Im pretty sure its the twenty-second century.

I'm pretty sure you're wrong.

No, I think it's the twenty-third

No, it really is the 21st Century.

1-100 1st Century
101-200 2nd
201-300 3rd
301-400 4th
401-500 5th
501-600 6th
601-700 7th
701-800 8th
801-900 9th
901-1000 10th
1001-1100 11th
1101-1200 12th
1201-1300 13th
1301-1400 14th
1401-1500 15th
1501-1600 16th
1601-1700 17th
1701-1800 18th
1801-1900 19th
1901-2000 20th
2001-2100 21st Century

Soon you will see a post from me about it being the 22 century, my cousin posted that because he's a smart @$$ and he thinks he knows everything.
Sorry about that,
--Ryan.

Of course, I was the first responder to the "2000 not compliant" fake news article and started a massive flame war over the year 2000 and 2001.

-Sherman

Yeah, woo hoo! 2001! My New Year's Resolution is to finish Triple Triad! Yeah! (and I prolly won't, but oh well =) And now it's the 21st century....it wasn't last year, but now it is.

Over
and
Out

Gtb

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2001 to y'all!!!
can't wait what ticalc.org is up to in the twenty-first century!
keep it up to the third millennium
good work to all the crew
you guys know we luv ya

hmm... first thing I would imagine Ticalc.org will be doing for their site this millenium would be fixing their own little Y2K (plus one) bug. You will notice that somewhere in this page of comments, when january second begins, Rather then cycling from January 1, 2001 to January 2, 2001, The date cycle to January 1, 2002. By the time this gets posted, I imagine it wil be January 1, 2003. later

...we are now in the third milennium...

I hope my programs I made for the new year will be posted. Have a y3k new years boy. And do this for the Glory of Olympia Corp., the largest Corp. in MN. holding 13 programmers led by Joey Moy the CEO and Chairman. wishing this year will bring peace,fame, $$$, and strength and honor.
For CEO and Corporation.

So, anyone have any comments to that letter to the editor in the newsletter? Are we all doomed?

Yes. I think that it's exaggerated. The writer is pointing out to how ZShell has been written and things are better documented and thinks that signals a decline? Completely wrong. It's a sign of progress that people don't have to recreate the wheel. It's a bit like math. Many of the big discoveries in it have been made a long time ago, since they had not yet been discovered, but does that mean that it has peaked? Not at all. Knowledge accumulates.

Plus, there have still been new innovations. How about HW2Patch and MaxMem and TI-GCC? How about C programs coming out with comparable speeds to assembly, making the number of potential programmers larger (since C is easier than asm)? What about shells like DoorsOS becoming less buggy and new shells being written like Universal OS and TeOS?

Things can only get better from here. Some of the old programmers may be gone but there's no reason that new ones cannot emerge. This letter sounds a lot like some people from the older generation who are yearning for the good old days and saying what a failure the newer generations are, even though people have always been speaking like that and the people in different generations aren't better or worse, they just exist in different circumstances. There's no reason that today's programmers are any worse than before, there are just fewer things that need to be accomplished. This means that instead of writing a shell or a tetris game they can spend time writing a pacman or chess game.

The major point that the letter was trying to make is that TI calculator programming has lost its uniqueness. There are so many different platforms one can program in: palm, TI, pc, HP, etc, etc, that there must be a reason to choose any one over another. For me, and for many others the luster that TI programming had was that it wasn't officially sanctioned. It presented a challenge. This challenge was enjoyable to face, and once you had overcome it, you knew you had accomplished something that the calculator wasn't designed to do.

Programming an application that has already been done is mostly trivial. Granted, there is much technical work that is involved and a lot of time, but it isn't so large of a step. Creating a solution to a problem or situation that hasn't been considered is considerably more significant. In effect, SDKs, TI officially sanctioning assembly in the TI-83 and above, trivializes the pursuit in regards to the standards that early programmers embarked upon. If they wanted that kind of support they would have used HPs which have supported programmers from the beginning.

Discovering a way to run arbitrary RAM resident machine instructions on the TI-85 was much more significant than writing a compiler, because a compiler is useless without a way to run the generated code. Considering this fact, all the advances really don't seem all that impressive. Don't get me wrong I believe TI-GCC, and all the others represent a lot of great work that's been done, but I think the early shells were more profound. As far as Doors becoming less buggy, that is really not an innovation but instead a progression, not comparable. New shells are usually also progressions and not great innovations.

Finally, you mention that things can only get better. I don't think this is true at all. A major failure I see of the "modern" TI community is the treatment of the varying AMS incompatibility. Zshell presented a very good model for ROM compatibility. Using a jump table, it created a sort of virtual machine that guaranteed a singular interface for programs. This in effect created a simple operating system. A similar construct would have solved the AMS incompatibility problems. Instead, we go on bumbling about what will run on what ROM. Zshell provided a simple and effective way which was superior. Incidentally, part of the reason why zshell could do this is as the only way to execute programs, it acted as a gatekeeper of sort to programs, and created a selective bias to zshell compatible programs. Granted, the functions available are limited, but there is a fundamental tradeoff between compatibility and functionality, and TI-89 and TI-92+ are really leaning too far right.

In any case, I don't think that there is no chance of the modern community achieving a great deal. I think instead, that different types of people will be attracted to developing for calculators. For me, personally, it has lost its appeal.

It's pretty much lost its appeal for me as well. I haven't touched my Graph Link for three years (actually I think it might be broken now), and only use my calculators for math.

I agree that different types of people will be attracted; before, it was more of the "hacker" crowd who wanted to do the supposedly impossible just because they could; now everything's more conventional. Perhaps as assembly/FLASH programming becomes more mainstream more people will be able to learn to program for calculators, kind of like C++ and Windows.

I agree. When I bought my first Ti calc (ti85) all I wanted it for was to play games. Then when the ti92 came out, I had to have one because it had better games. Then I bought a ti89 when it came out. I played games on it for about 2 months. Now the first to calcs i bought are collecting dust and the 89 i use for math only. And I hardly use it. TI should develope a calculator that shows you not only the answer, but how to get there. That is why I don't use the 89. TI beter make a calc that shows how to get the answer soon, or I might just go buy an HP!

The only time to use a calculator is when you already know how to get an answer to a given problem or to check your work.

If you are using your calculator to brute-force math and to avoid learning how to do the problems you are assigned, then you are abusing the calculator and don't deserve one.

This may not *always* strictly hold true in the Real World (although I can't think of a reason off-hand), this is always the case in school.

Go 2001!!!Happy New Year Everyone!

Yes, happy new year! But be careful, some machines are acting up because of the dreaded Y2.001K bug... (yes, it was upgraded!)

If you read the newspaper regularly you waste around 613 sheets of newsprint every week. Of course for some people that isn’t much, but you waste something like 31,876 pages per year. But if you read a newspaper every day of your adult life, this is 613 pages per week times 52 weeks times 57 years (you should live so long!), which is 1,816,932 pages. If there are 80,000,000 adult readers (almost all households) then we discard about 145,354,560,000,000 pages each year. One hundred forty-five trillion, three hundred fifty four billion, five hundred sixty million, thousand pages each year. Say twelve newspapers per cubic foot, a large landfill is say one mile by one mile by a thousand feet, 5,000 times 5,000 is 25,000,000 times 1,000 is 25,000,000,000. 25,000,000,000 divided by 12 is 2,083,333,333 and a third. 134,173,440,000,000 divided by 2,083,333,333 is 64,403. 64,403 landfills are used up by newspapers each year. At this rate in 50 years the nation will be covered in newspaper.

i like it

Good math, but what about recycling? Just think about it. I don't have the stats for that, but think about it.

Also, there is always the possibility of just burning the paper which does have good uses.

You know, that stuff is flammable!!!!

Hee, hee, hee!!!!!!

But burning that much paper across the nation would get some adverse results. For the first one, look at the name of the person who first posted the paper information. Also, the raining down of ash on us would not be the most pleasant thing. Nor would the smell.

don't forget about the several thousand pages are year thrown away by a single printing house that were not used or had errors on it.

onefastfiveoh