So what you're saying is that we've been dealing with shitty naming schemes in tech for decades?
this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
333 points (94.9% liked)
Today I Learned
17906 readers
44 users here now
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[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...
load more comments
(2 replies)
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
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
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.
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)
Schools own them a lot of the time
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I have fruit ninja on my ti-83. You swipe across the buttons to slice. It's surprisingly not as awful as you'd expect
load more comments
(2 replies)
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.
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.
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.
taking tests
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.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
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.
Lol do 8 + 9 + 4 + 7 + 6 + 5 + 1 + 9 + 7 + 8 + 5 with u shitty 6-number calculator
load more comments
(4 replies)
Where's my TI-86 plus?
view more: next ›