Survey posted 2005-05-16 19:04 by Jon.

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I took a random guess without calculating and said ln(i). Yay for laziness and ignorance.

lol... Talk about logic...

yeah, if you have a calc at hand, its easy... otherwise, you gotta guess and hope you know...

well, yeah!... or you could just look it up and answer it later, i mean, you don't have to answer it as soon as you see it!

No necessarily, all decent operating systems I know have a decent calculator built in.

A calc that supports imaginary numbers? I've looked at the calc in Win XP (or doesn't that count as "a decent operating system"?), and I couldn't get it to do complex math.

I am not sure if Windows XP is decent, but I know its calculator is. While it lacks imaginaries & other such more advanced concepts, it supports huge integers to some extent, which few built-in calculators do (including all TI calculators' OS's as far as I know). The calculator in XP seems more geared to programmers, but considering that it was written by (& probably tested by) programmers, that is understandable - not too many imaginaries in operating systems & productivity software, I hope. :)

The 68k calculators support large integers, even up to about 250 digits or more (I can't remember right now). That's probably not as many digits as the WinXP calc can handle, but it's good enough for most purposes.

Windows XP's calculator supports over 300,000 digits. It may very well have a proper arbitrary-size integer implementation (if Microsoft math routines (or any other kind, for that matter) can be trusted to work outside of their test range).

I wanted to test that. I got to 1,1858413391173947135123234475118 e +1004823 (that is over a million digits) before I decided to give up. (have you ever seen this screen:
The requested operation may take a very long time to complete.
Do you want to let the calculation continue, or stop the operation now?
LOL)

I *have* seen that! I always let it continue, of course. :)

I used to see how high I could get it to go in computer class after I finished my work (basically, the first 5 minutes). Those computers were slower, though. Another fun thing to do is fill an entire Excel spreadsheet with 1's (not 0's, since they might be more memory-efficient) using Fill Down/Right with the whole thing selected. :)

What do you mean? I've done a couple of projects where the productivity seemed completely imaginary. And the stabily of some operating systems is definitely more imaginary than it is real. ;)

Then use Google. Google can do LOTS of math. It will even let you take the factorial of non-integral values, something even a TI-89 won't do.

The TI-89 won't do that?! That's strange, because my TI-86 can take the factorial of a non-integer.

Unfortunately, that wonderful code from the TI-86 never made it into the 68K calculators' ROM's. Maybe TI could include it in their next OS upgrade (not too likely, but it would be nice not having to track down the formula every time I need it).

Well, burntfuse said "No necessarily, all decent operating systems I know have a decent calculator built in.", so if you consider Google built-in, then your OS would be what, the Internet? :D (And then there are people calling Windows bloated...)

Windows is bloated because the redundancies are quite useless & make it harder to understand/fix. The Internet's redundancies make it more stable & failsafe, & so should not really be considered bloat.

Microsoft also insists on backwards compatibility (yet stuff still breaks all the time), but it wouldn't be as big of a problem if they didn't have a lot of broken API's in the first place!

Microsoft: just fix the darn interfaces! (They won't, of course)

Well, 86 will do it, and you can cheat and use the Gamma integral to compute the factorial:
z!=int(e^-t*t^z,t,0,infinity)

TI-89 is actually more precise if you change the display digits and use the Gamma integral.
Plus, google can't do symbolics, and a laptop is too big to carry to the testing room (and banned).

I use Mac-81 for almost everything.

Why would you need to guess? You shouldn't need a calculator, but if you do use GOOGLE or one of the other 10^9(e^(pi*i)+ 2) online calculators.