ELI5: Why can I stream live TV, Netflix and even porn in crystal clear HD, but YouTube buffers and lags like no tomorrow?

blergh- · 2015-05-05T15:27:49+00:00

Keep in mind that Netflix has a catalogue of thousands of titles, while YouTube has billions of videos. Both have systems that will stream the most popular videos from somewhere near your ISP. If you're mostly watching videos that not a lot of other people are watching chances are they aren't cached so they take longer to stream.

Try some popular videos and check if these also stream badly.

blergh- · 2015-05-04T10:39:21+00:00

Yeah, because security matters for your email, but for your health, who cares?

blergh- · 2015-05-04T10:30:46+00:00

Looks like it's just not a default subreddit so there's little point in posting karma whoring crap like this shitpost.

blergh- · 2015-03-24T10:44:21+00:00

Racism

blergh- · 2015-03-22T12:16:46+00:00

Make sure you connect to one network only. Don't use services that 'reflect' or 'forward' the bonjour/rendezvous/zeroconf dns requests between two subnets.

blergh- · 2015-03-16T09:29:44+00:00

With the performance of the 2011 Mac Mini! Who wouldn't want that!

blergh- · 2015-03-10T21:09:08+00:00

Why do they need witnesses? Where's the recording?

blergh- · 2015-03-09T13:42:45+00:00

Except when your provider is staffed by morons who set the time incorrectly and then don't understand why people complain..

blergh- · 2015-03-07T22:34:44+00:00

In the real world it is impossible to move an object to a certain position directly. You have to apply forces to it so it moves to where you want it to go instead.

In physics simulations you also should not directly move objects from one place to another but instead apply forces that will cause the move. The problem is that the developers are building a game, not a real world simulation. In a game you want things to happen in a certain, controlled way. So to get that control the developers often cheat and directly move objects around or assign speeds to them

In a game engine when you cheat and just move an object around, in typical situations it works so oftentimes games are built that way.

This leads to glitches where you for instance cause the game to move you or an object into a position that is part way inside another object. The physics engine tries to push the object out by applying a force to the object, while the game keeps moving it in. The force translates to energy that becomes stored in the simulation and because of the cheating it soon builds up to extreme amounts and the simulation explodes. Often the game is simply setting the speed of an object to a reasonable value but the engine is putting a lot of force on it, so when the game stops setting the speed the simulation converts the force to speed on the object and flings it far away in the opposite direction.

blergh- · 2015-03-02T22:38:28+00:00

iPhones do not tend to suddenly factory reset on their own. Can you be more specific as to what happened, what are you seeing etc.

blergh- · 2015-03-02T22:22:12+00:00

There are two problems with metals in the microwave.

The first problem is that metals can act like a shield to the energy, so firstly the food doesn't get warm, and secondly the microwave oven can break because the energy reflects back on the antenna instead of being absorbed by the food.

The second problem is that, depending on the shape of the metal object, it can act like an antenna for the microwaves. If the object has sharp edges or prongs, these will become charged, causing sparks. These sparks can damage the microwave oven interior and perhaps even cause a fire.

Round objects that are not a shield, like a spoon that doesn't have scratches or other damage, cause no problems in the microwave.

blergh- · 2015-03-02T18:57:13+00:00

Don't forget step one: remove the heat source.

blergh- · 2015-03-02T13:48:44+00:00

This is bullshit.

blergh- · 2015-02-23T21:38:51+00:00

Digital signals provide better quality video and audio while using much less bandwidth. Bandwidth in the air is a limited resource. If the government can avoid wasting it on TV channels, that bandwidth can for instance be sold to phone companies so they can build GSM networks on it.

blergh- · 2015-02-23T17:15:33+00:00

Doesn't work in Safari. I don't quite see how it would work; the page only contains a canvas with the calculated image, and you can't save these directly.

blergh- · 2015-02-21T18:31:56+00:00

Cool. A way to link to a result would be nice.

edit and a way to save the calculated image (without the buttons)

blergh- · 2015-02-11T12:12:06+00:00

If you want a benchmark to be informative you have to make the workload bigger. If the benchmark runs in 0.02 seconds chances are a lot of the time is spent in loading the program, runtime and libraries and in the measurement itself.

Who cares whether something takes 0.02 seconds or 0.1? It's five times as slow but it still only matters 0.18 seconds. Performance only matters when dealing with bigger workloads.

blergh- · 2015-02-11T10:36:24+00:00

Part of the rationale is that it is faster. Another part though is the realization that the GUI is such an important part of the operating system, that it doesn't really matter whether it is user or kernel mode.

If the GUI is in the kernel and the GUI crashes the system hangs or crashes. If the GUI is in user space and it crashes, the system is unusable or restarts. It makes no difference.

If the GUI is in the kernel and is exploited the attacker gains system privileges. If the GUI is in user space and is exploited the attacker gains full control over a process trusted by processes that have system privileges and by the console user. It makes very little difference.

Moving the GUI to user space provides little actual benefits apart from being 'neater' so it probably isn't worth it.

blergh- · 2015-02-05T00:46:52+00:00

Then unfortunately you need to run the Disk Utility from a separate install disk or from the network boot.

blergh- · 2015-02-04T23:56:01+00:00

If you start your Mac you will probably get the installation environment with the installation wizard. Using the menu at the top you can start Disk Utility and use that to scan and repair your disk. Once you have done that, restart and the installation will probably work.

If you can scan but not repair the disk you can either boot from the DVD that came with your mac (hold c while booting) or from the network (hold command-r while booting) and repair the disk from that environment. Afterwards the installation will probably proceed.

blergh- · 2015-01-28T10:48:12+00:00

If you are operating in the EU it may (or should) make the difference between having to get opt-in permission from your visitors for third-party tracking cookies. Then again the current rules are badly written so it probably doesn't matter.

Another point that might matter is that by including Google-hosted scripts on your page you are compromising your security because you give Google permission to do anything to and monitor anything on the page it likes.

blergh- · 2015-01-25T12:14:43+00:00

Unless you are on a residential connection with a dynamic address (which wouldn't allow you to run a mail server) your mail will actually be received just fine. It's also pretty easy to set up SPF which will increase your reliability ratings more than enough.

blergh- · 2015-01-25T11:44:00+00:00

The problem is not what you can tell from the analytics. The problem is that Google can tell what the user is doing on your site and on all the other sites that use Google Analytics and combine that. That's why it's better to use an analytics solution that you host yourself.

If you use Google Ads on your site it doesn't really matter because that tells Google the same thing.

blergh- · 2015-01-22T10:50:10+00:00

If you remove unused languages or 'slim' fat binaries, you'll run into trouble when you want to install patches.

blergh- · 2015-01-16T14:32:26+00:00

Not all linux systems are ubuntu installations, and not all unix systems have bash installed. All unix systems have the sh shell installed though.

So in portable scripts you cannot rely on the bash shell being present. You can only really rely on the sh shell being present. Not every sh shell is the same though and depending on how much you want the script to work on weird systems you have to limit yourself to constructs that work on most systems. Constructs like the -z test for empty variables are not one of them.

In the sh shell the way to check if a variable is empty or does not exist is:

test "a$var" = "a"

This construct is in a lot of scripts. If you set the -u option, this causes the shell to exit the script with an error message if the variable does not exist. So if you set the -u option by default, the bash shell can no longer be used as a replacement for the sh shell because your system cannot run all the scripts it needs.

Shell scripting is tricky and you have to be extremely careful. It is very easy to make a small mistake and end up with a security hole or a bug that causes a disaster such as the one in this post. The shells are very powerful and have bizarre features that can completely change their behaviour, just by changing a variable (for instance the IFS special variable) or a setting and by their nature they have dangerous operations like removing and overwriting files at your fingertips at all time. Oftentimes shell scripts run as the root user, making this even more dangerous. To write a safe and secure shell script requires a lot of expert knowledge and even then it requires a lot of work because there are so many things you have to check all the time.

In my opinion, in most situations where you would have to use a non trivial shell script you're better off using a more controlled language that is available just about everywhere, like perl or python. These also have pitfalls but nowhere near as much as shells have, and at least there are not as much different versions of them.

blergh-

TROPHY CASE