Questions tagged [computers]
A computer is a programmable machine designed to automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations.
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Does Windows 7 have lower latencies than Windows 10 in gaming workflows? [closed]
I saw a claim that Windows 7 is superior to Windows 10 for gaming:
There’s a lot of reasons win7 is utilized. Especially in strictly
competitive games that support it, (CSGO, Valorant, Fortnite), a ...
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Do some captchas record your mouse movements?
I have heard (I can't remember where I heard this unfortunately) that some types of captchas don't verify that the user is human by having them click on the correct images but rather examine the users ...
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Has there never been a virus infection in Chromebook history?
Diamond product expert (maximum level expert for Chromebooks) Jim Dantin stated in a community post that
(quoting user) Chromebooks can be infected by viruses.
(response) It's never happened to a ...
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Did Burmese typewriters contain an upside-down character, which subsequently became proper typewriter style?
I was reading about the Internet Archive's work to archive the materials of a famous New York City typewriter family:
http://blog.archive.org/2020/08/26/an-archive-of-a-different-type/
I was ...
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Does looking at screens damage your brain?
I found several articles that warn of the dangers of too much computer time, especially for children.
Oxford Learning, Jun 2010: Too much computer time can be bad for your brain
However, a recent ...
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Did Intel have low chip yields due to a clerk hand-checking blank wafers?
In this blog post Bob Cringley recounts the following story (abriged for brevity here):
There was a time in the early 1980s when Intel suffered terrible quality problems. [..] The problem was caused ...
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Were flight reservations centrally managed on wall boards in huge halls in the pre-computer era?
For the first fifty years of scheudled air travel, agents' bookings were done over the telephone. At first, charts recording space on particular flights were sheets of paper. Eventually, for large ...
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Do long sessions of computer use damage the user's skin?
I believe that regularly spending long periods of time facing computers monitors while using them significantly damages the skin.
The Daily Mail reported in 2018:
According to [Rebecca Mason, skin ...
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Are Teslas with autopilot system safer than vehicles without it?
An AP article describes some recent crashes that may have been linked to the Tesla autopilot system. The article states that there have been three fatal crashes since 2016 potentially linked to the ...
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Are there 200 billion lines of COBOL in production in 2019? [duplicate]
Cited in this article from ZDNet,
According to a COBOL consulting company, which goes by the delightful name, COBOL Cowboys, 200 billion lines of COBOL code are still in use today and that 90% of ...
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Did the "Windows Web Browser Choice Screen" enforced by the EU make a difference?
In response to a EU anti-trust ruling, European Android users will soon be presented with a browser choice screen.
Those of us who are old enough will remember that the same thing happened on Windows ...
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Was credit for the black hole image misattributed?
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) was used to create an image of Messier 87*, a supermassive black hole in the Messier 87 galaxy. This result has been heavily reported in the media leading up to its ...
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Had ENIAC run more calculations than all mankind had done (up to 1955)? [closed]
According to this comment on Quantum Computing StackExchange,
For a decade, until a 1955 lightning strike, ENIAC may have run more calculations than all mankind had done up to that point
I search ...
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Was there a ML-backed algorithm that learnt to delete list instead of sorting it
Here's a quote from an article which was discussed pretty heavily a while ago:
Well, it’s not unsorted: For example, there was an algorithm that was
supposed to sort a list of numbers. Instead, ...
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Have ATMs across the US "spat out money" in the second half of January 2018?
In a response to the DDoS attacks on several Dutch banks and other institutions, "cybersecurity specialist" Rian van Rijbroek claimed on 29 January 2018 on the Dutch news programme Nieuwsuur ...
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Was this Harry-Potter themed text written solely by a computer program?
A YouTube video caught my eye with the title, "A Robot Wrote A Chapter To A Harry Potter Book, And It's Absolutely Insane." The video claims that a software algorithm created by Botnik Studios was ...
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Is Computer Science the fastest growing science field in the history of mankind? [closed]
Background
Wikipedia lists several scientific disciplines on its science article. To name a few, they are:
Logic, Maths, Statistics,
Molecular, Atomic, Plasma, Quantum Physics,
Astrophysics, ...
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Is humidity more relevant than high operating temperatures in hard drive reliability?
According to Environmental Conditions and Disk Reliability in Free-cooled Datacenters:
Based on our experience and observations, we conclude
that high relative humidity degrades reliability ...
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Is looking at a computer screen all that bad for you? [closed]
As you've all heard around on the internet looking at a screen is bad and awful for you, however, is there any proof that screens and only screens are the cause of these health issues?
This article ...
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Do four random common words make a stronger password than passwords like "Tr0ub4dor&3"?
In xkcd comic #936, Randall Munroe claims that passwords like "Tr0ub4dor&3" (uncommon base word, caps, common letter substitutions with a number and punctuation suffix) has ~28 bits of entropy, ...
user39173
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Can reading fine print cause damage to eyes?
I have my computer font set quite small so that I can see more on one screen at a time, but a collegue recently warned me that I would cause damage to my eyes later in life. Is there any scientific ...
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Does Windows 10 defragmentation damage your SSD?
I was having a conversation with one of my colleagues about installing Windows 10 on his machine, then he suddenly dropped a bomb that installing Windows 10 would reduce the life of his SSD since ...
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Do people not understand why Google's AlphaGo made a particular move? [closed]
I was reading a UK Government paper on AI and technology and found this section to be slightly unbelievable.
when Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo played Lee Sedol in March 2016 (see paragraph 3), the ...
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Did a TV news show cause lots of Amazon's Alexa devices to try to order doll houses?
With reference to this Stack Exchange Internet of Things question and this news article, which is only one of many:
Is there evidence that when a news anchor uttered the words "Alexa, buy me a ...
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Is light text on dark background less harmful to the eyes than dark text on light background [closed]
Most programmers (at least most of my undergraduate classmates) use light text on dark background (LTDB) and so do I, instead of dark text on light background (DTLB).
And as we know, traditional ...
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Is Linux less prone to getting infected by viruses than Windows? [closed]
Many sources (1, 2, 3) state that Linux operating systems have generally a smaller chance of getting infected/compromised by malware or spyware, and have some reasoning behind their claim. On the ...
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Can the "Xtra-PC" USB device make your old computer faster?
The Xtra-PC web-site describes a cheap USB device that can speed up old PCs:
Make everything fast again with Xtra-PC: browsing the Internet, writing emails, watching videos, playing games, and more!
...
user4951
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Does Windows 7 make up almost 50% of the desktop operating system market share?
NetworkMarketShare claims that, as of July 2016 (after the free upgrade cutoff), Windows 7 still beat Windows 10 in terms of market share by over 20%.
Is this analysis that the Windows 7, which is at ...
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Is Edge (significantly) better than Chrome for laptop battery life?
Microsoft recently released the results of a benchmark of four different browsers with respect to battery life. Chrome comes out the worst, then Firefox, then Opera and then Edge, by quite a margin. ...
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Is this measurement of data to grains of rice accurate? [closed]
This image purports that you can measure data in grains of rice - one byte being one grain of rice and one gigabyte then being three container lorries.
Byte of data : one grain of rice
Kilobyte ...
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Do consumer computers include components that can connect to the internet when the computer is apparently turned off?
I have seen many claims that devices such as laptop computers contain components that can "connect to the internet" even when the main device is powered off. The implication is that such devices could ...
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Did Babbage write programs for the Analytical Engine prior to Lovelace?
Charles Babbage was the inventor of Analytical Engine and Difference Engine.
Ada Lovelace was a mathematician and computer programmer.
The Guardian says :
Often described as the world's first ...
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Is Canadian PM Trudeau's explanation about quantum computing accurate?
In a recent press conference Justin Trudeau answered a journalist who asked him (initially jokingly) to explain quantum computers. He obliged with a <1 minute explanation which seems to receive ...
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Did a computer server get accidentally walled in?
I'm in IT and I've repeatedly heard stories of a server that was left stuck in a space that had a wall built in front of it, and was only discovered years later when the wall was torn down.
This 2001 ...
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Was a new deep learning toolkit released once every 22 days in 2015?
Guest Post (Part II): Deep Reinforcement Learning with Neon says:
The deep learning ecosystem has evolved a lot since then. Supposedly a new deep learning toolkit was released once every 22 days in ...
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Does Ubuntu have 40 million users?
Ubuntu.com claims that there are 40 million Ubuntu users:
Ubuntu now has over 40 million desktop users and counting.
40 million seems quite low, so I'm wondering how accurate this number is.
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Does deepnet have only 7100 onion sites? [closed]
I have read this article on forbes claiming that deepnet has only 7100 onion sites and took only 3 hours to scan completely.
Which to me sounds like total nonsense since if average .onion address is ...
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Can you use a computer's CPU's electrical noise to extract an encryption key?
This 2015 Wired article claims it is possible to use a remote device to determine a key used during decryption by sampling the radio emissions from the processor at 100kHz
They also claim that by:
...
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Can Magic Leap deliver its claims about their future augmented reality product?
Magic Leap has been very outward with their public face regarding their upcoming augmented reality product. They've been promising a great deal, and the media has hyped up their image as a result, ...
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Are these suppliers providing Macbook Pros for only US$230?
After requesting some quotes on computers in China-based global trade site Ali Baba, a friend of mine was bombarded with offers via email.
You can see an example in the image bellow.
The prices are ...
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CPH4 is exist or not [duplicate]
what if our brain really works at more than 50%.In Lucy movie they were telling about the drug name CPH4 or they tell that it will produce at the time of pregnancy when women is at 5 or 6 months.Is ...
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Do 15-25% of all computer users worldwide (both vocational and recreational) have some computer-related injury (CRI)?
This news article from the The Economic Times claims that:
15-25% of all computer users worldwide (both vocational and recreational) are estimated to have computer-related injuries (CRI).
The ...
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Did Russian hackers obtain billions of passwords?
Many news outlets seem to be reporting this story (NY Times article) about Russian hackers allegedly acquiring billions of usernames and passwords.
A Russian crime ring has amassed the largest known ...
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Can emails in draft box avoid detection?
At around the 28 mins and 13 secs of Season 3, Episode 9, of the TV series Strike Back, Major Oliver Sinclair (portrayed by Rhashan Stone) claims the following, the truth of which I'd like to know.
...
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Is Google Chrome killing my laptop battery?
I was reading an article on Forbes that says Google Chrome might be draining my laptop's battery because it brings the system into a mode that uses a tick rate of 1ms instead of 16ms, and is using up ...
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Does using a matched pair of memory sticks provide any benefit?
Apple recommends installing pairs of memory sticks with matched sizes to allow for dual-channel memory interface.
However, some people believe that it's also important not only to match the sizes of ...
user5582
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Is using "sleep mode" wasteful and harmful to a computer?
I have my home computer set to go into "sleep mode" when idle for a short time, and I assumed that by doing so I was saving lots of energy and that it was good for the computer by shutting down ...
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Does the lifespan of laptop depend significantly on its usage?
Every once in a while I see the claim that lifespan of a laptop is more or less the same, no matter how often it is used. How far is this from being true? Is it true that the difference in lifespan is ...
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Did the NSA pay RSA $10 million to make Dual_EC_DRBG the default in BSafe?
According to this article from Reuters
Undisclosed until now was that RSA received $10 million in a deal that set the NSA formula as the preferred, or default, method for number generation in the ...
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Are 1 in 5 pieces of software in the US unlicensed?
This BSA form claims that
1 in 5 pieces of software in the US are unlicensed.
How true is it?
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