Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2008 July 17

= July 17 =

Bluetooth headsets with USB charging
Anyone know of a guide or chart of Bluetooth headsets that feature USB charging? If I have to carry around another AC adaptor, I'm going to scream! :) --70.167.58.6 (talk) 00:15, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * NY Times recentlyLG Decoyt featured a Verizon Wireless phone that had a spot for you to put your bluetooth headset when you did not need it. And yes, the cell phone charger charges up the bluetooth headset as well. Please take a look at it. Kushal (talk) 14:34, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Not really interested in a new phone, thank you. I'm looking for Bluetooth headsets that have USB charging. --70.167.58.6 (talk) 18:45, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * The Jawbone (headset), very high quality!, charges with USB per their userguide . Others:, , , .  More results here . --mboverload @  05:37, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
Well? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.24.216.90 (talk) 00:43, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Woodchucks don't chuck wood. 86.154.195.19 (talk) 00:47, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Depends on how much wood it ate. (If you don't get this, check the slang meaning)  bibliomaniac 1  5  00:51, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * As much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood. Useight (talk) 01:19, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Is this a digital woodchuck? We might be able to set up a simulation... The Evil Spartan (talk) 01:20, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * *ZOT* --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 01:37, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * According to the Oracle, a woodchuck can't chuck wood. --Carnildo (talk) 20:19, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
 * That may be so, but the question accounts for that possibility - " ... if a woodchuck could ..." I know Cecil Adams addressed this (and I know the guy who mailed in the question), but I can't access the Straight Dope site from this computer to see if it's online.  -- LarryMac  | Talk  20:50, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * A woodchuck would chuck as much as it could chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 02:20, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Almost ... "A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood." StuRat (talk) 12:54, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Mine rolls of the tongue better, which has priority over fitting another redundancy in there. I stand by it. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 03:12, 19 July 2008 (UTC)


 * 50 cords. 84.239.160.166 (talk) 06:33, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

I thought it was "a woodchuck would chuck all the wood he could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood." you get that extra "could" in there. --Russoc4 (talk) 13:11, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Right, but you have to put an "all the" in there which screws it up. Again, I stand by mine. You could endlessly add redundancy but if it doesn't fit with the meter then its worthless, you'll trip over your own tongue. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 03:12, 19 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Isn't the whole point of a tongue twister to cause you to trip over your own tongue ? Also, how would you add more redundancy than my version ? StuRat (talk) 19:36, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Streaming/storing video
I have always had something that bugged me about streaming video. It seems that it would eat up a criminey-load of bandwidth in order to stream it, let alone store it on the servers. So my question is: How are sites able to store and stream video at small enough cost to provide it for free? (youtube is bad quality, but dailymotion or metacafe seems to be much better). The Evil Spartan (talk) 01:24, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Lots and lots of compression (probably of different types—you can lop off a lot of audio quality, for example, and still have it be acceptable for streaming. Cut down on max pixel dimensions, bit rate, etc. and you've easily lowered your final video size without doing anything unexpected for the web). That's it. It does take a lot of bandwidth. There's no secret trick. Storing it on the servers is no problem—hard disk space is cheap cheap cheap. Bandwidth is more of the problem. (As a simple example—I've probably got a TB of space here in my home residence. But I couldn't in the world upload all of that at once. Storing is easy. Streaming is harder.) Nothing's really "free" here—they are offsetting everything with ads, etc. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 03:27, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Foreign character recognition
How are websites able to recognize which language a foreign character belongs to? I know that sometimes a site can include the language in the header of the file, but how is Wikipedia able to figure out the language of and parse this: الأردن,日本語,ישראל, 中文(简体)‬, Русский, Ukrainą i Białorusią. I've checked out the text before, and I could have sworn I only saw unicode characters for each one. So how does it know which Unicode set to use? The Evil Spartan (talk) 01:30, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the character encoding specifications in the HTTP header send by the server. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 02:19, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Unicode is simply a mapping of integers to characters, of every writing system. "which Unicode set" doesn't make sense. There is only one Unicode mapping -- the Unicode mapping. Wikipedia does not need to "recognize" which writing system a character belongs to at all. Unicode includes all writing systems. Characters from different writing systems have different code points in Unicode.
 * How Unicode is stored on the computer is a separate matter. There are different encodings, like UTF-8, UTF-16, etc. But each of these encodings are able to represent all characters of Unicode; just in different ways. Wikipedia uses UTF-8 I think. --Spoon! (talk) 04:13, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Most websites use UTF-8 for Unicode. --grawity 16:14, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Ubuntu Super Edition
Hi, has anyone heard of Ubuntu Super Edition? I read it is a new distro based on Ubuntu, and it looks promising, but... is it any good? has anyone already tried it? 87.196.41.21 (talk) 02:42, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * It's just Ubuntu with more software pre-installed. Most of the extra software seem reasonable, although a big WTF is WinRAR. You can have the exact same software through repos on Ubuntu if you just take the time and install them through Synaptics. --antilivedT 05:37, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Printing circles
What is the easiest way for me to print out circles of specified radius, for example, a circle of 4.125" radius? Microsoft Paint doesn't seem to be coming through for me... any ideas? -97.113.54.71 (talk) 07:45, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Try using microsoft word? They have auto-shapes and you can specify the height/width. It doesn't seem to have a radius/diameter setting when you draw a circle (or oval) but I expect with a little tweaking you could get to the specified size a bit easier than with MS Paint. 194.221.133.226 (talk) 09:29, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * I'm afraid my solution isn't easy but you can do it in Flash studio using ActionScript, which will allow you to export the circle as an image in almost any format you wish.--Hello. I&#39;m new here, but I&#39;m sure I can help out. (talk) 09:56, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * NO, Flash is definitely NOT the way to go. You can use and office suite (like OpenOffice) to draw circles, or Inkscape or basically most drawing programmes. But why go through all this trouble when you can use a pencil and a compass? --antilivedT 10:32, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * No, they want to draw a circle with a specific radius. You cannot do that in OpenOffice. I don't know about InkScape, but it probably won't since even Illustrator won't let you do it. I imagine that they want an electronic copy, too, rather than a hard copy.--Hello. I&#39;m new here, but I&#39;m sure I can help out. (talk) 10:41, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * You can definitely do it in Illustrator. Set your units to inches, select the ellipse tool, click on the artboard and enter the diameter in Width and Height. — Matt Eason (Talk &#149; Contribs) 10:55, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * I know. It can do width and height, not the radius. That's what I meant. If you want to do it that way, be sure to constrain the proporitions, or else you'll have to adjust the width, then the height manually.--Hello. I&#39;m new here, but I&#39;m sure I can help out. (talk) 19:27, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * And indeed Inkscape can as well (draw circle, select it, units to inches, set width and height). And OpenOffice Draw will too - draw circle, right click on it, "position and size", and set the width and height (in cm at least). -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 12:24, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * What are your resources? What drawing applications do you have?  What type of printer?  If your printer supports PostScript, then there are snippets of code available that you can edit in Notepad and dump to the printer.  --——  Gadget850 (Ed)  talk  -  10:48, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Either way flash is NOT the way to go. In order to draw a circle of a specific physical size on screen you need to know the PPI of the screen, which is often wrong and unreliable, and there's no solution to that problem unless the user actually used a ruler and measure how big physically a 200px square is or something. I don't know about Illustrator but Inkscape allows units such as cm, mm, in, ft, and so you are perfectly able to define a circle of 4.125". Don't think that just because something is unavailable in commercial software it's definitely not available in open-source software. --antilivedT 10:57, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * If you want printed circles of a specific size then use the drawing tools in MS Word or a similar WP or drawing tool. MS Paint won't help you because it stores a circle as a bunch of pixels, not as a specific "circle" or "ellipse" object. MS Word, however, stores a circle as an object with its own properties. So you can draw a rough circle and then edit the circle's properties (right click - Format AutoShape - Size tab) to set height and width to whatever values you want (note that if you want a given radius then set height and width to twice that value). And Word can use physical units (inches, cm etc.) because it knows the dimensions of the printed page size and so it sizes objects on the page relative to these dimensions. Gandalf61 (talk) 11:10, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Simply telnet to your PostScript printer and type the following:

/inch {72 mul} def 4.25 inch 5.5 inch 4.125 inch 0 360 arc stroke showpage
 * You're done! --Sean 14:02, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Sean, you're my nerd hero. I'm freaking serious. --mboverload @  05:28, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Plug ins for Eclipse in Windows and Linux
Are the plug-ins the same for both OSs or do each need its plug-in?Mr.K. (talk) 10:39, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Depends on the plugin, but many are platform-independent. Care to tell us which plugin you are talking about? « Aaron Rotenberg « Talk « 16:07, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

light tree
is light tree same as optical packet switching ? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.90.206.19 (talk) 11:51, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Light tree switching is a method/type of optical switching, optical package switching does not have to use a light tree.87.102.86.73 (talk) 14:15, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Audio Files (eg WAV, AIFF, MP3) to MIDI converter?
Does anyone know if such a thing even exists? And were might I find one if it does? 76.166.21.149 (talk) 23:17, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Search for program called mp3 to midi" or mp32midi ;)


 * Note that converting to MIDI is very difficult and rarely works well, as the software has to distinguish the different instruments playing in the recording, plus filter out noise and vocals. &mdash; QuantumEleven 15:28, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * I'd still like an answer to this... 76.166.21.149 (talk) 19:39, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
 * If nobody has given you an answer till now, then nobody knows for sure. This means you should research this yourself. If you want my two-cents, I don't see the point. MP3 to MIDI would be pointless to try and convert. It would be almost impossible to retain the original instrumental samples and play them back with fixed-sample general midi or MT32 or whatever. Don't even think of converting voices etc. Now - MIDI to MP3 - that would make sense. Sandman30s (talk) 22:19, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Well, just doing a Google search for "mp3 to midi" gives a bunch of hits. I couldn't tell you if any of the software you can get that way is any good, but clearly it exists. -- Captain Disdain (talk) 20:05, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
 * When I have tried the software it is not good. For a pure tone like a flute, it works OK, but for more complex music, the results are pretty messy. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 02:40, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
 * I am not sure what you are trying to do. MP3 and MIDI are two completely different things.  MP3 is like a concert.  MIDI is like the sheet music.  Please read the MIDI article and I think you'll understand my confusion.  It's like converting a picture of a sunset into braille. --mboverload @  05:24, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Or converting a recording of someone's spoken words into a text file. I'm not sure why so many people are treating this as a useless or bizarre request.  Yes, the output isn't going to be identical to the input, but I'm sure there are legitimate and interesting uses for such a tool, just as there are for speech recognition or OCR tools.  -- Coneslayer (talk) 11:57, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Coneslayer, I agree with you - but I think a more apt comparison would be "like OCR in the 1950s", in theory it's doable but it's exceptionally difficult and currently there is no good way of doing it for all but the simplest of sounds. &mdash; QuantumEleven 13:48, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Garageband for PC?
Hi, I'm looking for some free/open source multitrack recording software for the PC, similar to Garageband. Hopefully, it should be fairly easy to use, but also able to do effects and filtering and things. It's to record a song or two on several instruments. I've had a look at Free_audio_software, but none of the PC ones seem to fit the bill. Ardour looks good, but linux only unfortunately. Any thoughts very much appreciated. Thanks, LHMike (talk) 22:34, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
 * I hear Audacity is good, but I've never tried it.  bibliomaniac 1  5  01:03, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Audacity is not like Garageband at all—it's just a waveform editor. (As for it being good; I think it's OK. It's not anywhere near as good as some of the commercial ones, but it's free, and it basically works fine most of the time. If I were an actual audio engineer it wouldn't be enough for me. If I'm just doing things on my own for fun and giggles, well, it's fine.) --98.217.8.46 (talk) 04:03, 18 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Sony ACID Pro or Ableton Live might work, both have free (limited) versions available last I checked. -- LarryMac  | Talk  13:21, 18 July 2008 (UTC)