Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2015 August 28

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August 28

Beats headphones

Are beats headphones worth the amount they cost compared to cheaper good quality ones like Sony. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.10.247.39 (talk) 16:27, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

It depends entirely on what you are using them for. As such, the value of the headphones is completely a matter of opinion, stubbornness, and fashion. Example: My Sony ear buds fit in my nose nicely and help block bad odors. The beats headphones are a terrible replacement, but it impresses the girls more until they get close enough to notice the odors I'm trying to block. 209.149.113.150 (talk) 17:15, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

The general consensus online tends to be that they're produced as a fashion statement and are not worth the premium placed upon them, from a build quality or sound quality perspective. Whether they're worth it to you is a matter of personal opinion, as (to many people, anyway) they certainly are very attractive visually, and they're not *bad* headphones. As a side note, I can't recommend Monoprice's 8323 headphones enough. Riffraffselbow (talk) (contribs) 17:45, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

So you're saying people buy them for their sex appeal? 94.10.247.39 (talk) 20:58, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

Beats_Electronics#Critical_reception has some refs that explain some of the criticism. (Sennheiser headphones come highly recommended for build quality, sound quality, and price. But they don't look as hip as Beats ;) SemanticMantis (talk) 22:46, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

Why is the radix point unavailable in Programmer mode of Microsoft calculator?

If I want to know what the decimal equivalent of, say, the binary number 0.101 is, I can't enter it in while the binary radio button is selected and then switch to the decimal radio button, as I can easily do for numbers greater than 1, because the radix point is unavailable in programmer mode. I have to manually in Scientific mode add 2^-1 + 2^-3. Obviously, this particular example is easy to do manually, but it stinks when I want to find out what .1100101010100001110 is. Why is there no radix point available in programmer mode? 75.75.42.89 (talk) 23:52, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

Just curious...under what circumstances would you ever need to do that? The actual binary representation of non-integers in real-world situations on a computer isn't usually handled like that (IEEE floating point, for example)...and I can't imagine any non-computer use where you'd be dealing with binary non-integers. SteveBaker (talk) 04:36, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

I was reading a book (Applications Programming in ANSI C by Johnsonbaugh & Kalin) which described in section 0.3, Internal Representations, how IEEE single precision is done. I read how the first bit is the sign bit, how the next eight bits are the exponent, which is -126 if all the bits are zero, and the unsigned int value of the eight bits minus 127 if it is not the case that all the bits are zero, and the remaining 23 bits are the mantissa and are to be interpreted as 0.b1b2...b23 if all the exponent bits are zero and 1.b1b2...b23 if not all the exponent bits are zero. I just wanted to find the mantissa by hand a few times while learning this. 75.75.42.89 (talk) 14:15, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

To determine your example, you need to convert TWO numbers to decimal the 101 from your 0.101 and the next biggest power of 10 (in this case 1000). Note/remember/store 1000(base2) = 8(base10). Then enter 101(base2), convert to 5(base10) and divide by the number you are remembering (8 here). Thus 0.101(base2) = 0.625(base10) -- SGBailey (talk) 23:11, 29 August 2015 (UTC)