So what? How does someone taking some free software I create and adding it into their own propriety product stop someone else from making some open source software using the same free, BSD licensed code to make their own?
The BSD license allows developers prohibit others from seeing, using or improving the source code past the point in time where it was put into a proprietary product. The benefits of FUTURE development are not shared. The development branch ends for the community. While I don't have an ethical problem with this if that is what the developer intended, I'm also not going to pretend that the community isn't being hurt. The rest of the world would clearly be better off having access to the source code than not.
Sure thing, the code may be included in a closed source system but the code itself never becomes propriety
Any enhancements to it do become proprietary and original code slowly becomes obsolete in a huge number of cases. After all, there was obviously a reason the added to the code. As soon as it forks into a proprietary product, that development branch is forever closed to the general public.
It is factually wrong. If you can't see or accept that then you really do need to grow up a little, both politically and intellectually.
"Factually wrong"? Prove it. You appear to be arguing that BSD licensed software is not regularly incorporated into proprietary products which is quite incorrect. Since you and I both know that happens on a regular basis (you admit as much) I'm a little puzzled where you think I'm wrong. A useful BSD licensed product WILL almost inevitably become part of a proprietary product at some point. While that if the developer choice to make, it happens constantly. Apple, Sun Microsystems, and countless other companies have significant parts of their business based on taking BSD licensed software and "enhancing" it in proprietary products.
Give Stallman some software with a BSD license and see how he responds.
BSD software has a strong tendency to turn into proprietary products - i.e. not free. That doesn't really bother someone like Stallman who is a programmer but it causes a huge problem for the majority of people who are not programmers like myself. My skills lie elsewhere and for the majority of us out there functionally there is little difference to me between a BSD license and a proprietary license.
He's of the "It's only free as long as I say it's as free as I want it to be" people.
Doesn't mean he's wrong. A BSD license may as well be proprietary because eventually it will become proprietary if it is of any use at all.
Stallman's a bit of an extremist, and wants all software to be open-source.
No he doesn't. He wants it to be free. Had you watched the video you would have seen him negatively describe open source as a way for people to avoid the subject of free software. He doesn't care at all about open source except insofar as it gets us to free software as defined by himself.
Slightly off topic but I watched the video. I've read a lot of what Stallman has written but haven't heard him speak before. He's a pretty bad public speaker judging by this TED talk. His slides looked like something a sixth grader would draw, he sounded like a robot and he clearly didn't spend enough time rehearsing. He kept looking at his slides as if it was a surprise what was coming next. If you want people to take your arguments seriously, having a good argument is not sufficient. You have to be able to present it well. He's been making these arguments long enough that he ought to be more polished by now. I respect the stance he is taking but based on this talk he's doing a pretty crap job of being an evangelist to the general public.
I really can't imagine anyone coming away from that presentation convinced that they've had their eyes opened. His argument was moralistic but he didn't really explain convincingly the consequences of not-free software or why anyone should care. He explained that we control software or it controls us as if it was axiomatic which it is not. Here on slashdot we understand what he's talking about (whether or not we agree) but a more general audience will NOT be convinced by such a superficial argument especially when presented in such an amateurish way.
So again you make the argument that only the wealthy should be entitled to a seat that they can actually fit in even if swapping seats with a short person costs nothing. Wow you're cold.
Where exactly did you get idea that you are entitled to as much leg room as you want for as little money as you are willing to pay?
It costs the airline NOTHING to have a tall person who literally cannot fit in a seat swap seats with a short person who can and you'll find that most people are willing to switch seats if you ask nicely. Sometimes you just do the right thing because its the right thing. Sometimes you leave the ideology behind and help someone out when they need it. In fact generally the passengers can work it out among themselves. The only time the airline needs to get involved is if they run into a cold hearted jerk who thinks people others should suffer if they don't happen to be wealthy enough.
Pay for what you need. Whatever happened to that idea?
What happened to that idea is that not everyone in the world is a money hungry sociopath and sometimes you just make allowances for the corner cases. You think handicapped people should have to pay extra to fly? My grandmother should pay more to visit my sick mother because she needs a little extra help getting to the gate in spite of the fact that she doesn't have a lot of money? Wow, you have a pretty cold way of looking at the world. It takes a real sociopath to think that everyone should have to pay for every little accommodation regardless of whether they have the means to do so or not.
Meh, statistically you'll make significantly more over your lifetime if you're tall.
Statistically that doesn't mean shit with regards to any specific person. If you're going to make a statistical argument at least make one that isn't retarded.
Doesn't every airline that offers economy plus (or whatever it's called) also let you upgrade with frequent flyer miles?
That is for paying for EXTRA leg room beyond what you actually need. If you actually need the legroom it isn't an upgrade and shouldn't cost extra.
Think of is this way: you can buy a "standard seat" ticket for $350, or an "I don't care how you torture me just give me the cheapest price" ticket for $300.
Or you can be a decent human being and accommodate those customers who are a little bit physically different for no extra money. It's not like there are a huge number of people 2 meters tall. There is a difference between being cheap and not having any reasonable options available at all. If you really want to be a bastard capitalist about it you should weigh every passenger with their luggage before they board and charge by weight because that has a MUCH bigger impact on airline costs than some modest legroom accommodations for unusually tall passengers. Of course that will never happen but it's actually the most reflective means of allocating cost to what the airline's actual cost per passenger is.
Not everything has to be about maximizing short term profit for the airline. The small amount for marginal revenue forgone by an airline making special arrangements for tall passengers would be probably more than made up for by customer loyalty.
So are the people reclining. Both sides are being inconsiderate here and I don't see either as being more wrong than they other.
The airlines should just disable the recline option
That I agree with. Honestly the seats don't recline enough to really matter except for the placebo effect in most cases. Plus then they don't have to make people "return their seats to their full upright and locked position" on every flippin' flight.
Delta's stock price has increased 400% since 2009. That's 5 years. Still sure about "notoriously bad investment"?
Pretty much yes. Sure they go up sometimes but you're looking at the data retrospectively. Go ahead and tell me which airline stock is going to go up 400% from today's price. Anyone who claims they can do that is either a liar or an idiot and likely both.
There is copious data about how badly airline companies have been as investments over the years. Lots of competition, high fixed costs, huge capital investments and a commodity product in a fickle retail business. One of the biggest costs (fuel) is almost entirely out of the control of the airlines and fluctuates wildly at times. Even profitable airlines like Southwest generate a big portion of their profits basically from making good hedging bets on fuel costs instead of on their day to day operations. If you needed a formula for minimizing profits, you'd have a hard time coming up with a more difficult industry to make a buck in.
Tall people are free to purchase bulkhead and emergency row seats right now.
So are you. Being tall isn't a choice so why should they be discriminated against if we don't force the 300 pound tub of lard next to us to pay for the portion of my seat he oozes into? After all, being fat is at least in theory a choice. There are times to be a capitalist but not when it involves human decency and dignity.
Adequate leg room isn't a premium feature. It's simple human decency to allow taller than average passengers the ability to sit with reasonable comfort without forcing them to pay more for the "privilege". There is nothing wrong with airlines waiving premium seating fees for unusually tall passengers to get them a adequate leg room. I'm all for being a capitalist for things that are genuinely extras but this doesn't fall into that category.
and this is what happens. Survival 101: you do not violate my personal space. EVER.
I strongly suggest you never travel to China then. There are places in this world that have a VERY different concept of personal space than what you are probably accustomed to. In China they don't respect personal space or lines the same way we do here in the US and they don't see any problem with that. It's not wrong but it is very different and jarring at first.
Why is it scummy for airlines to charge extra for better seating?
Having adequate leg room isn't a "premium feature", it's what should simply be standard. Being tall isn't even theoretically a choice like being overweight. Premium features are things like better food, better entertainment, better seats. There are plenty of tall people who don't actually fit in the economy seating. I have a good friend who is roughly 2 meters tall (~6'7") and he HAS to sit in an aisle seat or an exit row in coach because he simply cannot get his legs to fit behind a typical economy seat. Seems unfair to force him to pay more simply because he's taller than average. There is a difference between premium seating and seating that simply is adequate to fit a normal (if tall) human being. While you have to draw the line somewhere, airlines have gotten to the point where a statistically significant percent of the population has difficulty squeezing into the seats.
So you don't do advanced math? That's fine, but that doesn't invalidate the use of the Ti.
Sure I do. I do a ton of statistics and a bit of trig. None of which would be made easier in any way with a TI graphing calculator. I've worked as a design engineer, a stats analyst, an accountant, a finance analysis, and an industrial engineer. I have not once in 20 years found any situation in any of those jobs where a TI-8X would have been necessary or even particularly useful given that I have a PC available to me and no space or severe cost constraints. My computer can do the calculations more efficiently and with a far better interface. For basic quick and dirty calculations I don't need a fancy graphing calculator. The only reasons students are limited to such small devices is for space constraints in classrooms and cost. Since neither of those apply in my professional life there is no use case for me for those devices. None.
I have no patience with the argument "that's the way we've always done it". That is one of the most costly and damaging sentences in the English language. There are times to leave well enough alone but this certainly isn't one of them.
Interface and functionality? No, they couldn't improve that.
I disagree. The buttons don't have to be the same. The menus can be improved. More, better or different functions can be added. You could change to something completely different like a touchscreen. You're presuming it cannot be improved merely because no one has. The big innovation in cell phones in the last 10 years was the development of designed for touch interfaces. That was huge and it revolutionized the industry. There is no reason a pocket calculator has to hew to the traditions of 20 years ago just because we've always done it that way.
Even if something else is theoretically "better" (like RPN), there's too much inertia behind the status quo.
There is no reason a calculator cannot offer both RPN and algebraic notation and let the user choose. This isn't like the Querty vs Dvorak keyboard argument. There is no reason new calculators have to resemble existing calculators at all aside from efficiently doing math. Some of what we are doing now makes sense. Some can stand some significant improvement.
Maybe: color and/or LEDs would be inappropriate, but e-ink might be acceptable if it had the same resolution and refresh rate as the LCD it replaced (ideally, it should also support or emulate the "grayscale mode" accomplished by some TI-8X software by turning the pixels on and off really fast)
You offhandedly dismiss color and LEDs as "inappropriate" but unless you've actually tried I think you are being too hasty. You may be right but it's entirely possible there may be a market segment that very much desires such a thing and you don't know until you try. You can put a pretty big battery in a calculator the size of a TI-8X and it doesn't have to be feather light. I agree that e-ink might be interesting as well but there is no reason at all it needs to replicate the ridiculously low resolution of 20 year old technology.
Cost and performance? Yes, those could be improved -- I said as much in my post! But they don't count as making it outdated IMO.
If you can get better performance for the same (or less) money with newer technology then it is de-facto outdated. QED.
Wow, you came up with an extreme example that doesn't apply to most people. Well done.
Sometimes an extreme example is useful to get people to pay attention when they make false absolute statements. I can easily come up with more mundane examples if you would like. I'm an accountant and I damn well need to memorize whether increasing an asset is a debit or a credit. (it's a debit, FYI) Sure I can look it up but I would be pretty ineffective at my job if I needed to do that. A programmer damn well had better not have to look up how to pass a parameter in the language they are using.
Then again, he did say, "there is no value in memorizing any fact."
But I doubt I'm the right person to ask; I have a rather odd view of this on this topic.
Not odd at all and quite a few people agree with you. I agree that there is little need for graphing calculators before college at the earliest. They tend to become an overpriced crutch that does more to prevent learning than to enable it. There is no point in having a graphing calculator before you have mastered the concepts that you are using it to calculate.
Humans are now distributed systems, there is no value in memorizing any fact when information is available 24/7 everywhere.
Remember that the next time your surgeon needs to look something up on Google while you are coding on the operating table.
Yes there is value in knowing facts even to this day and that will never change. If any of my employees had to look up how to do their jobs constantly they would be quite useless. There is SOME information that is not worth memorizing but it doesn't follow that there is no value in memorization at all.
The *only* use? I completely disagree as an engineer. I have all kinds of "big boy" computational tools at my disposal, but at least once I day I turn on my TI-89 and use it for something.
I'm an engineer and also an accountant (yes I do both) in my day job. I have all sorts of fancy calculators including some TI-8X series and I can't remember the last time I used any of them. I sit in front of a desk where I have a spreadsheet and a basic calculator. If the job is complicated enough that I would need a TI-8X or involves calculating with lots of numbers then I'm just going to use the spreadsheet or some other analytical software. If it is just a basic quick addition or similar then I'm going to use a simple calculator. I really have no use for a "fancy" graphing calculator.
The thing that I find odd among accountants it that you wouldn't believe how many of them still rely on paper tape calculators. I have NO idea why anyone would use one of those when they are sitting in front of a spreadsheet but a ton of accountants still do. Bizarre...
The TI-8x calculators are not outdated; they do exactly what they need to do -- no more, no less.
That doesn't mean they do it in the best possible way. I could do calculations on an Apple ][ back in the 1980s but that doesn't mean the state of the art stopped there. Sure they get the job done but that doesn't mean they couldn't make further improvements. I have a hard time believing that the perfect calculator was developed back when I was still in school 25+ years ago.
I disagree that they are not outdated. Are you seriously going to argue that they couldn't have made any improvements to the interface, power, screen quality, cost, functionality, or performance in the last 20 years? They don't necessarily have to add more functions but there are plenty of improvements that could be made.
The bigger problem really is that too many students rely on these things as a crutch and never really learn the math properly. You do not need a graphing calculator the vast majority of the time to learn the concepts shown on the graph. If you don't understand without a calculator what a parabola or sine wave is, the calculator is not going to help. Aside from calculating things like sine and cosine functions I really don't see much point in graphing calculators until after students have mastered the concepts they calculate.
I went sailing with these guys on a day sail recently. They offer multi-day voyages from Lake Huron to Lake Erie on the Appledore IV. The tall ships they have are motorized schooners which were built for around the world sails.
The Great Lakes are loads of fun if you like water recreation. Realistically calling them lakes doesn't really do them justice. They're really freshwater inland seas. Hope you get the chance to visit one day. Good luck to you.
I'm dubious given the vague description of how to reproduce the problem. (open lots of tabs is not a lot of detail) However if so then then can I assume you have reported the problem to the folks at Mozilla with appropriate step by step details on how to reproduce the exact problem? It's not clear to me that they would worry much about running 200 tabs at once since almost nobody actually does that but there certainly could be a problem worth fixing.
I'm very boring, I've run the same addons for the best part of 3 years to boot as well.
And those addons have never been updated or changed and could not possible be the source of the problem? You have of course disabled/removed the addons to prove that they are not the source of the difficulty? You have established that your anti-virus is not interfering? You are dealing with a weird use case that not many people see. I don't doubt that you are experiencing the issues you say you are but I hope you are actively working with the developers to fix the problem.
IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER IF YOU AREN'T EXPERIENCING THESE PROBLEMS! Why do you freaks always insist on denying that very real problems exist just because you haven't personally experienced them?
Yes it does matter if others aren't experiencing these problems because you can't fix a problem you can't reproduce. The problem is with people who complain that "Firefox is broken" but then never provide adequate data to isolate what they are doing that is causing the problem. If User A says Firefox is slow when doing Behavior X and User B tries Behavior X as described and cannot replicate the problem then the source of the problem has to be something more than solely Behavior X or it might have nothing at all to do with Behavior X because User B is mistaken. It could be how the software interacts with other software. It could be a hardware issue. It could be a version mismatch. It could be any number of things, particularly when you are talking about some weird corner use case like opening 200 tabs at once. (why anyone would do that eludes me)
These aren't isolated problems that people are reporting, either. The reports are numerous, widespread, yet still quite consistent. Firefox is slow. Firefox suffers from memory leaks. Firefox has a shitty UI these days.
On a daily basis I run Firefox and Chrome side by side at work (yes I have a good reason) on Windows PCs and sometimes Macs. I run IE and Safari with some regularity too. I see no evidence that Firefox is meaningfully faster or slower than any of the other major browsers. There probably are some differences but they are so minor as to be meaningless to most people in most cases. I have seen memory leaks in the past but I see no current evidence of them with the current stable builds. While they may exist I'm certainly not seeing much evidence of them. Provide a reproducible use case though and I'll of course reconsider. As for the "shitty UI" that is more a matter of opinion than fact. I don't think Firefox's interface is meaningfully better or worse than Chrome, Safari or IE. I wish they would stop needlessly screwing with it but that's a separate issue.
ALL OF THOSE COMPLAINTS ARE LEGITIMATE, AND ALL ARE FACTUAL!
Right, because who would ever lie on the internet? It's such a bastion of integrity and fair play.
Slashdot Mirror
So what? How does someone taking some free software I create and adding it into their own propriety product stop someone else from making some open source software using the same free, BSD licensed code to make their own?
The BSD license allows developers prohibit others from seeing, using or improving the source code past the point in time where it was put into a proprietary product. The benefits of FUTURE development are not shared. The development branch ends for the community. While I don't have an ethical problem with this if that is what the developer intended, I'm also not going to pretend that the community isn't being hurt. The rest of the world would clearly be better off having access to the source code than not.
Sure thing, the code may be included in a closed source system but the code itself never becomes propriety
Any enhancements to it do become proprietary and original code slowly becomes obsolete in a huge number of cases. After all, there was obviously a reason the added to the code. As soon as it forks into a proprietary product, that development branch is forever closed to the general public.
It is factually wrong. If you can't see or accept that then you really do need to grow up a little, both politically and intellectually.
"Factually wrong"? Prove it. You appear to be arguing that BSD licensed software is not regularly incorporated into proprietary products which is quite incorrect. Since you and I both know that happens on a regular basis (you admit as much) I'm a little puzzled where you think I'm wrong. A useful BSD licensed product WILL almost inevitably become part of a proprietary product at some point. While that if the developer choice to make, it happens constantly. Apple, Sun Microsystems, and countless other companies have significant parts of their business based on taking BSD licensed software and "enhancing" it in proprietary products.
"Factually wrong"? I think not.
Just be happy with the content instead of expecting him to put on a show since it's much better when he doesn't try to put on a show.
That's a bit like saying your boat doesn't leak as much as it used to. It's still a problem...
What's depressing is that he's smart enough to understand the problem but apparently too arrogant to learn how to present his argument effectively.
Give Stallman some software with a BSD license and see how he responds.
BSD software has a strong tendency to turn into proprietary products - i.e. not free. That doesn't really bother someone like Stallman who is a programmer but it causes a huge problem for the majority of people who are not programmers like myself. My skills lie elsewhere and for the majority of us out there functionally there is little difference to me between a BSD license and a proprietary license.
He's of the "It's only free as long as I say it's as free as I want it to be" people.
Doesn't mean he's wrong. A BSD license may as well be proprietary because eventually it will become proprietary if it is of any use at all.
Richard's approach towards cellphones is not to use them.
As if land line phones are somehow less problematic from a Free software point of view.
Stallman's a bit of an extremist, and wants all software to be open-source.
No he doesn't. He wants it to be free. Had you watched the video you would have seen him negatively describe open source as a way for people to avoid the subject of free software. He doesn't care at all about open source except insofar as it gets us to free software as defined by himself.
Slightly off topic but I watched the video. I've read a lot of what Stallman has written but haven't heard him speak before. He's a pretty bad public speaker judging by this TED talk. His slides looked like something a sixth grader would draw, he sounded like a robot and he clearly didn't spend enough time rehearsing. He kept looking at his slides as if it was a surprise what was coming next. If you want people to take your arguments seriously, having a good argument is not sufficient. You have to be able to present it well. He's been making these arguments long enough that he ought to be more polished by now. I respect the stance he is taking but based on this talk he's doing a pretty crap job of being an evangelist to the general public.
I really can't imagine anyone coming away from that presentation convinced that they've had their eyes opened. His argument was moralistic but he didn't really explain convincingly the consequences of not-free software or why anyone should care. He explained that we control software or it controls us as if it was axiomatic which it is not. Here on slashdot we understand what he's talking about (whether or not we agree) but a more general audience will NOT be convinced by such a superficial argument especially when presented in such an amateurish way.
You can also not fly if you can't afford it.
So again you make the argument that only the wealthy should be entitled to a seat that they can actually fit in even if swapping seats with a short person costs nothing. Wow you're cold.
Where exactly did you get idea that you are entitled to as much leg room as you want for as little money as you are willing to pay?
It costs the airline NOTHING to have a tall person who literally cannot fit in a seat swap seats with a short person who can and you'll find that most people are willing to switch seats if you ask nicely. Sometimes you just do the right thing because its the right thing. Sometimes you leave the ideology behind and help someone out when they need it. In fact generally the passengers can work it out among themselves. The only time the airline needs to get involved is if they run into a cold hearted jerk who thinks people others should suffer if they don't happen to be wealthy enough.
Pay for what you need. Whatever happened to that idea?
What happened to that idea is that not everyone in the world is a money hungry sociopath and sometimes you just make allowances for the corner cases. You think handicapped people should have to pay extra to fly? My grandmother should pay more to visit my sick mother because she needs a little extra help getting to the gate in spite of the fact that she doesn't have a lot of money? Wow, you have a pretty cold way of looking at the world. It takes a real sociopath to think that everyone should have to pay for every little accommodation regardless of whether they have the means to do so or not.
Meh, statistically you'll make significantly more over your lifetime if you're tall.
Statistically that doesn't mean shit with regards to any specific person. If you're going to make a statistical argument at least make one that isn't retarded.
Doesn't every airline that offers economy plus (or whatever it's called) also let you upgrade with frequent flyer miles?
That is for paying for EXTRA leg room beyond what you actually need. If you actually need the legroom it isn't an upgrade and shouldn't cost extra.
Think of is this way: you can buy a "standard seat" ticket for $350, or an "I don't care how you torture me just give me the cheapest price" ticket for $300.
Or you can be a decent human being and accommodate those customers who are a little bit physically different for no extra money. It's not like there are a huge number of people 2 meters tall. There is a difference between being cheap and not having any reasonable options available at all. If you really want to be a bastard capitalist about it you should weigh every passenger with their luggage before they board and charge by weight because that has a MUCH bigger impact on airline costs than some modest legroom accommodations for unusually tall passengers. Of course that will never happen but it's actually the most reflective means of allocating cost to what the airline's actual cost per passenger is.
Not everything has to be about maximizing short term profit for the airline. The small amount for marginal revenue forgone by an airline making special arrangements for tall passengers would be probably more than made up for by customer loyalty.
The knee defenders are narcissistic jerks.
So are the people reclining. Both sides are being inconsiderate here and I don't see either as being more wrong than they other.
The airlines should just disable the recline option
That I agree with. Honestly the seats don't recline enough to really matter except for the placebo effect in most cases. Plus then they don't have to make people "return their seats to their full upright and locked position" on every flippin' flight.
Delta's stock price has increased 400% since 2009. That's 5 years. Still sure about "notoriously bad investment"?
Pretty much yes. Sure they go up sometimes but you're looking at the data retrospectively. Go ahead and tell me which airline stock is going to go up 400% from today's price. Anyone who claims they can do that is either a liar or an idiot and likely both.
There is copious data about how badly airline companies have been as investments over the years. Lots of competition, high fixed costs, huge capital investments and a commodity product in a fickle retail business. One of the biggest costs (fuel) is almost entirely out of the control of the airlines and fluctuates wildly at times. Even profitable airlines like Southwest generate a big portion of their profits basically from making good hedging bets on fuel costs instead of on their day to day operations. If you needed a formula for minimizing profits, you'd have a hard time coming up with a more difficult industry to make a buck in.
Stop complaining and buy business class if economy is too hard on your delicate knees.
So everyone should be rich is your answer? How generous of you... [/sarcasm]
There is a point where the pursuit of money has to end and causing needless discomfort to paying customers is right about at that point.
Tall people are free to purchase bulkhead and emergency row seats right now.
So are you. Being tall isn't a choice so why should they be discriminated against if we don't force the 300 pound tub of lard next to us to pay for the portion of my seat he oozes into? After all, being fat is at least in theory a choice. There are times to be a capitalist but not when it involves human decency and dignity.
Adequate leg room isn't a premium feature. It's simple human decency to allow taller than average passengers the ability to sit with reasonable comfort without forcing them to pay more for the "privilege". There is nothing wrong with airlines waiving premium seating fees for unusually tall passengers to get them a adequate leg room. I'm all for being a capitalist for things that are genuinely extras but this doesn't fall into that category.
and this is what happens. Survival 101: you do not violate my personal space. EVER.
I strongly suggest you never travel to China then. There are places in this world that have a VERY different concept of personal space than what you are probably accustomed to. In China they don't respect personal space or lines the same way we do here in the US and they don't see any problem with that. It's not wrong but it is very different and jarring at first.
Why is it scummy for airlines to charge extra for better seating?
Having adequate leg room isn't a "premium feature", it's what should simply be standard. Being tall isn't even theoretically a choice like being overweight. Premium features are things like better food, better entertainment, better seats. There are plenty of tall people who don't actually fit in the economy seating. I have a good friend who is roughly 2 meters tall (~6'7") and he HAS to sit in an aisle seat or an exit row in coach because he simply cannot get his legs to fit behind a typical economy seat. Seems unfair to force him to pay more simply because he's taller than average. There is a difference between premium seating and seating that simply is adequate to fit a normal (if tall) human being. While you have to draw the line somewhere, airlines have gotten to the point where a statistically significant percent of the population has difficulty squeezing into the seats.
So you don't do advanced math? That's fine, but that doesn't invalidate the use of the Ti.
Sure I do. I do a ton of statistics and a bit of trig. None of which would be made easier in any way with a TI graphing calculator. I've worked as a design engineer, a stats analyst, an accountant, a finance analysis, and an industrial engineer. I have not once in 20 years found any situation in any of those jobs where a TI-8X would have been necessary or even particularly useful given that I have a PC available to me and no space or severe cost constraints. My computer can do the calculations more efficiently and with a far better interface. For basic quick and dirty calculations I don't need a fancy graphing calculator. The only reasons students are limited to such small devices is for space constraints in classrooms and cost. Since neither of those apply in my professional life there is no use case for me for those devices. None.
I have no patience with the argument "that's the way we've always done it". That is one of the most costly and damaging sentences in the English language. There are times to leave well enough alone but this certainly isn't one of them.
Interface and functionality? No, they couldn't improve that.
I disagree. The buttons don't have to be the same. The menus can be improved. More, better or different functions can be added. You could change to something completely different like a touchscreen. You're presuming it cannot be improved merely because no one has. The big innovation in cell phones in the last 10 years was the development of designed for touch interfaces. That was huge and it revolutionized the industry. There is no reason a pocket calculator has to hew to the traditions of 20 years ago just because we've always done it that way.
Even if something else is theoretically "better" (like RPN), there's too much inertia behind the status quo.
There is no reason a calculator cannot offer both RPN and algebraic notation and let the user choose. This isn't like the Querty vs Dvorak keyboard argument. There is no reason new calculators have to resemble existing calculators at all aside from efficiently doing math. Some of what we are doing now makes sense. Some can stand some significant improvement.
Maybe: color and/or LEDs would be inappropriate, but e-ink might be acceptable if it had the same resolution and refresh rate as the LCD it replaced (ideally, it should also support or emulate the "grayscale mode" accomplished by some TI-8X software by turning the pixels on and off really fast)
You offhandedly dismiss color and LEDs as "inappropriate" but unless you've actually tried I think you are being too hasty. You may be right but it's entirely possible there may be a market segment that very much desires such a thing and you don't know until you try. You can put a pretty big battery in a calculator the size of a TI-8X and it doesn't have to be feather light. I agree that e-ink might be interesting as well but there is no reason at all it needs to replicate the ridiculously low resolution of 20 year old technology.
Cost and performance? Yes, those could be improved -- I said as much in my post! But they don't count as making it outdated IMO.
If you can get better performance for the same (or less) money with newer technology then it is de-facto outdated. QED.
Wow, you came up with an extreme example that doesn't apply to most people. Well done.
Sometimes an extreme example is useful to get people to pay attention when they make false absolute statements. I can easily come up with more mundane examples if you would like. I'm an accountant and I damn well need to memorize whether increasing an asset is a debit or a credit. (it's a debit, FYI) Sure I can look it up but I would be pretty ineffective at my job if I needed to do that. A programmer damn well had better not have to look up how to pass a parameter in the language they are using.
Then again, he did say, "there is no value in memorizing any fact."
Exactly my point.
But I doubt I'm the right person to ask; I have a rather odd view of this on this topic.
Not odd at all and quite a few people agree with you. I agree that there is little need for graphing calculators before college at the earliest. They tend to become an overpriced crutch that does more to prevent learning than to enable it. There is no point in having a graphing calculator before you have mastered the concepts that you are using it to calculate.
Humans are now distributed systems, there is no value in memorizing any fact when information is available 24/7 everywhere.
Remember that the next time your surgeon needs to look something up on Google while you are coding on the operating table.
Yes there is value in knowing facts even to this day and that will never change. If any of my employees had to look up how to do their jobs constantly they would be quite useless. There is SOME information that is not worth memorizing but it doesn't follow that there is no value in memorization at all.
The *only* use? I completely disagree as an engineer. I have all kinds of "big boy" computational tools at my disposal, but at least once I day I turn on my TI-89 and use it for something.
I'm an engineer and also an accountant (yes I do both) in my day job. I have all sorts of fancy calculators including some TI-8X series and I can't remember the last time I used any of them. I sit in front of a desk where I have a spreadsheet and a basic calculator. If the job is complicated enough that I would need a TI-8X or involves calculating with lots of numbers then I'm just going to use the spreadsheet or some other analytical software. If it is just a basic quick addition or similar then I'm going to use a simple calculator. I really have no use for a "fancy" graphing calculator.
The thing that I find odd among accountants it that you wouldn't believe how many of them still rely on paper tape calculators. I have NO idea why anyone would use one of those when they are sitting in front of a spreadsheet but a ton of accountants still do. Bizarre...
The TI-8x calculators are not outdated; they do exactly what they need to do -- no more, no less.
That doesn't mean they do it in the best possible way. I could do calculations on an Apple ][ back in the 1980s but that doesn't mean the state of the art stopped there. Sure they get the job done but that doesn't mean they couldn't make further improvements. I have a hard time believing that the perfect calculator was developed back when I was still in school 25+ years ago.
I disagree that they are not outdated. Are you seriously going to argue that they couldn't have made any improvements to the interface, power, screen quality, cost, functionality, or performance in the last 20 years? They don't necessarily have to add more functions but there are plenty of improvements that could be made.
The bigger problem really is that too many students rely on these things as a crutch and never really learn the math properly. You do not need a graphing calculator the vast majority of the time to learn the concepts shown on the graph. If you don't understand without a calculator what a parabola or sine wave is, the calculator is not going to help. Aside from calculating things like sine and cosine functions I really don't see much point in graphing calculators until after students have mastered the concepts they calculate.
I went sailing with these guys on a day sail recently. They offer multi-day voyages from Lake Huron to Lake Erie on the Appledore IV. The tall ships they have are motorized schooners which were built for around the world sails.
The Great Lakes are loads of fun if you like water recreation. Realistically calling them lakes doesn't really do them justice. They're really freshwater inland seas. Hope you get the chance to visit one day. Good luck to you.
I've isolated the problem perfectly
I'm dubious given the vague description of how to reproduce the problem. (open lots of tabs is not a lot of detail) However if so then then can I assume you have reported the problem to the folks at Mozilla with appropriate step by step details on how to reproduce the exact problem? It's not clear to me that they would worry much about running 200 tabs at once since almost nobody actually does that but there certainly could be a problem worth fixing.
I'm very boring, I've run the same addons for the best part of 3 years to boot as well.
And those addons have never been updated or changed and could not possible be the source of the problem? You have of course disabled/removed the addons to prove that they are not the source of the difficulty? You have established that your anti-virus is not interfering? You are dealing with a weird use case that not many people see. I don't doubt that you are experiencing the issues you say you are but I hope you are actively working with the developers to fix the problem.
IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER IF YOU AREN'T EXPERIENCING THESE PROBLEMS! Why do you freaks always insist on denying that very real problems exist just because you haven't personally experienced them?
Yes it does matter if others aren't experiencing these problems because you can't fix a problem you can't reproduce. The problem is with people who complain that "Firefox is broken" but then never provide adequate data to isolate what they are doing that is causing the problem. If User A says Firefox is slow when doing Behavior X and User B tries Behavior X as described and cannot replicate the problem then the source of the problem has to be something more than solely Behavior X or it might have nothing at all to do with Behavior X because User B is mistaken. It could be how the software interacts with other software. It could be a hardware issue. It could be a version mismatch. It could be any number of things, particularly when you are talking about some weird corner use case like opening 200 tabs at once. (why anyone would do that eludes me)
These aren't isolated problems that people are reporting, either. The reports are numerous, widespread, yet still quite consistent. Firefox is slow. Firefox suffers from memory leaks. Firefox has a shitty UI these days.
On a daily basis I run Firefox and Chrome side by side at work (yes I have a good reason) on Windows PCs and sometimes Macs. I run IE and Safari with some regularity too. I see no evidence that Firefox is meaningfully faster or slower than any of the other major browsers. There probably are some differences but they are so minor as to be meaningless to most people in most cases. I have seen memory leaks in the past but I see no current evidence of them with the current stable builds. While they may exist I'm certainly not seeing much evidence of them. Provide a reproducible use case though and I'll of course reconsider. As for the "shitty UI" that is more a matter of opinion than fact. I don't think Firefox's interface is meaningfully better or worse than Chrome, Safari or IE. I wish they would stop needlessly screwing with it but that's a separate issue.
ALL OF THOSE COMPLAINTS ARE LEGITIMATE, AND ALL ARE FACTUAL!
Right, because who would ever lie on the internet? It's such a bastion of integrity and fair play.