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flatluigi posted:there's a lot of better options for actually helping do math with, but the problem is they all can potentially access the internet and that would be Cheating Which is hilarious because in my actual job I use google all the time to verify my measurements add up, or the wiring colors are correct, or a million other things. Knowing things is great, but knowing where to find information is far more valuable.
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Apr 4, 2023 17:36
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I lost my TI-89 final year of Engineering and couldn't afford a new one. Turns out it was a good thing since I learned to do all that crap by hand real good. ( I still had a basic calc for double checking stuff and fiddly numbers)
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Apr 4, 2023 17:37
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The HP48 in particular was better for EE courses for the ease of switching between different vector notations. Made phasors and complex math so much faster
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Apr 4, 2023 17:38
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wa27 posted:Once I got to college I found a TI-89 at a thrift store and it was a revelation because it could differentiate. I was disallowed from using my Ti-92 to take my EIT exam because it had a keyboard. I prepared for this possibility by borrowing my roommate’s Ti-89, which has exactly the same symbolic math engine. But no keyboard. Unless you hold down the key that lets you type letters. In other words the rule had nothing to do with the capability of the calculator, just the form factor. Ti is an evil rent-seeker.
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Apr 4, 2023 17:46
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WithoutTheFezOn posted:But yeah, learn RPN. The parentheses slayer. I mean this very sincerely: why is it better? I've never used RPN, so it's always seemed confusing, and I have a lot of practice now with thinking of expressions either in infix notation (a+b) or function notation (add(a,b)) (please understand these are grammatical parentheses (except for the ones around a,b there)). So I don't know what it is that RPN fans like.
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Apr 4, 2023 17:49
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Vavrek posted:I mean this very sincerely: why is it better? I've never used RPN, so it's always seemed confusing, and I have a lot of practice now with thinking of expressions either in infix notation (a+b) or function notation (add(a,b)) (please understand these are grammatical parentheses (except for the ones around a,b there)). So I don't know what it is that RPN fans like. Something like A + B * C is easier to enter in RPN since you don't have to rearrange anything or worry about the order of operations while you enter A, B and C. Even if one or all of them requires you to go through yet another calculation, it doesn't matter, you can just build it up on the stack as you go if you want. SLOSifl has a new favorite as of 18:14 on Apr 4, 2023 |
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Apr 4, 2023 18:10
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Yeah that’s exactly it. A stack lets you store intermediate values easily.
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Apr 4, 2023 18:55
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RPN is not better outside a few niche edge cases. It basically exposes how the calculator is actually doing the calculations internally, but there's no reason the user needs to care about that. It's the DVORAK keyboard of calculators - worse in every way, but people think using it makes them special and interesting
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Apr 4, 2023 19:39
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Cojawfee posted:I have the one that does mortgages. I want the one that does hex and binary. They are Quite Expensive {tm} for the original HP 16C, but Swiss micros do a remake : https://www.swissmicros.com/product/dm16l I've been tempted but then I'm also not sure if it would actually get used or be an expensive but pretty ornament, just like everything else I keep collecting...
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Apr 4, 2023 20:46
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The programmer mode on the bog standard Windows calculator does most everything I would use that thing for. But it would not do so in style
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Apr 4, 2023 20:53
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I know if you turn your iPhone calculator sideways, it’s a scientific calculator, but I don’t know if that’s proper for use in college, which is why I asked. Of all the calculators I bought in college, I actually used zero of them. But my degree is in Radio/TV/Film, so who gives a poo poo. In fact, we can officially add it to the list: POST THE VERY BEST IN OBSOLETE AND FAILED TECHNOLOGY: A BACHELOR’S DEGREE IN RTVF.
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Apr 4, 2023 21:16
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In the late 90s, my friends and I split an order of the translucent colored covers for our mandatory TI-86's. I got pretty proficient at taking it on and off with one hand.
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Apr 4, 2023 21:19
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My high school/most-of-college calculator was the 83+ Silver Edition. Lots of good memories until the day it just up and died on me. I assume it died from lingering wounds from a vicious Pepsi attack I accidentally launched on it one day. Luckily by the time it died, I didn't really need a graphing calculator anymore, so I never replaced it with the 89 of my then-dreams. I suddenly want more HP calculators in my life
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Apr 4, 2023 21:57
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While packing for a move I found my Ti-81. Couldn't afford a fancy Ti-83 or higher in school, and it turned out I wouldn't have benefited from it anyway. Except I could have had a better version of DrugWars.
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Apr 4, 2023 23:22
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I had to buy a specific calculator for a Professional Engineering exam just last year. Multiple options were accepted and I opted for an older, used HP-35. That class of calculators isn't as fancy and doesn't have much storage.
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Apr 4, 2023 23:31
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Phanatic posted:I was disallowed from using my Ti-92 to take my EIT exam because it had a keyboard. I prepared for this possibility by borrowing my roommate’s Ti-89, which has exactly the same symbolic math engine. But no keyboard. Unless you hold down the key that lets you type letters. In other words the rule had nothing to do with the capability of the calculator, just the form factor. I'm 99% certain that when I took my EIT in 2010, you were limited to much less calculator than a TI-89. I just looked through my Amazon purchase history and I picked up a Casio FX115 for that one TotalLossBrain has a new favorite as of 23:35 on Apr 4, 2023 |
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Apr 4, 2023 23:33
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My lazy rear end got through university with my middle school TI 30X...and wolfram alpha
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Apr 5, 2023 03:08
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CitizenKain posted:While packing for a move I found my Ti-81. Couldn't afford a fancy Ti-83 or higher in school, and it turned out I wouldn't have benefited from it anyway. Except I could have had a better version of DrugWars. I had a similar experience. Everyone else had the TI-83+ and I was stuck with the stupid hand me down TI-83. Everyone else had flash storage with games. I could make a graph that looked like a roller coaster. Also the screen was tilted so it was easier to look at while it was on a desk I guess, but it just made everyone ask me why the screen was broken. It's not broken, I'm just stuck with the lovely old version. The sad part is that I legit wanted to spend my own money to buy an 83+ because I was really interested in the assembly programming you could do on the 83+ and wanted to try it out. Now I have an nspire that can run python scripts and I couldn't be bothered.
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Apr 5, 2023 04:19
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I fondly remember the days of scouring https://www.ticalc.org and downloading tons and tons of random crap and having to use custom launchers for loading games and apps. I might need to break out the ol' TI-83+ and take a trip down memory lane. TiCalc is still up and running.
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Apr 5, 2023 05:11
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My TI-83+ got me into programming, which is probably the most useful thing I learned in middle school considering I've got a computer toucher job. Man the games I made were so terrible, I wish it hadn't died so I could dig them up and save them 
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Apr 5, 2023 05:19
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SLOSifl posted:Something like A + B * C is easier to enter in RPN since you don't have to rearrange anything or worry about the order of operations while you enter A, B and C. Even if one or all of them requires you to go through yet another calculation, it doesn't matter, you can just build it up on the stack as you go if you want. Learning RPN is not easier or faster than typing A+B*C into a TI-89, which doesn’t need parenthesis to get the order of operations right on that expression. You literally type A plus B times C and hit enter and get the right answer. TotalLossBrain posted:I'm 99% certain that when I took my EIT in 2010, you were limited to much less calculator than a TI-89. I just looked through my Amazon purchase history and I picked up a Casio FX115 for that one Correct. I bought an HP 33S to take the EIT in 2006. Chemmy has a new favorite as of 06:33 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Apr 5, 2023 06:28
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Doing complex math, like every other business critical thing, I just use excel
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Apr 5, 2023 06:36
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You have to be careful though. There are a few calculators that have order of operations tables that are either wrong or have a liberal definition of what operators go first. I think it might have been eevblog who had a video of the same Casio calculator from two different countries and they did their order of operations differently and have different answers to the same equation. So it's best to always use parentheses to avoid any confusion.
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Apr 5, 2023 06:36
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I had Graphing and Scientific Calc in highschool in late 90s-early 2000s. Was really handy when the PS3 exploit USB exploit came out and my newer TI was on the list and I could execute the exploit with it.
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Apr 5, 2023 08:58
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Cojawfee posted:You have to be careful though. There are a few calculators that have order of operations tables that are either wrong or have a liberal definition of what operators go first. I think it might have been eevblog who had a video of the same Casio calculator from two different countries and they did their order of operations differently and have different answers to the same equation. So it's best to always use parentheses to avoid any confusion. I have used enough dumb languages and calculators to always add the parentheses, yeah. I know it's usually a waste of space, but it's never wrong, so why not?
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Apr 5, 2023 11:27
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flatluigi posted:there's a lot of better options for actually helping do math with, but the problem is they all can potentially access the internet and that would be Cheating In a few of my college courses, we couldn't use graphing calculators because we could save formulas in it, and that was considered cheating.
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Apr 5, 2023 12:12
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roffels posted:In a few of my college courses, we couldn't use graphing calculators because we could save formulas in it, and that was considered cheating. I totally cheated in high school by having stored formulas, stored programs, and notes-stored-as-programs on my TI-83, so I can sort of see the point.
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Apr 5, 2023 13:27
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Maybe but in real life you look that poo poo up anyway. In my physics class, all the formulas were printed around the room on posters.
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Apr 5, 2023 13:34
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GreenNight posted:Maybe but in real life you look that poo poo up anyway. In my physics class, all the formulas were printed around the room on posters. In a few tests I remember it being a completely clean room, but we were handed a sheet of paper with a LOAD of formulas randomly on it. None of them were titled or described. The idea was if you knew what you were doing, you knew the formula to use from your 'bag of tools'.
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Apr 5, 2023 13:59
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Humphreys posted:In a few tests I remember it being a completely clean room, but we were handed a sheet of paper with a LOAD of formulas randomly on it. None of them were titled or described. The idea was if you knew what you were doing, you knew the formula to use from your 'bag of tools'. I'd rather be in a Saw movie
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Apr 5, 2023 14:02
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I taught undergrad EE courses for a few years. I told my students they could write whatever on a note card of a certain side and use it. That worked pretty well.
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Apr 5, 2023 14:07
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TotalLossBrain posted:I taught undergrad EE courses for a few years. I told my students they could write whatever on a note card of a certain side and use it. This, this I can do. Granted, I have tiny handwriting. A sheet of unlabeled formulae written by someone else in an arbitrary organization scheme however is my personal hell.
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Apr 5, 2023 14:08
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TotalLossBrain posted:I taught undergrad EE courses for a few years. I told my students they could write whatever on a note card of a certain side and use it. Hell, just figuring out what to write on the card is a lot of learning in itself.
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Apr 5, 2023 14:12
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Groke posted:Hell, just figuring out what to write on the card is a lot of learning in itself. Exactly my reasoning
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Apr 5, 2023 14:18
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Computer viking posted:I totally cheated in high school by having stored formulas, stored programs, and notes-stored-as-programs on my TI-83, so I can sort of see the point. It was common for teachers to come around the room before a test so they could see the "Mem cleared" screen on everyone's TI-81. So of course, people wrote programs that would draw a fake of that screen. But that was less common than you'd think, since the program essentially had to draw the letters pixel by pixel (you couldn't just print it as text because it had lower-case letters). So in addition to being a huge pain to figure out and type in, the program also took up a good chunk of memory, not leaving much for your cheat sheets. So lot of us only did it once, just to prove we could outsmart the teacher, and then never bothered again.
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Apr 5, 2023 15:28
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TotalLossBrain posted:Exactly my reasoning (It's an old trick, but it still works.)
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Apr 5, 2023 15:42
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Computer viking posted:I totally cheated in high school by having stored formulas, stored programs, and notes-stored-as-programs on my TI-83, so I can sort of see the point. Sure, but I ended up just writing formulas in pencil on the back of my calculator anyways. Light enough to not be too obvious, and easy enough to erase with just a wipe of my finger.
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Apr 5, 2023 17:14
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Got a working VIC-20 that doesn't smell of mold, and I gotta say the Penultimate Cartridge+ is pretty much a must buy. Except I already bought one. I don't see myself needing the Datasette much since it (the cartridge) comes with so many games. Man Pentagorat is impressive, but then it takes all the expanded memory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xs4w4kG1Tw
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Apr 5, 2023 17:38
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TotalLossBrain posted:I taught undergrad EE courses for a few years. I told my students they could write whatever on a note card of a certain side and use it. My high school chemistry/physics teacher always allowed one side of a 3x5" note card for formulas. My friends and I always had a competition to see how small we could write and cram everything in. I always won once you figured in being able to read them. I also always just ended up with formulae memorized, so I didn't need the cards much regardless.
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Apr 5, 2023 17:50
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That's how it went for me. By writing the info on the card, I ended up memorizing it. And just used it as a reference.
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Apr 5, 2023 18:41
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