- cross-posted to:
- calculators@midwest.social
- cross-posted to:
- calculators@midwest.social
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Calculators just have a bad user interface in general. It’s pretty amazing that the UI was established in 1970 and was never changed after that.
ah yes, wait until you find out about the qwerty keyboard. Or better yet, the fucking ABCDE layout for some godforsaken reason.
Well, they’ve sold the same product for about the same price since 1970, so it makes sense. I have no idea how schools can require a specific device from a specific manufacturer. It’s just straight up market control by a public entity.
Curious to know why ? Basic functionality seems very obvious and friendly to me.
For one thing, just displaying the latest number isn’t useful if you’re doing anything complicated. For another, many calculations involve using the same number over again multiple times. Some calculators have a memory entry, but many don’t. There’s a “C/CE” but there isn’t a backspace, so if you get one digit wrong, you have to start that entry over (and hope you chose the right option among C/CE/AC/CA/etc. If you accidentally hit the wrong operation key (multiply, divide, plus, minus) AFAIK there’s no way to clear the operation. A lot of common math operations involves parenthesized expressions, but if you’re using a basic calculator you have to instead enter things in an unnatural order. It’s pretty common to end up in a situation where the calculator is displaying B and you want to do A/B but you can only easily do B/A. Fancy calculators have a 1/X button to fix this, but if not you’re out of luck. Same with having B and wanting to do A-B but only being able to do B-A. You can fix that by multiplying by -1, but again, it’s a UI issue that you can’t just say “hold onto that number for a second because I want to enter another number and then use it”.
If there is any nuance beyond a 4-function calculator with a single clear button, any nuance or deviation from any kind of standard will not be clearly explained.
There’s never a backspace key, only two “clear” buttons that have nuance between them and little to no description as to which does what.
Press both simultaneously, while twisting the joystick in a “C” motion, to launch a fireball.
It’s amazing how much better this game looks than a bunch of games that came out years after it.
That’s ki, not fire. 🤓
There sure is a lot of overlap with people criticizing the technical interface of a calculator and nerds, wonder why that is? Oh well glad I’m not one of those nerds, now back to the clear button being so obtuse.
I am using and loving Solve by Pomegranate Apps. Multiple workspaces and advanced functions available a swipe away. It doesn’t seem to be available anymore, and it looked like the company was hitting hard times when they dumped things like Trump quotes and other shit apps into the store. So, apprehensive to recommend because of weirdness but best calculator ever.
Edit: down arrows barely meant anything on Reddit and they mean literally nothing here. Fuck you and your annoying orange. Peace out, hugs and kisses.
My favorite was MathAlly. I still have it through some built-in android backwards compatibility emulator, but once it goes, it goes. They haven’t been on the app store for years.
Software engineer: just turn it off and on again.
docker system prune -a docker compose up —buildThe “nuke it from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure” approach.
CE is Clear Entry. If you want to hit 2 x 4, but accidentally press 2 x 44, you can press the CE button before pressing = to clear the 44 but not the “2 x” part.
C will clear all of it so you can start over at the beginning.
Pressing CE twice may or may not clear entries in reverse order, depending on you calculator model.
Should be replaced with a backspace icon and a trash can icon
And in my mind “CE” is “Clear everything”. I’m keeping OP’s method
So you’re saying mash both a bunch of times to be super sure?
Calculators are similar to a Dark Souls game. You always restart from the beginning.
Calculators are similar to a Dark Souls game.
If that were true then mashing buttons on your calculator would prevent any inputs from being processed for a few seconds.
Fromsoft believes in punishing button-mashers.
Unless it’s Dark Souls 2 wherein you mash a couple buttons after being knocked down or rolling and manage to queue up your binoculars perfectly. This, in turn, allows you to get a really splendid look at your enemy’s grimacing face as he shoves a rather vicious and often seriously pointy metal object up your ass. All the while you’re frantically trying to roll away and accidentally toss back a flask. This manages to save you from an untimely demise until you notice that you backed up a little too much and that dude waiting to ambush took one last drag from his cigarette, flicked it away, and proceeded to club your head like he was Babe Ruth after a particularly hearty breakfast.
Then on the way back to your souls some asshole named “Forsworn” gets in your way. God only knows what his problem is.
That explains so much…
…and may end with a shattered calculator.
Problem is on some calculators C is clear all and CE is clear entry, on some C is clear entry and AC is clear all, and some have a C/AC or CE/C button where it’s press once to clear entry and press twice to clear all.
So it’s safest to mash unless you really know your calculator, because the industry can’t get its shit together, and that’s the sole reason it died (I’m assuming.)
Thanks I was looking at the answer and thinking it didn’t fit my memory. i’m sure most of mine were ACs. TBF with things like VPAM coming in the late 90s, you did have backspace and all sorts of stuff like that.
I still remember doing linear regression in a stats exam on i think a casio fx-115W something like that . Excellent calculator - but just no, it was time for some things to be on a real computer.
Why didn’t they just make one Clear and make another Backspace? The concept of erasing the last character had been in typewriters for a while by then, and this is far more obvious. Maybe erasing a single digit in earlier software/hardware was much harder than just clearing it all?
Some do that, too. Unfortunately the weight of tradition seems to enforce the C/CE/AC key preference.
Even the iphone built in OS calculator has the “AC” button unless you manually tap the entry window, then you get a backspace.
That’s why it never worked for me. I assumed CE was Clear Everything.
Oh my God. Me too!
We three were on the same page.
This person calculates.
But sometimes CE is “Clear Everything” and it works exactly the opposite way.
deleted by creator
Shit. I thought it was clear and clear everything. I guess this is why I also push both buttons rapidly and make sure to just retype everything
It’s solar powered so I just wait for night time to clear it then do the next problem in the morning
Mate, you can just put your finger over the solar panel until it slowly gets strangled
edging the calcy
Now we know the C stands for Cum and CE for Cum Edging
Hhhhyeah baby let’s multiply
I discovered that hitting something like C, CE and 0 simultaneously for some reason worked as an instant power off for my school calculator. Do calculators have such hidden off-buttons? Because I have discovered other calculators with other combinations.
There’s actually a neat reason for this! The way that simple keys work, like those in a calculator, is by connecting a circuit and letting a small amount of voltage through. This is usually fine because the keypad is broken up into different rollover zones, which is how multi-key input works. But if you find and press keys that are all in the same zone, their voltages add up and can actually overwhelm the little cpu in there. Really old calculators were really easy to break because designers never thought users would need to press keys like division, multiplication, subtract, add, square and square root all at once, which as you can imagine, caused a massive power spike.
Now, is any of this true? I have no idea dude, you’re calculator was probably fucking haunted or something. I’d have taken that thing to a seance with a ouija board immediately.
I love that you bring a great technical and insightful answer and then just leave with that my calculator is probably posessed.
What are you, my local DMV?
Clearly nobody here does any serious calculator based math
I mostly use matlab
Ive been forced to use it a bit and it has so many weird quirks that are just messed up. Index start at 1. Sometimes u have to assign some function output to a variable before u can pass it as an argument to another function.
I far prefer to use python with numpy matlab and scipy
Use R
neve!
Let’s be honest, if you are doing serious math, you’ll have a graphing calculator to do way more stuff, and the controls are much more like a mini computer (with a backspace key, and being able to delete individual lines of history, or all of the history with menus)
RPN gang!
Not if ur university has dumb rules about what calculator u can us in exams.
Or uses a serious calculator.
Same energy as me holding Ctrl and pressing S seven times just to make sure.
On an editor that auto saved and where Ctrl+S doesn’t do anything, yes been there done that.
I don’t think anyone’s ever been punished for saving twice. Right?
This is where people give me examples where people have been prove me wrong. Please I want to know the sadness of others sadness give give sadness. Give give now sadness give
Once I was working on some music and got so excited about how it turned out I hit ctrl S like 5 times, it corrupted the project and I lost it 😭
The calculator on my phone has an “AC” button, further confusing the situation.
The AC button cools the air around you.
No, i used it immediately when i was arriving to an answer it heated me up
I think AC stands for All Clear
C = clear
CE = clear everything
I thought it was the other way around and CE was clear entry, C was clear.
C = Cthulhu
CE = Cthulhu Evermore
What does that mean? It just sounds like fish noises if I sound it out. Are you ok?
I am fairly confident it was a joke.
That’s only of you have it set to Wumbo
Is that true though? We’ll never know. One of the great mysteries
Clear and Clear Entry.
The better option is to use an RPN calculator as Hewlett-Packard used to make. Then the back arrow button just eliminates one digit at a time.
That’s how it works on the adding machine I use at work. That might not be universal, but if I input something wrong I press C and retype it, meanwhile if I need to reset it all I press CE.
So it’s not just me who’s wrong! Good good. See you in math hell
huhuhuhh, i do thaaat.
I actually did laugh out loud at this though.
I just noticed I don’t have a hardware calculator…
And the software one I remember about is translated.
I do it a bunch of times for the same reason I also CTRL+C a bunch of times when I need to copy on windows.
I mean that I get since it seems to ignore a single ctrl+c on windows regularly.
