Re: New keyboard problem with new ROM
- From: "James M. Prange" <jmprange@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 01:36:53 -0400
Steen Schmidt wrote:
> James M. Prange wrote:
>
>
>>>That's not my general understanding. Have you browsed MSKB?
>>
>>I've looked for some solutions there, but I don't think that I
>>ever found a solution that worked for my particular problem on any
>>Microsoft Web site.
>
>
> Ok, bad luck then. I have on countless occasions found valuable
> information there.
>
>
>>FAT12 problems are what I was mostly referring to, although I did
>>notice a rather minor discrepancy with FAT16 sectors/FAT values.
>>And of course not being able to update the ROM from cards larger
>>than 32MB that the 49g+ formats to FAT32 has the potential for a
>>lot of complaints at the next (hoped-for) release.
>
>
> I update my calc from a 128 MB card just fine.
Yes indeed, I can update my ROM just fine from any of my cards
too, as long as I have the card formatted FAT16. But I expect that
if a new ROM were released, a good many users would have 64MB or
larger cards that their calculators have formatted to FAT32, and
I'd guess that most users probably aren't even aware of this
newsgroup. I hope that the update instructions emphasize that a
card has to be FAT16 formatted to use it for updating, and gives
some suggestions for formatting it, and of course a reminder to
copy anything on it to a safe place before formatting it.
> That card is FAT16
> formatted and my calc starts instantly* even when the card is installed
> in the slot.
Yes, it depends on the card and how it's formatted. With my
SanDisk 128MB SD card formatted (by Windows) to FAT32 with 2KB
clusters, I don't notice any delay. With the 128MB card formatted
(by the 49g+) to FAT32 with 512B clusters, it's hard to notice the
delay. With my SanDisk 64MB MMC card formatted (by Windows) to
FAT16 with 2KB clusters, there's a slight (less than a second)
delay, but with the 64MB card formatted (by the 49g+) to FAT32
with 512B clusters, there's about a 4- or 5-second delay; that
certainly isn't a show-stopper for me, but it is annoying.
But I've just received a 512MB "Super Talent" MMC that I purchased
(surprisingly cheap) on eBay, Unfortunately, neither the original
packaging nor their Web site even mentions speed, so I assume that
it isn't particularly fast. Windows formats it FAT16, with 8KB
clusters, and this gives me a start-up delay of perhaps a bit over
2 seconds; definitely noticeable, but not especially
objectionable. The 49g+ formats it FAT32 with 4KB clusters, and
that gives me a start-up delay of perhaps a bit under 6 second;
slow, but I could live with that. If I format it FAT32 with 512B
clusters, then the start-up delay is about 36 seconds; that would
be difficult to put up with.
Of course all of the above are with ROM 2.00. After "downgrading"
to ROM 1.23, the start-up delay seems about the same for FAT16
cards. The start-up delay with ROM 1.23 is gone with a FAT32 card,
but except for formatting it, the ability to use it is gone too.
> I have formatted my card with my Windows PC. That I'll
> always defend as being the best way to do it
Well, given that the 49g+ doesn't give any choices on how to
format the card, of course using some other device is the best way
to do it. But I'd guess that the typical user would format the
card in the 49g+, just to play it safe, which might or might not
give reasonably good results.
I've formatted mine to various "custom" settings using a
combination of initially formatting a card with either the 49g+ or
Windows, then tweaking it Norton Utilities and a disk editor; this
works perfectly, but it does require some calculation, care, and
extra time, and certainly isn't for the typical "Joe User" who
quite reasonably expects to format a card with just a command line
or a few mouse clicks. I just wish I had an easier way to format
it the way I want it, short of installing a different operating
system.
> - you can't necessarily
> expect the optimum choice per default when leaving it up to a handheld
> device to format such a card.
Nor are the default choices of any formatting program very likely
to be optimal for a particular use, for that matter,
> Which options do you get when letting a
> digital camera format an SD card?
I don't have a digital camera, so neither know nor care. If and
when I decide to get one, I'll look into such matters.
> * I can't see any difference in startup time either the card is in the
> calc or not.
Yes, that makes sense, you're using FAT16 with a cluster size of
at least 2KB. How about FAT32 using the same cluster size? No, on
second thought, I'm not sure if FAT32 will even work with that few
clusters; does Windows require that FAT32 volumes have at least
65536 clusters? How about with the smallest allowable cluster size
for the file system and card? A slower card? A bigger card? After
all, they're currently available up to as least 2GB now, and we
can reasonably expect that prices on the larger sizes will go down
in the future.
Actually, if it weren't for the formatting problems and start-up
delay, for typical calculator uses I'd recommend the cheapest SD
card or MMC available, used or new. After all, how many of us
would actually fill up even an entire 8MB card? And for typical
calculator files, the transfer time seems negligible to me.
But I'll grant that those who want to store huge graphics files on
the card for use in games and such may well want something faster
and bigger.
In general, it seems to me that the fewer clusters a particular
card has, the less start-up delay it causes. Faster cards are
generally better of course, but there's bound to be some limit to
the speed of the calculator's SD port. I wouldn't know how fast a
card has to be before the calculator's speed becomes the limiting
factor.
>>As for the slow start up, I expect that the FAT32 format tends to
>>make it worse, although I don't think that I've rigorously tested
>>that hypothesis.
>
>
> I've never seen so many people complain so much about such small
> things. Jesus - the startup speed? The keyboard I can understand. The
> broken alarms.
Agreed, those are serious faults.
> The display flickering
That one never bothered me. I could see it if I looked for it, but
most of the time I never even noticed it.
> etc. But startup speed? I think
> you're making too big a deal out of it,
I don't think that I've been making a "big deal" out of it at all,
but it can be annoying, especially because for a few seconds it
can look as if nothing at all happened when the ON key was
pressed, as if it were just another unregistered keystroke. What
does the calculator do with the card at start-up? And why?
> expecting every single feature
> and ability to function 100% perfect
I don't expect that, and would be very surprised to see it, but I
do wish for it. What should I wish for? Something that's 99%
perfect? Or maybe 75% is "good enough"? Or maybe I should settle
for 50%? Surely it's acceptable to wish for known problems to be
fixed, though I'll grant that sometimes it's debatable whether
something is a "bug", a "limitation", an "undocumented feature",
or a "mis-documented feature". I do realize that with something as
complicated as these calculators, some problems are practically a
certainty, and fixing one problem or adding a feature can all too
easily have unintended consequences.
> (even when people have different
> preferences).
Different preferences, yes, but is there really anyone who prefers
to have FAT12 formatted cards suddenly stop working, even though
the 49g+ still formats 8MB cards to FAT12? Or the sudden flurry of
new complaints about doubled keystrokes to add to the existing
keyboard problem?
> Does any of your other electronic appliances work 100% as
> you want them to?
Of course not, but some, especially some of the older ones, come
pretty close. But some of the reason for the remaining older items
to be better is that many of the ones that didn't work as I wanted
them to were given away, are stored somewhere, were scavenged for
parts, or discarded. The "survivors" are still around for good
reasons.
> I have a high-end DVD-player that drives me nuts! The
> disc drawer spends several seconds opening and closing while I want it
> to just get it over with.
At least you can tell that it's doing something.
> Are the TI89/92/V200 perfect?
Surely you're joking! Don't those have algebraic user interfaces?
They'd be nearly useless to me.
> Is the HP48?
No, but when I just want to get some real work done, I find either
the 48SX or 48GX to be faster and easier than the 49 series. To be
sure, the 49g+ does execute objects faster, but the keyboard
problems, complications from the CAS, and orphaned menus bring my
overall throughput with it down. The 48 series just works for me.
But the 49 series is more fun to play around with, and may well be
better suited for math students, and game-players too, for that
matter.
> The 42 or the 32SII?
I've never tried either of those two.
> Definetely not, but the older HPs don't get one percent of the flames
> the HP49G+ is getting.
They got their share of complaints, although I don't know if they
got as many as the 49 series; browse the newsgroup to back when
they were current. But they don't have the problems that the 49
series has either. Missed keystrokes? Broken key hinges? Messed up
time/alarm system? Not on any 48 series that I've used.
> And the 49G+ can be had for a fourth or a fifth
> the price of what the HP48GX cost in the mid-nineties.
The price/capability ratios of electronic devices in general are a
lot lower than they were a decade ago, and it's hardly surprising
that this is true of HP calculators as well, although it looks to
me as if they've down a bit too much cost-cutting.
> And it does a
> kazillion things the 48 didn't,
All too often including some things that I'd rather it not do.
> and it's fast and it has the bigger
> screen etc etc.
The bigger screen is nice -- a couple of more stack levels, but I
don't see the size itself as all that great an improvement. What I
especially appreciate about the 49g+ screen is that it's so much
easier to read than the 49G screen, and even the 48 series
screens.
I do especially appreciate the SD card and MMC capability. Just
imagine how much it would cost us to buy that much storage
capacity in 48 series memory cards, or the stack of floppies it
would take to equal the capacity of one of these little bitty
cards.
But actually, the larger cards in port 2 of the 48GX have plenty
of capacity for me; the trouble is that I don't have anything else
that can read them, so any transfers to the PC have to be via
wire. For me, the big advantage of the SD card is that a card
reader for it is easily available and quite cheap, so I find
transferring files with a card even easier and faster than via
USB.
> All the things people were asking for when they had the
> HP48. Now it's here, but I still see people ask for an HP50GX or
> whathaveyou (VPN?).
Personally, I'd rather they didn't try any major feature changes
until they've fixed the known problems in the 49g+, either by ROM
upgrades plus slip-streaming hardware fixes into production, or by
releasing a new model with fixes and relatively minor changes. I'd
consider adding an RS-232 compatible port (as well as keeping the
USB and IR ports) to qualify as "minor" ;-).
So once the 49g+ (or something much like it) is reasonably
problem-free, combine the best features of the 28, 48, and 49
series, fix any remaining known problems, and I'll be extremely
happy with whatever HP calls it, even if it costs what the earlier
calculators did when they were new.
> I don't think it's possible to satisfy anyone - whichever point you
> reach, there'll always be some guys who want more. They don't care
> about the 1000 things that have been fixed and improved, they want the
> *other* 5 things exactly *that* way instead.
True, but mostly what I'd like would be for everything to be at
least as good as earlier models.
>>That seems like a basic survival mechanism; if it hurts, then
>>avoid it. I wouldn't condemn a company for one bad product, but
>>after repeated bad experiences, I will avoid their products.
>
>
> Of course - I feel the same way.
>
>
>>Are you saying that Microsoft products are more secure than the
>>alternatives?
>
>
> I was comparing one Microsoft product with another - which alternatives
> do you mean?
For operating systems, whatever Apple's selling these days and
various Linux distributions are the most obvious alternatives for
a personal computer. For a browser and mail/news client, I rather
favor Firefox and Thunderbird. Is there any Microsoft product that
doesn't have reasonable alternatives?
> In this day and age security is more than the OS. You need
> a hardware firewall and a truckload of common sense. And then you need
> some skill setting up your particular system. When that's taken care
> of, my opinion is you can have a smooth and beatiful system based on
> either WinXP, Linux or MacOS 10.4. But Win98 is crap.
In my experience, pretty much everything from Microsoft tends to
fit that description.
Believe it or not, there are still users (including businesses)
running Windows 95.
> It just doesn't
> cut it today, and you're disfavouring yourself comparing Win98 and
> WinXP.
Hey, I don't want to compare them. The less that I have to deal
with Microsoft products, the better I'll like it.
For now, I hope that I'm avoiding the worst of the vulnerabilities
by never using Outlook Express, and firing up Internet Explorer
only for Windows updates and accessing a very few badly broken Web
sites that just don't work with Firefox, but I really feel a need
to get to; for downloading device drivers, for example.
I expect that I will get around to installing Linux fairly soon,
but it will be a dual-boot set-up, for the sake of some current
applications, and perhaps some devices.
> BUT as we agreed above, we all fall victim to brand-sickness.
Something that HP ought to keep in mind.
> We're
> only human (except Cyrille - he's part Saturn ;-).
Thank goodness for that. I fell in love with UserRPL the first
time that I played with a 28S sales display unit, and now that
I've finally gotten around to trying a bit more SysRPL and Saturn
Assembly, I appreciate the Saturn even more. And the emulated
Saturn is even better, because it can be (and has been) improved
with software changes in the underlying operating system.
>>>They won't ever, since magnetic and optical drives gets faster too.
>>
>>The relevant question would be are their speeds increasing faster
>>than flash memory speeds, but I don't care enough about it to
>>bother researching it; what will be will be.
>
>
> That's all you and I can do really - we'll have to live with what gets
> thought up by someone. At least when it comes to flash memory and the
> like. In 20 or 30 years this discussion will probably seem totally
> hillarious - we'll be grinning all the way over to the couch while we
> boot our semisentient MicroMac cluster.net from our elbow implant in a
> couple of milliseconds :-)
I'll pass on any implant that isn't medically necessary, but I
expect that we'll be using some things that would seem incredible
today. I remember a couple of my co-workers having seemingly
endless debates about which audio tape cassettes, recorders, and
bias setting were best for storing programs (from our Sharp
"Scientific Computers", basically hand-helds switchable between
calculator and BASIC modes); personally, any tape and player that
sounded reasonably good with audio seemed to work just fine for
me. Yes, hard drives were available, but our "computer" at work
was really an HP desktop calculator running HPL from ROM and using
a 5-1/4" floppy drive for the application and data storage,
although it did have a CRT display and HP-IB for the peripherals;
I wish I could remember the model number. Who would've believed a
100GB hard drive in a personal computer, or 2GB on one of these
little flash memory cards, and whatever could one use a whole
gigabyte of storage for anyway? And that was only about 15 years
ago. Going back about 35 years, the first electronic calculator I
ever used had to be plugged in and used Nixie tubes for the
display, and it only did basic arithmetic, not even square roots.
--
Regards,
James
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