Originally published at: Graphing calculators are "sexy" now | Boing Boing
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So, Ti see Numworks as competition now…
I don’t think I’ve been as annoyed by a website’s design as much as I was by that review site in a long time.
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The HP Prime recently got a Python upgrade with its beta firmware. It already had a color touchscreen and really fast processor. But it still uses a Micro-USB port with a very unusual opening.
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Ug, that is a terrible UI.
If you’re going to do that lousy side-slideshow junk, at least enable scrolling with the mouse wheel.
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These calculators have been roughly the same price – and within a couple of orders of magnitude, the same computational power – for the last 3 decades. Maybe that’s not so bad considering inflation, but it’s also not great considering Moore’s Law.
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In what way is this sexier than an HP-45, or an HP-41C?
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a whopping 3MB of flash ROM for storing data and apps, along with 154KB of free RAM
So we’re going from 1990s era technology to 2000s era technology?
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The quotation marks in that headline are doing A LOT of work.
Also I can’t imagine trying to learn to code in any useful modern programming language on a machine that does not have a QWERTY keyboard. I think trying to code on a device with only a touchscreen keyboard would be ridiculously frustrating, but still way better than trying to use that calculator.
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Texas Instruments also notes that students can w̶r̶i̶t̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶d̶e̶ make cheat sheets for tests
FTFY
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RPN or bust.
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TI is going to the victim of their own lobbying here when the college board makes these illegal for SAT and AP tests.
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My college laptop (in 1993 had a 16 Mhz 68030, with 4MB RAM and a 40 MB hard drive. And the laptops that came out two years later enthusiastically fulfilled Moore’s law Didn’t get a new laptop, though. Games on a monochrome 640x400 screen-- ugh.
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Seems like 70 percent of the kids at my high school have a smart phone. You can put a graphing calculator app on the phone, which I think goes a long way to explaining why sales are down. Also, is it THAT hard to graph? Put pencil on x value and move it to Y value. Make a dot. Repeat. Connect the dots. Am I missing something that makes a calculator with a tiny screen worth 80+ bucks?
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RPN NOT IF BUST THEN;
(If your calculator uses RPN, then why not Forth?)
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Especially when you can attach “units” to the numbers. That is invaluable in tracking down math errors when you get a results in meters/second when you were expecting a result in meters, and that alone is worth the cost of admission.
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They are going to have to take dc away from my cold dead hands.
