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Casio Unveils New Color Screen Graphing Calculator
An anonymous reader writes "As reported by hobbyist calculator programmers, Casio has recently unveiled new graphing calculator models, the Casio fx-CG10/20 series, less than a year after Texas Instruments released the TI-Nspire Touchpad. The calculators features a 65536 colors screen (16-bit) with a resolution of 384x216 pixels, 16 MB of Flash memory (10 available for the user) and 140 hours of battery life. The calculators will retail starting at $129.99. Although Casio's new calculator official page have limited information about the calculator programming capabilities and processor speed, could this eventually mark the end of TI's reign in North American schools?"
What I don't get is why someone would spend $150 on a calculator when you could get a netbook with a gig of RAM and 180 gigs of drive space with a dual core processor for the price of two of them. Kubuntu comes with a scientific calculator, and it's a free OS you can replace Windows with or install dual-boot.
I just don't know why anyone would buy a calculator, period.
They don't allow laptops into most exam rooms. There has always been a lot of places which had restrictions on graphing calculators, and required you to have standard 8(?) function calculators, or they would wipe the internal memory in a few cases.
It's probably why calculators didn't really improve much over the years, if you improved them, even if it lowered the cost, you would ironically reduce your potential market.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
I thought of that too. Maybe XKCD has shamed calculator makers into actually trying. I'm imagining it now.
"Lets see, time to check the webcomics... ...
I... I didn't become an engineer for this! Where did the dream of making the worlds best calculator die?!? I thought I was going to change the world of handheld calculators, but then I tried skipping coffee and spending more time with the family... before I knew it we were asking ourselves 'Why fix what's not really that broken and that students have to buy anyway' rather than 'What new features can we cram into it?' I knew I had hit some type of bottom when I actually told schools they should just recycle their old calculators rather than buying new.
That changes today. By God, I'm putting color on this motherfucker... FOR AMERICA!!!"
No... RPN has more advantages than you claim, and people who have become adept at it (not just learned it as a token thing, but really learned to think in that way) almost never want to go back.
(1) You can see intermediate results of your calculations as you go along.
(2) Fewer keystrokes are needed to perform computations, so there are fewer opportunities for mistakes.
(3) For highly proficient users, RPN allows for faster use of the calculator because of not having to enter and track lots of parens.
It's a similar situation to texting on a cell phone vs touch typing. If you are used to texting and never learned to touch type, you won't truly realize how much of a superior input system touch typing is.
But more and more our world is moving away from things that require any degree of learned skill, in favor of no or low-skill methods which yield inferior results.
Underpowered also means runs on a quartet of AAA's for months...