The making, usage, and knowledge of tools, machines, techniques, crafts, systems, or methods of organization in order to solve a problem or perform a specific function.
Questions tagged [technology]
176 questions
177
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Is Google using ReCaptcha as a free source of human-intelligent labour?
Having worked at the Amazon Mechanical Turk for a long time, I find that some ReCaptcha questions are very similar to the 1c tasks there. Identify this, identify that.
A search shows that several web authors share the same suspicion. Most of them…
Mindwin Remember Monica
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Was there Cyrillic text visible on Intel 386 chips after decapping?
Heise, a German IT news portal, reported today about a chip presented to the State Council, including Erich Honecker, exactly thirty years ago.
They also mention how other chips had been copied from Western chips and relate the following story,…
0xC0000022L
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87
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Was the wheel invented before the wall?
So, this extraordinary claim has been getting a lot of publicity lately:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQKrfGCd7I8
They say a wall is medieval, well so is a wheel. A wheel is older than a wall. And I looked at every single car out there, even the…
AJFaraday
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Was the Roman knowledge of how to build aqueducts lost?
In a TED interview, Elon Musk stated:
People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves. It does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better, and actually it will, I…
Favst
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Were pen cap holes designed to prevent death by suffocation if swallowed?
Someone posted the following trivia on a social media website:
Do you know that pen caps have holes so that if someone swallows a cap, then air could still pass through?
This started a small debate, with some saying that the needed volume of air…
Adrian Iftode
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70
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Do 3 billion devices run Java?
I was installing Java today and this was shown in the installation. Is there anything that supports this claim?
Alfredo Osorio
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Did COBOL have 250 billion lines of code and 1 million programmers, as late as 2009?
In 2009 COBOL turned 50 years old. It got some publicity with claims, which I find rather hard to believe:
"Cobol hits 50 and keeps counting" article in the Guardian.
According to David Stephenson, the UK
manager for the software provider
Micro…
vartec
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Does the color temperature of a computer screen affect sleep patterns?
There's a little tool called f.lux that claims:
During the day, computer screens look good — they're designed to look like the sun. But, at 9PM, 10PM, or 3AM, you probably shouldn't be looking at the sun.
F.lux fixes this: it makes the color of…
Lagerbaer
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47
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What is the failure rate of Solid-State Drives (SSD)?
One of our favourite StackExchange Overlords, Jeff Atwood, wrote a Coding Horror blog article in May 2011, decrying the unreliability of SSD drives.
Solid state hard drives fail. A lot. And not just any fail. I'm talking about catastrophic,…
Oddthinking
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VHS vs Betamax: How influential was the pornography industry in the format war?
Image Source
For many years I have heard the legend that
the porn industry played a crucial role in the victory of JVC's VHS
over Sony's Betamax.
It resurfaced during the format war between HD DVD and Blu-ray.
From Macworld:
Just as in the…
Oliver_C
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Does the BBC have TV detector vans and how can they tell if you aren't paying a license fee?
I've heard from more than a few Brits that if you own a TV but don't pay your license fee, they'll come after you with unexpected visits and or fines.
Here is an example article debating their existence.
Even if you smuggle your TV into the…
Nick T
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44
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Were metered taxis busy roaming Imperial Rome?
While in Rome, I heard a claim that Ancient Romans had invented the taxi meter.
"Ancient" here means the common usage of "a long time ago" instead of a specific historical period such as the Early Republic.
Claim: Ancient Roman taxis had meters. …
Paul
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Will entering the ATM's PIN in reverse notify the police?
I received a rather intriguing email. It says that if I am at an ATM and I'm in the process of getting robbed, I just enter my PIN in reverse order e.g. 4321 instead of 1234. The ATM will still give me the cash but it will notify the police.
Is…
maltadolls
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Does a human on a bicycle travel more efficiently than any other species?
Steve Jobs claimed on video that a bicycling human is more efficient at locomotion than any other species can manage. He repeated it separately on video, and in writing. The quote is still oft repeated. A poster print run raised 5k USD on…
Anko - inactive in protest
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Do patents boost innovation?
In a recent judgement Europe's highest court ruled that Stem Cells derived from human embryos cannot be patented (see BBC story here). This provoked many scientists to argue that both research and the european economy would suffer as a result. The…
RomanSt
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