Re: HP49G+ - strengths and weakneses?

John

I guess my frustration just added up finally on this last straw. I have one
of those HP49G+ with miserable keyboards. Prior to the latest software
update it was failing randomly to register some keys. After the update it is
now registering randomly keys as several strokes of the same key. I don't
really know what is worse, fail to register a key or register it as two or
three strokes ?
I have tried different values for keytime but it doesn't seem to help much.
But what frustrated me the most, was, that when the problem, I described,
failed to solve on HP (including numerical approximation, which was failing
too), I thought, that TI will also either fail to solve it or would require
special, time consuming tricks, which probably one could also employ to
solve it on HP. I quit using TI long time ago and forgot it. To my surprise
my dusted off TI solved the issue without any tricks, and also did it so
fast. The real eye opener was the final form of the r(t) formula. On the HP
after applying "EVAL", "SIMPLIFICATION", "COLLECT" and "kitchen sink" the
formula looks as pure, unreadable garbage, that is hard to analyze and
decipher what fails in numerical approximation. The convoluted look of the
formula, which HP used so much time to produce, makes it practically
impossible to decipher and apply your own algebraic skills to find out the
solution that the calculator fails to do. On the contrary, the formula on TI
was elegant, simple to read, short to display in the window, so even if TI
would fail to find limit, it would be so much easier for the user to find
the solution manually. TI formula was almost as good looking as the one
produced by the Mathematica, $2000 software package.
The TI keyboard was such a pleasure to work with when I suddenly switched
from HP to TI. It reminded me how good HP keyboard used to be and how bad
the current product is. I finally realized that I'm hanging on HP mostly
because of admiration for RPN and admiration for the whole HP OS integration
including excellent integration of programming. TI lacks so much in the
beauty of its OS, but when it comes to the algebraic real life work, it just
beats HP over and over again at least in the algebra range that I'm
employing in my work.

JAM


"John H Meyers" <jhmeyers@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:op.sy2bjfgcwmwqgg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> On Sat, 22 Oct 2005 09:42:04 -0500,
> JAM wrote (in a very familiar style, as always :)
>
> [snipped]
>
> But Jacek, as you well know from your long experience
> with HP and TI calculators, in the newer HP product line,
> "the important thing is to understand what you're doing,
> rather than to get the right answer" :)
>
> [plagiarized from:
> http://members.aol.com/quentncree/lehrer/newmath.htm]
>
> "I got it from Lobachevsky"
> http://members.aol.com/quentncree/lehrer/lobachev.htm
> http://members.aol.com/quentncree/lehrer/agnes.htm
>
> If you forgot Lehrer's original tunes, here they are:
> http://members.aol.com/quentncree/lehrer
>
> With best wishes for happy automotive engineering.
>
> [r->][OFF]


.

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