that...that is also not a desired outcome. Most of the outages on high voltage lines in the lower part of the voltage span are because of trees. You have to take into account that what you are looking for is pretty likely to be something that will cause a wildfire if you do dumb things."
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kjvzne | How are games ported to other platforms, e.g. PC to PS5? | Also as a game developer who wants to make a game available on all platforms, what platform do they usually start with or is there a "master version" that is then adapted to each platform? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ggz7fpu",
"ggzhikv",
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"text": [
"# What's A Platform? A \"platform\" can be roughly defined by a combination of hardware and software. The hardware (e.g., CPU, GPU, chipset(s), ...) mostly defines the performance as well as what computing features are available (you may have heard of hardware assisted ray tracing, it's the new shit). The software (OS, DirectX, OpenGL, Vulkan, other Frameworks) provides the primitives to *access* these features. So, in order for your code to run on \"all platforms\" it must be runnable on all the given hardware and also support all the various different ways the platform's softwares work with said hardware. # Hardware Platforms **Hardware-wise**, the current Sony and Microsoft consoles are quite close to a regular PC you could buy. Specifically, they use a (slightly customized) x86 CPU defining the ISA, the set of instructions the CPU can execute. This means, from a pure CPU perspective all programs running on a current PS/XBox run on your average PC. In fact, the PS/XBox are so similar to a PC that quite some have taken up to install Linux as an OS on them. Android phones *mostly* use ARM CPUs and also work a bit differently inside, more akin to a console than a PC. # Software Platforms **The Software**, however, is quite different on all these platforms. While most PCs run Windows, with Linux trailing (and Apple currently taking a completely different route), the XBox runs a modified version of Windows and the PlayStation runs a modified version of FreeBSD. While on Windows, the dominating graphics framework was/is DirectX, on Linux and BSD as well as macOS this was/is OpenGL^(1). Vulkan was created as an alternative to both, supporting all^TM platforms^(2). So while there is some convergence, even accessing a file works drastically different in Windows compared to *almost* any other platform out there^(3). Luckily, you don't need to directly access the OS as many people have built another layer of abstraction which gives you a simple interface to, e.g., open a file, and translates that into the diverse OS specific ways to do precisely that. Pretty much any modern engine gives you such a layer, enabling comparatively easy cross-platform development. # Issues with Porting So, what's the **issue with porting**, if the engines do all the heavy lifting and even out the differences between the platforms? Well, there are bugs and design faults in all of these layers. We have a \"technology stack\" reaching from CPU+GPU+Chipset, to OS, to OS Frameworks, to the Engine. A bug at the lowest layer can send all the above tripping. And the Engine, hopefully, accounts for all that, knows that in Windows 10 Build xyz the function `FooBarW()` cannot be called andsoforth. So, in order to ensure compatibility, nowadays one of the most important things after choosing the right engine is to *test*, i.e., Quality Assurance. The best but also **most expensive** way is to test on all platforms, continuously, while developing the game. This includes game testers. That way, you are likely to find every bug, but also quite many double or thrice as they occur on all platforms -- this will lead to many internal bug reports someone has to deal and categorize. The **cheap** way is to develop on one platform, often either Windows PC, XBox or PlayStation first and, when it's (almost) done, trying to get the game run on the other platforms. This will reduce the number of bugs found as the tests on the other platforms aren't as thorough, but you will also have less duplicate bug reports and need less testing time (hopefully). However, if you are unlucky, the fine print of your engine says that feature X that you direly depend on is only supported on platform Y -- and you notice that a few weeks before release. Often enough, companies go route 2, but some at least have \"that one developer\" who constantly builds and runs the game on the other target platforms, ironing out the gravest problems. # Other Platforms What about **other platforms**? You mentioned you want to cover them \"all\". Bear in mind that this is a rather big list: * Android (ARM + x86) * iOS, iPadOS (ARM) * Windows + XBox (x86) * macOS (x86 + ARM) * Linux (x86 + ARM, supports a bunch more) * many BSDs (same as above) * PlayStation (x86) * Browsers (WebAssembly, JS) * Stadia (basically as Linux) * Nintendo Switch (ARM) So you should make yourself clear what *kind* of game it is, what *controls* does it require? Is controller play actually sane? Is the performance of the Switch feasible? Then you should decide on the platforms. # Build Portably Finally, I want to encourage you to **build on different platforms**, even *if* you don't really look at, say, Linux sales. While porting seems daunting, having a portable program doesn't only have business benefits. Usually, when testing on not just one stack, you uncover bugs in your code that *might* bight you on your other platform as well but just haven't occurred yet. Say, you have a bug which triggers under so specific circumstances, you could call it \"randomly\". However, the probability is greatly higher, for some reason, on platform Y than on X. So now, having run/tested your code on Y, you uncover that bug and are able to fix it comparatively easily while on X you'd have a hard time even reproducing the bug. Good code is portable code! ------ ^1 While OGL had it's pitfalls, it was *fine*, however MS crippled the OGL implementation on Windows making it rather slow there... . ^2 Vulkan started out as AMD Mantle. DX12 and Metal are pretty much just MS/Apple branded versions of Vulkan. ^3 macOS as well as BSD and Linux (mostly) implement an industry standard for **Portable** Operating System Interfaces, POSIX. This makes it quite easy to program, s.t. your code can be trivially built and run on \"all\" platforms. Windows XP even implemented some parts of it due to US Govt. demanding POSIX as they didn't want to depend on one vendor.",
"Imagine you are baking your grandma’s favorite cake recipe (the software program). You live in America and have measuring cups, half cups, tablespoons, and teaspoons to work with (computer hardware). But her recipe is in metric and calls for measurements of 100 ml and 250 grams etc. Also baking in C not F. The basics are the same but the specifics are different. How you get to a delicious baked cake is porting.",
"Imagine if you will you held a book written in England English, and its written incredibly well and the speakers fully understand it, even if it has typos and speaks a little too literal for their culture. We will call this the PS5 port. Now take it and stick it in front of an american. This will be the XBox port. The american looks at it and understands almost all of it, but since it wasn't fully designed for american english they get confused and things don't have as much meaning in other places. Theoretically, both could read it. But it's not 100% the same book if one is American English or English. Though the exception is the language in general, or the base copy. English does not change regardless of where you go, its spoken language and growth of new words and lingo is. The new words are new hardware and the lingo is drivers. Region after region it changes. If you make a video game dedicated to one console, you technically can reuse the book perfectly fine in other consoles, but it will require some rewrites and fixes for specific consoles. Another example would be using a mouse and keyboard in a playstation. Its not impossible, but with some work you can create something to make a similar effect to what you want."
],
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4
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kk2ei4 | How does game optimization for different platforms work? like what do they change to make things run more smoothly on console or pc? | I'm not really sure how things are being done differently on other consoles. It would seem that just generally downgrading the graphics would do that but that feels like a dumb solution. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gh02ufu"
],
"text": [
"Different hardware does the same thing, but I'm a different manner. In simple terms let's say you're trying to get to the number 9. You have a Funbox that does 4 and 5, and a Gamestation that multiplies 3 and 3. Let's say you build a game so that it prefers to use 3*3. Every time it needs that 9 it has to take the extra step of checking for 3*3, it saying \"nah,\" then using 4+5. An optimized game would know which console e game is running on so it doesn't waste time doing this step, and just to the calculation. That's lots of little differences between hardware which has different advantages and disadvantages. A well optimized program has to be able to utilize these small differences to squeeze out maximum performance."
],
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5
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kk2vdu | How do plugged in electronics take only as much power as they need? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gh03vxy"
],
"text": [
"Think of mains power like the water in a tap. The water can only flow if there is a path for it to flow. Opening, closing, or limiting the path, the device controls how much current flows."
],
"score": [
19
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kk428p | why do phone automated systems and hold music STILL have extremely bad sound quality? | I would assume with today’s technology companies could make these sound crystal clear and not like someone was hired to record these with a tin can and a piece of string | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gh0ho74",
"gh0bpyy"
],
"text": [
"I know you've been answered - but a picture is worth a thousand words - here's a Tom Scott video about it - URL_0",
"Call quality in general might be considered \"bad,\" but it's just an effect of the system it's built upon. We don't *need* to have crystal-clear fidelity or 7.1.2 Dolby to use the phone for its intended purpose which is to speak and be understood. Phone companies know this. So even with 5G sporting crazy fast data speeds, the data rate of a standard phone call is very low. This is a benefit to the user who uses less battery, and to the phone company who can support many more concurrent phone calls under the fixed bandwidth of their towers. And since phone call quality isn't something to write home about, why bother having hold music that *is* superior fidelity? It'll just be degraded by the POTS anyway."
],
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"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2A8q3XIhu0"
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kk4r29 | Why are some old sound effects used so much? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gh0en2e"
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"text": [
"Mostly because they are free. Think of them like stock photos but for sounds. Its easier and cheaper to use public domain sound effects than record new ones."
],
"score": [
4
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kk9i84 | Why are downloads always sooo much slower than your supposed download speed? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gh19p6a",
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"gh18d11",
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"text": [
"Lots of people are glancing over the real reason . Remember that your download speed is measured in megabits per second. Not to be confused with megabytes. If you speed test your connection at 100 megabits per second that works out to receiving a little over 12 megabytes per second. So that 120 megabyte file should in theory take you 10 seconds, where many people assume it'll be under 1 second.",
"Tl;dr ISP companies advertise in MegaBITS, and every device we as consumers use measures in megaBYTES. A rough estimate of what they’re actually advertising can be found by dividing that speed by 8 (correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s always been accurate for me)",
"The server the data is coming from may be being shared, under maintenance, or just old and slow You can only download as fast as the orgin can read and send that data. HDD’s are slow compared to SSD’s and often times old data or mass data is stored on HDD’s You can also only download as fast as your computer can take the data and “unload” it. If you’re trying to write 30gb to a sd card that can only right at 5mb/s it’s gonna take a while",
"Because ISPs lie about speed and also because the target website (wherever you're downloading from) probably also has bandwidth limitations. Not to mention limitations within your own network. Let's imagine: You have a hose. Your hose is physically capable of a certain maximum water flow, but you have pipes in your house that have different flow capabilities, your water provider also had pipes and flow speeds throughout the system, there are other water users drawing on the system and your water tower or pumping station may only be capable of certain pressured or flows. So the maximum download speed is the maximum under ideal circumstances and it's possible, but most of the time circumstances are not ideal."
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kk9rol | Why is it that products made 50+ years ago seem to be so much better than their modern day counterparts? (i.e. Fans, shaving razors, knives etc.) | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"gh19mqq",
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"I don’t think they necessarily are. It’s just the ones that have lasted to the modern day are the ones you probably handle. All the low quality stuff broke decades ago and only the high quality stuff is left. This is an example of survivorship bias. Since your experience only contains products that have been durable to survive into modern day, it seems to you that these products from back then are better.",
"In addition to the other good answers here, there has also been a shift in consumer priorities toward low-cost products and a corresponding shift by manufacturers toward lowering the costs of those products. As a result, many modern products are not built as durable as they were in the past, since the modern consumer isn't concerned with long term use/repairability, and is more focused on getting the product for the lowest cost, and replacing it when it breaks. You can see this most apparently in consumer electronics. It once wasn't unusual for electronics like stereos to come with wiring diagrams and parts lists to aid the owner in repairs. Nowadays, electronics are seldom engineered to be consumer-serviceable, instead theu're meant to be discarded and replaced when they break.",
"Simple answer is that no one keeps junk versions of things for 50+ years so if you see a fifty year old fan it's because it was so good someone kept it that long.",
"Despite the well meaning answers from others, the bottom line is something called 'planned obsolescence'. If you look at older products you will find they are built with stronger materials. Today's products are light plastic as much as possible. Moving parts used to be long wearing metal. Now they are nylon and plastic. Also the more something tries to do the more points of failure it has. A computerized refrigerator with video in the door has many more parts to fail than an old fridge with a light bulb and a compressor. More possible failure points means less reliability.",
"Survivor's Bias. The only old stuff that's still around is the stuff that was reliable. The unreliable old junk was thrown away fifty years ago and nobody really remembers that stuff.",
"First, crummy products don't make it for 50 years so there is a bit of sorting going on. But another big issue is that people of that time had to mostly guess at how much material was required to make a product sturdy enough for use, so they tended to overbuild things. This made them much more durable at the price of weight and... price. These days designers can calculate how much material they need and build exactly as much as needed. This means they can't take abuse above normal use and wear out, but are much less expensive.",
"At least some of the stuff was probably hand made and as such prohibitively expensive which in turn lead people to care and repair, rather than replace it. Whereas most things nowadays are treated with a lot less care and are simply replaced when broken.",
"I can't remember his name but a man in the50s or 60s I think did some math that if companies sold to the same person more often and they'd make more money;(revolutionary I know) and sold his idea to some companie but the thing they bought had to be worse than the new one or the old on had to be broken. So planned obsolescence came around when you know in a year or two you put today's technology in to a slightly different productthats why next year's Iphone or ford focus will be almost the exact same but with just on more bell or whistle Also 50 years is a long time for a cheap thing to last they all ended up in landfills probably leaving only the nice stuff"
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kkb3ai | Why do so many websites like Google, Microsoft, etc. separate the email and password screens? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Also worth noting that for microsoft in particular, for the office web apps and email, having a split login screen also allows the user to be redirected to the appropriate login page if they are logging in with an organization's email address. (If you type in a college email address to access office online, the login will be handled by your school's single login system)",
"It makes it more difficult to break in. A program trying to brute force their way in will have to go through the multi page login which slows them down a lot."
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