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So what you're saying is that we've been dealing with shitty naming schemes in tech for decades?
[Sony has entered the chat]
wfxm100000mk4
I use these when I game on my Nintendo DS 3DS XL and have an adaptor to use a USB Type C 3.2 Gen 2x2 cable for easier connectivity.
Lol I'm pretty sure I have those headphones
They got it right with PlayStation. Sony's other product lines should take notes
Ever try shopping for Sony earbuds? I feel like the model names are a riddle that the consumer needs to solve before they can buy.
The phones are mental too.
The Xperia range have a model number to denote the different models (similar to Samsung’s S and A) and a version number so if you say the phone’s full name it’s the Xperia 10 5 but the version number is in Roman numerals so it’s written Xperia 10 V, Xperia 5 IV, Xperia 1 V etc.
Destroy TI's walled garden!
If only you knew what they've been doing to the embedded devices lately...
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There is a website of a person who catalogs Texas Instruments calculators. You can wonder over to the graphing calculator section to see how many different graphing calculators they made along with a bit of information on each one.
I love websites like this.
That's web 1.0. Many of us had sites like this on Geocities and Tripod back in the day.
I absolutely love them too because they're so content dense where as today this would be a 15 item list where you had to click a new page to see each one while reading several paragraphs of what sounds like the most generic, 6th-grade book report on each one "The TI-84 is a calculator. Many people use calculators to do math..."
I love that you can tell they're a product of passion. Someone was just really into something and wanted to share the info with the world. There's something beautiful about that.
On my TI-83 plus, a fellow students and my calculator were matching rand(int) and it was amazing. Random wasn't really random. I thought it'd be based on some sort of hidden internal clock.
True randomness is really really hard to do in software; bigger CPUs often have hardware random number generators that exploit some sort of quantum or otherwise non-determanistic phenomena, but in software the best you can do is pseudo-random. These are algorithms that generate a sequence of randomly distributed numbers, but in a deterministic way - from a given starting state, it will always generate the same sequence of numbers. Good algorithms are designed to make it hard to infer the starting state just by observing the sequence (if you can do that, you can run the algorithm in parallel and predict the next number), but that's an active area of research.
At a guess, the calculator was programmed to initialise the random number generator from something that it is hard for the user to control (milliseconds since power on would be a good one) the first time you used it, but maybe TI got lazy and just initialised it to a constant value
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You need to set the seed number.
thank you for reminding my to take out the dead batteries from my Ti-86 before they leak!
still have it next to my desk... since 1997 or so.
Do kids still use these? Aka, are their parents forced to pay $100 bucks for this piece of 40 year old technology?
They're passed down as heirlooms now, like slide rules before them.
fun fact: there are graphing calculator emulators, even modern tinspire cx and cx2 models can be emulated (firebird emu) (as well as ti 83/84 etc, although obviously a different emulator is used for those models)
They aren't allowed anymore where I live. Only basic calculators now
Here I think using GeoGebra is the norm now for graphing needs.
Desmos is it where I am.
Schools own them a lot of the time
Iircc the next level up was the TI 92 which could solve linear equations for you by default which was why they don't let you use it on standard tests. Also cuz the Ti8x line can be quickly reset.
But does it play Doom?
Some kid in middle school put mario on my TI-83. The buttons were not ergonomic at all, but it was cool. I also wrote my first ever script on the thing; it solved the quadratic equation.
I did that back in the ‘90s on a TI-85 while everyone else in my class was sideloading Tetris onto their fancy TI-86es and laughing at my poor ass; iirc there was already a function built in for solving polynomials though so not only was I a poor loser, but I also wasted my time
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are there any applications for calculators anymore? I feel like since everything can be done on our phones or computers, what's the point of a dedicated piece of hardware that's generally inferior?
what's the point of a dedicated piece of hardware that's generally inferior?
Focus/concentration, kinda like how George R R Martin writes on an old DOS computer to eliminate distractions while writing (bad example for expediting work, I know). Still requires you to do a lot of the heavy lifting, which instills knowledge for the future.
There's also an element of trust; schools generally trust Texas Instruments that their products do math correctly (you'd be surprised how many calculators don't), the same cannot be said for MegaPower Graphing Calculator Pro (Ad-Free Premium) off of the Play Store.
What do you mean generally inferior?
It has physical buttons, no distractions, and the batteries last forever compared to a phone.
Except when you put it in "exam mode" and the LED stays lit until the battery dies.
I use a calculator at work, i could use the one in my phone. I like using my calculator though.
taking tests
Inferior hardware doesn't mean inferior performance. Phones do much more than calculators, and calculators just calculate.
Pacemaker hardware is a million times less powerful than mobile phone hardware. But I trust it more to keep the heart going.
I have an HP prime I use at home and work. I also have the app that is identical on my phone, but I am much faster with the physical buttons on the actual calculator. Before I had my HP prime I had a TI 84+ silver and a TI 84+ emulator on my phone with similar experiences.
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I had one of these ti-84s.
I also had their “stat” one, it was like a ti-34 or something. It was way easier to use for probability stuff, and parenthesis and plugging in variables to simple polynomials.
Got an OG TI-83 when it first came out as an upgrade to my TI-82 circa 1997. Still use my 83 regularly.
Where's my TI-86 plus?
American kids and their damn fancy calculators. I got through a technician degree in Electronics and a Grad degree in Robotics with a Casio FX82. It can display two lines with simple letters and numbers, no graphs. It also stores up to 6 numbers in memory.
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this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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