Survey posted 2005-10-30 17:49 by Jon.

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I feel so persecuted.

But I shall have my revenge when Jon has the newsletter out LATE.

No kidding. What you write is pretty much what people see when the page is first loaded. Visitors have to scroll if they want to see the survey...

No! Jon - post about the newsletter being out so we have two articles!

At least you're far behind Microsoft as a source of crashes...

I crash my calculators (real and virtual) with my own software!

I congradulate you on your success at programming! Does anyone know why my TI-89 Titanium would crash when updating the OS from 3.01 to 3.10? I've been wondering why it did. Could it have anything to do with Microsoft Windows XP which everybody must say is the best OS yet? Don't worry, I finally got it to update. The wierd thing was that when I left the batteries out all night and even the backup, the calculator still came on to the OS installation program (of course after I reinstalled the batteries). I couldn't get out of the OS installation program. I tried to use the special key codes, but nothing worked.

There are three possible explanations for this:

1. You forgot to take out the memory battery.

2. The calculator wrote to a special memory loacation that it is in OS Receiving mode and it cannot be interrupted.

3. The OS in the calc was corrupted...

Yeah, once you start sending the OS, you must finish sending it in order to get out of the OS loader. It's like that on all calcs -- you can't use half of say OS 3.01 and 3.10 because routines could move around a lot and they wouldn't know anything about it.

In other words, that's by design.

TI-Connect would tell me something like Error Sending OS to TI-89 Titanium, and it would give me Retry, which I pressed numerous times, or Cancel. I believe the TI-Connect software is corrupted. Oh, I did let the calculators sit upside down with all the batteries out including the backup. But anyway, I finally was able to send it somehow. I'll just blame Microsoft.

it's still some one elses fault.

ninjas.

YES! Let's go get Uzumaki Naruto to go chase the evil Monkey Ninjas out of our calculators!

neutrinos

No, no. Ninjas are a computer's only hope, ...well, that and Linux.

Windows Vista is looking good. Even though most, if not all, problems that XP had are solved in Vista, with new features come new problems. Maybe Microsoft will actually take the time to fix everything before they launch Vista in 2006? I doubt it. Oh well... I can't wait for Windows 2010 then!

"Vista is a part of the atmosphere that surrounds the world of Arda before the cataclysm at the end of the Second Age. Vista forms the inner layer of normal air: above it is Ilmen, and above that Vaiya."

See, the problem with XP is that it's too user-friendly. For "security purposes," it disables a lot of stuff that would make programming a heck of a lot easier. I'm assuming Vista will be just like that...if not, then a lot of people will complain about how it's not secure enough. You can't get it right if you assume that the people who will use it don't know their way around a computer...the problem is that a lot of times that's the case.

actually i read this one article that explain how they would release vista and there are gonna have like 9 different versions of it for like users and professional and all that jazz...

they might make a developer version or something that has less security built in and more simple code and stuff... i dont really know anything about programming but i assume that that might help

I remember people saying that Win98 looked good.

Ah, fully one third of us are in denial! *Of course* it has to be someone else's fault! Never would it be our fault...
Seriously, as rational thinking human beings (not to demean or exclude those of us here that are higher-dimensional beings...), we control what we put on our calculators. So, all crashes could be avoided if you ran your calc without any applications, BASIC or ASM programs. The only possible culprit left would be TI-OS...(can't do much about that...)

My calculator freezes whenever it garbage collects, so i'm leaning towards its the os...

Mine used to do that, but I just re-installed the OS and it worked fine ever since.

Yeah every time that happens I have to reset it and install a new OS, but it still does it. So I reset the memory and deleted a bunch of useless apps so now I have like 1000K of archive and hopefully will never have to garbage collect again

Give it a few weeks (IF that long, depending on how heavy you use the archive), you will.

And by freezes, do you mean it NEVER does anything? It's SUPPOSED to just sit there with a jerky run indicator when it's garbage collecting. The manual says it may take up to 20 minutes (for a black/basic/boring edition), but I've never seen it take more than a minute. No clue how long it could take on a silver. It's dependant on the EEPROM speed, has nothing to do with the processor speed.

My SE usually takes about 2.5 minutes to fully garbage collect..

The run bar just stops moving after a few seconds. I left it on overnight, too to see if it would stop garbage collecting (or run out of batteries) but it was still going. So I am assuming it is the os until someone can give me proof otherwise.

You should try to back up your calc on your computer.. dont use the Ti-Connect back up file.. individually copy all the programs to a folder on your computer [it's more stable that way..] and then delete everything on your calculator.. only the OS Should be left.. [All programs, APPS, lists, variables, everything..] Reset the RAM then.. push 2nd, MEM [this usually stabalizes the ROM] and clear out after the "Archive Free" number appears.. Now go into the catalog and run the "GarbageCollect" command.. if it crashes then, it is the OS.. if not, it's a program or APP you have installed on the calc that somehow messes with the garbage collecting.

Two questions:

1) What is a Garbage Collect? I've seen my calc do that, and I speculate it's like a disk defrag on a computer.

2) What's EEPROM?

Garbage collecting is like defraging. Flash memory has to do it because it does not reuse sectors until it is full (so as to reduce wear upon individual sectors, since they have a finite lifespan).

EEPROM, "Electrically Erasible Programmable Read-Only Memory," (somewhat of an oxymoron) is a kind of memory that retains its data without power & can be erased using an electrical signal (while plain EPROM requires UV light). Flash memory is like EEPROM, except it is divided into sectors (while EEPROM can write a single byte at a time), which somehow makes it write faster. All of these ((E)EPROM & flash) will die after too many rewrites (between 1,000 & 10,000,000 depending upon the kind, manufacturer, batch, etc.).

I think I can answer one of em.. [I have no idea what EEPROM is..]

Garbage collecting is somewhat like a defragmenter on a computer.. when you archive a program/variable/list/etc., all the data in it is stored into a temporary position in the ROM.. when you unarchive it, all that data is left there, and it is copied into the RAM of the calculator for execution.. over time, these used sections of ROM add up, and the calculator needs to get rid of them to make room. This is what garbage collecting does. It deletes all this temporary data to make room for new programs, apps, etc.

This is all my understanding, and some or even all of this could be wrong, so please, someone correct me, if I am wrong.

I think that's a good approximation; as I understand it, the process would look something like this (I appologize for the hideous graphics...):

simplified example: 5 flash pages of 40 bytes each
last page represents a 1-page flash app
_________ _________ _________ _________ __________
|******** |!!!!!*** |;;;;;;;; |;;;***'' |FFFFFFFF|
|***;;;;; |******** |!!!!;;;; |'''''*** |FFFFFFFF|
|;;;;;*** |******** |;;;;;;;; |*******: |FFFFFFFF|
|:::::::* |******** | |:::::::: |FFFFFFFF|
| |** | | |FFFFFFFF|

If you wanted to archive an 18 byte program, you'd need to perform a garbage collect to rearrange the variables on the flash pages, to make it look like this:

_________ _________ _________ _________ __________
|******** |!!!!!*** |;;;;;;;; |;;;***'' |FFFFFFFF|
|***;;;;; |******** |;;;;;;;; |'''''*** |FFFFFFFF|
|;;;;;*** |******** |;;;;NNNN |*******: |FFFFFFFF|
|:::::::* |******** |NNNNNNNN |:::::::: |FFFFFFFF|
|!!!! |** |NNNNNN | |FFFFFFFF|

Where "NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN" is the program you just archived. Basically, the OS looks for enough free space on each flash page until it finds a place to put the program, and if it can't find the space it needs, it tries to rearrange the variables to make the program fit.

Hmm...that didn't come out quite like I intended...

But on my v200, it /must/ be the OS, as an ASM program will only work for three weeks to a month before causing an address error and requiring an all-batteries pull, sometimes for 6+ hours. Not fun. And it's happened in the following AMS versions: 2.07, 2.08, 2.09, 3.01, 3.10 (aka, all of them).

Most likely, this is due to the program itself.

But they all do it:
Civ89, Monster, Phoenix, Platinum Edition, Hawk, Space Dementia (I and II), and every other ASM game I've tried.

Not to say that it also wouldn't crash if you didn't push any buttons and, for that matter, didn't use it at all. If your calc is never turned on, it can't crash. Therefor, by turning it on, you enable even the slightest possibility that it might crash! But, by that logic, those who introduced the possibility of you turning it on were, through a system of tracing it back to the source, TI themselves! No... the inventors of the original calculator! No... umm... who invented math? Oh... no... well then it must have been......

That's just silly. Isn't that the kind of logic that leads to the common ancestor of all humans being responsible for all of the sins of mankind? Oh wait... huh I guess it works... Nevermind.