Survey posted 2004-07-22 23:29 by Jon.

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Yah, I use it all the time.
My program production has kinda halted this summer, but my calculator solves plenty of problems for me. I always try to figure things out. Like when I went to maui, I went parasailing, and I knew they let out 800 feet of rope, and I knew that one of the most common natural angles (e.g. slope of piled loose sediment such as mounds of dirt) is about 30 degrees, and I wanted to figure out how Hight I was. so I whipped out my calculator, opened up the Super Duper Triangle Solver I made, and Poof, I was given the answer. Ah... I love to rant.

sin(30) = 0.5
800 * 0.5 = 400
You need a calc for that? ;)

Not all of us can picture sin/cos/tan as a curved line on a graph and instantly tell you the number at a certain point on it. (not saying I can't ;-P )

There are certain angles that people memorize (generally) because they are so common-like 30, 45, 60, 90.

Yes, but it still takes some time to remember. I prefer to use my calc. :-)

(copy paste this to your favorite editor and choose a fixed-width font)
angle sin
0 1/2 sqrt(0) = 0
30 1/2 sqrt(1) = .5
45 1/2 sqrt(2)
60 1/2 sqrt(3)
90 1/2 sqrt(4) = 1
Personally, I can recall this faster than firing up my calc...
(You only need to remember that sin(0)=0 and cos(0)=1, so you won't mix them up.)

That's a clever way to remember it!

I can. If you study the progression, it's easy to memorize.

Hey, [almost] everybody knows sin(30°). :) That's the point he's trying to make.

No, not really. But I preffer to do so when I can. Makes my life simpler, gives me a sense of accomplishment when I actually use my program, and it gives me more time to think about more complicated things- such as how I can prove that Ghosts don't exist (which I'm pretty close to).

P.S. I never really cared to memorize the sin(30)... even though the fraction it produces isn't very complicated :-)

You didn't take your calculator out while in the air, did you?

MWM

No. I apted to be dunked... so I left all of my electronic equipment safely on shore. I forgot about my wallet though... I took a while for the bills to dry.

I went parasailing on my vacation too! That's awesome! (And I got dunked too :-D) Just out of curiosity, did you, by chance, go to Ocean City, NJ? (I doubt it, but you never know :))

To me it makes no difference, as I use it for my job year-round.

I never release software without testing it on a real calculator first.

Same here. Graphics look better (or sometimes worse) in VTI, and occasionally some things don't work on a real calc work in emulators.

I always find the opposite... most of the time my calculator is faster than VTI, so I have to tune down some calculations. I don't have that bad computer 1.8GHz should be able to simulate a calculator in real-time... whatever.

A 1.8GHz should emulate a full Pentium class at ~30MHz
so a Z80 should easily emulate < 8MHz, and I don't think the 68k was much faster.
Do other calcs use much different?

That's hard to believe. Are you sure there's nothing running in the background that's burning a lot of cycles?
My Pentium 1 at 120 MHz could emulate an 83 at 100% (most of the time, it appears some operations take more CPU time to emulate).
Now that I've got a Centrino 1400 MHz, I can run 6 VTIs (including skin) and still get approx. 150% of their actual speed (and without bothering to kill everything in the background).

Hell, my old pentium two @250mhz can emulate 4 VTI's (with skins) at 100%, so i think your 1.8 gigahertz comp can do more than that :-p Hell, my 250mhz computer can even emulate a Sega Genisis at >100% so...

I remember running I think 12 or more TI-92+'s on my 1.0GHz notebook computer just to be crazy and to show my mom that I didn't turn a $1000+ computer into a $180 calculator. I turned it into *12* $180 calculators! That's $2160, so I more than doubled the value of my computer!! :P I don't remember how fast each one was running, but I bet they were less than 100%.

Imagine this too: I was running VTI through Wine on Slackware 8.1. Woohoo! An emulator on top of an emulator! (I know, Wine Is Not an Emulator, blah blah blah)

You're sure that's what Wine stands for? I always thought it was WINdows Emulator (just like Dosemu is DOS EMUlator).
I checked with acronymfinder, but that didn't help either, it lists them both... :(
http://www. acronymfinder. com/af-query. asp?String=exact &Acronym=wine (remove spaces, the linkie above this post goes to the acronymfinder main page, this link itself was too long.)

Check the offical site: www.winehq.org. It is in fact "Wine Is Not an Emulator". Check out my weblink for an faq explaining this.

Now, this is compleatly unfounded, but I am _guessing_ that it started out as WINdows Emulator, but it gave people the impression that the x86 hardware was being emulated. That is just a guess...

Note that DOSEmu works differently: it actually does emulate a machine. In itself, it doesn't have a dos implamenation at all; for that it uses FreeDOS.

MWM