Survey posted 2000-01-22 16:00 by Andy.

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I've never seen a nerdy girl in my life. Maybe that's the reason. <sigh>

I know two nerdy girls! They have their calculus grades way up there, like me. However, I doubt they play games on their calcs, much less program.

HEY I get F/D in my classes and im still a nerd!!!

woo hoo! There's no nerd like a lazy nerd! When you spend at least half of every day in the relentless pursuit of more ways to do nothing, you have to make a choice about what to do for the other half: school work or independant nerd work. You've made the right choice, my son.

(If, on the other hand, you spend your *entire* day doing nerd work, well then.... aw, hell, it's still the right choice.)

MalSyned

P.S. If you detect sarcasm, then I was being sarcastic. if you think my views are serious and justified, then I agree :)

You've never seen me.

how do we know that? we all could be going to the same school and see each other, but never get to know them

What?

All the girls at my school are hippies, whose only calculator use is finding out how much they owe the person who sells them their pot...well most of them anyway.

The man's got a point. To take it one step further, we might all know each other very well in the real (i.e. non-ticalc) world, but just not know that we all visit the same site. Also, we're all using pseudonyms because we're inexplicably embarrased that we come to this site.

It's a thought.

maybe ticalc should give out a "TICALC.ORG fan" hat with every purchase.

Are you a nerdy girl? I've never seen one. I think that they are some mythological creature. Don't get me wrong, I've known lots of "smart" girls, but none that I would classify as "nerdy."

Well, I wouldn't call myself nerdy to the extent that otehrs do. Maybe I am because I don't spend hours preening and grooming. I actually have interests other than looks. I spend quality time alone late at night, just me and ...my TI85.

Thank you very much.

I have never actually seen anybody use an 85. Ive seen them at the store, Ive played 85 games on my 86, but I've never seen one being used by another student at school. But then again, I have never seen anyone use an HP graphing calc. Ive seen an HP at Office Depot, and I couldn't imagine anyone putting up w/ those stubby, odd-shaped buttons. =P

~Jonathan Taylor

The TI 85 in my opinion is one of the best calculators, and probably one of the easiest to use. But an 86 is much better, it is the replacement for the 85. It will eventually be phased out. Anyway, to answer your question I've never seen anybody, other than myself, using a TI 85. There fading away, sniff.

I Actualy own and until a year ago still used my Ti-85 on a regular basis. (i. e. Wrote programs for it, and played games on it) It was the Replacement for my broken Casio Color Calculator, now there is a crummy calculator. Any way mine still works and I still use it from time to time on tests that don't allow the use of more advanced calcs such as the Ti-89.

My friend has an 85 and has kept it around just for craps and giggles (I even gave him some new games recently). I've used his, and after owning an 86, I find the blue pixels very annoying. Also, for some reason his screen has a row of "dead pixels" that seems to mysteriosly grow each time I use it. Last time I checked the bar of non-working pixels was about 5 dots wide...

"COMING SOON TO AN 85 SCREEN NEAR YOU:
It TERRIFIES!
It's INVISIBLE!
It...GROWS!
Beware the menace that is 'Dead Pixel'! It feeds upon blue pixels, at the same time growing stronger and stronger! YOU may be the next pixel consumed by the deadly menace! WATCH OUT!!!"

That was really stupid. What are you, some loser desperate for attention?

There's nothing in the posting guidelines that says you can't flame *yourself*...

That happened to my old, clunky, b&w GameBoy. (the collumns of dead pizels)

~Jonathan Taylor =P

I also believe that the TI-85 is a great calculator (despite the lack of RAM). I play games like Super Breakout and Tetris on it all the time, and I've also written a slew of BASIC programs, plus, ported a TI-83 BASIC game to the 85 (boy, that wasn't quick, especially because I had to have them sitting next to eachother, copying line by line by line...). But, sadly, I know of only 1 other student at my high school that uses a TI-85. I'd really like to get an 89 someday, though.

The HP graphing calcuator is an evil force that must be stopped. You can't do anything with that weird machine. You have to put in simple functions backwards. they are just impossible to work with. My current math teacher said it would take us all quarter to learn how to use them. I think we should start a petition to get HP to recall all of their graphing calculators and stop manufacturing the. WHO IS WITH ME?!?!?

I agree with you 100% HP's are crap and should be banned.

Hey! I happen to like the precision that the HP can give you, and the Reverse Polish Notation operation procedure!

Reverse Polish notation is screwed up.

But it's faster than algebraic notation.

How is going 2 ENTER 2 + faster than 2+2? And how in the world do you do more complicated functions. Its also funny to look at HPs at the store, they have furuteistic packageing that's common from HP, but inside is this 1970's style calculator. Don't get me wrong, I like HP's products, but their calculators are crap.

Well, many of the TI calculators use 1970s technology.

RPN is faster once you're used to it. My friend -- who happens to own an HP 49G -- demonstrated it; I'll have to ask him to do it again so I can really understand why.

I guess, but they're so convoluted it just boggles my mind as to how I'd use one.

FYI: Many calculators, the TIs included (I believe), have to convert all expressions to RPN before they work with them. RPN just makes more sense to computers. However, since we've been trained to understand standard math notation, it's nice that the makers of TI calcs bothered to write the extra code to interpret it.

If you want to understand how RPN works (if you write a lot of code, I'm probably not talking to you), just think of it as function-notation, but backwards, and without the parentheses:

standard:
2+2/3-root(3,5)*3

function notation:
+(2,-(/(2,3),*(root(3,5),3)))

function notation with the function name at the end instead of the begining (e.g. (x)sin instead of sin(x)):
(2,((2,3)/,((3,5)root,3)*)-)+

without the parentheses (they are actually unecessary at this point):

2 2 3 / 3 5 root 3 * - +

That's reverse polish notation.

Wow. that was way, way, way off-topic. Sorry.

-MalSyned

Ummm... hate to burst you guys' bubble, but the HP-49G+ is far superior to any TI-89...

* Support for expansion cards (can you compare to 512 MEGS memory?)

* 70 mHz processor compared to 12 (I just tested this today... 5000 factorial is near instantaneous on the 49G+ with native code. My friend's TI-89 couldn't even handle a number that big)

* Infrared port

* RPN... not for little kids, but once you know how o use it, you'll never go back. mIt makes repetitive operations that TI owners would make a program to do simple as pie. And it does reduce keystrokes. A lot. Your 2+2 example: 2 enter 2 plus has the same number of keystrokes as 2 plus 2 equals that you would do.

Final point. Get a TI for the games, that's the real reason you don't see all these middle and high school punks using HPs.

Did you ever think that the people you are replying to just might never see your post as this survey is so old? Oh, wait, I just realized I'm being hipocritical. I'll stop now.

Eww...

My school (Georgia Tech) is full of them.

My school, the University of Montana, is full of idiots. I have a computer science class that is supposed to teach me how to use new software. That "new" software is Windows 95!!!

That is just sad. That's all I have to say.

But I do still have Win95 on my old computer and it works just fine (as long as you don't want to do anything interesting).

It's worse than I previously thought. Today's assignment is to print out text from word that involved usinge more than one font, more than one text size, and bold and italics. The hard part is where we have to save it to a disk...This may give you the wrong impression, but the class I described above is not my easiest class!!! Oh, if I could go back to Physics for just one day...never mind I like slacker classes.

Snakeman

Is college really like that?!?!?! I think I knew how to do that stuff when I was eight.

Matt H.

It's not like that here at UC Berkeley.