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Messages - mlytle0
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« on: July 04, 2013, 12:32:32 am »
Very Cool!
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« on: November 13, 2012, 05:27:44 pm »
23K of free memory? Is that the best that TI can do? Another intentional cripple, this one, albeit with a much prettier face...
The TI-89 was the last calc they produced that was 'minimally crippled', and they're phasing that one out.
That leads me to think any speed-up over current TI Z80 products will be modest at best...They're sooooo terrified of taking any shine away from the Nspire line, their 'higher' crippled product line...
If Casio would just produce a CAS for the Prizm, they could clean TI's clock.
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« on: November 12, 2012, 09:49:38 pm »
Regarding the speed of this new Z80 calculator, Just wanted to mention that the eZ80, and other potential implementations of this old instruction set don't have to rely on clock speed alone....Some instructions on newer Z80 clones execute the same code in many fewer clock cycles than the original, giving effective comparison speeds well above what simple clock speed multiples would give you.
Assuming that TI is trying to at least competitively match the Prizm, it will have to bench roughly 3 times faster than the current 15 Mhz TI-84. I have a TI-89, and I can tell you that the Prizm I recently bought is easily 4-6 times as fast as the '89 (in Basic, anyway). That is what TI has to shoot for....and that should be within reach with the newer Z80 chips. Available user memory will probably go up as well, well past the 24K currently offered...
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« on: July 01, 2012, 03:36:25 pm »
My comment about smartphones replacing calculators is not directed towards students. Most people will be students for 8 years, sometimes more. People will be in the working world for decades, and professionals will not be worried about "exam taking" from after college through retirement.
Yes, I see a HUGE future for computing devices TI can't control....
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« on: June 19, 2012, 08:18:48 pm »
There is a new potential competitor looming out there, and that's software apps for various smartphones. Given that most phones have ARM processors running much faster than the Nspire, the non-education market may eventually be served by pieces of software, if that software has some sort of built in programming language.
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« on: June 17, 2012, 10:05:35 am »
One other thing, is, I think the arrival of low power CPU's that can address megabytes of memory with speed, like the ARM family, just begs for some marketing clown to "fill it" with something and ruin everything. The bloated and buggy OS on the Nspire was probably predictable, as this level of hardware became available. You could never screw up this bad with a Motorola 68000, as it could never support such a monstrocity.
I see the Nspire OS as the Windows Vista of calculators...
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« on: June 17, 2012, 09:52:03 am »
@aetios
My impression is that TI is trying to lock in a market by trying to get education departments to see the Nspire as a necessary part of the Education infrastructure. As necessary as the textbooks. This is why they want kids to do their homework on the Nspire and then upload the problem sets to their teacher. Sort of like 'Electronic paper'. It's very ambitious, but I don't think the world of the near future will see this as essential when maybe 30% or more of the college seats in the U.S. go away, when recession battered single parent or two parent families are wondering where they can find $150 for a calculator only useful for a few classes. I don't think people will do their English assignments on it.
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« on: June 17, 2012, 09:32:27 am »
I think TI is making a huge marketing mistake with the Education-centric Nspire in a more subtle way. Education is in a massive bubble right now (like a lot of other things, as well).
Young people, trying to not end up being burger flippers for the rest of their lives, are borrowing heavily to go to college to avoid that fate. Example: I bought a used textbook on Linear Algebra on Amazon to have as a reference. I paid 30 bucks used, and the "new" price was well north of $200! That's a bubble! In a year, or two, or three, the whole education system crashes, as (1) Student loans become rare because of Austerity programs (think Greece or Europe, that's coming here, too) (2) Students realise there are no jobs to train for (well, a whole lot fewer, anyway).
TI is trying, with the Nspire, to ride the same bubble as the people selling $250 textbooks. You can guess where that's going....They'll just get the worst bugs worked out, and by then the market they're targeting, will have disappeared.
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« on: June 16, 2012, 08:39:29 pm »
Now, if they put Lua Programming on the Inspire, more then just letting it run programs, then I will stop dissing them...
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« on: June 16, 2012, 08:35:34 pm »
O.K., a concession is being made, that's fine, but TI needs to go the whole way, and it looks like it's only a minor concession really. I have nothing against Lua, but since you can't program this on the calculator, if you have a REAL JOB and are not a student, where you have to program for WORK, in the FIELD, you don't want to have to take a laptop with you to alter your program to meet changing requirements.
I think they're really trying to sell their PC software, ultimately. it's another revenue stream...
I still find the Nspire crippled and clunky, in spite of the processor speed. It's for education only...
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« on: June 05, 2012, 08:18:06 pm »
Not everyone on this site loves the Nspire. I see a lot of people frustrated by it's closed format. I don't think you speak for everyone.
I own a Ti-86 and two Titaniums. I'm hardly anti-Texas Instruments, per se
Anyway, when you try and do production work with them they are very cumbersome. Maybe o.k. for education, but they've turned their back on researchers and others who needs are different.
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« on: June 05, 2012, 02:37:22 pm »
If any of you are as annoyed as I am with the closed nature of the Nspire compared to the Casio Prizm or even earlier TI calcs, and if you happen to have bought your Nspire at Amazon as I did, write a review and let the world know. The manufacturers DO pay attention to Amazon ratings, as that is what many people use to decide what to buy. My own personal peeve is that I do research and write small to medium size programs in TI-Basic to test certain ideas, some of it to do with Signal Processing. I'm talking things like Fast Fourier Transforms. The Nspire has the needed speed, but you can't start a graph at the end of a program run, automatically, like I could on the slower but well thought out TI-89. Everything is manual on the Nspire. My 'rant' is on Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A14BPYS1D1ZJS5/ref=cm_cr_pr_auth_rev?ie=UTF8&sort_by=MostRecentReviewIt's best if you only do this if you bought your unit on Amazon, that way it wouldn't look like some group was stacking the cards against this product (it would look political, contrived or something). Nonetheless, used well, the Amazon product review feedback is one way of getting manufacturers to 'listen up'.
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