q_id
stringlengths 6
6
| title
stringlengths 4
294
| selftext
stringlengths 0
2.48k
| category
stringclasses 1
value | subreddit
stringclasses 1
value | answers
dict | title_urls
listlengths 1
1
| selftext_urls
listlengths 1
1
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
ftrmm7
|
Why does the plague doctors wore mask of a Crow
|
Why does the plague doctors portrayed in any movie or photos wore mask with beaks like a Crow?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fm8oa5x",
"fm8pfzs",
"fm8mnv5",
"fm8olz2"
],
"text": [
"At the time, the germ theory of disease had yet to be established. The prevailing thinking was the miasma theory of disease, which held that disease was caused by bad air and especially bad smells. Plague doctor masks were sort of like primitive gas masks. The \"beak\" was filled with aromatics like herbs and dried flowers to stop the \"miasma\" from infiltrating. The distinctive costume also openly indicated their profession, which may have been required by law in some cities.",
"There were two theories on how diseases worked in the middle ages. The first was that disease was caused by evil spirits/demons. Ravens will scavenge dead bodies and if you have a lot of dead bodies in an area you will get a lot of ravens eating those bodies. You would also get a lot of rats and bugs - but rats and bugs were considered to be \"evil\" animals who remained unaffected by disease due to their affiliation with the evil spirits/demons. Ravens were considered to be clean, \"good\" animals who *should* have been affected by disease if the evil spirit/demon theory was correct. The fact that ravens were able to eat plague bodies without being affected by plague led people to therefore conclude that something about ravens frightened the evil spirits/demons away. The raven mask was an attempt to make the plague doctor look like a raven and therefore trick the evil spirits/demons - similar to how a scarecrow works. The second disease theory was that diseases were caused by bad smells. That is, when you smelled something bad what you were smelling was the disease itself. This might sound kind of dumb but its very similar to them thinking that the disease was something like chlorine gas - chlorine has a very distinct smell and if you breath too much of it then you die. They thought diseases worked the same way. The theory they had on this was that whatever was causing the bad smell could be neutralized by stuff that smelled good. So they would stuff the beaks of the masks with good smelling stuff in the belief that this would neutralize the bad smells involved with people dying, and therefore neutralize the disease itself. They didn't know which of those two theories was correct, and the plague doctor outfit that was worn at the time had the benefit of simultaneously protecting against both theorized causes of disease at the same time.",
"They used to stuff the beak parts with various herbs to help mask the smells and possibly try to ward off the sickness",
"The Plague Doctors wore masks filled with aromatic items (flowers, roses, carnations, herbs, spices...) to keep away the bad smells (\"miasma\") which were thought to be the main cause of the Plague. Doctors believed the herbs would counter the \"evil\" of the smells, thus preventing infection. Interestingly enough, while the science behind the masks (ie. miasma theory) was unfounded, it was somewhat (emphasis on somewhat.. mostly not) effective in being a physical/water barrier which stopped the spread by fluids. [Source]( URL_0 )"
],
"score": [
22,
10,
9,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[
"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_doctor_costume"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fts5ry
|
How are well known illegal TV streaming sites able to stay up?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fm8qnl6",
"fm90337",
"fm931f3"
],
"text": [
"These sites do one of two things. They operate in a jurisdiction where it would be difficult to shut them down. If they are ever actually shut down, they simply create a new site and port everything over. It's usually a game of whack-a-mole. With law enforcement trying to shut them down but the sites simply coming back up with a new domain name.",
"Many of these sites operate out of jurisdictions where it's difficult to shut down the site. They aren't hosted in US datacenters for example. They also obfuscate their ownership. Shutting down a site and holding the people involved responsible are two different things. The copyright holders prefer the later to send a message. They are also prolific and easy to spinup/move. If a particular site gets shutdown, 3 will pop up to take it's place within hours, and the authorities are well aware of this fact. Taking down a major player like the PirateBay seemed like a big win for the authorities but the site was back online within hours under new ownership and in a new location. Then the process of taking them down had to start all over again. Legal proceedings are expensive and take time, so the copyright holders can't afford to take every single one of these sites to court. Part of the problem is that it isn't profitable to do so, many of these sites have no real assets and are run as a hobby, so you ~~can~~ can't squeeze a multi-million dollar settlement out of them to cover your costs. Some of the big media companies are finally waking up to the idea that a lot of people don't pirate because it's free, they did it out of convenience. A lot of early piracy was driven by peoples realization that you could download a show and not have to tune in \"same Bat time same Bat channel\" anymore, or have to wait 2 months for that episode you wanted to show to appear in syndication. The way you defeat piracy is to provide a similar and reasonably priced service. People are perfectly willing to pay for a reasonably priced legal content on a streaming service.",
"So what's the point in hosting these? Who makes (any) money?"
],
"score": [
234,
102,
11
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ftsgti
|
what does the phrase record your web traffic mean?
|
is it recording what's being used on the wifi?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fm8waeh"
],
"text": [
"Not just wifi, but everything you do on the web. Your \"web traffic\" consists of every website you go to, every action you take, everything that your browser downloads in the background, what cookies are being set, etc, etc."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
ftu1wz
|
What exactly is being done when game servers are down for maintenance?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fm91xb2",
"fm93zik",
"fm96cjo"
],
"text": [
"maintenance. Just like your home PC needs new software installed, security update patches, upgrade to memory or hard drive, cleaning out dust on fans, etc etc",
"Typically the have a development server running in parallel. They get the new updates verified and tested on there. When they take it down, they are updating the live servers to their tested updates. This also allows them to upgrade or swap defective hardware.",
"It can be a lot of different things, all of it falling under the umbrella of general maintenance (or more verbosely: tasks that are undertaken periodically to extend the useful life of the server). Depending on the type of server, it can be anything as simple as a reboot and fresh start of software to prevent things like memory leaks from getting out of control, to full-on hard disk swaps in a RAID array to replace a broken drive. It can also be used for software patches, new hardware, a full server migration, cloud synchronization, database re-indexing, hard drive defragmentation, and probably a dozen other things that are either system specific or I've just forgotten about in the 5 years since I was in charge of any server maintenance :)"
],
"score": [
9,
6,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
ftvaj2
|
the difference between volume and gain.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fm9dpvv",
"fm9v741",
"fm9y7z9"
],
"text": [
"At the simplest level: gain goes in, volume comes out. Volume is easy. It's just how loud the sound that comes out of your speakers is. Gain is how loud the sound that goes *into* the system is, before it's processed by anything inside (like amplifiers etc.). Increasing gain can therefore increase volume, like how a loud noise simply is louder than a quiet noise at a given volume level. But they're two independent things, and you could possibly turn gain way up but keep the sound output low by turning volume down. This could be useful if, say, you have a mic and a keyboard both plugged into a speaker system. Imagine the mic is kind of broken and isn't very sensitive, and it comes out of the speaker as very quiet. If you just turn up the speaker volume, then the mic might be at a good volume, but now the keyboard is super loud. So what you could do is turn up the mic gain to increase the loudness of the sound the mic provides to the speaker without affecting the sound provided by the keyboard. Turning gain up high typically causes some distortion because you hit the limits of the system. We know that sound travels in waves; imagine a simple voltage wave that just goes 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1. Let's say we decide to apply a voltage gain of 5; this means everything get multiplied by 5, so now it's 5-10-15-20-25-20-15-10-5. But if our system has a maximum voltage of 15, nothing can go above that, so it just becomes 5-10-15-15-15-15-15-10-5. The sound is louder, yes, but we've lost some definition, and that changes how it sounds. (That's obviously a huge simplification but conceptually it's still sound [pun not intended lol].) This is generally used with guitar amps to manufacture distortion. Amps typically have a gain and a volume knob. If you turn up the volume knob only, the sound from your guitar just gets louder. If you turn up the gain knob only, the sound gets louder but also more distorted. Using both knobs lets you control how distorted your audio sounds *and* also how loud it is; you could turn up gain a little but volume a lot to get a loud sound with minimal distortion. **Actual ELI5:** take your phone, start recording (whether by taking a video or using an actual audio recording app) and speak normally into it, then play the audio back. How loud you spoke could be considered 'gain'; it's how loud the *input* is. You can control how loud the *output* is by using the buttons on your phone; that's volume. Now start recording again and scream the same thing you said earlier but at the top of your lungs. Play the audio back. Notice how it's a lot harder to make out the words you're saying? That's because your input--the gain--was so high that you hit the limitations of the system (what your phone can process), so you lost some audio definition and got some distorted audio as a result. You can make it less loud by adjusting the output volume with the buttons, but the high gain has already affected the sound quality.",
"Imagine you have a garden hose with a spray nozzle on the end. Gain is like turning the knob on the side of the house. You're changing how powerful the stream is going to be, but no water comes out. Volume is like squeezing the spray nozzle to spray water. (This isn't a perfect metaphor. I'm viewing the knob on the house as affecting pressure (voltage) and the spray nozzle like pressure and volume (wattage).)",
"Gain adjusts the strength of the signal comong into a piece of equipment, volume adjusts the strength of the actual sound that signal is turned into by the equipment."
],
"score": [
50,
7,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fu3blv
|
Why are certain CPU sizes of nanometers important and why not just go bigger to accommodate more “stuff” on them?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmak1r2",
"fmajf59"
],
"text": [
"That nm measurement is a measure of how fine the individual circuit traces are on the unit. So the smaller the measurement, the finer the 'wires', the more you can fit in a cpu. As a bonus, narrower circuitry also requires less power, lower voltages, and therefore gives of less heat.",
"The bigger the wire, the longer it takes to discharge (on/off cycles). Bigger wires = slower CPU speed. Also, bigger wires cause more heat loss on discharge and require more cooling to get the same speeds."
],
"score": [
13,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fu7971
|
Why does a PS4 have to download a game that you have the physical copy of? Shouldn’t it just play the game right off the disc?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmb20si"
],
"text": [
"It doesn't necessarily have to download anything off the Internet, but it does have to install it from the disc. Blu-ray discs are just too slow for modern games to be played from them directly. They have to be installed to the hard disk instead, which is much faster relatively speaking. When you put the disc in the first thing it does is start installing the data from the disc. In theory it doesn't have to install it all before you can start playing. It can install say the first level and then you can play that while it installs the rest in the background. However that's not really possible for many games. It might also download and install the latest update. It's common for games to have updates even on the day the game comes out. But if it's a single player game you should be able cancel that and play without the update if you want."
],
"score": [
8
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fu7c6q
|
what is the difference between 5G and 4G? While we are here, what is a "G" ?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmb2ldm",
"fmb2mkj",
"fmb34p0"
],
"text": [
"G means generation. 1G = First generation, which meant we could actually make phone calls outside of the house. 2G = second generation, which brought in text messaging, mobile internet. 3G = third generation, which brought in faster mobile internet. 4G = fourth generation, even faster internet, closer to the speeds found on landlines. 5G = fifth generation, potentially 1 gigabit mobile internet.",
"The G refers to generation. As in 5G is the fifth generation mobile network. Each new generation brings speed and feature improvements. Multiple carriers have multiple method for implementing the improvements though, so the experience can vary depending upon where you live. New generations of mobile networks also require phobe hardware that can use them.",
"5G stands for \"Fifth Generation\" of wireless communications technologies supporting cellular data networks. The name is largely just a marketing buzzword, since there's really no \"official\" designation of when one generation transitions to another. The biggest difference between 4G and 5G is that 5G uses a much higher radio frequency (28GHz band) than the older 4G standard. This allows for much greater capacity to transfer data, but comes with the cost of reduced range. 5G also utilizes other technologies that allow it to support a much larger number of phones in an area than a 4G network can. Fundamentally it's just an upgrade of the same systems we've had for almost 50 years now. As for why people are freaking out? Mostly it's just idiots. The legitimate concern is less about 5G and more about certain companies building the infrastructure that are well know bad actors (Huawei, in particular)."
],
"score": [
7,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fu7rqp
|
Why are passwords and stuff that keeps things locked prime numbers
|
How come there’s prime numbers and not un-prime numbers?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmb4vnv"
],
"text": [
"Increasingly they're not - other methods are being used. However, the basic principle is that you want a mathematical operation that is easy to perform in one direction but hard to perform in reverse. If I give you two prime numbers, multiplying them is easy. Even if I give you two 100-digit prime numbers, you can probably multiply them by hand in a minute or two. However, if I give you the result of that multiplication and ask you to factor it back into the two original 100-digit prime numbers, you could spend the rest of your life trying to solve that problem and you'd still run out of time. What that means is that I can give you that very large composite number and you can use it to mathematically manipulate the data in such a way that only someone (presumably me) who has the original prime factors can undo. Since it's so hard to factor the composite number, I don't have to worry (much) about someone reverse-engineering the original prime factors from the very large composite number."
],
"score": [
13
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fu8ug8
|
Is there a reason we couldn't flash firmware on a CPAP or APAP to function more like a ventilator?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmbc96d"
],
"text": [
"CPAPs only push air in. A ventilator needs to push air in and also pull air back our. I don't know about APAP functionality."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fu9y25
|
How do phone/console emulators work?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmbj8in"
],
"text": [
"Consoles are just like computers - they have storage (like a hard drive), memory (RAM), a processor (CPU) and some other parts. An emulator is a program which creates a virtual version of the console's hardware, including the console processor's instruction set (the language of the processor). Because the emulated processor can \"speak the language\" of the original console's processor, it can run the console's operating system (equivalent to Windows/iOS/Android etc). When you combine the virtual hardware and the operating system, the resulting emulator can run the games that were coded for the original console. As for phone emulators - if you mean smartphones in particular, I think they use something called a virtual machine, which is slightly different - it doesn't exactly emulate the hardware but it does run the mobile operating system."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fuljvt
|
How GitHub works
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmdgfnn"
],
"text": [
"First, what Git is because obviously Github depends on it. Git is software revision control. This means that not only does it store each released version of a piece of software in a timeline, it includes the many *many* incremental updates applied. If your program is translated into multiple languages and someone added a new language, that's an update. If someone fixed a spelling error in one of the translations, that's an update. If someone added a feature, that might be 1 or 100 updates depending on how complex the update was. The extensive edit history allows bugs to be tracked down very effectively. If a user said a bug was introduced between versions X and Y, a developer can ask Git to select a point in time between them, see if the bug exists, and use the higher/lower method of finding the bug in a very specific, very small update which should help identifying and fixing it. So github is a web site for programmers and their users to collaborate on their projects maintained using Git for their edit history. The Git repositories are open and visible with a web browsers, users can comment on pieces of code, offer their own updates to the developers by web browser, maintain a bug list, and a whole bunch more. It's actually quite convenient. Within reason a project could run entirely on github, including a wiki as a sort of web site with information and documentation, and Github will let users download the official released versions of the software as well."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fuofvf
|
How do self healing plastics work?
|
Some test tubes in labs have the ability to be poked by needles yet the needle hole closes again. There are also membranes that are able to do that. How does that work and how „pokeable“ are these surfaces? Can one just poke them 10 (20, 100) times all over the place and they still „heal“?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fme3ezu",
"fme5zvb"
],
"text": [
"So most if not all engineered materials like plastics are made from polymers. Which are long twisted strands of molecules. When those materials are punctured or broken the bonds between the molecules themselves are broken. In most cases those bonds can't be repaired simply because of the type of polymer. These new self healing plastics are made of polymers that when put in the right conditions will re form the bonds that were broken.",
"Self healing plastic often includes tiny bits of adhesive mixed into the plastic. Imagine microscope little droplets of super-glue sealed up in bubbles inside the plastic. The glue leaks out when the plastic is damaged, then immediately hardens to repair the damage. I really don't know if that's the tech in these self-healing test tubes you refer to--could be something else! (I don't see much in a quick Google search) Edit: I found a nice ELI5 article: URL_0"
],
"score": [
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://www.popsci.com/this-plastic-can-repair-itself/"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fupvfr
|
How would the EARN IT act negatively affect end to end encryption?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fme4q3r"
],
"text": [
"Hopefully a simple example: No matter how good a safe you install to store your valuables, the government wants the safe manufacturer to make a door at the back with a key available to the government. This is just in case, the government feels that you might be storing something illegal in the safe. This means the safety provided by the safe is only as strong as the \"back door\". The problem is similar for encryption. Any time (for software) you try to make a \"back door\" available, it becomes the vulnerable point for hackers. And what is worse, if the method for breaking the \"back door\" is found, ALL messages are potentially vulnerable. This is like the government asking for a \"skeleton key\" for all the safes - if anyone steals or copies the key, then every safe built is now vulnerable to the thief."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fut61j
|
In electronic devices, how can electrons carry information? In this context, what is information exactly?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmepic2",
"fmeioq8",
"fmeqswk"
],
"text": [
"Think of at as an abacus. The beads in an abacus represent numbers. In a microchip, clusters of electrons are the beads. The abacus is binary, so each bead is a “1” and an empty space where a bead isn’t is a “0.” The pathways in this abacus are microscopic and incredibly complex, allowing it to process any kind of information that can be expressed in binary. Billions of times per second, 64 beads at a time are combined or moved to process data.",
"Hmm.... maybe my best explanation is that modern computing uses binary to store and transmit information. Binary is nothing more than a light switch. Either it is on or off. When create a pattern with these digits of basically on or off it is data.",
"Suppose I want to communicate with you, my neighbor, but all we have between our houses are two garden hoses. One connected to a faucet in my yard, going to your yard, and the other connected to a faucet in your yard, coming to mine. We agree to use Morse code (water is \"dash\", no water is \"dot\", one for either every 10 seconds), and we send information by opening and closing our faucets. We then decipher the messages by looking at the water flow at the tip of the hoses. Now replace our water supply with two batteries, one in each house. Replace the hoses with wires (we can have either 2 wires each, or a common wire connected to the \"-\" of both batteries, and one wire which connected to each \"+\" of each battery). Replace the faucet with an electrical switch. Now as we cannot \"see\" electricity, we each connect a lamp at the other end of the wires. We can still use Morse code to exchange information, right? Who is carrying the information? Electrons through the wires. When we open/close the switch, we are opening/closing an \"electron faucet\". The Voltage in the batteries is the water pressure trying to push electrons through the wire. The Charge of the batteries is the amount of water (electrons) the battery can push before it is empty. The resistance of the wire and lamp is how hard it is for electrons to move (think thickness of the hoses). The current through the wires and lamp is the flow of water (electrons). The faster they move, the higher the current. The higher the pressure, the higher the current. The higher the resistance, the lower the current. That's why Current = Voltage / Resistance. Now suppose we go back to our hoses, and we want to be able to store our messages for deciphering later. We can get a bunch of buckets in a line, and move the tip of the hoses along them, so the water/no water flow will result in a sequence of buckets with/without water. Easy heh? So when a device wants to store a \"word\" made of a sequence of current/no current, it can also use \"buckets\"; which can be in practical terms (but not necessarily the actual electronic component) Capacitors. Capacitors are buckets of charge (electrons). Now suppose I want you to send back a message I sent you and you stored in buckets, or you want to relay that message to your next neighbor. Can you imagine how? You can sequentiality empty your buckets on a funnel connected to a hose, and I'll get the exact sentence back, with water/no water flows right? If you don't want to spend the buckets water and end up deleting our message, you can instead just stick your finger in the buckets and open/close your \"send\" faucet depending on your finger coming out dry or wet - this spending a minimum amount of water. Easy? In devices, those buckets are the memory, full of tiny Capacitors (the actual tech is more complex, but at the end of the day most are \"charge buckets\" anyway). You can store data by filling/emptying them with electrons, and read back by measuring the voltage on them (the fuller they are, the higher the \"pressure\", and the Voltage in a capacitor is Charge / Capacitance; Capacitance measures the diameter of the bucket, Charge is the number of electrons). Measuring the voltage in a capacitor is like sticking your finger in the bucket to feel how much electrons are there. Inside a device the hoses are pretty short. In a computer processor you basically have a multitude of buckets, hoses, and automatic fauces that open/close depending of the pressure they measure on a third hose (imagine a water valve with 3 connections; one controls the open/close, the other is the input, the other is the output - that's a Transistor, and you have millions inside a processor). Just for the kicks, let's make a water gate (two inputs, one power supply, one output) that only lets water out if both inputs are \"on\". We get two of those automatic faucets, and piggyback them (output of first goes to the input of the second). Now we connect the first input to the power supply (water mains). Can you see that we'll only have water at the second faucet output if we apply pressure on both faucets \"command\" input? Both have to open for water to flow, right? So we just made an AND gate. Output = Input1 AND Input2. That's how logical gates are implemented in processors and other logic circuits. There are NOT, OR, NOT-AND, NOT-OR, EXCLUSIVE-OR, etc. Add up and connect millions of them, and you have your processor, with information flowing around carried by electrons. As a side note, electrons move VERY slowly through a wire, specially with nanoscopic currents involved in carrying data in an electronic circuit. The speed is in the range of millimeters per second. How the processor can work so fast then? Well, to send you a message through the hose, I don't need the water that comes out my faucet to travel all the way to your house; I just need it to push a bit of water that is already inside the hose, to drop out on your side, right? So although the flow of electrons is slow, when we open a gate on one side of the wire, the electrons at the other tip of the wire immediately (as in billions of km per second) push forward, creating a change in voltage there."
],
"score": [
7,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
futluy
|
Why is zoom so popular nowadays? i never heard about this company before
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmepm1f"
],
"text": [
"For business type interactions, it has it all for free, up until you need the meeting rooms for a longer period of time, or for more than a certain number of people. We use it for education conferences, and meet in a virtual \"room\" with 50 plus people, then break into multiple smaller \"rooms,\" then meet back in the big \"room.\" I can share anything on my screen (like a presentation), there can be separate text chats going on, and basically most anything you need to do as a group can be done intuitively with zoom (except group hugs and you don't need to wear pants if that's your thing). AFAIK Facebook and Skype, etc don't have the ability to integrate large groups relatively seamlessly."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fv84jz
|
Why do games go crazy when alt-tabbing?
|
When I minimize or switch to a different tab, it just freezes and turns to black before I see my desktop. When I switch tab back to my game, sometimes it goes back flawlessly (especially when windowed). Sometimes, it takes a full minute before I can see my game again.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmh90eg"
],
"text": [
"You have your in-game settings configured for Full Screen, which means your video card is only rendering the game and is no longer rendering anything on your desktop for that screen. When you alt-tab in full screen mode, the video card has to drop rendering for the game and switch to rendering the desktop again, which is why everything goes to black and depending on poor/lazy code in the game, can cause a crash or take an extended period of time. This is why Borderless Windowed mode exists, the video card continues rendering the desktop behind the game, so alt-tabbing is very seamless while still providing a full-screen look."
],
"score": [
10
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fvc1rp
|
How does GeForce NOW or other game streaming services downloads and installs even huge games in a few seconds?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmhl96w",
"fmhvkjb"
],
"text": [
"The answer is in your title. They're not downloaded and installed on your local machine, you're streaming the game from their machines.",
"They don't. The game is actually running on a remote server in a data centre somewhere, and a compressed video stream is then sent through the internet for you to watch. It's no different than watching any other live stream on say YouTube or Twitch. All your device at home has to do is send input commands to the server, and decode the video it sends back. Of course this method does have its drawbacks. Namely something called lag. That is, the time delay between you pressing a button on your controller and you seeing that action happen on screen. With consoles and PCs, it happens so fast that it may as well be instantaneous. But with streaming, that's highly dependent on the quality of your internet connection, how far the server is, and the route that data has to take to get to the server and back. Even half a second of delay can render some games difficult to play. This has been one of the big reasons why game streaming has not taken off."
],
"score": [
6,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fvep6m
|
How exactly do website cookies have the ability to track you?
|
All I really know about cookies is that they store info from sites you visit, info like login details and similar stuff. But I've only recently heard that they can track people. How do they do this?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmi0wx3"
],
"text": [
"Think of a cookie as a number written on your chest. Every time you enter a store, they write down when you entered, what you did, and when you left. Every time you drive, they watch what you drive, how you drive, and where you go. Now all that data is sent to a central data aggregation company. This data is then used against you. For example: you visit a web site, and the ads you see are customized to fit your profile. ...or a marketer buys a list of people that fit a certain profile. ...or a potential employer buys a dossier before deciding if you want to hire you."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fvgm79
|
How do printers work?
|
Ok so I know how they get the picture of what to print but how does it actually make the picture?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmi9jvr"
],
"text": [
"There are several ways of doing that, but nowadays there are really only two kinds of printers: Laser/LED printer (99% of office printers) use an electrostatically charged drum which can hold toner powder like hair can get attracted to a charged balloon, a laser can selectively discharge an area so the toner powered doesn’t stick there, the result is you can get an image made of powder on a drum, you can then transfer it to the paper and melt it on there (this is way the paper comes out hot) Regular home printers are often inkjet printers, these use lots of very small, carefully controlled heaters to sort of boil ink and create a precise jet of ink that hits the paper and colors it, these can reach a higher resolution and better quality, however they are less reliable and the ink costs a lot"
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fvhd54
|
Why do most fighting games function at 60fps, even when the game itself doesn’t run at 60
|
Most popular fighting games tend to consistently run at 60fps, even in the day and age where 60fps frame rate has become rare due to coding concerns and wanting to “Sell” it through upgraded systems.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmiqut7"
],
"text": [
"The game *does* run on 60fps, as they are in effect \"turn based\" games, with distinct states in each of those 60 turns. The graphics are strictly tied to the ingame turns, so things like continuous movement(like in a shooter, or racing game) don't make sense, and there's no real point having a higher frame rate, since those extra frames would just be duplicates."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fvj80c
|
what is dirty_bytes and dirty_background bytes in linux system?
|
I do have an idea but I don't know if it is the correct idea. Where I got the terms from: [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmip3wx"
],
"text": [
"URL_0 Dirty memory is related to how Linux caches writes to nonvolatile storage (hard drives, USB sticks, etc.). Basically the actual writing operation only begins when a given amount to be written is accumulated to prevent the system from having to babysit a huge amount of small and slow I/O operations. *Dirty pages* are memory pages allocated to this cache feature that have data written on them that is yet to be transfered to the nonvolatile storage."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/Linux_Page_Cache_Basics"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fvj92t
|
Why are so many tech guys of Indian origin
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmiodry",
"fmip9gk"
],
"text": [
"Probably because something like 1 in 7 people is Indian. It's a really big (populous) country with a strong tech sector",
"India has a good public school system in part due to the British Empire and a society which believes in education as a way of improving your status in life. India is also a relatively young and populous country so lots of the kids went into computers and IT in their education specialties, these people are now in the jobs market and selling their skills wherever they are needed and since there a large number of them in India many are going overseas for better money."
],
"score": [
18,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fvnlip
|
how do people isolate specific audio tracks from a file without access to the master tapes? Such as when someone makes an isolated vocal or bass track of a song or when someone makes a mashup of instruments from one song with the vocals from another.
|
Such as when people make "isolated bass/vocal," tracks of popular songs or make a meme mashup of one song with he vocal line of another over it?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmjk2m9",
"fmjfaqw",
"fmk5v85",
"fmkbud7"
],
"text": [
"To add to what the other commenter said, audio files are usually in stereo - there are actually 2 tracks, one for the left side and one for the right - and when a song is created, different sounds are usually placed in different locations in the stereo field. Lead vocals, kick drums, bass, and sometimes snare drums are usually placed in mono - the left and right channels are identical. Most other sounds are usually not in mono - the left and right channels are different. For example, a sound may be panned, where the volume on one side is louder than the other. If your goal is to extract vocals, you can simply discard all the data that isn't the same on both the left and right channels. You will be left with less overlapping frequency information to try and cut the vocals out of. There are also AI tools that can assist with separating tracks, such as Spleeter.",
"The song contains a range of sound frequencies. Think of these frequencies as “audio colours.” The bass is red, and all the way on the other end do the rainbow is high-pitched purple. To isolate just one voice in the music, you can filter the spectrum so you only have the range you want — just the “orange”, for example, or just the “green”, like screwing filters over a lens, where some colours are blocked and others are let through. With software it’s relatively easy to choose just the exact frequencies that comprise a particular sound in the mix, and filter out the rest. A couple of passes like this with different settings, and you have imperfect but workable “separated” tracks. ———————— Edit to add: I do this in the course of my work, when creating generative visuals from mixed-down audio files.",
"Not commenting on isolating individual instruments, but a common trick to remove the voice for a karaoke track is to subtract left from right channel. In most stereo recordings, the voice is present with equal intensity in both channels. This is how cheap karaoke machines work.",
"There are many different approaches. To add to what other folks have said, these days you can use neural networks that have been trained to do the job. [Spleeter]( URL_0 ) is one such software. Basically, a computer \"learns\" what different instruments sound like, and can then identify the different parts in the spectrum of the full song, and then cuts out those bits separately. It works well with clear, well defined, loud instruments in simple tracks; not so much with things buried in a complicated mix (where even a human would have a hard time picking them out). Others have also mentioned that if you have the instrumental track, you can subtract it from the full track to get just the vocals. This works rather well for some tracks, but the two tracks have to be perfectly aligned for that to work directly. There is software that can help with this by automatically stretching and shrinking tracks in time to match them (I wrote a version of this myself). Sometimes it doesn't work well anyway, because the tracks might have been processed differently or different instruments might be out of phase (this often happens with synthesizers and other virtual instruments, where both versions aren't the same render to audio). In this case you can use even smarter software to try to subtract at the level of tones in the spectrum, instead of at the level of the raw audio. Ultimately it's all a bunch of compromises, and if you're doing this by hand you're probably going to be postprocessing stuff manually to cut out noise, EQ the result, etc. It's not a one button push process."
],
"score": [
19,
8,
6,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[
"https://github.com/deezer/spleeter"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fvpv99
|
Why do modern phones lack the soap opera effect of modern TVs?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmjxd4o",
"fmk0pj3",
"fmk1pae"
],
"text": [
"I think they r referring to that hyper realistic quality in the picture.. i dont like it..it does remind me of a soap opera..I thought i was high the first time i saw it on someones tv..",
"The effect you’re talking about is the motion blending that takes what is normally 30fps or 24fps material and turning into into 120fps, which makes everything look like shit and if you have it turned on you’re a horrible person. I don’t know for sure why it’s not on phones, other than maybe no one fucking wants this garbage feature. And also it would absolutely wreck your battery like this wrecks whatever it is you’re trying to watch.",
"Newer TV's use display panels with much higher refresh rates than the programs they are showing. That means the program is made at 24 or 30 frames per second but the panel itself is refreshing up to e.g 200 times per second. In order for the motion to be smooth and without jitters and judders the TV has to interpolate the other 170-ish frames every second. It does that using an algorithm running on a processor. And algorithms like that can't account for every eventuality. So they get it wrong sometimes and the motion looks weird. There should be an option to disable the interpolation. Samsung calls it Auto Motion Plus, LG calls it TruMotion, Sony calls it MotionFlow, and so on. Edit : Sorry that didn't actually answer your question. I would guess phones don't do the same because of the cost of integrating or developing their own interpolation system. I think the decoding of most video formats is already done in integrated third party hardware (GPU chips) and tacking another stage onto that wouldn't be easy or cheap. And of course the reduction in battery life isn't something their sales literature could easily spin as a worthwhile tradeoff."
],
"score": [
5,
4,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fvqn39
|
how we are able to take clear photos of earth without getting any satellites in the picture.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmjzdbm"
],
"text": [
"if any satellites are in view they are so small and so far away from the camera that you cant see them"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fvubsj
|
Why does reseating RAM actually fix things for a computer?
|
My stock CPU fan wasn’t working properly so I saw a YouTube video that said to reseat the RAM. I doubted it would work but ever since then, my fan has been working perfectly.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmkkzpt"
],
"text": [
"I've never reseated memory and gotten it to work again. The fact that it was impacting your CPU fan leads me to wonder if your motherboard is possessed. BUT. If there's any dirt or dust or crud in the RAM slot, then it could have a bad connection, including intermittent power issues. That sort of wobbly power draw could theoretically do all sorts of bad stuff in the mobo. Connecting and reconnecting RAM every 5ish milliseconds is way outside the spec for X86 considering it's not hot-swappable in the first place. I do the software end of bare-metal development though, so EE issues like power consumption or misconfigured hardware falls into the realm of black magic for me."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fvum8f
|
What makes ads to load faster than the content in websites and apps?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmkmbp6",
"fmkmse8"
],
"text": [
"It’s typically because ads are stored on a different server than the content from a website or app. The servers for ads are faster since they are paying to deliver content to you, they want to make sure it loads quick and properly.",
"It's all about the priority the data is transmitted. Simply put, the advertiser paid the company directly to place their ad so the company has once give to ensure you see the ad moreso than to share whatever free content you're viewing. After all ads are how websites make money. Thus, the web page will load the page itself, then the ads, and then the content."
],
"score": [
11,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fvz0dg
|
How does LiDAR work, what are the uses/benefits, especially in the context of phone cameras/AR?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmlbp2u"
],
"text": [
"LiDAR just sends a laser out and measures time for it to return (it bounces off something, the time it takes to travel there and back is used to calculate distance). The benefit of it is that it's very accurate and precise It's used a lot in archaeology and agriculture because it's so precise a plane flying over land can map at a resolution of 1 foot (every 12 inches registers a point) even at altitude and high speeds. It's what autonomous vehicles use to scan their surroundings. In a mobile phone the interest is 3d scanning, you can google an example of LiDAR used to scan a penny and see how accurate is. There are examples now of a game that creates lava on your floor to avoid, a room scanned into 3d software like CAD to see how additions would look and measure dimensions, and IKEA is developing an app to show you what their furniture would look like in your room. There are AR games like Pokemon Go but it's not accurate at all, right now it's just looking for flat lines in a 2d picture while this would add actually 3d capability."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fvzaok
|
How can people who use gambling and card playing sites be sure that there's no funny business going on behind the scenes?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmla23q"
],
"text": [
"They cannot. This is one of many reasons that state gambling regulators have a problem with online gambling. Software in this environment is simply too susceptible to to cheating, as many MMORG companies can testify."
],
"score": [
8
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fvzrz4
|
How do anti-plagiarism detectors and programs work to find exact wordings from other sources and determine that they aren't just coincidence?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmlebsl",
"fmlqc1m",
"fmlcq5i",
"fmlcyp1",
"fmm69q5"
],
"text": [
"It is VERY rare for a single sentence to be repeated by random chance. The odds of an entire paragraph or page being copied are zero. To give you some context. I've written several 100,000 word books. Often I'll think to myself \"Oh, I need to edit this section or that section\" and I'll use the search feature. If I can remember one or two words from the section I want to find then there are never more than 3 hits and usually its just 1. If you want you can test it out with an online bible. If you remember any few word you can usually immediately find the bible verse you were thinking of. plagiarism software shouldn't (and almost never is) used to try and find one sentence in a multi-thousand word essay. It looks for patterns of behavior where big blocks of text have been taken from a handful of sources. And that just never happens honestly.",
"The system is able to detect commonly quoted authors, definitions, etc. People will literally rip off entire sections from source materials and put it in word for word in their papers. Put quotes around it and cite your work and you are totally fine. If you are writing about abortion, many sentences will be very similar across the spectrum because the subject has been talked to death. Similar sentence is OK but exactly the same is very suspect. It doesn't report a 'pass/fail', it gives the professor a percentage of similarity and it is up to them to decide whether you plagiarized. I used turnitin for some philosophy classes I took a few years ago, we were talking about very well trodden subjects and my arguments were not particularly unique or insightful and my papers were \\~5% similar to other papers. When I have talked to professors who have nailed people for plagiarism they have told me whole paragraphs were wholesale copied. They can tell when you were just being to close to the source material. The more you read another author the more you will adopt their way of talking/writing and it is a skill to take their ideas and describe them from your perspective. Depending on who is teaching you, while you might not get nailed for plagiarism but you may get a bad grade on the paper. When you are talking about the difference between a graduate school writer and an undergrad writer, this skill is one of the defining factors between those two cohorts of students.",
"they don't. these detectors never take into account that there are only so many ways to phrase the same thought without looking like you perused a thesaurus for oblique phraseology",
"They do detect coincidences. That effect can be educed by looking for larger word blocks. The code can exclude the most common conflicts among the background documents, and consider them to be coincidences. These tools still require some thought to interpret.",
"One small bit of terminology that will help. String is the term linguists use for a sequence of words. The shorter a string is, the less likely it is to be unique. Think about a two word string. Virtually every noun in English is going to exist in a two word string \"the NOUN\". A plagiarism checker isn't going to even bother trying to spot those things, because there will be so many similarities with so many sources that it would be pointless. But the longer a string is, the more likely it is to be unique. Let's take a completely innocuous sentence: \"Reddit is very fun\". This is a 4-string, and if we do a google search for it, we end up with ~5,070 results. Now let's add just a little bit more to it: \"I think Reddit is very fun\". Just adding those two words to the beginning of the sentences drops the results from ~5,070 to 0. It is actually fairly easy to search for similarities in strings of words, and what plagiarism checkers basically do is compare sequences of strings in a document to sources that are available online as well as to other sources that are available in their database of student papers. A couple things here. I won't speak for all plagiarism checkers, but Turnitin doesn't identify something as plagiarism or not. It checks for similarities, and leaves the identification of plagiarism up to the person reading the report. They will often identify direct quotations as being similar, and the person reading the report will recognize based on the context that they are quotations and not plagiarism. Sometimes it will note similarities that are incidental. They are more common with shorter sentences, but can also happen for longer ones if the sentence contains a phrase that has to occur in a particular way or that is about a bit of factual information where there aren't honestly that many ways of phrasing the information. For instance, a source discussing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is already going to have similarities to a bunch of other sources just by virtue of its name, and sentences containing those kinds of phrases might be more likely to be flagged erroneously. One thing to note is that plagiarism detectors aren't perfect. They don't catch all plagiarism, and just because they detect a similarity, it doesn't mean that it is plagiarism. However, an identical passage that is two or more substantive sentences long is almost always going to be plagiarism. There are sometimes ways to avoid detection by plagiarism checkers. For instance, students will sometimes substitute synonyms for some of the words or will delete or change some parts of the sentence. But to avoid notice, the number of words that have to be changed is typically so large that the meaning of the passage is altered in a way that may not be apparent to students but often is apparent to professors. Also, importantly, this is still a form of plagiarism."
],
"score": [
28,
5,
3,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fw2rkh
|
What is happening when uploads/downloads get stuck at 99%?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmlvwgs",
"fmmm5gz",
"fmmhuzv"
],
"text": [
"The first thing you should know is that progress bars aren’t real. They are somewhat linked to actual progress, but they do not accurately measure progress; they’re just there for the user to be able to visualize what’s happening. That’s why they get stuck on 99% so often; the bar has to keep going forward but if it miscalculates, or if there is a dip in internet speed, or if the next packet to arrive is huge, it can’t usually go back and show less progress. So instead it just stalls at 99%. That being said there are many reasons why the last 99% takes a while. It can be an integrity check of all the previous packets, a very large packet that just takes a long time, or your internet speed or the server speed dips for a variety of reasons.",
"Obligatory xkcd: URL_0 ELI5: A progress bar „guesses“ the real progress. Much like you would when you tell your parents that „you’ll be home any minute“. Any „unforeseen“ hiccup in the last minutes towards the deadline will have a large impact on your ability to be home on time. Say you meet your friend Bob and have a quick chat. If you only have a few minutes left the chat would probably make you late. On the other hand, if you still have 2 hours time the chat with Bob will probably not have an impact on being on time or not. Also Progress often is doing a lot of different things: e.g. to clean your room you need to pick up your stuff, vacuum the floor and bring out the trash. A progress bar has to guess right from the start how many socks you’ll pick up, if vacuuming the floor is enough or if you need to get a mop as well. If any of the guesses is wrong, the estimation is wrong — but you’ll only see that it is wrong (and how wrong) after you have cleaned your room (just before 100% done).",
"Usually it's because the software is doing one or more of the following things: Hash check/checksum - makes sure that the file isn't corrupted, and is in fact the file you intended to upload/download. Signature Check - makes sure the file came from a trusted source. Decompression - many downloads come in compressed data formats that must be decompressed before they can be used. Sometimes this is done automatically by the downloader. Restore points - for things like system & software updates the software creates a restore point before applying the downloaded update. That way you can revert back to the way it was if the update breaks something. Torrent Seeding - most torrent clients will want to try to seed any files that you download from them so that others can download parts of the file from you. Content screening - when uplading a file most web services employ various methods of screening the file for illegal, inappropriate, copyrighted, malicious, or other offending content. Anti-virus - when uploading or downloading a file, the file is usually scanned by anti-virus before the upload/download is allowed to complete. Copy & paste - some downloaders save the file in a temporary location while its downloading, then copy it to the downlads folder when its done. Reformatting - when uploading media files to a service, that service may need to convert the file into a different format. For example: when uploading an image in .bmp format to an image hosting or social media site, the site will most likely convert it to .jpg or .png because those formats are smaller and can be shared more easily. Additionally the site may want to generate a thumbnail or preview clip for the file. Edit: typo"
],
"score": [
71,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://xkcd.com/612/"
],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fw4ogh
|
Why are cell phone towers found in pairs?
|
My husband and I were driving around and keep noticing that cell phone towers are almost always in pairs. Particularly along highways and in open fields.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmm8abh",
"fmm7e6x"
],
"text": [
"The existing tower is strong enough for 2 sets of antennas, but 4 companies want their antennas in the area, so the tower owner built another tower.",
"* Most cell sites are privately owned and space on them is leased by carriers. * Most cell sites host antennas from multiple carriers. * Not all carriers can reach agreements with all site owners. * Despite your observations, many sites don't have another site close by."
],
"score": [
4,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fw5sbi
|
Why do you say the alarm goes “off” and not “on” ?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmmfatj",
"fmn2ul3"
],
"text": [
"That's a customary term for result of something being triggered. Same with a trap, a gun, a camera flash, etc. The trigger could be considered \"on\" in its armed state. Once the mechanism releases it, the result would be that the trigger is no longer on and the opposite would be off. You then just shorten the phrase to \"the alarm went off\" rather than \"the triggering mechanism for the alarm went off\"",
"It comes from the old mechanism used in older alarms. The hammer that hits the bells is kept in place by some sort of spring till the clock mechanism hits a state where it releases the spring from the hammer and the hammer basically goes \"off\""
],
"score": [
9,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fw90mn
|
When a photographer is attempting to catch something at a very precise moment, why can they not use video and then select the exact frame they want to be the photo?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmn0hgv",
"fmn9acc",
"fmmy7yw"
],
"text": [
"They could, but taking a video at High res and High Speed produces a FUCKTON of data. They would have to go with specialized hardware that are both able to have the space to record, and the capacity to write that fast. In short, they would need to go in the middle of the wild with a 40kg thing big like a small fridge. Impossible to do for nature shooting. And also much, much more expensive.",
"The first issue is that video is lower resolution than photographs. HD was 2 megapixels and 4k is 8.5 megapixels. Photographers shoot more like 24-50 megapixels. Until recently, cameras couldn't shoot fast enough to take high resolution pictures at the speed of video. The in camera processor, the ability to hold that much data, and the mechanics of taking pictures in quick succession were all limiting factors. In reality, the latest cameras can take between 15 and 60 high resolution pictures per second, and that IS how people capture quick movements. Sports photographs routinely do this. You can also hear it at news press conferences. So why did it take this photographer so many tries? Well first, I'm sure he's talking about the number of pictures it took,not the number of times he tried. They might take 200 pictures each time a bird dives. Other guesses: Focusing can be hard with a moving object and cameras we're significantly slower even 5 years ago. And even with 60 framers per second, they still might not get the exact moment because birds are moving so fast.",
"That sort of rate produces a huge amount of data. The special cameras, like the Phantom, only work for very brief times. To shoot that fast you also need a lot of light. Not the sort of inobtrusive thing an animal wouldn't run from."
],
"score": [
27,
15,
6
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fwa9w9
|
How the video app ZOOM is dangerous/not secure
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmnf37o"
],
"text": [
"Zoom doesn't have end-to-end encryption. A bank web page has end-to-end encryption, so you can type stuff in knowing that even someone has tapped into your internet connection and is watching all the traffic coming in and out of your house, they can't steal anything because it's all encrypted. Because Zoom video calls don't have that kind of security, someone watching the packets could basically listen in on all the meetings you're having on Zoom. That's a big deal if you're suddenly having to have senior executive meetings in Zoom that decide the future of your company. Someone with access to inside information like that could manipulate stocks, or steal corporate secrets, etc. Additionally, Zoom has been caught doing things in the past that make your computer much less secure, like making it possible for a web page on the net to activate your webcam and start recording to some cloud server they own."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fwavz5
|
How come cheat codes are not prevelant in modern games today?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmnah54",
"fmn9ipe",
"fmn9p0j"
],
"text": [
"The biggest reason is really that games in the past were often brutally hard and cheat codes were a way to make them easier or fun, especially for kids. Games didn't have different difficultly levels or even saves a lot of times, so they could be crazy hard... hence cheat codes became a fun way to play the game without having to worry about all the hardness of the game. Secondly, cheat codes were actually part of the game development process-- the devs would put these codes in to test the game (then they would often just leave them in for fun). With more modern ways of making games, its unnecessary to create cheat codes to make the game (but they can, just they have other tools to do the same) Lastly, in the past, most games were single player (or cooperative play), so cheating was fine, it was just you playing with your friends or by yourself--no one was harmed. In the modern age, most games are collaborative with many players, as such a \"cheat code\" doesn't have a place in the game as it breaks the system to favor one player who cheats over those that don't. Cheaters don't make a game more fun when they beat you, it seems unfair, hence, no cheats.",
"Because selling OP equipment that lets you play as basically a god makes more money than making it a secret code.",
"Cheat codes are more prevalent then ever. The main difference is that today it's all about $$$.. in game purchases, bonus packs or this or that, that's all \"cheating\". Just in a different form."
],
"score": [
14,
10,
8
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fwh07r
|
How do broadcasting stations estimate how many people watch their program?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmod303",
"fmo988g"
],
"text": [
"I’d like to highjack this post and ask how radio stations know how many listeners they have.",
"They don’t estimate. They know. A certain amount of households have boxes that track and report what they watch. This is where they get the numbers. Plus, now, you’ve also got on demand which is easy to track. So anyway, once they’ve got the numbers of people who watched, that’s the basis of X% of people watched xxx and so on."
],
"score": [
7,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fwin68
|
Netflix streaming
|
Why do Netflix not buffer while YouTube and other streaming site buffers?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmogz94",
"fmovfqw"
],
"text": [
"They do. It’s just that it does in very small amounts of data that you don’t even realize. Also their structure is far more different than YouTube. They’re probably closer to you than YouTube is.",
"They do, but their algorithms are so good at it that you don't really notice. Netflix's algorithm automatically adjusts the quality of a video based on the available bandwidth in order to prevent choppiness and buffering. So if you have low bandwidth due to a background download your netflix will adjust the resolution and quality to compensate. Also unlike older content delivery services like the Real Player we used to use back in the day, Netflix has a lot of caching services all over the place. Your ISP most likely has a caching server on site. That means that popular series and movies are stored on a server relatively nearby to you so it doesn't have to be streamed across the entire country. This allows Netflix to send the same movie to dozens of people simultaneously in your neighborhood without any significant impact to overall bandwidth."
],
"score": [
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fwitve
|
What are seeds/peers in torrent?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmoh1wz"
],
"text": [
"Seeds is the amount of computers sharing the file(s) and peers is the amount of computers downloading the file(s)."
],
"score": [
14
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fwjsvf
|
How do proxy servers work and what do different types of proxy do?
|
I can't seem to understand it when looking on professional sites.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmonbc7",
"fmou4mv"
],
"text": [
"Normally, when you connect to a web page, it is a direct connection between your computer and that web page. With a proxy server, your computer instead connects to the proxy server and then the proxy server connects to the web page and it relays the information between the two. This allows the proxy to control the connection and inspect the traffic and, in general, allows for improved security. There are probably any number of different kinds, but the main two are normal proxies, which are primarily intended for out going communication and reverse proxies which are primarily intended for in coming communication. In addition to that the \"kinds\" of proxies relate to the additional services they provide (firewall, content inspection, etc.)",
"If Alice wants to talk to Bob without Bob knowing, she can use Carl as a proxy: Alice speaks with Carl, Carl speaks to Bob. This way Bob will only meet Carl and ignore the existence of Alice. Your computer is alice, Bob is the server you want to contact (usually a computer running website, but there are a lot of services online like mail, file transfer, etc.), Carl is the proxy (usually a third computer that listens to what you say, talk to Bob and report back answers)."
],
"score": [
7,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fwm9hx
|
Fire shutters
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmp298w",
"fmp52db"
],
"text": [
"They typically give you enough time to get out of there after the alarm goes off. And then they stop the fire and smoke from spreading to *everyone else*. So instead of the entire building burning down and a large number of tenants dying and all of them now homeless because someone left their stove on. It's just the one section that get destroyed or damaged.",
"The fire shutters automatically close when the fire alarm goes off but they do not automatically lock you inn. There may be a nearby door, the shutter may have a built inn door or you can just lift the shutter manually to get out. You should always be able to escape a burning building that complies to the fire codes."
],
"score": [
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fwmo30
|
Why are people so afraid of 5G?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmp4ofr"
],
"text": [
"The best answer to this is that people fear that which is new. 5G is fundamentally no different than any other cell-phone frequency that is already in use. However, people, generally, lack a proper understanding of how things work and are more prone to react based on emotion than by logic (see the Elephant and the Man analogy). Also, conspiracy theories are fun and make people believe they know something that most others do not know. Basically, people are easily misguided and conspiracy and fear breeds in this environment. Malicious actors use this to their advantage."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fwo0pn
|
How do iPhones fake Taptic feedback buttons feel so real?
|
When I first got my phone I didn’t even realise my home button didn’t have moving parts until about a year in. How in holy hell is this illusion so effective and how does it work?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmpdt7p",
"fmplr7x"
],
"text": [
"Your phone vibrates a bit when you push the button. It does one oscillation (there's a very tiny motor with an unbalanced weight that spins only once around for each click). Your phone, being a computer, is exceptionally fast at reacting. Your hands, being made of meat, are not nearly as fast at detecting. To your brain (which already messes with your perception to compensate for nerve lag), it can't consciously distinguish any disparity between a mechanical click and the artificial one. Your own expectations that it will click make the illusion even harder to break.",
"The haptics are generated by the Taptic Engine. Most other phones use a small weight attached off-axis on a simple spinning motor that can be turned off or on. Taptic Engine uses a much larger weight that is precisely controlled by linear electromagnetics. So then the Taptic Engine can apply varying amounts of power to the weight, and with precise timing. This makes it more like a speaker than a simple spinning motor, except instead of emitting sound, it emits vibrations. The haptic for the home button is a single “thump” which is generated by pushing the weight to the other side of the engine one time, with considerable force."
],
"score": [
21,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fwo8j9
|
How do computers know how to turn 0s & 1s into information like images and sounds?
|
I'm assuming that there are programs running in the computer telling it to do these things, I just don't understand how 0s & 1s are turned into usable information.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmpfjpw",
"fmperyf",
"fmpef7j"
],
"text": [
"It's all fundamentally math, down at the metal. You can think of it like this: A computer fetches an instruction from memory. That instruction is a series of on and off switches that turns on a specific component in the CPU, such as the circuit that does addition. Then it loads in the data and uses that as the input to the component. The output is then saved to memory, and your computer goes to get the next instruction. Now, that second-to-last bit, \"The output is then saved to memory,\" can be exploited for other things, such as audio, video, networking, etc. Rather than saving to your normal memory, it saves to a different location that controls the output device. In video, rather than saving the bits to memory, it saves them to your monitor, which has the effect of turning each pixel on or off in sequence. Your computer just repeatedly \"saves\" the picture to your screen 60 times a second. In audio, you have another spot where you can save data. Your computer saves a number there, one at a time. Each time it saves a number, an electromagnet moves the speaker cone to that position. So, if it saved 1-2-3-4-5-6-5-4-3-2-1-2-3-4-5-6-5-4-3-2-1 and so on, doing the sequence 440 times per second, your speaker would produces a sound like this: URL_0 In networking, your computer is saving bits in sequence to a third location, which instead generates pulses in the same sequence down a wire or which gets converted into pulses of radio waves. Literally everything else your computer does is math to figure out the right sequence of bits to save in those special locations.",
"Any image or video or sound can be translated into numbers. \"Pixel 0,0 has a color value of 123456.\" 1's and 0's, known as binary, are just numbers. 6 is equal to 110 in binary. Your computer is just a bunch of hardware and programs that expect certain info to be saved in certain places, or computed in specific ways, and then each piece of the computer does its thing with that info.",
"Computers have hardware specifically designed to do this. The sound chip takes a specific pattern of bits and turns it into a specific audio frequency electrical waveform, that flows through wires into your speaker/headset. Display cards work in a much more complex, but corresponding, way because the information content of human vision is much higher than the content of human hearing."
],
"score": [
5,
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaoHFZXDN5g"
],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fwoqdu
|
How can someone track me using my IP? Can they find out my info our location solely from online posts?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmphu4k",
"fmpjvjd"
],
"text": [
"If you Google any ip address you can see where it is located (which city). If you post online, only the administrators of the site can see your ip address.",
"Have you ever tracked a package through UPS before? It's sorta like that. When you access anything online, like videos, websites, or downloads, your computer sends a tiny packet of data to request the content. This request starts at your computer, goes to your ISP, which sends it out to whatever server hosts the website you're wanting to go to. Then, the website replies with data that opens the website back to your ISP, which then sends it back to you. Just like how you can use Google Maps to locate a physical address, your IP address can be tracked digitally, and just like how a package can be tracked, the data itself can be digitally tracked."
],
"score": [
10,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fwt5s4
|
Why do some older recordings of songs have different instruments coming more prominently from either the right or left of my headphones?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmqfu9l",
"fmqsxqb"
],
"text": [
"I know what you're talking about. Others commenters are thinking about normal stereo mixing, which is pleasant. Some old records (with original mixing) have a very radical separation, like guitars 100% on one side, vocals in the middle, drums 100% on the other. It's annoying. IIRC, some original or \"remastered\" long ago Beatles songs sound like that. My guess is that stereo was a novelty, and people didn't quite know what to do with it; they wanted to make sure you noticed it was stereo, so no subtleties.",
"Stereophonic sound was only reproducible in the home starting around 1958. In the early 60s stereo was a novelty and tracks were widely panned to exaggerate the stereo effect, often for demonstration purposes or to show off your system. Eventually stereo became commonplace and audio engineers realized things sounded better with more even mixing."
],
"score": [
13,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fwtxlb
|
Time it takes to save something onto the hard-drive vs deleting it
|
How does saving something onto the hard drive (or moving from one hard drive to another) take a long time, whilst deleting it takes a couple of seconds?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmqebyc",
"fmqsx75"
],
"text": [
"When you store a file you do have to write all the data that in content to the disk and update the file table with a file name, what blocks on the drive the file is stored at, and some other information. When you delete a file you do not touch the data but just update the file table and remove the file from it and say that the blocks are no longer in use and can be overwritten. So deleting a file is just removing the information of where it is the data is still there and there are programs that can recover the information. The data is lots when the next file uses the same block and overwrite them.",
"Saving something on the hard drive is like writing 10 pages in your diary. Deleting something from the hard drive is like writing an X next to a diary entry in your table of contents. (The X is a shorthand note to your future self that the diary entry's garbage you don't care about any more. So you can erase whatever''s on them if you start running low on blank pages.) It's a lot quicker and easier to write a single X than it is to write a 10-page diary entry."
],
"score": [
6,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fwuomk
|
why newer operating systems can’t run 32 bit applications/games
|
I downloaded Mac OS Catalina and i cannot play 32 bit games such as Undertale. Why would a stronger newer operating system not be able to run a simpler format??
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmqj0mx",
"fmqo0bo"
],
"text": [
"Newer operating systems can run 32-bit programs just fine. You can blame Apple specifically for trying to force everyone who develops software for their platform to code 64-bit software by removing any and all native 32-bit support for programs from their operating system. That's an Apple thing, other companies don't tend to do that.",
"To run 32 bit programs you need two things: * A CPU that supports 32 bit instructions. This isn't a problem. * 32 bit libraries. This is a big problem. Libraries are pieces of reusable code. For instance, every time a program wants to load a .jpg or .png they don't do it from scratch. Instead they use a library that reads such files. On OSX, a good amount of such libraries are distributed as part of the OS itself. To support 32 bit code you need to ship 32 bit versions, and that's a bit of a problem: * It takes more room. Now you have two copies of many things. * It takes more effort on the part of the developers, since for instance packaging needs doing twice. * It takes twice the amount of testing. Somebody needs to test the 32 bit stuff for every release. * It requires the developers of such libraries to care about 32 bit compatibility. I suspect the last one is the real dealbreaker. 32 bit is effectively dead tech, and many developers don't really care about it anymore. It might work, but often there's nobody testing if it still works. This is a problem because many such pieces of code are not made by Apple, though Apple distributes them with the OS. So as time goes on, Apple runs into more and more issues with those libraries having problems on systems the main developers don't care about anymore. At some point you just cut your losses and decide it's too much work for too little benefit."
],
"score": [
12,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fx36nz
|
Why is it impossible to generate true random numbers with a computer?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmrw0tc",
"fmrw20m",
"fmrwv7e",
"fmrwqf2"
],
"text": [
"You can program a computer to spit out what can be called “random” numbers, but the machine is always controlled by its programming. You can’t get anything you could really call a random sequence of numbers, because the machine is following the same algorithm to pick them. Usually, that means it starts with a \"seed\" number and then follows a programmed pattern, with varying complexity. The results may be sufficiently complex to make the pattern difficult to identify, but because it is ruled by a carefully defined and consistently repeated algorithm, the numbers it produces are not truly random. They are what we call \"pseudo-random\" numbers.",
"Computers are essentially just input machines, as in they can only be filled with information that is originally placed within and manipulated in a specified way. Technically speaking, in a cause and effect universe, ‘random’ is just a term we use when we don’t have 100% of the information needed to predict an outcome. RNG’s are more effective as more number generating factors are introduced, but those factors are extremely limited compared to the complexity of existence as a whole. In short, there’s no such thing as ‘true random’, Just our absence of knowing exactly what makes everything go the ways they do.",
"The problem with true randomness is that it should be impossible to guess. Computers are very good at following instructions, but they have to be told exactly what to do. With a given starting state, the outcome should be the same every time. It’s not possible to be “random” in this sense, since if we knew all the relevant inputs we would be able to guess the “random” number every time. We get around this by making the inputs hard to guess in the first place. If we wanted to write a random dice function, we might write a function that takes integers and spits out a dice roll. For example dice(1) = 3, dice(2) = 6, dice(3) = 5, and so on for all the ints. We can make this table look as random as possible, even though it’s deterministic. Then, every time we call the random function, we just return dice(current_time) in microseconds. It’s almost impossible to know from a key press exactly what the current time is in microseconds, so the random function ends up looking very random, even though it’s not.",
"Computers can add numbers, multiply them, subtract them, divide them, etc etc. You can't use adding and multiplying and subtracting and dividing etc. to make random numbers, because the next time you do the same additions and multiplications and subtractions and divisions etc., you'll get the same number! You can figure out long and complicated instructions that make numbers that look random, or at least nobody can tell the difference. You can also make a true random number chip, and connect that to the computer, so then you can tell the computer \"get a random number from the random number chip\". It's not really the computer itself doing that though, it's the random number chip."
],
"score": [
12,
8,
6,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fx9lqf
|
What is different about the insides of wires that transmit power (Charger), data (Aux, Ethernet), or both (USB-C)?
|
Basically what is inside that allows wires to transfer only energy, only data, or both?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmsxpl8",
"fmsz4mb"
],
"text": [
"It's more about the connections between the two ends of the cord. Cords that are only for power only have connections at the pins that carry power, so a power only cord will have less individual wires inside it than one that can transfer power and data. That's why the power only cords are generally cheaper. They also don't have to conform to the data speed standards that data cords have to conform to.",
"There are gonna be exceptions, but in general... Wires for carrying energy tend to be thicker to minimize loss and heating. They also tend to be unshielded and unbraided - just straight wires. Wires that carry data tend to be braided or shielded, as this reduces noise and interference. Wires intended for both may be thicker *and* braided/shielded."
],
"score": [
15,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fx9oks
|
How is it possible that scammers can make their number look like your banks number? And if they can do that, why can't they make it so if you try to call the bank it goes to them instead?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmsyrrg",
"fmt4yrm"
],
"text": [
"Displayed called ID is sent from the caller to the receiver. This information is not secure, and it can say anything you want it to say. The equipment that turns your called number into where the call goes is done completely differently, securely.",
"Basically if you get a call from your “bank” (or any other financial / health institution) be skeptical. Government agencies will never call you. They will send a letter for contact. Hang up and call them back with their published phone number on their web site. Banks will never ask for stuff like your pin over the phone."
],
"score": [
10,
8
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fx9rhd
|
Why does it take wireless earbuds cases to charge for a really long time even though they have a small battery size ?
|
I've recently bought a Razer Hammerhead and as you know, BT earbuds are quite small and they usually have a case to charge them. What I don't understand is, I'm quite sure that the case doesn't boast a big battery like my phone, but somehow it takes about 90 mins to fully charge the case.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmsyij9",
"fmsyxqu"
],
"text": [
"Charging those tiny batteries at a fast rate would cause them to get hot and malfunction. Things go bad fast when those batteries fail. As a result, and the fact that being in your ear exposes your delicate ear and even brain to potential damage. The companies that make them know this, and they use very small charging currents to keep things safe.",
"The smaller the battery is, the less power it can safely accept/discharge. Maximum safe current ratings for batteries are specced in relation to their capacity. For example a 2.5Ah battery with maximum 10***C*** discharge means you can get up to 25A from the battery safely, but for the same type of battery with 5Ah capacity, it would be up to 50A. The same goes in reverse, but with usually smaller ratings - the battery might only be specced to charge at 1C for example."
],
"score": [
5,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fxa68b
|
what does VMware do?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmt4hrt",
"fmt4mkt"
],
"text": [
"VMware is a program that simulates a new computer (usually called a virtual machine) and boots it. All hardware is simulated, faked, proxied, or otherwise not real in the usual sense. There's even a BIOS setup menu like when your system says \"Press DEL to enter Setup\" during startup to play with some hardware settings. It's somewhat similar to how you can run an emulator for old game consoles (eg: Super Nintendo)... but because VMware is simulating the exact same type of computer as you already have it can use your hardware more directly to run faster. Apps inside the virtual machine can run on your CPU almost normally because they were designed to, whereas the SNES CPU is nothing like your computer's and everything about it must be simulated. It's popular with businesses because for security reasons it's best that every program run on its own computer/server to keep them apart. But that gets pretty expensive pretty fast, so VMware (and similar programs) let you have one big machine and treat it like it's 10 or 20 smaller machines. This gives you that same level of isolation as you want without 10 or 20 times as many machines taking up space, electricity, etc.",
"It's a software company that makes hypervisors (and services for controlling hypervisors). A hypervisor is what enables you to create virtual machines on a computer. Say, you have a server with 32 cores and 256GB RAM, plus a whole bunch of hard drives, etc. It would be mighty convenient for you if you could make this server act like, for example, 8 4-core computers with 32GB RAM each, so you can rent them out to 8 different companies. So you install a hypervisor, which lets this computer fake being multiple other computers that can each have an operating system (windows, linux, etc) installed and work pretty much completely independently. The OSes installed on these virtual machines think that they are on a completely normal computer because VMWare fakes every component of the PC for them.This is better for you than actually owning 8 such computers, because if your customers suddenly want to increase/decrease their \"computer\" specs, you can do it via software commands instead of having to physically disassemble several computers! Now, big companies have many, many servers, each with their own hypervisors, usually connected to another array of servers that are just basically giant hard drive array spinners that serve the hypervisors storage space as needed, and other complex stuff. For that, VMWare also makes software that can connect to many VMWare hypervisors in your server farm and control them. For example if you want to add more cores to a VM but the current server it is on doesn't have enough of those left free, you can move the VM to another server seamlessly."
],
"score": [
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fxddj3
|
How does authenticator apps work? How do the other ends like steam and discord know that the code provided is correct even when the auth app is working offline?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmto9o3"
],
"text": [
"Math and clocks. There are some calculations which are quick and easy to do in one direction and yet practically impossible to do in the other direction. A common example is that it is easy to tell if a number is a prime number, but *finding* the next prime number is very hard. What the authenticators do is keep a secret key and use it as part of a \"seed\" in an equation, the other part of that seed being the current time. This equation will spit out a short sequence of letters and numbers based on that information which because the server knows both the secret key and the current time can easily be verified. However to an outside observer the pass sequence is seemingly random and unpredictable. It is also time-sensitive because the authentication server won't take old codes, and since they are based on the current time they cannot be intercepted and saved for later use. So when the authentication app is working offline it can still provide the required code because the secret key is stored in the device and the device has a clock keeping time. If the time of the device was not correct then the codes wouldn't work."
],
"score": [
8
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fxdtzv
|
Why do computers slow down with time?
|
Computers tend to slow down after a few years of use, and tend to remain slow even after the removal of the majority of installed software and/or “cleaning”. Why is that?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmtqnsn",
"fmtrshw",
"fmu4irq",
"fmtrjih"
],
"text": [
"The average system requirements of software increase. But honestly I think this in general is a bit of a misconception. My main computer is 10 years old, the computer I'm typing this on is 8 years old. They both still run absolutely fine. What I've done on them both is installed an SSD, and kept them maintained from a software sense.",
"They don't. Provided the components don't break outright, they generally will be as fast after 10 years as they were when you first got them. Any sort of slowdown you perceive is either imaginary, caused by running more demanding programs, or due to external factors (dust accumulation, dried out thermal paste etc.)",
"My best attempt at a comprehensive answer: There’s multiple reasons why your computer appears to slow down with age. First and foremost is the nature of patches. The longer you run a given OS, the more patches you will inevitably install to improve performance, fix security issues, and resolve errors. Every OS has some mechanism that tracks these updates and several systems (including windows) keeps prior patch data for compatibility reasons. This leads to data accumulation and over time, which causes the system to take longer to complete various background tasks, which ultimately spills over into perceived slowness of the computer itself. Secondly is “junk data”. Most, if not all, uninstaller programs still leave small traces of a program behind, be it program data that’s intentionally left for re-install purposes or it may be file handlers in the registry that are left behind due to lazy coding. No matter the reason, you almost definitely have some on your system if you’ve installed and removed any programs on your system. Junk data can lead to minor file fragmentation which can result in slower file read times, particularly on older hardware. In extreme cases, filling the HDD with junk data can make the computer run slower as virtual memory cannot be allocated on the drive’s free space. Third is the nature of increasing system requirements. Over time, new versions of OSes and programs will require greater memory, storage, and processor requirements as newer hardware is released to market with higher specs. A ten year old computer may struggle to load the latest version of Windows 10 and Firefox compared to a more recent machine. It’s reasonable to expect your Windows XP machine to keep running software which came out during that era, but good luck trying to put modern photoshop on it. Fourth is “the perception of slowness”. Even if you never upgrade your home computer, many businesses continue to upgrade their systems as time goes on to provide better quality and faster service. It’s almost inevitable that you’ll encounter technology outside your household that’s more advanced than what you’ve gotten used to. This causes the perception that your older system is “slower”. In reality, the change in speed from most wear and tear on a computer is negligible and it’s roughly as fast as it’s always been. It’s not that your old computer became slow, it’s that you’ve experienced a faster computer to compare it to. The last reason is actual wear and tear. Physical problems that can occur due to poor ventilation or maintenance often result in heat stress on parts. While this rarely causes long term damage, many computers have throttling systems to lower the processor’s speed if there is thermal issues occurring. In rare instances, capacitors can leak and fail, resulting in power issues which again, can cause throttling. Honestly though, unless the computer itself was poorly built or it resides in a place with lots of air contaminants, wear and tear should never result in noticeable slow downs. Bonus info: how to keep old computers performing quickly? Reformat! A fresh OS install basically removes reasons one and two for slowness. Choosing the right OS for older hardware can also really help as well. Many an outdated Windows desktop have been repurposed as viable Linux boxes.",
"Software updates often slow a computer down in the name of doing more security checks. Newer versions of the software are usually more efficient in how they handle these checks, while older versions receive less care."
],
"score": [
23,
14,
8,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fxlbbc
|
I have smart LED lightbulbs that can change into a dozen different colors. How’s does that work?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmv2jhn"
],
"text": [
"There are 4 leds inside the light. A red, green, blue, and white one. When you select a color, the rgb leds are lit to varying degrees to give off the color selected. Red and blue will be brighter for purple for instance."
],
"score": [
8
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fxud1a
|
Why do computers get slower?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmwh6rk",
"fmwpikq",
"fmx7pch",
"fmxityl",
"fmwt8ua"
],
"text": [
"Because over time more features are added to the operating system and apps as updates. This happens because there is always pressure to add more capabilities, to stay competitive. If you could take an older slow computer and reset its software to exactly the same as was when it was new, it would have the same speed as when it was new.",
"Apart from software getting more bloaty, another important factor is that fans get clogged up with dust and don't cool down the computer as well, so the computer makes itself go slower so that it generates less heat. Make sure to clean them out occasionally - especially on laptops!",
"There's a lot of good answers here but ***I*** personally don't feel they quite hit the mark. There's two reasons a computer will get slower over time: * Software. * Hardware. **Hardware** This is simple and people have answered it clearly. Check your fans. If they collect dust (or spider webs), they can't cool as effectively and the computer will run slower because it's running hotter, particularly the video card. Newer CPUs (like Ryzen) can also be affected by hot air. Older CPUs may just be more prone to crashing if they get too hot. **Software - Startup Applications** Software is more complicated. Let's say I get a new computer. Fresh installation of Windows. There's nothing installed but the stock Windows applications. Runs great! Then I install Teams on it. Teams starts up when the computer starts up. It also takes a *very minuscule* amount of CPU power as long as it's open. Then I install some anti-virus software. It also starts up when the computer starts up. It doesn't take a lot of CPU power unless it's doing a scan but when that scan runs, oof. Then I install Spotify. Spotify may just be running in the background and not doing anything! But there's something I didn't mention: all those open applications I just installed are also taking up memory! (Note: I'm *not* referring to disk space, I'm referring to RAM. That temporary memory the computer uses for running applications.) Then I install Steam. Steam may also start up with the computer, or only when you open it but it's also using some RAM. Then you install your keyboard software. Maybe it's Logitech. Logitech Gaming Software has some uses but it's kinda bloatware. It takes up some RAM as well. It also takes up a tiny bit of CPU power! Then I install my mouse software. Say I have a Corsair mouse. Corsair's software takes up some RAM and CPU. Then I install Microsoft Office. That also has some permanent residence in RAM and CPU. Then I install a shell extension that adds a few menu items to Windows Explorer's right click menu. This just so happens to be a poorly made program and requires something to be running in the background (most shell extensions don't). Then over the next 2 years you install some other random crap that also runs on startup. The system tray looks like like a mini start menu, kind of like my work laptop from all the crap corporate puts on it. Guess what? You installed a bunch of applications that are all using up a tiny bit of RAM and a tiny bit of CPU. Separately, it's not much. Over a family computer's 3-5 year life, that adds up. And suddenly your computer runs like molasses because like 30% of its RAM is being eaten up by applications that run on startup and like 5-7% of CPU *at all times*. And you know what? Less available RAM means applications need to use your disk drive more often. RAM is fast. Drives are not, even compared to SSDs or M.2s (though not as drastically as a spinning hard drive). Suddenly, opening any application is slow because it can't all fit in RAM and Windows has to swap stuff out from RAM to disk. One of the fastest ways to fix this bloat problem? You don't necessarily need to uninstall everything. An application that's not running is not taking up any of your resources, except real estate on your disk drive. Just don't open them. Tell them bitches to stop running on startup. It is *also* possible that applications don't uninstall correctly that plug in to Windows, like shell extensions, and just installing a bunch of those badly-made programs can cause problems. **Software - Feature Bloat** Of course, it could also be a situation like where Windows 8 won't run well on a computer that can run Windows 7 just fine. (Guess what? Windows 10 runs a little faster than 8.) Windows 8 just takes up a little more resources to do the same thing than 7. Which took up a little more resources to do the same thing than Windows XP. (I'm greatly simplifying. Generally newer Windows versions needed more RAM.)",
"There are alot of good responses, there is one more thing I would like to add. For windows in particular the operating system stores a bunch of information in a big file called a registry. Because this is such a big file with a bunch of information about a bunch of different things it gets full of junk. Windows has also historically been bad about managing it's registry, this adds to to the issue. What I used to do in my windows 7 days was to periodically run a program that would clean up the registry as well as taking care of some other disk clutter. I haven't felt the need since switching to windows 10 so it is possible that 10 does a better job managing it's registry that 7 and previous operating systems.",
"more features can affect performance as u/BogBirdBingle said, but it is possible to implement many of them so they stay out of the way until they're needed. it just takes time and care that commercial developers with deadlines to meet can't afford. in the android world hobbyists often release custom ROMs with all the features of a phone's stock software (or more) but significantly improved performance security is trickier. you can do what gets the fastest results, or you can do what gets results securely. the simplest example of this is encryption: something like shifting each letter of a text file 1 to the right doesn't take long to do, but it doesn't take long to crack either. you have to use a more complex method, like converting each letter to a number and multiplying it with the biggest prime you can think of a third factor is the hardware itself getting slower. storage drives can wear out if they're written to thousands of times, thermal paste dries and dust clogs fans so less heat can escape and the CPU throttles sooner"
],
"score": [
44,
21,
4,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fxveyo
|
Why is it bad to use Zoom?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmwn3gd"
],
"text": [
"URL_0 It claims to be encrypted, it’s not. It shares your information with third parties (Facebook, LinkedIn, others) It’s not secure (room listing and room bombing was possible until few days ago) Their business model is based on information collected on the users."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://protonmail.com/blog/zoom-privacy-issues/"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fxvh46
|
2G, 3G, 4G and 5G.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmwomqi",
"fmwnjqf"
],
"text": [
"Answer: they're different generations of the same technology. 1G also exists (when your phone has a data connection but no symbol). The main differences that the average users will notice is speed. 2G is incredibly slow and struggles to even load text-only web pages. 3G is a bit faster and is often used with burner phones. 4G is what we use the most now. 4G towers also have longer connection ranges than 2G or 3G. LTE stands for \"long term evolution\" and it's basically just 4G with more continuous development, so it ends up being somewhat faster. 5G has two types. The one most people associate it with, and the type that most carriers are building, is called \"millimeter wave 5G\" and actually is a large development in comparison to 3G or 4G. It carries incredibly high upload and download speeds, but it can't travel through walls easily and each antenna has very little range. The other type is basically just slightly faster 4G. It's only really supported by T-Mobile as far as I know. AT & T also has their \"5G e\" thing but it's literally just 4G with more bandwidth per user. No techincal developments or anything and they were using 5G as a buzzword. For 2G through 4G, I also recommend checking out [this Techquickie video]( URL_0 ) if you want a bit more detail.",
"G is for generation. So each is the next generation of communications technology. 2g is SMS. 3g is data, 4g is 5x faster data. 5g will be faster still."
],
"score": [
21,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OrNuAf6C3I"
],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fxx4ac
|
differences between LAN, MAN, and WAN
|
What are the actual difference between these types of networks? The sites that I can find really only say that LAN's are smaller than MAN's, which are smaller than WAN's.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmwywzd"
],
"text": [
"LAN - your home/office building’s network MAN - your city’s local ISP WAN - a major internet ISP or the Internet as a whole"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fy2jr1
|
in computer science, what does recursive mean?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmxz2i7"
],
"text": [
"recursive means that a function calls itself. The old joke is \"in order to understand recursion, you must first understand recursion\" It would look something like this in Python: def countdown(n): if n == 0: print('Blastoff!') else: print(n) countdown(n - 1) To go through this: You start with the \"def\" command, which defines a function with a name (countdown) and an input, or series of inputs (n in this case) it first checks to see if n is 0, and if it is, it prints out \"Blastoff!\" If it does that, it skips the \"else\" and breaks out of itself. If it doesn't do that, it reads the else, where it will print the value of n, then run a new copy of itself, where n = n-1 This is not a particularly good program since it is going to fail to terminate if given a negative value, but it illustrates the main point: the function has a line where it runs a new instance of itself."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fy6c2h
|
Why is green the choice of color when it comes to editing in/out when recording video?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmygzt3",
"fmyh3t7",
"fmymn4q"
],
"text": [
"Well basically because humans aren’t green. Green isn’t anywhere close to the human skin tone, while others could potentially confuse the system and cause some issues. The color can also be blue, or pink! These colors are also somewhat rarer to find in clothing.",
"Because it is one of the colours that is most removed from the colour of Skin tone, which means better cleaner lines when editing (well, that's what I was told the other day) a deep rich blue is also quite effective.",
"It’s called “chroma keying” or even just “keying” for short if you’re interested in looking it up further in the old google machine. As someone already mentioned, digital sensors “see” green “better”, with film it was blue screens that were the color of choice due to how (most popular ones I guess) film color science works."
],
"score": [
17,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fyeqmt
|
Why is internet service inconsistent and unreliable for days or weeks after a thunderstorm rolls through town?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fmziu4b"
],
"text": [
"Water can get trapped in the COAX cable and then does all sorts of things to the signal. When I did that kind of work, any low points we built into the wire run also included slitting the wire casing on the bottom so any water that got into the casing would drain out."
],
"score": [
8
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fymt6m
|
how do people make those rewritten games? like club penguin and toon town. how do they get access to the files and stuff?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn0shv4"
],
"text": [
"Data scraping If you are accessing the game, you are usually processing almost all of the data on your computer - it's faster and cheaper for the companies to do it that way. You can just scrape that data. Sometimes the data is in unique formats but once yiu understand the structure you can usually scrape anything client-side and remake anything missing yourself"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fysf9n
|
How do 360 camera views works in vehicles?
|
I don't understand how a vehicle shows a video of the top of your vehicle. Is it a satellite or some random camera?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn1l7m5"
],
"text": [
"The picture of the car in the middle is basically a stock photo of a car. Then there are multiple cameras (generally at least four) with very wide fields of view installed around the car (for instance, on the side they might be on the mirrors; on the rear they'll be tucked into the trunk, etc.). So, ultimately it's mostly a visual illusion that makes it look like it's coming from \"over\" the car, but it's really different pictures coming from *around* the car."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fysy6b
|
How did the bright colors of some World War II tank camouflages help conceal the vehicle?
|
I am a bit of a casual fan of historical armored fighting vehicles, and something that I've noticed from a lot of World War II camouflage patterns is that many of them include bright reds, bright yellow tan colorations, and even sometimes sky blue colors. For example, [this Tiger II MOC]( URL_1 ) and [this Matilda]( URL_0 ). There are other examples that I am having difficulty finding of StuG tanks with bright red, green, and tan coloration used in *Europe*, which would've been densely populated with *foliage*. How were such camouflage schemes helpful in concealing or preventing recognition of the vehicle? I understand that paint camouflage's purpose is usually to hinder quick recognition of the vehicle but wouldn't bright colors just attract attention?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn1qcz2",
"fn1qvip"
],
"text": [
"This is what I was led to understand about why there is red in Germany’s WWII camouflage. Many of the tanks from Germany sported red camouflage because when they were built, the tanks were initially painted with a dark red metal primer. Later, near the end of the war, things like paint and time became scarce. So it was decided to send the tanks out in the red primer color. However some were painted with additional camouflage colors when supplies allowed.",
"Camouflage patterns are often tailored to the specific region the vehicles are operating in. Bright yellows, pink, tan, and red and usually associated with dessert terrain. Famously the Land Rovers used by the SAS in North Africa were painted pink (pink panthers), it's said that this was because an Aircraft had been painted pink to be easily spotted but after it crashed it couldn't be found in the desert. But contrary to popular belief the pink color was likely an accident. The paint was supposed to be more like a desert tan but dried pink. But it proved effective so they kept it. This doesn't mean camo is always effective though, in all honesty armies tried just about everything in WW2 with varying degrees of effectiveness. Different camo theories, manufacturers, and supply shortages all factored in. Sometimes to tried to hide the vehicles, other times to make them more visible. Just because it's in a textbook and it saw use in the field doesn't mean it actually worked. This is still a problem to this day. The American ACU pattern uniform for example was widely criticized as being ineffective and that's after 60 years of wide spread Camouflage research and development."
],
"score": [
5,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fytape
|
What exactly does the "closed" mean in closed captions?
|
I know it means it's "closed" to the viewer, but why is this necessary to mention? Are closed captions different from just "captions"? Thanks for any answers.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn1pjvl",
"fn2elyn"
],
"text": [
"Open Captions are ones that that always showing, and can't be turned off or on. Closed Captions indicate that you have the option of turning the captions on or off.",
"[Everything you never wanted to know about Closed Captions.]( URL_0 )"
],
"score": [
54,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SL6zs2bDks"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fyvnil
|
What are ELF antennas and what is their intended purpose?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn245ar"
],
"text": [
"ELF = Extremely Low Frequency, from 3 to 30Hz or 3Hz-30kHz depending on the area of study. These are used most often for communicating with submarines, as these frequencies can penetrate seawater well, and are also used for atmospheric science and studies because they are naturally generated by lightning and changes in Earth's magnetic field. Re: submarine communications, the US, Russia, India and China are the only countries known to have built antennas for this use, and the US decommisioned them in 2004."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fyvsa8
|
What is sensor fusion in self driving cars? How do people who write algorithms for this?!
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn258md"
],
"text": [
"Sensor fusion is when you use multiple different sensors to get a more accurate observation. To understand how it works, you need to remember that all your sensors are observing the same phenomenon. As a result, you can look for correlations between the sensor data - even when those sensors are collecting different types of data - that will help you refine your observation. Perhaps the most common sort of sensor fusion is a Kalman filter. While there are more advanced machine learning techniques and non-adaptive techniques like beamforming that would also fall under this rubric, Kalman filters still remain a foundational introduction to the notion. To understand this in principle, imagine you have 3 friends in the same class. One of them can only tell you the color of someone's hair. One of them can only tell you how tall someone is. One of them can only tell you whether they're male or female. If one of your classmates is alone in the room and your three peek into the room, no one of your 'sensors' will be able to inform you who is in the room with the information they're allowed to disclose. But if you 'fuse' the information from those three 'sensors', you probably have a good idea who is in the room."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fywlhe
|
How does subnetting work for IPv4 addresses?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn297nc"
],
"text": [
"Write the numbers of the IP address out in bits. 4 8 bit numbers. Like 192.168.20.17 = 11000000.10101000.00010100.00010001 . Then write the subnet mask out the same way. 255.255.0.0 = 11111111.11111111.00000000.00000000. Where do the 1’s stop and the zeroes start? In this case after 16 bits. So the first 16 bits of the IP address are the subnet - 192.168.0.0"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fz29hl
|
How do Netflix servers output the same video files to a huge number of people without any delay?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn2u678",
"fn380ex",
"fn31juf"
],
"text": [
"There is a technology called CDN (content delivery network). The videos will be stored in each of network providers in your country and delivered through you. That's why the video won't lag while you watch them.",
"Let’s say you are in a huge classroom and a pencil sharpener is in one corner of that room. Ever time you need to sharpen your pencil you need to walk all the way to that corner, sharpen it and then comeback to your seat. And if there are more people wanting to do the same, you have to wait your turn and it will take longer. Now imagine each row has their own sharpener, it will take less time and less people in the queue. It will be faster. That’s how the content is served. Instead of everyone going to one place to get their video content, they just go to the place which is closer to them which will reduce time to serve you the video content. Replace “place” with data center and “sharpener” with video file. There are thousands of these data centers spread across the world and the same content is replicated across all these data centers. Also, like someone else that mentioned the folks that provide you internet service host these content directly as well to make it even faster.",
"First of all there are a LOT of servers. They actually give them away to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to put in spots that are close to large numbers of users. Netflix knows where they are (the ISP tells them) and what's on it. So when a user nearby watches something the server has Netflix will direct them to that machine to let them watch it. Through analytics and statistics Netflix knows what is most popular and will fill up the server with what is most popular to ensure it has those files ready. Second, the servers themselves are designed to be fast. They have SSD hard drives for the really popular stuff, MANY spinning hard drives so that each one has its own mechanism that moves to get data ready, and there are several fiber-optic connections into the server to go to the network. This results in a machine that can get data from disk out the network really easily."
],
"score": [
96,
78,
11
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fz5673
|
How do synthesizers work? Can computer software replace them?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn33uf7"
],
"text": [
"[Yes, of course.]( URL_0 ) A (modern) traditional synth is basically a little computer that can modify and mix sounds on demand, with a large musical keyboard as the input instead of a mouse+keyboard. Arguably, every PC is doing the same thing as a synth when its using the computer's audio outputs to make sound. Older analog synths didn't have a computer inside and had analog circuits to create/shape electrical waves, but in the end the results are basically the same."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://midi.city/"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fz6ql0
|
Why do some credit card readers tell you to insert and remove your card as quickly as possible and others tell you to leave it in for several seconds?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn3bgy7"
],
"text": [
"The ones that want you to go fast are reading the swipe strip. The ones that want you to hold it are reading the chip. Chip is more secure and the rest of the world has been using it for years. America is currently catching up with the new tech, but there's a lot of POS out there that don't read chips."
],
"score": [
53
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fz7v5p
|
Why do selfies not capture what you look like in a mirror?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn3hku7"
],
"text": [
"Your brain is expecting the mirror/reverse image. It is what you think you look like, the photo shows you what you look like from a different perspective ( URL_0 )"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.distractify.com/fyi/2018/07/30/29YpYr/why-do-i-look-different-in-pictures"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fzaj2r
|
How does a computer know when it does the right thing when using learning algorithms? Why/how does it care about the reward system assigned?
|
I know that in computer learning algorithms, there is a reward function which somehow gives the computer a higher reward output the better it does, but how does the computer use that reward output to improve itself in future generations?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn3sd8u",
"fn3tnv9",
"fn3v9ih",
"fn3zquz",
"fn4182z"
],
"text": [
"A bigger number (higher reward) is better. So the computer will use elements from the times where it got the highest reward. That'll shape its behavior in the future.",
"[Here's the wikipedia article]( URL_0 ), and you can see that it groups the different learning algorithms into several broad categories: supervised learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, etc. Basically, \"the right thing to do\" can either be \"trained\" by the operator, or there can be some sort of function where the computer \"judges\" the results by itself and gives itself a score. And the \"reward system\" is typically programmed in with the algorithm itself. Look at [this article]( URL_1 ) about actual algorithms and how they work, and you'll see that the \"rewards\" or how it keeps track of progress are part of the algorithm itself.",
"It doesn’t know. It doesn’t care. There is an evaluation function. The computer tries to maximize or minimize that function as desired.",
"Let's do a simple example: you have a spoon, and your goal is to balance it on your finger. The reward function is how long does it stay on the finger. If you don't have \"intuition\" you put the spoon randomly in space. It doesn't even touch your finger. 0 reward. Then at some point the spoon touch your finger, bounce, then fall. Reward 0.1 sec. Ah ha! Next time I should try again in that region. Then you become better and better at bouncing on the finger. You might put the spoon really high to bounce multiple time and increase your reward. But sometimes you happen to put it really close to the center of gravity of the spoon. It stays 2 to 3 seconds. Crazy progress! While you don't know things like center of gravity, you do know to put the spoon \"around here\" the more you try, the less you change the position, and eventually you reach a position where the spoon stay indefinitely. It's the same for machine learning, each tiny parameter get adjusted randomly, and when you improve your result you decide to stay around those values more.",
"Most learning algorithms use gradient descent or some variation, this a key part in the learning process because that's how the algorithms know how to efficiently update the parameters to increase the reward (or decrease the cost depending on how you look at it). How does gradient descent work? Imagine a robot climbing a mountain, the robot only has an altitude sensor and a compass so it doesn't know how the mountain looks like, it only knows in which direction is going and whether the altitude increases or not. The objective of course is to reach the highest altitude. The robot will look at how a step in every direction changes the altitude. It may find that going North and going East increases the altude, and that going North increases it more, so it will take a big step to the North and a small step to the East. It will calculate how big each step needs to be to effectively follow the path with the greatest slope. In this way the robot will keep updating it's position until eventually reaches the top where any other step would decrease the altitude. Of course if a mountain has several peaks there's no guarantee the robot will reach the highest one. A very common variation of gradient descent consists in telling the robot to take some steps at random so it can possibly get off a peak and explore more of the mountain."
],
"score": [
7,
6,
5,
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning",
"https://www.dataquest.io/blog/top-10-machine-learning-algorithms-for-beginners/"
],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fzc0nc
|
How do "speedrunners" discover intricate glitches that require you to do a lot of seemingly random pixel-perfect moves?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn3xfvi",
"fn3xuaf"
],
"text": [
"Constant repetition and intuition. When you play a single room in a game over and over and over again occasionally you do something unusual and analyze what just happened. Repeatable glitches get documented online and speed runners take advantage of numerous ones discovered over the years and misc players. People also review the de-compiled code of video games to understand how they work underneath in order to take advantage. Once you understand that a particular glitch or mechanism is possible in a game speed runners will try it in various places and in different combinations throughout the game to get the best results from it.",
"In many cases, speed runners have a close relationship with the tool assisted speedrun (TAS) community. TAS runners often look through the game's code itself to find new oddities and exploits. Information sharing between the two communities has had a lot of benefits and breakthroughs."
],
"score": [
10,
6
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fzc8ei
|
How to graphics card driver updates improve performance in certain games/programs?
|
Do the driver updates just correct errors or does the driver make the hardware do different things based on which game is running to "fix" poorly written game code? I thought a driver is just a way to access the hardware and should work the same for all games. Also why are graphics drivers huge (400MB+ file size for the installer)?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn3xixx",
"fn44gxi"
],
"text": [
"Usually driver updates just patch errors and inefficient bits of code. Since running code takes time and energy, cleaning up inefficiencies can make games run better by making it take less time or resources to calculate a particular thing. As for why drivers are huge... they've got to contain all the code to run an entire video output and all of the calculations underlying most rendering principles, as well as specific optimisations for thousands of games and softwares. That's a lotta code.",
"Graphics card drivers translates api commands into hardware commands. You can make games run more efficiently by translating api commands into more efficient (or fewer) hardware commands. Or you can translate them to utilize your available hardware resources more efficiently. Such as changing the way your thread dispatcher sends shaders to the EUs. And you can analyze the type of workload for the game and do different things depending on the game to more efficiently utilize your hardware. The actual driver is small but the installer containz a lot of bundled software that you may or may not care about. They want to bundle the most amount of crap for you so theres only.one thing to download regardless of what you choose to install."
],
"score": [
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fzjt2y
|
Why do computers need restarting?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn4ieyc",
"fn4lk9d"
],
"text": [
"Software bugs (mistakes made by humans) put the computer into a bad state. Something is incorrect and since the computer can’t always fix itself, restarting (reloading the software) will put it into a less broken state.",
"The computer has lots of invisible programs that run in the background and are essential for the correct execution of the apps you actually use. This processes exist on the RAM memory of the computer, which is temporal and is emptied when the computer is turned off. Sometimes this invisible programs or processes get into a bad state and are incapable of doing what they are supposed to, making all the other apps and functions of the computer to stop working or performing badly. Restarting the computer, as said before, clears the memory this processes use and makes them start again with a clean state, potentially solving lots of issues. Another reason to do so, is that sometimes when you close a program not all the processes or background tasks associated to it are removed, restarting the computer cleans all those “zombies” processes, freeing up memory and reducing the amount of work for the CPU, which translates to speeding up the system Hope it helps!"
],
"score": [
7,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fzlqwt
|
Why do old movies have such quiet dialogue but loud sound effects?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn4yxi6",
"fn58tjn",
"fn5917u",
"fn5n6w6",
"fn5ok3x",
"fn5mgf2"
],
"text": [
"This is definitely the case for newer movies as well. The levels are mixed for movie theater systems where loud explosions and other effects can be exciting without scaring your pets or annoying your neighbors. Dialog is generally panned so it affects only the front speakers and other effects are distributed depending on their source. When it all gets boiled down to a simpler speaker system (in your home), the mismatch in balance becomes horrible apparent. Drives me crazy. I wish streaming services evened out the levels (normalization or compression) when they convert to digital format.",
"This applies to movies in general, regardless of when they were made. The reason is dynamic range. Movies are mixed to be realistic. In the real world, you sometimes have very loud sounds and very quiet sounds. Even the range of volumes that a person's voice can have is very large - just compare someone talking quietly at night, vs. someone shouting. Your TV's speakers, or typical computer speakers or cheap HiFi systems, cannot reproduce this range. They don't go loud enough, so if they play back everything quieter than expected, now the quiet parts are too quiet. And you're probably going to be listening in an environment with background noise (people moving, cars outside, appliance hum, etc). Basically, the level of background noise sets the quietest thing you can hear, and the maximum level of your speakers sets the loudest thing you can hear. Anything else has to fit between there. So music and TV productions have their audio *compressed* (this has nothing to do with file compression like MP3s, the same word is used for two things). Quieter things are made louder and louder things are made quieter. Then everything fits comfortably in the volume range that your TV or HiFi can reproduce in your living room, and all is well. Radio stations compress things even more, especially because they expect people to be listening in their cars, and cars are an even worse environment with a lot of background noise. But movies are mixed for a movie theater. That's a very quiet environment with a huge speaker system, so it can comfortably reproduce sounds from whispers to loud explosions. In a movie theater, you can hear the quietest details without issue, and still have bangs blasted at you. As long as the movie gives some time between those sections for your ears to adjust, it all sounds great. But if you now take the same movie audio track and play it back at home... It doesn't sound so great. Loud sound effects will be about as loud as your speakers can handle, but dialogue will now be too low, and whispers all but inaudible, and buried in background noise. Modern home releases probably remaster the audio a bit more to reduce the dynamic range under the expectation that people will listen to it on something simpler than a high-end home theater system, but only to an extent. The more you adjust for low end systems, the crappier it sounds on high end ones, so it's not something that studios want to do lightly.",
"This is how I felt with Game of Thrones. Dialogue was so quiet but all other sounds were ear killers",
"A lot of TVs have built in volume normalization that you can turn on to compress the audio and reduce the dynamic range. Another nice thing about having a PC as a media center is if your TV doesn't have a decibel limiter or volume balancer you can setup a customizable compressor of your choosing.",
"A lot of this is down to videos that have surround sound soundtracks being played on misconfigured equipment. Videos with multichannel audio (i.e. more channels than just left and right) places focused dialogue mainly in the centre channel. For cinemas and those of us with multichannel setups at home the centre speaker sits directly under, above or behind the screen. Now if you don't have a dedicated centre speaker on your system and find that dialogue is really quiet in the left/right speakers compared to other sounds you're just hearing the overbleed or ambience of the dialogue in the stereo channels because your TV/audio system is not properly downmixing the multichannel audio down to two channels. It is just playing the left/right channels of a multichannel soundtrack and discarding the rest (the centre, surround and subwoofer channels). Dig into the audio settings of the player (blu-ray, media player, console, smart TV, Kodi etc.) and whatever's producing the audio (TV, soundbar, amplifier etc.) and make sure everything has the number of channels/speakers set to Stereo or 2.0. That should mix down the output of all those other channels into the left and right channels on your TV or stereo/2.0 system and should fix your dialogue problem.",
"I was watching the old James Bond films tonight with my BF and I commented to him that the sound really annoyed me because of exactly this! Kinda ruins he movie for me😕"
],
"score": [
208,
38,
6,
4,
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fzmmzy
|
How did long pre-industrial ship voyages deal with drinking water?
|
It seems like the amount of fresh water you'd need for a crew of say 15 for months or even years would be massive. Food is more easily stocked but how did they deal with drinking water on long voyages?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn50q7t",
"fn51y35",
"fn51obe",
"fn50x4t",
"fn5j9ol",
"fn58mv2",
"fn56dyp",
"fn5dqv4",
"fn5a3lu",
"fn5hvx3",
"fn5rkkt",
"fn5ixvn",
"fn5pq1y",
"fn61vg2",
"fn5t258",
"fn643eb",
"fn6cik2",
"fn5h2c2",
"fn5zurd",
"fn6e80z",
"fn5z3u4",
"fn6ayiy",
"fn6ag7b"
],
"text": [
"They carried one month's worth of barrels of drinkable water onboard and refilled them every time they reach land. EDIT: beer, wine, or brandy were often mixed with the kegs of fresh water to keep the water from developing algae and making it palatable. In the 17th century, these beverages were replaced with Rum which brought forward the existence of ['Grog']( URL_0 ).",
"They never stayed out to sea the whole time. A 15 month voyage would involve several resupply stops, either at a nearby port or a beach.",
"They would also take advantage of rainfall, setting up collection points. But for the most part, water was the most limited resource on a sail age ship, every opportunity to replenish was taken advantage of. In a voyage of more than a month, some stop for water was planned.",
"You bring it along. In form of straight water, Mead, or beer. You ration it for per person per day. Yea that's alot of beer for a months long voyage",
"They typically carried three types of beverage. 1) clean water, this didn’t last long. 2) beer, like 2% alcohol. Everyone could drink this and not really be “drunk” but it lasted a while in barrels. 3) liquor, like Rum. This was the last source of liquid that would be safe to drink. Refill those supplies anytime you got and call it good. Low alcohol beer was used for people on land too. It was safe to drink, even somewhat nutritious, and lasted a while in storage.",
"They often drank beer instead, even children. Beer at the time had a lower alcohol content. Since beer is boiled during its manufacture and contained healthy bacteria, it was a much safer alternative to regular water. Beer also has higher nutrients and vitamins than regular water. Nautical voyages also gave rise to punch, since higher proof alcohol keeps for long periods of time. Often the alcohol was not as refined (read: tasted horrible) so it was mixed with sugar and juices. There is an old rhyme for making punch from the 1600s that I still use to make punch today: “one part sour, two parts sweet, three parts strong, and four parts weak”. In a practical recipe, that would be one part lemon juice, two parts simple syrup or juice, three parts alcohol (I like to mix Cava and vodka), and four parts seltzer. And add some citrus to keep the scurvy at bay.",
"It only took Colombus 36 days to sail across the Atlantic. Most of the time ships were just sailing back and forth from trading ports so they stayed close to the coast.",
"The ancient Chinese (in the 1400s) reportedly would use an on-ship distilling process where they boiled seawater and collected the steam moisture as pure water to drink. But this was dangerous because it involved fire, on wooden ships. & #x200B; Edit: I do need to point out that this comes from Gavin Menzies' book *1421*, which has been challenged as historically inaccurate.",
"It's also worth mentioning that it regularly rains at sea. It sounds funny, but it's true. This wasn't something you could rely on like islands and ports and things, but it did help lengthen the rations a fair bit.",
"Ships often made frequent stops to fill up on basic supplies. Ships had to be pretty big to handle open-ocean crossings, and even then did them in hops when they could. If you study ocean maps, a lot of these tiny and ignored islands used to be thriving pit stops, and shipping routes would account for this.",
"They also used rainwater. And sometimes they just ran out. Like in the Rome of the Ancient Mariner. \"Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.\"",
"People didn't drink a lot of water like you'd think, even outside of long sea voyages. They drank alcohol. Water, while being the giver of life, also gives life to malaria, cholera and all sorts of other bad bacteria. The fermentation process that makes beer, wine, rum and other alcohol kills the harmful stuff in water. The biggest ingredient in an alcoholic beverage is still water, and even then they watered that down with regular H2O a bit to stretch it out. Grog, for example, was rum mixed with water. On long voyages they rationed it out, but there was always the problem of not having enough of everything. As was said elsewhere, most voyages were not extremely far from land with fresh water (in case of the unpredictability of rain) for extremely long periods of time. Voyages of discovery usually hugged coastlines and stayed close enough to where people had been before so they could make maps and find their way back. It was rare that they would just sail out into the open ocean without an idea of where they were going and how long it would take to get there.",
"Grog... They mixed alcohol with water to keep it fresher longer. IPA. India Pale Ale has a higher alcohol content than other Ales of the day so it wouldn't spoil on the voyage from Britain to India. Alcoholic beverages, for a very long time, we're common due to fresh drinking water being hard to come by.",
"i know on some routes they used giant turtles as a source of meat and water, they used to stack them alive on the decks and select one for the chop whenever it was needed. apparently the meat of the turtle rivalled or bettered that from calves, lamb, chicken and pork. & #x200B; > The meat of a giant tortoise has variously been described as tasting superior to chicken, beef and pork whereas their fat is likened to tasting better than the [purest butter.]( URL_0 ) & #x200B; [ URL_1 ]( URL_1 )",
"Polynesians would cook ti plant roots for 4 days and suck the moisture and nutrients out of it as one example",
"I would actually like to hear about this problem from the point of view of polynesian sailors in double hulled waka. who didn't have things such as barrels and sailed from eastern polynesia down to New zealand, up to Hawaii and across to Rapanui (Eaater Island).",
"They used wooden barrels for almost every liquid, so the problem was that water after a while starts to create a layer of mold and algae inside the barrels, as it wasn't distilled water of course. Usually it was one of the major limits of longer voyages, and one of the most important aspects to keep in mind for sailors. They used to stop along the way on the coasts, but that could help up until a certain point. The best solution though, was alcohol and spirits. They prevented molding, it lasted forever, and it was cheap and usually easily produced everywhere. This is one of the main reasons why it was in every ship, and why the general image of a pirate is a guy drinking rum! Also, it kept the morale high, so it really was perfect for long travels, where you wouldn't see land for months at times.",
"Wouldn't they have a rudimentary steam still of some sort to make fresh water from sea water? They could use the left over salt for seasoning food.",
"They drank alot of rum as lasts forever. Mixed rum and water to make there 'grog'. Eventually figured adding lime helped with scurvy",
"I don’t think it has been mentioned but rain collection is also useful. Simply rig a sail into a trough shape and place a barrel at one end.",
"Mostly weak beer and rum after the water had gone bad. And not just a shot of rum either, unbelievable amounts. 8 pints beer, half a pint of rum per day according to wiki but I have read that the rum ration was much larger. URL_0",
"Poorly, actually. History is rife with stories and accounts of sailors resorting to extreme measures when the water supply ran out, such as rigging sails as tarps to catch rainwater and fill barrels, drinking their own urine and so on, and just plain dying of thirst.",
"I'm really thankful that you asked this question, OP! My father is a historian, and he's done a podcast about exactly this question! It's in french though, and it's called \"Les maladies de l'eau\" meaning litterally \"Water's illnesses\". Here's the link if you want to watch it: URL_0 Quick answer like you're five (according to pre-industrial era knowledge) - First, water is potable; -Then it isn't. (Worms and such); - Worms die, water is potable, but not tasty; - Then other bad stuff happens to water; - Then again it is potable. (Still doesn't taste good though); - For one last time, it turns bad; - After that, it's good for a looong time. But, you know, still not like a clear spring water."
],
"score": [
6198,
1246,
1028,
872,
828,
663,
124,
118,
59,
49,
33,
23,
22,
17,
12,
7,
6,
4,
3,
3,
3,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grog"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=k-T-PC6p0u4C&pg=PA98&dq=giant+tortoise+tasty&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiC6tyuq4rQAhWlLcAKHU72AEwQ6AEIJjAA#v=onepage&q=giant%20tortoise%20tasty&f=false",
"http://www.factfiend.com/tortoise-delicious-live/"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rum_ration"
],
[],
[
"http://104histoires.com/030-les-maladies-de-leau-bord-des-bateaux/"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fzphyb
|
What is RISC-V and how can it be different from the x86/64?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn5l1zt"
],
"text": [
"It's an instruction set architecture (ISA). A computer program works by sending a string of instructions to the cpu. The cpu will understand certain instructions and do something in response to that instruction. The instruction set architecture is a specification of what instructions a compliant cpu will understand and what it will do in response to that instruction. For example, a particular ISA might specify that a certain CPU should accept the instruction LDAxxxx and it should interpret that as \"load the data at memory address xxxx into register a\". A different ISA might specify that LDAxxxx means \"load the value xxxx into the memory address currently stored in register a\". Obviously, an application program needs to know what ISA the CPU complies with, so that it can issue the correct instructions. When we say that a CPU is compliant with the RISC-V architecture, we mean that it will accept the instructions listed in the RISC-V standard, and will understand those instructions to mean what the standard says they mean. At the highest level, the only real difference to x86/64 is that x86 processors will instead accept the instructions listed in the x86 standard and interpret them accordingly. Driving a bit deeper, one of the most obvious differences between these two ISAs is that one is RISC (reduced instruction set computer), the other is CISC (complex instruction set computer). If your ISA has a fairly short list of instructions (RISC), then you can dedicate a small chunk of the CPU to implementing each instruction on the list in hardware. With a CISC computer, the list of instructions is very long and you can't implement each instruction in hardware, as the sheer number of instructions each requiring their own section of the CPU would make the chip uneconomically large. Instead, a CISC chip (such as the x86) implements every instruction as a small program stored on the chip somewhere and the actual hardware is actually just a fairly simple interpreter for these programs. Because there is a limited number of instructions, an application written for RISC typically requires many more instructions than the same application written for CISC. However, because each instruction is implemented in hardware directly, each instruction executes very quickly. Provided you make sure to carefully optimize all your code, the benefits of fast execution are greater than the disadvantages of having to execute more instructions. In other words, RISC should, on balance, run faster overall. In the past when a lot of software was written in assembler code, you couldn't always guarantee that the code was optimized, so RISC was kinda a gamble. As higher level languages took over from assembler in the 90s, and compilers (that can be relied upon to always optimize the code) became ubiquitous, the popularity of RISC increased. However, RISC had never fully replaced CISC, in part, because its harder to add special purpose extensions to RISC architectures without turning them into unwieldy beasts. These special purpose extensions provide an enormous performance benefit for certain specific tasks. So modern CISC chips are usually faster at a couple of things that most users do frequently, while RISC chips are faster at everything else. On balance this means that a modern CISC chip might be a better choice once again."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fzq70o
|
Why do phones take up way lesser time to boot up than a pc?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn5k7uf"
],
"text": [
"There is a lot less to boot up, but it also depends on your PC. A good processor and a solid state drive without a bunch of autorun programs"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
fzs1sb
|
what's difference between ham and salami especially regarding meat content?
|
You can find in supermarket sliced hams proudly showing on package 96% meat content, while salami has written in small letters on back they used 140g of meat to produce 100g of salami without showing off. Is the difference in quality of meat in ham mostly unprocessed while in salami highly processed low quality meat? edit: I'm curious about this since ham with 96% meat content cost at least 30% more than 140/100 salami and it doesn't make sense to me, since ham preparation seem much simpler and consumes less meat to prepare final product
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn5tscw",
"fn5tzld"
],
"text": [
"There's a huge difference. So much that's hard to compare those two The 140g of meat to produce 100g of salami gives away that that meat was dehydrated a lot. That happens through a very very slow process. I don't know the technical terms, but the meat spend months, sometimes years, in a dry room and they let a kind of fungus grow on it. It's an expensive process to some extent, given how delicate it is. All the variables must be taken care of, because if one thing goes wrong, large amounts of a product take can literally take years to be ready for consume, go to waste. Ham doesn't go through that process. Although I can't explain it technically, they are so so different that I can't help but wonder how come you're asking what the difference is. They look, smell and taste absurdly different. There's no similarity at all. But yeah, the difference regarding meeting content is that the salami meat loses a lot of water (thus mass) through a long dehydration process when it's cured. Ham, on the other hand, doesn't.",
"Ham is a whole cut of meat that is the upper hip of the rear legs of the pig. It is typically smoked (but can be wet cured) and commonly has a sugar glaze of some-kind be it honey or maple based. Salami is a kind of sausage preparation. It is ground pork mixed with spices and sometimes things like garlic and onions, cured in a fermentation liquid, and then dried to the point of dehydration. It is sometimes smoked while drying. Many varieties allow specific colonies of fungus to grow on the outsides during drying. I am not sure what the percentages of meat content are, I buy both salami and ham from a deli counter and not prepackaged, but I would assume the difference is water content."
],
"score": [
5,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fztegs
|
in large battles where armies needed moving hundreds of miles (romans eg) where do they get food/drinks?
|
Surely you can’t carry all that water and food for thousands and thousands of men abouts to into battle?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn600d3",
"fn61c0p"
],
"text": [
"They either foraged off the land, camped near cities/villages and requisitioned the supplies, or had long baggage trains (mostly non-combatants hauling wagons) with enough supplies to last them the campaign season.",
"For battle they would drop off their equipment and pack animals at the camp. They would carry some food and water into battle but not more then for a few hours. The best organized armies (like the Romans) would have skirmishers that were lightly armored who would return to camp for supplies and bring it to the front lines. So soldiers would be getting fresh water, weapons and food brought to them during battle. For marches they would preferably live off the land. In front of the army were a number of scouts who in addition to looking for enemies would also look for places to camp and forage as well as locate villages and farms with food stores. Taxes were usually collected as rations for the army anyway so collecting the taxes directly was not an issue. Water would be taken from nearby rivers. Issues with dried up or polluted rivers is a rather new problem. In addition the army would maintain a supply line from the capitol with the help of messengers. So that tax that were collected from areas of the country the army had not been to yet could be brought to the army. Without this supply line the army would have to move slower as they would have to stop to forage or pillage in order to get enough supplies."
],
"score": [
7,
6
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fztfqd
|
what makes computers do what you program them to
|
Before you explain this to me I need to clarify: I’ve built a few computers alone in the past If you send me a picture of any inch of a pc interior I can identify it and tell you what it is. But what I don’t understand is how, for example, when you code something, why the fuck does it do what it’s coded to. Like what is forcing it to obey what you typed in cmd?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn62mpp",
"fn636fj",
"fn65vha"
],
"text": [
"start with a light switch. then imagine two light switches that control one light. swap out the light and replace it with a switch flipping device, so now switches can control other switches. its possible for this mess of switches do to simple math or logic operations. these switches work in a similar way to the transistors in a CPU. many small very simple logical and mathematical circuits are linked together to build the complex circuitry of a CPU. here's a basic intro to how comuters add. i recommend this guys channel for anyone who is interested in learning about the underlying workings of a computer. URL_0",
"A computer is actually really, really, really \\*stupid\\*. At it's base, core, most tiny detail, it only knows how to tell a 1 from a 0. & #x200B; 1 means go left. 0 means go right. (Not really, but just for ELI5) & #x200B; How do you get to Washington DC from Washington state by driving? I could tell you a whole series of highway names, exits to take, and routes to choose. Or, I could just give you a series of \"turn left\" and \"turn right\" commands and you would get there perfectly fine without having to even be aware of any of that highway naming stuff. You only had to know two things. To turn or not, and which direction. To an outsider it might look like you understood a whole bunch of geography, highway maps, and planned out a route but really you just took two inputs. & #x200B; So imagine you have a bunch of sensors which can detect a series of 0 or a 1, and this sensor only does one thing if it detects a specific pattern. A series of 00001111 triggers a different hardwired response than 00110011, but the response will ALWAYS be the same, and it's only in the order that these base binary values are fed into the chips that determine how the system behaves as a whole. & #x200B; For example, take the numbers 2, 4, 6, and 8. And take the symbols + and -. 2 + 4 + 6 + 8 is not the same as 1 + 4 - 6 + 8. You've fed the same sequences, just in a different order, and got a completely different result. & #x200B; Only there are a dozen layers of firmware/software built ontop of the hardware. So that simple ability to read a 1 and a 0 and to know it means \"go left\" and \"go right\" becomes a far more complex and fully featured system because it can read a series of values instead of just one.",
"Other answer are great ELI5. However, for those of you who are interested in actually learning how a computer works, I strongly recommend the [NAND to Tetris]( URL_0 ) course on Coursera. It takes you from 0 to building a quite inefficient APU and all the other components from there on. It doesn't hide anything from you, so you get to know how everything works."
],
"score": [
10,
7,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJc9CZcvBc"
],
[],
[
"https://www.coursera.org/learn/build-a-computer"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fzty97
|
what makes a code language work
|
Like I get that scripting and code = working OS. But why does that jumbo of words and numbers and shit make a working system and how is that even recognized
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn63sqh",
"fn64u1c"
],
"text": [
"Computers store billions and billions of ones and zeros in specific order: ``` 1010 0101 0101 0001 1010 0000 1010 ``` We have made computers in such a way that we can give them simple instructions to change the values of these ones and zeros. These instructions look something like this: 0x 60 01 00 84 0x A4 01 02 00 0x 60 02 00 00 As you can see, this is not very easy for a human to understand. It is possible to learn this kind of machine code, but it would take a very long time to learn and making a modern app with machine code would take something like a thousand years. To make coding simpler, we have made coding languages that are easier for people to understand. These languages usually have many instructions written in English. For example, you can probably figure out what this code prints even if you don't know how to code: let x = 6; if(x < 5) { print(\"x is less than 5!\") } else { print(\"X is more than 5!\") } We can write the code in a way that is easier for people to understand and use a special thing called compiler to turn that code into the machine code and then tell the computer to do what the code says. Edit: Typo",
"There are several levels of abstraction here. At the CPU level, there is machine code, composed of 1's and 0's. These are fed into the CPU in packets called instructions. Every CPU has an instruction set, which is basically a predetermined set of operations that it can perform. For example, let's say that 01010101 is interpreted by the CPU as an instruction to add two numbers, which follow. Those will also be encoded in binary 0 and 1. CPU level operations are very basic, but they are very fast with modern CPUs capable of processing hundreds of millions of them per second. The next level of abstraction is the assembly language. It's still very low level, but instructions are given labels so instead of 01010101, you might need to write ADD in assembly language. The way it's converted into machine code is that assembly instructions are translated via painstakingly written machine code where the mapping of ADD instruction to sequence 01010101 is defined with all of it's requisite rules, such as that adding two numbers requires providing two numeric inputs. The good thing is that the translator only needed to be created once (and tested thoroughly), and then there is little need to go back to machine code unless for some very specialized applications. Assembly language in turn is used to write translators (or compilers) for languages such as C, C++, BASIC, etc. Translation works according to a similar rule where writing something like x = a + b is translated into assembly language (which uses ADD instruction) and that in turn is translated into machine code (which uses 01010101 instruction). This way the programmer need not see machine code or even assembly code. Higher level code can still look very cryptic to the uninitiated, but it's a heck of a lot better than underlying layers. There is yet another possible layer for interpreted rather than compiled code. Some languages (Java, PHP, Python) are not pre-compiled ahead of time. They are translated in real time when the code is run or they use a hybrid solution where a sort of compilation happens at the beginning of a program run and then things proceed as usual. These languages are often less strict in terms of syntax, meaning that they may accept things that are \"wrong\", but will not prevent the user from running the program. If you want to know more about compiling/translating/interpreting code, then look up \"parser\" or \"compiler\" on Wikipedia and go from there."
],
"score": [
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fzyq1t
|
How can multiple TVs connected to one aerial watch different channels
|
I know that the aerial resonates at the particular frequency it wants to receive. In the UK, we have multiplexes that carry multiple channels on one frequency. However, it's still possible for multiple TVs to tune in to different multiplexes at the same time using one aerial. How is this possible?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn6rq7o"
],
"text": [
"> I know that the aerial resonates at the particular frequency it wants to receive This isn't exactly true. The aerial resonates at a lot of frequencies at the same time, especially the ones that are used for television broadcasts (they're specifically designed for that). The signal coming out of the antenna has all of the TV you could watch on it at the same time. Inside the TV is a tuner. The TV's tuner is what resonates at only the frequency for the channel you want to watch. If you have multiple TVs, each of these TVs have their own tuner that can tune to different channels, even if they're connected to the same aerial."
],
"score": [
9
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fzzf9w
|
What is wifi?
|
i know how i interact with it, but i don’t understand the concept of “pockets of data” and how they’re transported?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn6w0l5",
"fn6v96l"
],
"text": [
"wifi is radio signals. the same type of thing that radio in your car gets from the radio station, on a different frequency. the data is broken up into chunks and formatted into differing waves and then broadcasted by the sender, hoping the receiver will hear the broadcast and reply back with a broadcast \"i acknowledge that send\" and hoping the sender hears that ACK so the sender can send the next chunk",
"You want to send your friend a book but can only send it one page at a time. So you add numbers in the bottom corner, rip out all the pages individually, and send them one by one to your friend. All he had to look at are the numbers in the corner, and he can put the book back together."
],
"score": [
6,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
fzzv7e
|
Why is online participation with a unique keycode (and in-person follow up for those who don't respond in time) considered reliable for the US Census but not for Voting? [see link]
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn6yc3s",
"fn76fnn",
"fn7azoc",
"fn7ar76"
],
"text": [
"There isn't all that much incentive to 'cheat' on the Census and correcting the results of such 'cheating' is fairly easy. While the Census is used for apportionment and funding, trying to add/subtract individuals from the Census in sufficient numbers to make a difference would trigger all sorts of red flags. Moreover, any subsequent investigation that uncovered malfeasance would be able to easily correct the figures before they had much (if any) impact. Contrast this with an election, where you have a single winner and everyone else loses. Moreover, the results of an election are difficult to undo even if malfeasance is later discovered unless it can be directly tied to the candidate in question. You can also change the results of an election with a relatively small number of votes - especially if those votes are properly timed (i.e. in response to information you have about the votes already cast). This makes such fraud harder to detect.",
"I am sure that your device is malware and virus free; but can you guarantee that for everyone in your street, in your voting district. Imagine the sort of attack that could be put together by a well funded, not necessarily foreign, team that wants to influence the country for the next four years. This attack on the vote will scale very easily, find a bug and exploit it. It would require the same number of people to change 1000 votes as it would to change 1 vote I will let [Tom Scott]( URL_0 ) explain better (on line voting is from about 8 mins in)",
"Well first I think you need to rephrase the question. It isn't just a question of how reliable census-by-mail is in absolute terms; it's a question of how reliable census-by-mail is versus a door-to-door count. A respondent can lie in person just as well as they can lie by mail. Meanwhile, if fraud is the concern, remember that voting must be anonymized. That is: they can't keep records of who cast which ballots. This makes it much easier for dead people to vote. Investigating and prosecuting fraud is very difficult when you can't keep any records. The same is not true for Census data. Although the Census bureau is forbidden from publicly **publishing** certain details about individuals, they are not forbidden from **keeping** the data. So as soon as fraud was suspected, it would be much easier to investigate.",
"It's because individual votes are supposed to be anonymous. For the census, individuals get a unique keycode, which means you can identify who submitted a single specific response. The census bureau doesn't publish individually identified data, but they have it. For an election, you don't want to be able to identify who submitted a single specific ballot (ideally you wouldn't even be able to know who voted and who didn't, but nobody has found a good way to do that). A digital ballot is just bits on a computer. If you couldn't see where it came from, you couldn't be sure that it was made by a person; it might be the software doing something wrong. So to know that the totals are right, you have to know who every vote came from, but we don't want to know who every vote came from because that's not anonymous. We can't use computers to vote because we can't have both things."
],
"score": [
112,
8,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://youtu.be/LkH2r-sNjQs"
],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g01c0e
|
how can a USB fiber optic cable charge something
|
I was reading about the USB Link cable for the Oculus quest and I might have misunderstood this but it appears to convert to a fiber optic cable and back. From what I understand fiber optic sends data with light pulses as compared to a regular wire that uses electricity. So how can it charge something at the other end, especially something that needs a lot of power?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn77isl"
],
"text": [
"I have no direct info on the Oculus cable but if you look at other they have optical fiber for the data and copper wires for the power. Look at [this one]( URL_0 ). You use fiber for the data because is harder to transfer a high-frequency signal for a long-distance electrical then optically. The power does not have the same problem with length so copper wires work fine if the conductor is thick enough."
],
"score": [
9
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.corning.com/microsites/coc/ocbc/Documents/CNT-075-AEN.pdf"
]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
g02oqh
|
How exactly do industrial potato chip manufacturers slice their potatoes into thin slices?
|
I’m struggling to get my head around how you can process thousands of pounds/kilograms of variably sized potatoes, feed them into a machine, and then magic out standardised, millimeter-thin wafers of potato pre-frying.
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn7ej1l",
"fn7g142"
],
"text": [
"This is one of my favourite shows! They explain how things are made pretty well. URL_0",
"The same way we can cut wood into paper, or slabs if meat into deli meat. By using a stop block and running the incredibly thin remainder across a very sharp blade."
],
"score": [
14,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://youtu.be/KU3O7A82DLs"
],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
g051vg
|
How do hashtags on twitter start trending? Who decides that everyone will start using the same exact hashtag at the same exact time?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn7s9d9"
],
"text": [
"They don’t unless an official group puts it out with notifications Else it’s seen and adopted"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g05b42
|
Why was a heavily compressed Zoom Video feed, much higher quality when viewed through my iPhone?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn7u9oh"
],
"text": [
"Find some pixel art drawings. If you look at it zoomed out, you can know what it is, if you put it on the full screen zoomed in. It's hard to know what it is"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g05ofp
|
Why the US government still uses floppy disks?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn7wnus"
],
"text": [
"Don't listen to trolls. Many militaries use generally outdated equipment such as floppies, CDs and other old hardware for one simple reason - they are difficult to hack into. EDIT: I've also read articles of militaries using magnetic tapes."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g0fnif
|
What is the difference between OLED, AMOLED, Super AMOLED, QLED and P-OLED?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn9g1zo"
],
"text": [
"Firstly, I want to say that this topic is very difficult to explain very simply. I do my best here and I'm happy to answer any further questions if something is hard to understand. OLED is a display technology where each tiny point on your display (pixel) has an organic material in them that makes light when you send electricity through it. Organic means the chemical has carbon atoms in it. AMOLED is also an OLED display but it's more complicated. It has special electric components for each pixel that make it easier to control the brightness of each pixel. It uses less energy, creates a better image and is able to change the image faster than a standard OLED display. Super AMOLED is a marketing term created by Samsung for their AMOLED displays. Many smartphone displays have two layers. One layer senses when you touch the display and the other creates a picture on the display. Samsung has made these two layers into one layer. The picture itself is made exactly the same way as with all AMOLED displays. QLED is basically just like any other LED display but it uses very very tiny things called quantum dots to give its pixels more brightness and color. POLED displays are OLED displays that use plastic panels instead of glass. This makes it possible to bend, fold and roll the display without it breaking."
],
"score": [
65
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g0ij3o
|
Why does sometimes when you delete an app from your phone to open up space but when you try to download same thing you deleted it says “not enough space”
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fn9yazf",
"fn9s88b",
"fna4dbe",
"fna0vq8"
],
"text": [
"You know when a house gets built, how there are piles of lumber/materials in the yard, on the driveway, etc that get cleared up once house is built? Similar idea... maybe there’s room for the completed dwelling, but not all the initial construction debris.",
"Ever download a zipped file? You might download a 10 MB compressed file, it needs to expand into a 20MB file, and then after that you can delete the original 10MB file. It's not exactly the same concept, but you can see that there are ways that computers balloon beyond the actual final space used during setup.",
"1. The app may temporarily need more space to install. Think of it as using a extra sheet of paper to help calculate a math problem. 2. Your phone may have used the free space for other things, such as downloading a software update. Think of it as the fridge being filled up by other food after you empty it. 3. The app may have been updated by the developer and is now larger than before. Think of it as upgrading a meal from Medium to Large and how it now takes up more space.",
"I think it might be similar to how a computer writes memory. Once you download something it is stored on a hard drive or memory card. When you delete the program or app most of it deleted but there is always some fragments of data left over on the outer end of the hard drive. The apps you use most often is on the inside of hard drive so those apps starts faster. Remember apps never completely delete and when you install many apps and delete them this will slow your phone or computer eventually just because of memory fragments on the outer edges of your hard drive. You will always lose space that can be used for memory from deletion."
],
"score": [
36,
7,
5,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g0jlbg
|
For automated processes, for example online banking, why do "business days" still exist?
|
Why is it not just 3 days to process, rather than 3 business days? And follow up, why does it still take 3 days?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fna8mml",
"fn9yfxk",
"fnagxty",
"fna97hi",
"fnad8k1",
"fn9z54p",
"fna6az2",
"fnauxsw",
"fnag9ye",
"fnaheoq",
"fnaixw2",
"fnaf9a8",
"fnagtty",
"fnae4si",
"fnbgt36",
"fnago8w",
"fnbmt25",
"fnan373"
],
"text": [
"The majority of these answers are wrong. Yes, the process takes time, but that's only because of the way they're implemented. The answer is similar to the same reason the [IRS is scrambling to hire COBOL developers]( URL_0 ) to make updates - everything in this World is built on aging technology (in this example the bank ACH network), and no one wants to pay to update it when it's easier to just cobble together patches. [One of many sources]( URL_1 ).",
"The user access is online. The banking accounting process is still done by batch at end of day to transmit to the clearing house. The clearing house then does batch end of day to submit to the destination bank.",
"Basically lack of will to do it faster. In the Netherlands we have [Instant Payments]( URL_0 ) which means for transfers between participating banks it takes 5 seconds at any time of the day or week.",
"So, I work in IT for a utility in Canada, and have quite a bit of involvement in our posting process. First of all, we only process payments on business days. We also only perform \"batch billing runs\" on business days. More specifically, at night on business days, to avoid overloading the system everyone is using during the business day, and to avoid database locking issues. We don't invoice/bill customers on weekends or holidays. If we were bigger, we would maybe start doing those things on weekends, but that means someone has to be on call to support it on the weekend. Second, the payment data files come from our bank. Payments that arrive at our bank are posted the next business day, unless we have an issue with the payment data, such as a corrupt or missing file. This could delay the payment by a day or two. Additionally, the payments that come to our bank are collected from the banks that YOU bank at, so there is a one or two day delay for those payments to get to our bank before the data files with the payments are sent to us. Edit to add: if you pay from your account on our website through our credit card processor, we get those payments much faster, as they follow a different path. We actually process payments that come through five different possible paths before they get to us. TLDR: Big companies typically process things at night in batch, to avoid putting a heavy load on the system during the business day, and it can take two or three days for data to get from your bank, to our bank, and then to us to post against your account.",
"A lot of these answers are pretty good (batch processing, manual process, etc...) but you'd be surprised to know how manual it really is. If a bank doesn't have an existing e-bill relationship with a vendor, your auto bill pay isn't really electronic at all. They actually print the check out and physically mail it for you. It's insane. Nobody is printing and mailing checks on weekends or holidays.",
"Banks still work in giant batch transactions. They don't want to constantly deal with Bank A owes Bank B $8, but then Bank B owes Bank A $9, and back and forth all the time. They want single giant transactions for processing between them to reduce confusion.",
"US banks use an old system, in Australia for example bank transfers are now instant. Your intuition is right, there is no technological reason for a delay.",
"Well, one big reason is that in the USA there hasn't been enough government intervention forcing banks to modernise. They don't spend the money to modernise, instead they get slower than banks in other countries. & #x200B; Source: Am immigrant; am constantly irritated at how slow banking is here compared to my home country a decade ago.",
"Related question: If both banks are open on both Saturday and Sunday, then why do they still count those as separate from business days?",
"Because so many of these processes are so far from automated. Most people would be horrified if they could understand the tangled mess of spaghetti code that drives so much of the world's infrastructure.",
"[This episode of Planet Money explains things nicely.]( URL_0 )",
"The government. Financial institutions that rely heavily on daily government interaction (aka banks) also will reflect government hours of operation (at least when it comes to actually processing transactions). It’s only recent that banks started having Saturday hours. Banks work with the federal reserve and regional federal reserve banks daily as transactions are credited and debited against banks. The federal reserve is not open on weekends for processing.",
"For banking transactions there are still human checks in the process. Those checks do not happen on Saturday or Sunday because these 8-5 workers are home on these days. They also get federal holidays off, because banks. These checks are not completed, and therefore must wait. Some things are automatic effective the next business day because those systems are trusted enough to automate entirely and only require review after the fact. Basically, people are still involved at some points and those people generally work bakers hours. & #x200B; Source: Decades in banking.",
"Because many people don't work on weekends like the people who would be fulfilling the order, doing the processing, etc, etc.",
"The replies went down the road about cobol developers. Anyway I am a core banking developer and here is my input. It pretty much depends on the type of payment first of all. In my view, business days exist because a money transfer needs an origin,destination and in between it goes through the clearing house, and for many times, the payment may still arrive to the destination bank but with some minor validation errors that are not detected by clearing house(such as account is not open anymore, invalid name, and so on). These payments go to pending review status, and these can be accpeted or rejected by the user working in the bank. Also, for the majority of the payments (at least SEPA on Europe), you are obliged to follow some rules when it comes to the days that you have if you want to reject or recall the payment. Having days going by, when no worker is able to work on them(non business days) would lead to a less good approach on the payment area, hence customers would be not so satisfied. Another point is also the support from clearing house. If we don't have anyone working on clearing house side, things would be delayed as well. Of course the majority of the payments would go through, but some would just accumulate over the weekend. The same on the receiving bank.",
"Because the back end systems are still ran in batches. Could it be changed? Probably, but why fix what isn't broken? It's a complex system that was written when it made sense to batch up transactions and process them in chucks.",
"Operations Banker here. There are a few reasons but they all remove around how manual the process actual is. Many of your online bill pays still mail a check and everything else still needs to be reviewed via reports so bank employees can catch payments etc with error or insufficient funds. These have to be fixed or rejected with specific coding to fit regulations. So if anything the process being “electronic” is a mirage and it is actually a multi-day process that is still combed through by people.",
"Most of these answers aren’t correct. It is because all of the banking in the US is backed by the federal reserve. So let’s say you get a check from someone using Wells Fargo and you bank at Chase. It isn’t as simple as Wells Fargo sending money to Chase. Chase has to make a request for funds from the federal reserve. The federal reserve in turn has to send that request to Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo will then take the funds from the funding account on the check and let the federal reserve know it went through, and send the funds. The federal reserve will then let Chase know transaction has processed on the Wells Fargo side. Then the actual transferring of funds through this whole chain has to happen. Add into this that the federal reserve isn’t open on weekends, and that’s why it’s business days and not calendar days. That’s also why cashier’s checks, money orders, and wire transfers are faster, because they all take out the federal reserve middle man."
],
"score": [
8241,
644,
628,
296,
67,
53,
46,
26,
18,
15,
10,
10,
10,
4,
4,
3,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.pcmag.com/news/us-states-ask-for-help-from-cobol-programmers",
"https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/banking/slow-mobile-payments/"
],
[],
[
"https://www.betaalvereniging.nl/en/focus/instant-payments/"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/10/04/229224964/episode-489-the-invisible-plumbing-of-our-economy"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
g0mgzt
|
how does sound get recorded digitally and played back perfectly?
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fnaewx0"
],
"text": [
"It isn't actually \"recorded digitally\", it starts out as analog. The sound goes into a microphone (or guitar pickup or whatever) and creates a voltage waveform. That is sent to a special circuit/chip called an \"Analog to Digital Converter\" (ADC). The ADC measures (\"samples\") the incoming waveform very rapidly over and over, and converts the voltage at each sample point into a number. Each number is output as a binary digital value. Those binary numbers are output creating a stream of numbers that represents the original sound's waveform. That digital value series is stored and/or sent to another device, which reverses the process. It has a circuit/chip called a Digital to Analog Converter (DAC) which takes the number and outputs a corresponding voltage. It does this over and over, very fast. That voltage is sent to an amplifier and speakers to re-create the sound. Note that it isn't a \"perfect\" process. There's a limit to how precise the numbers are to represent the waveform samples (usually 16 or 24 bits). And since the original conversion to digital only took rapid samples at some rate, very high frequencies aren't going to be perfectly captured. But this is usually done at a rate so fast that the human ear has a very difficult time telling the difference."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
|
g0mwjl
|
Why can’t containers be recycled if they have even a little bit of food on them? How does a tiny bit of dried yogurt on a yogurt cup impede the recycling process? Thanks!
|
Technology
|
explainlikeimfive
|
{
"a_id": [
"fnaiz3q",
"fnagt26",
"fnaj9kz"
],
"text": [
"I've not heard that any plastic recyclables have to be pristine in order for them to be recycled. And I think that's not the case. [This source]( URL_2 ) confirms that \"a quick rinse is fine--there's no need to make it clean enough to eat off of. The heat process \\[in the recycling\\] can burn off small amounts of stuck-on food.\" But the source also notes that, in \"single-stream\" communities (where you put all your recycling into one bin rather than separating them), small food particles, oil, or grease could ruin paper recyclables if they're mixed in. [A confirming source.]( URL_0 ) This source, a TV news report quoting an official who works at a recycling center, notes that the rinse is for \"the benefit of the people who have to touch\" the soon-to-be-recycled materials. [This source]( URL_1 ) takes a slightly more pro-washing perspective --lots of food waste will increase the risk of rats and may take so much work at the recycling center that they employees will throw it out rather than invest the time (and money) to clean it sufficiently to recycle (apparently especially glass). But even it recognizes that they can be \"a little\" dirty and pizza boxes can be \"slightly greasy.\" & #x200B; td;dr -- Question has a false premise. Unless your local recycling plant says otherwise, \"little bits\" of food are absolutely fine. Particularly greasy things, particularly sticky things should get a little more of a rinse.",
"I saved this post because I never thought I wanted to know this and now I'm waiting for the answer",
"You are right in the sense that different amounts and kinds of food would have different impacts on the ability to recycle some material. However, the second you start looking at it like that, then you have to implement measures that analyze each piece of recycled material to see if it meets those standards. The more rules you have, and the more specific and granular they are, the hard and more costlier they are to implement. Recycling is about dealing in bulk. That is, processing the largest quantity of material in the quickest amount of time for the lowest cost. Things that make the process more costly or take longer risk making recycling not a worthwhile process which results in less recycling altogether."
],
"score": [
44,
7,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.kare11.com/article/news/verify/verify-do-you-have-to-wash-recyclables/89-487133563",
"https://lifehacker.com/please-rinse-your-recyclables-1825471366",
"https://recyclecoach.com/residents/blog/should-you-rinse-your-recyclables/"
],
[],
[]
]
}
|
[
"url"
] |
[
"url"
] |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.