Suppose I should have clarified. Keyboard buttons. The kind you push. With your finger. Keyboards are always going to be more efficient then mouses, though sometimes they require more memorization. This is not the case with the specialized keypads they have on graphing calculator.
I agree, Moore's Law seems to have no effect on the TI series. They don't change price much at all. Suppose it could because the production cost of last decades processors doesn't really change. But still.
Not only that, their screens are so crappy compared to similarly priced Palm computers. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If Palm decided to put out a graphing calc (in other words, a Palm with an extended mathematical keypad and a math-oriented OS), it would make the TI calc series look like a joke.
I was really disappointed to see that, outside of new apps, it doesn't look like the new 89 has any extra functionality. The 89 is great for calc 1, but it becomes less useful into Calc 2 and Calc 3. Its "3-D support" is superficial at best. It can graph only one kind of 3-D graph and has issues dealing with 3-D functions and vectors in general. In other words, there is plenty of room for improvement, but TI obviously doesn't really care. I would hardly call "adding more memory" innovation. And few of the apps deal with more complicated mathematical concepts, and the apps are always less useful then integrated functionality in my experience. And you can install the apps on the TI-89 anyways, though perhaps not so many.
If you were to bother looking at the rules (for at least the ACT, which is the one I took a few years ago) you would know that it isn't cheating to have those materials on your calculator. Your not allowed to have test materials or communicate with your calculator, but thats it IIRC. Realistically, having math materials on your calculator isn't that helpful due to time constraints. Time isn't as much a problem for the AP (at least in the bio and government APs I took), so I wonder what they do for that. Not that time plays a small role for AP tests, but its/very/ important for the ACT, it's almost an IQ test. I imagine its simular for SAT.
Dude, the point is on a graphing calculator you have a few dozen buttons that allow you to access whatever function you want quickly.
I wouldn't mind a special keyboard for Mathematica. Of course the problem is that I still couldn't really use it because I can use a TI-89 on a test often, but usually not Mathematica.
The other problem is that Mathematica is like the worst in closed-source software. From what I've heard, the Mathematica license easily costs my university more then the Microsoft one (and outside of our Math and CS dept, we have a very MS-oriented campus.) Maxima is a good open source alternative to Mathematica, but it isn't yet at the same level.
I agree, I have a Gigabyte motherboard, its pretty nifty. Gigabyte is from Taiwan.
And by the way (responding to Anonymous Coward), I bought my computer from Cyber Power. I thought it would be obvious enough that the alternative to retail is online, but apparently not. You see, there is little old Texan company called "Dell". Perhaps you haven't heard of it.
I was responding to your comment that students who are afflicted with spyware and virus are stupid.
You forgot about installing a virus checker and running Windows Update. And not running as Administrator helps too.
The difference between a car and Windows is an important one. In Linux and Mac (well, probably Mac, I don't have personal experience with it) are both not afflicted with a constant barrage of spyware and worms. There is maintance to perform, but it isn't such a big deal. If there was a line of cars that broke down within a day of purchase without the user performing some maintance it would be called a lemon. Thats how the situation is with Windows XP and the various worms.
The other difference is that there is no assumption at all with a car that drivers should know how to fix their car. They know how to drive it. If computer maintance was restricted to bringing your computer to experts once a year, that wouldn't be unreasonable. But thats not the situation, for XP users especially. Its more like keeping a sick pet then owning a car.
You mean *gasp* not all users are as good at computers as you? Its folks like you that give all us techies a bad name. Because, you know what? Some people don't give a crap about computers. That may be hard for you to understand. They use it for word processing and Internet and are reasonably competent at those activities. Really that should be fine, but since IE and Microsoft are so insecure and easily corruptible, it isn't.
I think there is some brutal irony that to run Windows you have to be technically competent or else everything starts breaking down. Yet, its supposed to be the OS thats easy to use.
Dell. Gateway (our campus uses Gateway). These names are hardly a gamble, at least not more then Compaq and Co. My computer is a Cyber Power PC.
And actually, for non-gaming non-Linux users (who make up the great majority of our campus) I don't see why they don't buy Apple. Well, the lack of KaZaa might be an issue for our users. More apple users would certainly mean we wouldn't have to worry so much about worms and spyware. Basically, given from what I've seen, I think most non-techies do not have the ability to maintain a Windows machine. Not installing spyware, not running as administrator, installing a virus scanner (the one we provide for free), and updating Windows is really too much to ask from some of these people. And even the more technically-savvy folks will occasionally install Windows XP, plug it into the Internet and within a day will start spreading a worm since they didn't update immediately. It is really ridiculous.
Like I said, it could be the users that give HP and Compaq bad names. And as you say, you get what you pay for. Maybe thats what's given retail a bad name... people who buy cheap buy retail, as opposed to online. I guess retail has just always rubbed me the wrong way ever since we got some IBM-compatible POS from Sears in the late 80s that didn't work. We returned it and got an Amiga instead (technically retail, but it was a specialty store), certainly the best decision at the time. And I don't want some Circuit City employee giving me suggestions regardless.
And I'm sure HP and Compaq don't have crap within 15 minutes of our university... its in Kirksville, MO. In case your not familiar with Kirksville (which is highly likely), its a Wal-Mart town about 1.5 hours from anywhere.
And really, you can't make generalizations about mom and pop stores. There's a place in Columbia, MO, Personalized Computers, they give a lot of support to products they sell you. And they're hardly a crap-shoot either. One feature of mom and pop shops is that you can easily get to know them, since the customer service and the owners are often the same folks.
Or you could just do it anyway. What are they going to do, kick you out of the store? *gasp*
Anyways, buying computers retail is a bad idea usually. I'm a student worker at the IT dept. of my University and it seems we're always working on student HPs and Compaqs. I'm not sure if thats because its what most people have, or if the people that need help (usually from catching a virus and/or getting loads of spyware) or if its because the machines are crap. Perhaps all of the above.
Well, doing some "research" on my own using this new-fangled "Google", the first hit had the correct definition:
n. A much-hyped software product that currently exists only as a series of slides in a sales or marketing presentation.
What I find amazing is that the author Edward Tufle (followed blindly by NYT's Clive Thompson) used the word knowing full well that it was new, so they put it in quotes. But obviously they hadn't bothered to actually look it, or decided that if Oxford didn't have the word (which it doesn't) they could ascribe whatever meaning they wanted to. Perhaps the author read the word in another article didn't understand what the author meant, or they did at the time but decided it was a generic for PowerPoint later.
Given that now at least two published sources say that slideware is just another way of saying presentation software (and one of them is the NYT), you could almost consider it another acceptable defintion. And the English language chugs on.
I think your missing the point. It's "slideware" (did the NY Times coin that just now? I've always just used the word PowerPoint even in reference to Impress, its like Kleenex) in general that is of fault. Theres only so much you can put on the screen. Theres only so much you would want to put on the screen. That can't be changed with a better designed slideware.
I agree. I never have really understood where SF gets any money, which is worrying consider what a crucial role they play in the open source world. They could be a method of bringing in some good income.
I have one and it is (a). I can use it on the lab computers I don't have administrator access to, so obviously there isn't any drivers being installed. And anyways, if it could install drivers off the thumb drive... why would it need drivers in the first place?
I doubt its actually cheaper in any way to develop your own FS, or port ext2 (or whatever) to the variety of OS's that it would need to be ported to, as opposed to $250,000. In California, that will buy you a nice 2 bedroom house. And some places less then that. It really ain't much. Its kind of like the Tea Act, the British just wanted to show that they could tax, more then they actually wanted to acquire funds.
If a company does start using a different FS, it will be to extert control over their products and customers and to take the control away from MS.
So each voter has a unique id, negating the possiblity of stuffing the 'recount ballot box'. The computer could encode everything in a bar code (id and votes), so re-counts could be done automatically in case the electronic system fails. And if/that/ system fails, the actual votes could be counted by hand easily, since it could be printed cleary on the card, perhaps in a system that makes hand counting easier.
One of the outputs should be declared the legally authoritative source, so it would make sense this would be the human-readable format that the voters themselves would be checking.
Another system would be to keep the unique ID thing, but to get another print out you would have to put the card through the shredder that recognized the ID. But really, thats not necesary.
Everything in the system should be open source as possible, from the video driver to user interface. so that groups like the EFF could check it out. The results could be stored on the machines themselves, sneaker-net could be used to bring the ballots in, perhaps encrypted by a private key unique to each voting machine. These encrypted results could be made available directly to interested parties, along with the public keys.
Instead of sneaker-net, each ballot box could run a server allowing any interested party to download the encrypted results. The problem with this is the possible security hazard of having the systems online at all, the advantage of the snearker-net is that it wouldn't have to have anything to do with the internet.
Another idea would be for every voter to have their own private key encoded on their voter registration card. The encrypted results could be made available using one of the methods above, public keys would be made available to the general public. This has the benefit of every citizen having a private key, which could be used for encypted online communication as well. Granted, if your the NSA this would be a disadvantage. The other problem is how the inital creation of the private key would take place. It would have to be done by some trusted party. Ideally, the voters themselves, though I'm not sure how that would work. Though really, at some point you have to trust your county clerks office, so they may as well do it.
Granted, lots of ways to do it. Not easy, but far from impossible.
While this may hold for digital cameras, the whole point of the pen drives is that you can use it without installing drivers, or any other sort of hassle. Even with digital cameras, its nice to be able to go to a Internet Cafe in an exotic country, hand them your CompactFlash and have them burn it on a CD without having to worry whether they have the necesary drivers. I know I would not buy a camera that used a non-FAT filesystem until it was as established as FAT is, since you have to depend on other computers if you have to take a long vacation. And the only way I see a filesystem becoming as established as FAT is its inclusion in the next version of Windows and about a decade of time for older versions of windows to disappear.
And you would be on some legal thin ice making a closed source ext2, so they would probably prefer making their own or just use the already open source one (so they can't license it about obviously.) And if they make their own, well, thats just puts everyone in a worse position, the last thing we need is more standards.
I've gotten sick of the "most of the music is crap" agrument. It can be argued that Pop music is crap (though I'm not sure this is a recent development). And as such, the majority of radio sucks, which is too bad. However, when it comes to buying music, theres no one forcing you, especially in this day of Amazon.com, to buy from the top 40 charts. If 99% of music being sold is total crap (which I doubt) that still leaves 1% good music, and thats more then enough. Why do you care what groups the RIAA push's or not? Its a weak agrument. While being anti-RIAA it assumes the only music worth listening to (legally or not) is the music being advertised.
Actually, I always format new cards, as they advise you to. Theoretically, a FAT system is a FAT system, but it certainly doesn't hurt to have the camera itself be the doing the formating. Less ways for things to screw up. And formating a card takes only a few seconds.
I don't see why the fact that FAT is used is no longer due, to a large extent, Windows compability. Granted, now there are more reasons to use FAT now. But Windows compability remains.
$250,000... do you really think that is that so much to make these billion dollar multinationals change what amounts to a standard? The issue here isn't money really, its about control.
But then again, I like being able to stick my Sony keychaing 128 megabyte into any 2000 or XP computer without installing extra drivers. Sony I'm sure won't have trouble finding $250,000. The problem is open source software and smaller companies
Given that MS can't be expecting to make that much on this (given the scale of MS), this is mostly about control.
While these formats might work out OK, they certainly aren't optimized for small hard drives the way that fat is. More importantly, perhaps, Windows can't read them without extra drivers, so one could easily argue this is just Microsoft taking advantage of their monopoly status: have an OS that only reads file systems patented by themselves. How convenient.
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Now that I look more closely at the screenshots, suppose I say should say keyboards are more efficient then mouses or pens.
Suppose I should have clarified. Keyboard buttons. The kind you push. With your finger. Keyboards are always going to be more efficient then mouses, though sometimes they require more memorization. This is not the case with the specialized keypads they have on graphing calculator.
I agree, Moore's Law seems to have no effect on the TI series. They don't change price much at all. Suppose it could because the production cost of last decades processors doesn't really change. But still.
Not only that, their screens are so crappy compared to similarly priced Palm computers. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If Palm decided to put out a graphing calc (in other words, a Palm with an extended mathematical keypad and a math-oriented OS), it would make the TI calc series look like a joke.
I was really disappointed to see that, outside of new apps, it doesn't look like the new 89 has any extra functionality. The 89 is great for calc 1, but it becomes less useful into Calc 2 and Calc 3. Its "3-D support" is superficial at best. It can graph only one kind of 3-D graph and has issues dealing with 3-D functions and vectors in general. In other words, there is plenty of room for improvement, but TI obviously doesn't really care. I would hardly call "adding more memory" innovation. And few of the apps deal with more complicated mathematical concepts, and the apps are always less useful then integrated functionality in my experience. And you can install the apps on the TI-89 anyways, though perhaps not so many.
I smell a near-monopoly.
If you were to bother looking at the rules (for at least the ACT, which is the one I took a few years ago) you would know that it isn't cheating to have those materials on your calculator. Your not allowed to have test materials or communicate with your calculator, but thats it IIRC. Realistically, having math materials on your calculator isn't that helpful due to time constraints. Time isn't as much a problem for the AP (at least in the bio and government APs I took), so I wonder what they do for that. Not that time plays a small role for AP tests, but its /very/ important for the ACT, it's almost an IQ test. I imagine its simular for SAT.
Dude, the point is on a graphing calculator you have a few dozen buttons that allow you to access whatever function you want quickly.
I wouldn't mind a special keyboard for Mathematica. Of course the problem is that I still couldn't really use it because I can use a TI-89 on a test often, but usually not Mathematica.
The other problem is that Mathematica is like the worst in closed-source software. From what I've heard, the Mathematica license easily costs my university more then the Microsoft one (and outside of our Math and CS dept, we have a very MS-oriented campus.) Maxima is a good open source alternative to Mathematica, but it isn't yet at the same level.
I agree, I have a Gigabyte motherboard, its pretty nifty. Gigabyte is from Taiwan.
And by the way (responding to Anonymous Coward), I bought my computer from Cyber Power. I thought it would be obvious enough that the alternative to retail is online, but apparently not. You see, there is little old Texan company called "Dell". Perhaps you haven't heard of it.
I was responding to your comment that students who are afflicted with spyware and virus are stupid.
You forgot about installing a virus checker and running Windows Update. And not running as Administrator helps too.
The difference between a car and Windows is an important one. In Linux and Mac (well, probably Mac, I don't have personal experience with it) are both not afflicted with a constant barrage of spyware and worms. There is maintance to perform, but it isn't such a big deal. If there was a line of cars that broke down within a day of purchase without the user performing some maintance it would be called a lemon. Thats how the situation is with Windows XP and the various worms.
The other difference is that there is no assumption at all with a car that drivers should know how to fix their car. They know how to drive it. If computer maintance was restricted to bringing your computer to experts once a year, that wouldn't be unreasonable. But thats not the situation, for XP users especially. Its more like keeping a sick pet then owning a car.
You mean *gasp* not all users are as good at computers as you? Its folks like you that give all us techies a bad name. Because, you know what? Some people don't give a crap about computers. That may be hard for you to understand. They use it for word processing and Internet and are reasonably competent at those activities. Really that should be fine, but since IE and Microsoft are so insecure and easily corruptible, it isn't.
I think there is some brutal irony that to run Windows you have to be technically competent or else everything starts breaking down. Yet, its supposed to be the OS thats easy to use.
Dell. Gateway (our campus uses Gateway). These names are hardly a gamble, at least not more then Compaq and Co. My computer is a Cyber Power PC.
And actually, for non-gaming non-Linux users (who make up the great majority of our campus) I don't see why they don't buy Apple. Well, the lack of KaZaa might be an issue for our users. More apple users would certainly mean we wouldn't have to worry so much about worms and spyware. Basically, given from what I've seen, I think most non-techies do not have the ability to maintain a Windows machine. Not installing spyware, not running as administrator, installing a virus scanner (the one we provide for free), and updating Windows is really too much to ask from some of these people. And even the more technically-savvy folks will occasionally install Windows XP, plug it into the Internet and within a day will start spreading a worm since they didn't update immediately. It is really ridiculous.
Like I said, it could be the users that give HP and Compaq bad names. And as you say, you get what you pay for. Maybe thats what's given retail a bad name... people who buy cheap buy retail, as opposed to online. I guess retail has just always rubbed me the wrong way ever since we got some IBM-compatible POS from Sears in the late 80s that didn't work. We returned it and got an Amiga instead (technically retail, but it was a specialty store), certainly the best decision at the time. And I don't want some Circuit City employee giving me suggestions regardless.
And I'm sure HP and Compaq don't have crap within 15 minutes of our university... its in Kirksville, MO. In case your not familiar with Kirksville (which is highly likely), its a Wal-Mart town about 1.5 hours from anywhere.
And really, you can't make generalizations about mom and pop stores. There's a place in Columbia, MO, Personalized Computers, they give a lot of support to products they sell you. And they're hardly a crap-shoot either. One feature of mom and pop shops is that you can easily get to know them, since the customer service and the owners are often the same folks.
Or you could just do it anyway. What are they going to do, kick you out of the store? *gasp*
Anyways, buying computers retail is a bad idea usually. I'm a student worker at the IT dept. of my University and it seems we're always working on student HPs and Compaqs. I'm not sure if thats because its what most people have, or if the people that need help (usually from catching a virus and/or getting loads of spyware) or if its because the machines are crap. Perhaps all of the above.
Given that now at least two published sources say that slideware is just another way of saying presentation software (and one of them is the NYT), you could almost consider it another acceptable defintion. And the English language chugs on.
I think your missing the point. It's "slideware" (did the NY Times coin that just now? I've always just used the word PowerPoint even in reference to Impress, its like Kleenex) in general that is of fault. Theres only so much you can put on the screen. Theres only so much you would want to put on the screen. That can't be changed with a better designed slideware.
I agree. I never have really understood where SF gets any money, which is worrying consider what a crucial role they play in the open source world. They could be a method of bringing in some good income.
I have one and it is (a). I can use it on the lab computers I don't have administrator access to, so obviously there isn't any drivers being installed. And anyways, if it could install drivers off the thumb drive... why would it need drivers in the first place?
Seems like an easy decision. What sort of Geek buys retail regardless? I haven't bought a computer retail since the Amiga 500...
I doubt its actually cheaper in any way to develop your own FS, or port ext2 (or whatever) to the variety of OS's that it would need to be ported to, as opposed to $250,000. In California, that will buy you a nice 2 bedroom house. And some places less then that. It really ain't much. Its kind of like the Tea Act, the British just wanted to show that they could tax, more then they actually wanted to acquire funds.
If a company does start using a different FS, it will be to extert control over their products and customers and to take the control away from MS.
Scratch the public keys encoded on voter reg card idea. Thats stupid, as it would obviously take away anonymity.
So each voter has a unique id, negating the possiblity of stuffing the 'recount ballot box'. The computer could encode everything in a bar code (id and votes), so re-counts could be done automatically in case the electronic system fails. And if /that/ system fails, the actual votes could be counted by hand easily, since it could be printed cleary on the card, perhaps in a system that makes hand counting easier.
One of the outputs should be declared the legally authoritative source, so it would make sense this would be the human-readable format that the voters themselves would be checking.
Another system would be to keep the unique ID thing, but to get another print out you would have to put the card through the shredder that recognized the ID. But really, thats not necesary.
Everything in the system should be open source as possible, from the video driver to user interface. so that groups like the EFF could check it out. The results could be stored on the machines themselves, sneaker-net could be used to bring the ballots in, perhaps encrypted by a private key unique to each voting machine. These encrypted results could be made available directly to interested parties, along with the public keys.
Instead of sneaker-net, each ballot box could run a server allowing any interested party to download the encrypted results. The problem with this is the possible security hazard of having the systems online at all, the advantage of the snearker-net is that it wouldn't have to have anything to do with the internet.
Another idea would be for every voter to have their own private key encoded on their voter registration card. The encrypted results could be made available using one of the methods above, public keys would be made available to the general public. This has the benefit of every citizen having a private key, which could be used for encypted online communication as well. Granted, if your the NSA this would be a disadvantage. The other problem is how the inital creation of the private key would take place. It would have to be done by some trusted party. Ideally, the voters themselves, though I'm not sure how that would work. Though really, at some point you have to trust your county clerks office, so they may as well do it.
Granted, lots of ways to do it. Not easy, but far from impossible.
While this may hold for digital cameras, the whole point of the pen drives is that you can use it without installing drivers, or any other sort of hassle. Even with digital cameras, its nice to be able to go to a Internet Cafe in an exotic country, hand them your CompactFlash and have them burn it on a CD without having to worry whether they have the necesary drivers. I know I would not buy a camera that used a non-FAT filesystem until it was as established as FAT is, since you have to depend on other computers if you have to take a long vacation. And the only way I see a filesystem becoming as established as FAT is its inclusion in the next version of Windows and about a decade of time for older versions of windows to disappear.
And you would be on some legal thin ice making a closed source ext2, so they would probably prefer making their own or just use the already open source one (so they can't license it about obviously.) And if they make their own, well, thats just puts everyone in a worse position, the last thing we need is more standards.
I've gotten sick of the "most of the music is crap" agrument. It can be argued that Pop music is crap (though I'm not sure this is a recent development). And as such, the majority of radio sucks, which is too bad. However, when it comes to buying music, theres no one forcing you, especially in this day of Amazon.com, to buy from the top 40 charts. If 99% of music being sold is total crap (which I doubt) that still leaves 1% good music, and thats more then enough. Why do you care what groups the RIAA push's or not? Its a weak agrument. While being anti-RIAA it assumes the only music worth listening to (legally or not) is the music being advertised.
Actually, I always format new cards, as they advise you to. Theoretically, a FAT system is a FAT system, but it certainly doesn't hurt to have the camera itself be the doing the formating. Less ways for things to screw up. And formating a card takes only a few seconds.
I don't see why the fact that FAT is used is no longer due, to a large extent, Windows compability. Granted, now there are more reasons to use FAT now. But Windows compability remains.
Stick a USB pen drive into a Windows XP machine and it loads the drivers and gives it a drive letter.
$250,000... do you really think that is that so much to make these billion dollar multinationals change what amounts to a standard? The issue here isn't money really, its about control.
But then again, I like being able to stick my Sony keychaing 128 megabyte into any 2000 or XP computer without installing extra drivers. Sony I'm sure won't have trouble finding $250,000. The problem is open source software and smaller companies
Given that MS can't be expecting to make that much on this (given the scale of MS), this is mostly about control.
While these formats might work out OK, they certainly aren't optimized for small hard drives the way that fat is. More importantly, perhaps, Windows can't read them without extra drivers, so one could easily argue this is just Microsoft taking advantage of their monopoly status: have an OS that only reads file systems patented by themselves. How convenient.