Technology
Exploring "Why" questions about Technology
491 articles
Why is a video taken from my phone camera a couple GB but a movie which is much longer is about the same size?
It is possible to significantly compress video, but it takes a lot of computing power, too much for your phone to do it on the fly. You could take your video, run it through a conversion and compressi
Why did silent films exist? Don’t microphones pre-date the video camera?
Films were recorded on - you guessed it - *film*, which predates modern microphones. While the technology to record and replay sounds did predate film, you weren't able to record them from multiple so
Why is touching a computer screen such a big deal?
oil on fingers and all your finger shit gets on my pretty screen and I have to wipe it off. My pretty screen takes a lot of maintanence and careful wiping to keep it smudge free. Then you come in with
Why do spaces turn into when typing websites into the browser address bar?
URLs are not allowed to contain spaces. Trust me - it makes life a million times easier for programmers. If you want to access a resource that has spaces in it's proper name (like a file named "why di
Why are some sites fooled by VPN and others not?
You're *signing in* to Facebook. You've already given it all your info including your location and all your friends names.
Why do software installers recommend that you close all other programs?
it's a safety net... if another program is running it may have a lock on some file or directory that the installer may try to access. This could lead the installer to fail, and the end user may report
Why does my internet go so much faster when downloading from Steam or a torrent?
Your download speeds depend both on your connection to the server and the server's capacity. If you're connecting to a server on the other side of the world, you'll probably get a crappy download spee
Why is “they are” correct grammatically, while “everyone are” is incorrect, when they are both used as singular pronouns?
Think of 'everyone' as 'each and every one'. 'One is', singular. 'They' is used when there is a plurality of people *or* when there are plural options for addressing someone and you don't know which t
Why did we shift from calling computer “programs” to calling them “applications?”
Mac OS had been calling them applications for a long time. Their application file type is .app while Windows uses .exe (which stands for executable). There are technical difference but I’d argue this
Why do news channels care so much about who breaks the story now? Doesn’t the internet make everything break at the same time?
You want people to watch your channel instead of your competition. If you have a reputation for only getting the story after everyone else, people will be less likely to watch your channel. Sure, the