clear
October 18, 2024 7:03 AM Subscribe
The update offered some improvements! I appreciated the vertical orientation of its scientific mode, because turning your phone sideways is so 2009; the continuing display of each operation (e.g., 217 ÷ 4 + 8) on the screen until I asked for the result; the unit-conversion mode, because I will never know what a centimeter is. But there also was a startling omission: The calculator’s “C” button—the one that clears input—was gone. The “C” itself had been cleared [atlantic]
How annoying. Maybe you can “unlock” it by signing in with your Google ID or maybe there’s a subscription option? Is this calculator enshittification?
This is one of those things that makes me feel profoundly conservative, in the sense that I don’t know how I’m going to explain it to my child. “Back in the old days, you bought a calculator once and then you had it - including all its functionality - forever until it broke!” “Ok, old lady, was that back when phones were ATTACHED TO THE WALL??” (rolls eyes)
posted by Vatnesine at 7:48 AM on October 18 [3 favorites]
This is one of those things that makes me feel profoundly conservative, in the sense that I don’t know how I’m going to explain it to my child. “Back in the old days, you bought a calculator once and then you had it - including all its functionality - forever until it broke!” “Ok, old lady, was that back when phones were ATTACHED TO THE WALL??” (rolls eyes)
posted by Vatnesine at 7:48 AM on October 18 [3 favorites]
I'm still on ios 17. So what happens when you hold the backspace button? Does it clear the current entry like the C/AC button did?
posted by howbigisthistextfield at 7:53 AM on October 18 [1 favorite]
posted by howbigisthistextfield at 7:53 AM on October 18 [1 favorite]
The original skeumorphic calculator had issues with conceptual leakage around the edges of the C button. Apple tried to address those with a gasket upgrade included in the first round of the "flat" UI design language, but it never really worked 100% unless you were religious about holding the phone in the recommended fashion.
The best part is no part, or so they say; this new design should prove quite a lot more reliable.
posted by flabdablet at 7:55 AM on October 18 [4 favorites]
The best part is no part, or so they say; this new design should prove quite a lot more reliable.
posted by flabdablet at 7:55 AM on October 18 [4 favorites]
… I’m having some conceptual leakage myself here. Flabdablet, what does your comment mean?
posted by Vatnesine at 8:03 AM on October 18 [14 favorites]
posted by Vatnesine at 8:03 AM on October 18 [14 favorites]
I'm still on ios 17. So what happens when you hold the backspace button? Does it clear the current entry like the C/AC button did?
Yes. But otherwise it lets you delete a typo at the end of a long entry in a kind of useful way. This is the weirdest goddamn beanplating ever, but it is Apple and Metafilter, so feel free to get your 10 minute hate on MeFi does.
posted by Kyol at 8:07 AM on October 18 [8 favorites]
Yes. But otherwise it lets you delete a typo at the end of a long entry in a kind of useful way. This is the weirdest goddamn beanplating ever, but it is Apple and Metafilter, so feel free to get your 10 minute hate on MeFi does.
posted by Kyol at 8:07 AM on October 18 [8 favorites]
I am in normal mode. It says AC and clears. In scientific mode it still says AC and clicking does erase the last one while holding onto it for a split second does a normal clear. iOS 18.1
posted by geoff. at 8:14 AM on October 18 [2 favorites]
posted by geoff. at 8:14 AM on October 18 [2 favorites]
TFA author lost me with "I will never know what a centimeter is." Are we going to relitigate losing ADB now? Or having to take your right hand off the keyboard to use that crazy gadget that they're calling a "mouse"?
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:21 AM on October 18 [3 favorites]
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:21 AM on October 18 [3 favorites]
I’ve been using PCalc for years on my iPhone and iPad. It has a far more important button - Enter. As in, I’m a rabid user of RPN calculators since my first one, an HP 25 in the 70’s. PCalc also has a C, an AC, and an MC key. The C key has a distinct semantics - Clear the entry. Backspace, which is a typewriter holdover, requires multiple hits to do the same job. Whoever decided to remove it is not a calculator user.
posted by njohnson23 at 8:26 AM on October 18 [8 favorites]
posted by njohnson23 at 8:26 AM on October 18 [8 favorites]
Can I admit even though I theoretically understand the difference between C and AC, I've never trusted a calculator to correctly do that one 'clear' transaction correctly in a long calculation?
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:38 AM on October 18 [9 favorites]
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:38 AM on October 18 [9 favorites]
RPN jeez.
posted by whatevernot at 8:45 AM on October 18 [5 favorites]
posted by whatevernot at 8:45 AM on October 18 [5 favorites]
Not an ios person. Have they also eliminated the Clear Entry (CE) key? On my Android devices, a long push (as opposed to repeated taps) of the backspace key is often interpreted as a "clear entry" request, in most places where input is required.
Anyway I just confirmed that this Android tablet's calculator still has a C key (he added smugly).
posted by Artful Codger at 8:47 AM on October 18 [3 favorites]
Anyway I just confirmed that this Android tablet's calculator still has a C key (he added smugly).
posted by Artful Codger at 8:47 AM on October 18 [3 favorites]
One thing I appreciate as people around me get older is how much cost there is to UI changes in software products. This change (and the article) are a great example.
My partner is 78, a software engineer himself, been using computers for 50+ years. He's fully capable. But he's got less patience and energy for learning new stuff. Every time a UI changes, like this calculator, there's a big sigh as he realizes he has to figure out something new just to do the same old thing he always does.
For something this simple he'd figure it out. The iPhone camera app has been a bigger problem, he's constantly accidentally putting it into the wrong mode or can't find the way to turn off the flash in a new version. I finally set him up with Simple Camera, a third party app. But its UI has changed and gotten more complex over time too. And when big things change sometimes he just gives up. Web site authentication is a particular problem. He only sort of understands how to use 1Password (I've tried to help him) and anytime a website changes the login flow, often adding 2FA, it's 50/50 whether he'll bother figuring it out. His online world is getting smaller.
I have another friend in his 80s now and has a lot of health problems but a clearly functioning mind. When WordPress.com switched to the Block editor it damn near killed him. I'm not exaggerating. He was having severe health problems and his one joy in life was writing long detailed blog posts: half academic, half delightfully sexually explicit gay stuff. One day he logs in to write something and poof it's all different, he can't figure out how to use any of it. And he was not going to be able to figure it out. Again, no exaggeration, he shared with his close friends that he figured he might as well just die now and his health was so bad I was worried that might actually be the thing that pushed him over. Fortunately a friend was able to go to his house and help configure WordPress to use the old editor. He's still using it, I think, and I wonder what will happen if they ever stop supporting it.
Product changes are often improvements: the C button is superfluous, cameras are more capable, the block editor is an improvement. But these improvements are only incremental. And young computer interface experts don't appreciate enough how much cost US changes impose on their users. I keep hoping people put more effort into simplified systems, particularly for older people. There are a few (like the Jitterbug phones) but it's not a big enough product category to get much development.
posted by Nelson at 8:51 AM on October 18 [28 favorites]
My partner is 78, a software engineer himself, been using computers for 50+ years. He's fully capable. But he's got less patience and energy for learning new stuff. Every time a UI changes, like this calculator, there's a big sigh as he realizes he has to figure out something new just to do the same old thing he always does.
For something this simple he'd figure it out. The iPhone camera app has been a bigger problem, he's constantly accidentally putting it into the wrong mode or can't find the way to turn off the flash in a new version. I finally set him up with Simple Camera, a third party app. But its UI has changed and gotten more complex over time too. And when big things change sometimes he just gives up. Web site authentication is a particular problem. He only sort of understands how to use 1Password (I've tried to help him) and anytime a website changes the login flow, often adding 2FA, it's 50/50 whether he'll bother figuring it out. His online world is getting smaller.
I have another friend in his 80s now and has a lot of health problems but a clearly functioning mind. When WordPress.com switched to the Block editor it damn near killed him. I'm not exaggerating. He was having severe health problems and his one joy in life was writing long detailed blog posts: half academic, half delightfully sexually explicit gay stuff. One day he logs in to write something and poof it's all different, he can't figure out how to use any of it. And he was not going to be able to figure it out. Again, no exaggeration, he shared with his close friends that he figured he might as well just die now and his health was so bad I was worried that might actually be the thing that pushed him over. Fortunately a friend was able to go to his house and help configure WordPress to use the old editor. He's still using it, I think, and I wonder what will happen if they ever stop supporting it.
Product changes are often improvements: the C button is superfluous, cameras are more capable, the block editor is an improvement. But these improvements are only incremental. And young computer interface experts don't appreciate enough how much cost US changes impose on their users. I keep hoping people put more effort into simplified systems, particularly for older people. There are a few (like the Jitterbug phones) but it's not a big enough product category to get much development.
posted by Nelson at 8:51 AM on October 18 [28 favorites]
The current display of 14+37+99.2+8 is nice, and being able backspace makes it more approachable to people that aren't used to how AC/C buttons worked on calculators.
I am amused by 2+2x6=14 in this app. This is not how an adding machine would have done it...
posted by advicepig at 8:57 AM on October 18 [2 favorites]
I am amused by 2+2x6=14 in this app. This is not how an adding machine would have done it...
posted by advicepig at 8:57 AM on October 18 [2 favorites]
I am amused by 2+2x6=14 in this app. This is not how an adding machine would have done it...
Which is why as a programmer, I got into the habit of explicitly defining my order of operations, and not relying on the guy who wrote the compiler agreeing with me.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:02 AM on October 18 [16 favorites]
Which is why as a programmer, I got into the habit of explicitly defining my order of operations, and not relying on the guy who wrote the compiler agreeing with me.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:02 AM on October 18 [16 favorites]
I have yet to hear anyone say good things about iOS 18 (or the iPad version for that matter), and I worry it's going to be the Windows 11 of iPhones. Fortunately I treat the C/AC button like it has dangerous magical properties best left unexplored, so this change will not particularly affect me, but I'm kinda scared of other changes.
posted by mittens at 9:30 AM on October 18 [1 favorite]
posted by mittens at 9:30 AM on October 18 [1 favorite]
what does your comment mean?
achieving synergy with corporate objectives
posted by HearHere at 9:47 AM on October 18 [6 favorites]
achieving synergy with corporate objectives
posted by HearHere at 9:47 AM on October 18 [6 favorites]
the rugged Hewlett-Packard that you swiped off Dad’s desk so you could make its display read BOOBIES upside-down (5318008).I’m a rabid user of RPN calculators since my first one, an HP 25 in the 70’s
If you really want to bite your thumb at calculator modernity, I commend unto you nonpareil, a glorious monument to obstinance, anachronism, and calculator fandom.
Nonpareil is a high-fidelity simulator for calculators. It currently supports many HP calculators models introduced between 1972 and 1982. Simulation fidelity is achieved through the use of the actual microcode of the calculators, thus in most cases the simulation behavior exactly matches that of the real calculator. In particular, numerical results will be identical, because the simulator is using the BCD arithmetic algorithms from the calculator.For MacOS, the easiest starting point is probably Mark Shin's Nonpareil Voyager Series, prebuilt macOS Universal Binaries that emulate the Voyager calculators at Retina resolution.
posted by zamboni at 9:50 AM on October 18 [4 favorites]
Hold the backspace button to clear the entire entry. Press it once to only delete one character. I guess they don't make The Atlantic writers like they used to.
Somebody at Apple just won a bucket of brownie points...
We actually get six figures RSU refreshers and haven't had to worry about a layoff since Steve got back in '97. As a bonus, we get to see curmudgeon whine about our products improving, but that's more an added bonus on top of our actual bonuses.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 10:05 AM on October 18 [8 favorites]
Somebody at Apple just won a bucket of brownie points...
We actually get six figures RSU refreshers and haven't had to worry about a layoff since Steve got back in '97. As a bonus, we get to see curmudgeon whine about our products improving, but that's more an added bonus on top of our actual bonuses.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 10:05 AM on October 18 [8 favorites]
I have yet to hear anyone say good things about iOS 18
There are a lot of good things about it, including a new Passwords app, more privacy and security options, a much improved Photos app, easier conversions in the Calculator app, messages via satellite (in the US and Canada, when out of cell service range), new hiking routes and the option to add notes to locations in Maps, much more home screen and Control Center customization options...
Some new emoji and Message options too, plus RCS support for messaging with Android users.
There's a lot of other stuff, too--it's a big update--but those are some things that I've noticed and liked.
posted by box at 10:09 AM on October 18 [7 favorites]
There are a lot of good things about it, including a new Passwords app, more privacy and security options, a much improved Photos app, easier conversions in the Calculator app, messages via satellite (in the US and Canada, when out of cell service range), new hiking routes and the option to add notes to locations in Maps, much more home screen and Control Center customization options...
Some new emoji and Message options too, plus RCS support for messaging with Android users.
There's a lot of other stuff, too--it's a big update--but those are some things that I've noticed and liked.
posted by box at 10:09 AM on October 18 [7 favorites]
Yes. But otherwise it lets you delete a typo at the end of a long entry in a kind of useful way. This is the weirdest goddamn beanplating ever, but it is Apple and Metafilter, so feel free to get your 10 minute hate on MeFi does.
Can we please not do this? Removing the C button on a calculator is an important change, it was Ian Bogost in The Atlantic who complained about it not "Metafilter," whoever exactly that might be, and Apple is not an aggrieved solo dev but a giant corporation worth many billions of dollars.
posted by JHarris at 10:31 AM on October 18 [15 favorites]
Can we please not do this? Removing the C button on a calculator is an important change, it was Ian Bogost in The Atlantic who complained about it not "Metafilter," whoever exactly that might be, and Apple is not an aggrieved solo dev but a giant corporation worth many billions of dollars.
posted by JHarris at 10:31 AM on October 18 [15 favorites]
I don't mind turning my phone sideways to get the scientific calculator, but I wish it would work when I just use the calculator widget from the lock screen. I don't want to have to unlock my phone and find the calculator app just to take a quick square root.
posted by nickmark at 10:37 AM on October 18 [1 favorite]
posted by nickmark at 10:37 AM on October 18 [1 favorite]
Good on the PCalc dev for refusing to be Sherlocked. The other guy blinked.
posted by credulous at 10:54 AM on October 18 [1 favorite]
posted by credulous at 10:54 AM on October 18 [1 favorite]
Product changes are often improvements: the C button is superfluous
It is not! Or if "you can do this by other means" makes something superfluous, they could make an "improvement" in the same sense by just removing the calculator app altogether. After all, it's superfluous when wolfram alpha and Google and Siri etc. exist.
posted by Dysk at 10:54 AM on October 18 [3 favorites]
It is not! Or if "you can do this by other means" makes something superfluous, they could make an "improvement" in the same sense by just removing the calculator app altogether. After all, it's superfluous when wolfram alpha and Google and Siri etc. exist.
posted by Dysk at 10:54 AM on October 18 [3 favorites]
One thing I appreciate as people around me get older is how much cost there is to UI changes in software products.
I get this, and I sympathize with your partner's frustration with seemingly inexplicable changes.
I'm a recently retired developer/programmer myself. It IS frustrating when we think that an interface has been optimised and runs fine... then some youngster has A New Idea (sorry, Paradigm) and suddenly the familiarity and muscle memory that you've built up over years is useless. At the very least, if there's going to be that big of a shift, please put more of an effort into beta testing and promoting the new system, and have a decently long overlap period so that the transition is easier.
It's also pretty annoying to see problems and conventions that I thought had been conquered a decade or two ago, broken again in somebody's new take. And some apparent slacking off in QA from a user perspective.
(but yes, I also appreciate many of the technological advances that have come, and that do require a different interface model to be used to best advantage. Most recent example - I'm playing with a new multiband radio whose interface is a huge change from the pre-millenium analog multiband portables with big "sliderule" tuning scales that I grew up with. It took two days with a somewhat obfuscated small-print manual to figure it out... but it's definitely a step up, now that I've got the hang of it.)
Of course my favourite changes are the ones that do about nothing to improve things for the user. Like... robotic phone agent systems. Or Netflix suddenly dropping support for perfectly-working devices, like our 8 yr old Samsung smart TV.
posted by Artful Codger at 11:01 AM on October 18 [4 favorites]
I get this, and I sympathize with your partner's frustration with seemingly inexplicable changes.
I'm a recently retired developer/programmer myself. It IS frustrating when we think that an interface has been optimised and runs fine... then some youngster has A New Idea (sorry, Paradigm) and suddenly the familiarity and muscle memory that you've built up over years is useless. At the very least, if there's going to be that big of a shift, please put more of an effort into beta testing and promoting the new system, and have a decently long overlap period so that the transition is easier.
It's also pretty annoying to see problems and conventions that I thought had been conquered a decade or two ago, broken again in somebody's new take. And some apparent slacking off in QA from a user perspective.
(but yes, I also appreciate many of the technological advances that have come, and that do require a different interface model to be used to best advantage. Most recent example - I'm playing with a new multiband radio whose interface is a huge change from the pre-millenium analog multiband portables with big "sliderule" tuning scales that I grew up with. It took two days with a somewhat obfuscated small-print manual to figure it out... but it's definitely a step up, now that I've got the hang of it.)
Of course my favourite changes are the ones that do about nothing to improve things for the user. Like... robotic phone agent systems. Or Netflix suddenly dropping support for perfectly-working devices, like our 8 yr old Samsung smart TV.
posted by Artful Codger at 11:01 AM on October 18 [4 favorites]
"Please listen carefully as our phone options have recently changed"
posted by Nelson at 11:33 AM on October 18 [7 favorites]
posted by Nelson at 11:33 AM on October 18 [7 favorites]
Last week, I was complaining about how they ruined the Photos app. Today, I can't even remember why I was mad.
posted by advicepig at 11:55 AM on October 18 [1 favorite]
posted by advicepig at 11:55 AM on October 18 [1 favorite]
I don't think I ever got the hang of the C and AC buttons. For sure now when I use a calculator I'll just end up re-inputting the numbers if I mess up, but maybe there was a point in high school where I was better at calculators.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 11:59 AM on October 18 [1 favorite]
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 11:59 AM on October 18 [1 favorite]
After all, it's superfluous when wolfram alpha and Google and Siri etc. exist.
I didn't know that Calculator.app followed PEMDAS until today. Especially since I can't see the state, on macOS I typically just use Python in a terminal to do basic math rather than a calculator that may or may not consistently apply operations the way I expect. Oh, and if it's really simple, I might use Spotlight, which also handles many useful unit conversions, and lets you type in functions like "log()" and "cos()" that even the official Calculator.app requires you to mouse button press for.
The new setup of evaluating expressions you type in seems a lot better, and pretty much obsoletes the C button. You get to see what you typed before the most recent operator! You can undo a mathematical operator typo! You get a backspace button so you don't have to retype in parts you got right!
Side question: would anyone really be sad if they ditched the Memory functions? Who in 2024 needs this but doesn't have like, Numbers, Google Sheets, or Python experience?
posted by pwnguin at 12:08 PM on October 18 [1 favorite]
I didn't know that Calculator.app followed PEMDAS until today. Especially since I can't see the state, on macOS I typically just use Python in a terminal to do basic math rather than a calculator that may or may not consistently apply operations the way I expect. Oh, and if it's really simple, I might use Spotlight, which also handles many useful unit conversions, and lets you type in functions like "log()" and "cos()" that even the official Calculator.app requires you to mouse button press for.
The new setup of evaluating expressions you type in seems a lot better, and pretty much obsoletes the C button. You get to see what you typed before the most recent operator! You can undo a mathematical operator typo! You get a backspace button so you don't have to retype in parts you got right!
Side question: would anyone really be sad if they ditched the Memory functions? Who in 2024 needs this but doesn't have like, Numbers, Google Sheets, or Python experience?
posted by pwnguin at 12:08 PM on October 18 [1 favorite]
If this isn't the best thread to recommend a third-party calculator app, I don't which one is.
As someone who struggles with using math in "real world" scenarios, I've used for years (and don't know what I would do without) Soulver.
Here's the stuff I love about it:
As someone who struggles with using math in "real world" scenarios, I've used for years (and don't know what I would do without) Soulver.
Here's the stuff I love about it:
- You can integrate natural language into your equations, i.e. you type:
- Food = $45 per day x 30 days
- (Soulver returns answer of "$1350)
- It has "behind-the-scenes" access to data, the Apple calculator has this, but you need to choose what calculation you're looking for. Soulver does this:
- 100USD in Mexican Peso
- (Soulver returns answer of "MX$1988.66")
- 30 x (1/16inch) in cm
- (Soulver returns answer of "1.35466667 cm")
- Multi-line calculations. So basically, it "remembers" your previous lines and calculations, so it functions like a spreadsheet-lite. I use this all the time to come up with numbers for different scenarios. Recently I had to price out the estimate for building a fence, something I would be woefully inept at without using words. I was able to group things like the cost of the fence components (height, different types of wood,etc.) and then the distance of the fence, and then have it make estimates based on the different variables.
So yeah, Soulver is great for math-challenged folks like myself.
And young computer interface experts don't appreciate enough how much cost US changes impose on their users.
When my mother was still alive and still living in her own brain, she was a moderately successful user of her Windows 7 computer, keeping in touch via email and even doing web stuff and online banking and the like. For the holidays one year my brother got her a new computer, running Windows 8, which utterly defeated her. I spent literal hours over there trying to get her up to speed, typing out reference cards, trying to set up her desktop so there were only "obvious" things to do...to no avail. She literally gave up and that was the end of that.
And while win7 to win8 was a fairly big change, it was not, from my perspective, a huge change, but my perspective doesn't mean diddly. (It's hard to remember now, but I think Office also changed dramatically at that juncture, with the stupid push to "cloud" everything and was that when the "ribbon" was introduced? Anyway, just a disaster.) I even bought her a touch screen laptop hoping that the "optimization" towards touch interface might be a way to break through, but her cold arthritic hands were not useful and I think the concept was also challenging.
Anyway, I sympathize with the author.
posted by maxwelton at 1:42 PM on October 18 [4 favorites]
When my mother was still alive and still living in her own brain, she was a moderately successful user of her Windows 7 computer, keeping in touch via email and even doing web stuff and online banking and the like. For the holidays one year my brother got her a new computer, running Windows 8, which utterly defeated her. I spent literal hours over there trying to get her up to speed, typing out reference cards, trying to set up her desktop so there were only "obvious" things to do...to no avail. She literally gave up and that was the end of that.
And while win7 to win8 was a fairly big change, it was not, from my perspective, a huge change, but my perspective doesn't mean diddly. (It's hard to remember now, but I think Office also changed dramatically at that juncture, with the stupid push to "cloud" everything and was that when the "ribbon" was introduced? Anyway, just a disaster.) I even bought her a touch screen laptop hoping that the "optimization" towards touch interface might be a way to break through, but her cold arthritic hands were not useful and I think the concept was also challenging.
Anyway, I sympathize with the author.
posted by maxwelton at 1:42 PM on October 18 [4 favorites]
30 x (1/16inch) in cmI may be making a stupid error that I can't see now but I think the real answer is closer to 4.7625 cm
(Soulver returns answer of "1.35466667 cm")
posted by achrise at 2:37 PM on October 18 [7 favorites]
I am 42 and prior to this article never understood what the C button was for. I knew it was the false AC, that would leave cruft in memory that would screw up my next calculation, but beyond that, it was never explained. Getting a graphing calculator was fantastic, I could now fix mistakes instead of needing to start over.
So yeah, fuck the C button. Removing it isn't a negative, it actually removes a false clear for people who never had it explained to them in middle school. And I guarantee for anyone younger than me, it was also a complete mystery. To us, it's a useless waste of real estate that could include something useful, like a square root or reciprocal function.
posted by Hactar at 2:51 PM on October 18 [2 favorites]
So yeah, fuck the C button. Removing it isn't a negative, it actually removes a false clear for people who never had it explained to them in middle school. And I guarantee for anyone younger than me, it was also a complete mystery. To us, it's a useless waste of real estate that could include something useful, like a square root or reciprocal function.
posted by Hactar at 2:51 PM on October 18 [2 favorites]
look, i know i'm going to be That Asshole here, but if you want an excellent, fast calculator that will do exactly what you want and never update its interface, you should probably just buy a calculator. A hair over ten bucks will get you this one. It's solar! It will never run out of batteries! It's hot pink! No iOS update will ever give you that.
okay technically they could make the interface hot pink but apple's entire design department would instantly and collectively shit out their own kidneys if they ever shipped a product that wasn't four shades of Dystopian Sterile
posted by phooky at 2:51 PM on October 18 [10 favorites]
okay technically they could make the interface hot pink but apple's entire design department would instantly and collectively shit out their own kidneys if they ever shipped a product that wasn't four shades of Dystopian Sterile
posted by phooky at 2:51 PM on October 18 [10 favorites]
I bought a new fx-260 a couple of months ago! I could use the calc app on my phone but I'd have to unlock it first, but the fx-260 is ready and waiting. (Except if I'm sitting in the dark, then I have to turn on the light.)
And I'm also one who is intensely distrustful (mistrustful?) of the "C" button, I'm never sure exactly what it will erase. IMHO a backspace is much more useful than the half-ass "C". Assuming I'm using the phone because I can't find the fx-260 in the mess on my desk.
posted by phliar at 3:00 PM on October 18 [1 favorite]
And I'm also one who is intensely distrustful (mistrustful?) of the "C" button, I'm never sure exactly what it will erase. IMHO a backspace is much more useful than the half-ass "C". Assuming I'm using the phone because I can't find the fx-260 in the mess on my desk.
posted by phliar at 3:00 PM on October 18 [1 favorite]
I can barely remember my keys I'm not going to start carrying around a calculator in adition to a phone no matter how pocket it is.
posted by onya at 3:07 PM on October 18 [1 favorite]
posted by onya at 3:07 PM on October 18 [1 favorite]
And I'm also one who is intensely distrustful (mistrustful?) of the "C" button,
No, see, you just hit the "C" button several times in a row and the calculator knows you want to Clear It All. But sometimes you have to also hit the CA button. You know. To let it know you mean business. That will do a proper Clearing. Three or four Cs, then one or two CAs. Now it's clear.
All this calculator talk and I went looking for my TI 30X IIS. Not as clumsy or random as an app. An elegant weapon, from a more civilized age.
posted by howbigisthistextfield at 3:10 PM on October 18 [4 favorites]
No, see, you just hit the "C" button several times in a row and the calculator knows you want to Clear It All. But sometimes you have to also hit the CA button. You know. To let it know you mean business. That will do a proper Clearing. Three or four Cs, then one or two CAs. Now it's clear.
All this calculator talk and I went looking for my TI 30X IIS. Not as clumsy or random as an app. An elegant weapon, from a more civilized age.
posted by howbigisthistextfield at 3:10 PM on October 18 [4 favorites]
MetaFilter: half academic, half delightfully sexually explicit gay stuff.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 5:10 PM on October 18 [4 favorites]
posted by Horace Rumpole at 5:10 PM on October 18 [4 favorites]
30 x (1/16inch) in cm
(Soulver returns answer of "1.35466667 cm")
I may be making a stupid error that I can't see now but I think the real answer is closer to 4.7625 cm
4.76 is right (intuitively, 30/16 is a little less than 2 and there are 2.54 cm in an inch, so the answer should be a little less than 5).
1.35466667cm is 16/30 inches. I don't know how Soulver flipped that around.
posted by wanderingmind at 11:51 PM on October 18 [1 favorite]
(Soulver returns answer of "1.35466667 cm")
I may be making a stupid error that I can't see now but I think the real answer is closer to 4.7625 cm
4.76 is right (intuitively, 30/16 is a little less than 2 and there are 2.54 cm in an inch, so the answer should be a little less than 5).
1.35466667cm is 16/30 inches. I don't know how Soulver flipped that around.
posted by wanderingmind at 11:51 PM on October 18 [1 favorite]
I switched to the Numerical calculator app because the Apple calculator has so many bugs.
e.g. (5 + 15) - (10 * (5 - 3))
The result of this calculation should be "0", but it returns 20
= (5 + 15) - (10 * (5 - 3))
= (20) - (10 * (2))
= 20 - (20)
= 0
Also the Apple calculator will not display parenthesis even in scientific mode, you just have to remember which buttons you pressed.
Will be interesting to see if any of this is fixed in the new version, but I doubt I'll ever switch back, the Apple calculator has such a long history of bugs like this, there are bound to be more.
posted by Lanark at 1:30 AM on October 19 [1 favorite]
e.g. (5 + 15) - (10 * (5 - 3))
The result of this calculation should be "0", but it returns 20
= (5 + 15) - (10 * (5 - 3))
= (20) - (10 * (2))
= 20 - (20)
= 0
Also the Apple calculator will not display parenthesis even in scientific mode, you just have to remember which buttons you pressed.
Will be interesting to see if any of this is fixed in the new version, but I doubt I'll ever switch back, the Apple calculator has such a long history of bugs like this, there are bound to be more.
posted by Lanark at 1:30 AM on October 19 [1 favorite]
→
Yup:
I own too many real calculators (that is, HP 48Gs) to be bothered with iOS apps. I have PCalc's free "About" app, though: it's not a calculator, but the result of the PCalc developer's baroque imagination. If you need to be able to fire bananas at various objects, then have a car-chase over infinite terrain, then it's the perfect app for you.
posted by scruss at 7:08 AM on October 19 [2 favorites]
the real answer is closer to 4.7625 cm
Yup:
units --terse '30 * (1/16) in' 'cm' 4.7625Apple have made good products worse before now. I had a chance last week to work with one of the ones they'd like to keep hidden : the Apple III. It is a horrendously ugly machine, all jutting angles and lumpy crevices. Its huge metal chassis completely encloses the power supply with no ventilation (big yay for Steve Jobs' teamwork skills there!) so it will invariably overheat and malfunction after a while. The main PCB is huge, containing far too many chips doing weird off-label things. It is hilariously crap.
I own too many real calculators (that is, HP 48Gs) to be bothered with iOS apps. I have PCalc's free "About" app, though: it's not a calculator, but the result of the PCalc developer's baroque imagination. If you need to be able to fire bananas at various objects, then have a car-chase over infinite terrain, then it's the perfect app for you.
posted by scruss at 7:08 AM on October 19 [2 favorites]
I don't know how Soulver flipped that around.
A little dimensional analysis shows what's probably going on.
"30 x (1/16inch) in cm" asks for [quantity] in cm, so Soulver needs to know the units for [quantity] in order to make the conversion.
If it parses 30 x (1/16inch) as 30 x (1/(16 inch)), which it will do if unit names bind more tightly than arithmetic operations as they almost always should do, then the unit for the 16 is inch, so the unit for the 1/16 partial result is inch-1. That partial result then gets multiplied by 30, yielding 1.875 inch-1.
The conversion factor from inch to cm is 2.54 cm inch-1. If Soulver had a length in inch it could just multiply the conversion factor by that to make the inch in the length cancel the inch-1 in the conversion factor. However, the length it actually has is in inch-1 rather than inch, so to cancel out the conversion factor's inch-1 dimension and end up with a result in cm, it needs to divide the conversion factor by that length: 2.54 cm inch-1 / 1.875 inch-1 = 1.35466667 cm.
This is obviously not what the user thought they were asking for, but that's the trouble with "friendly" interfaces: most of them are no such thing, they're just window dressing.
Soulver is great for math-challenged folks like myself.
A computer is a device that will do what you tell it to, not what you meant. If you don't actually understand what it is that you're telling it to do, having a facility to tell it in a more long-winded way doesn't usually help. All it does is lull you into a false sense of confidence in the results.
The GNU units program apparently works the same way as Soulver for expressions including units, though it also tells you a tiny bit more about what it's doing. Here's a short terminal transcript:
posted by flabdablet at 7:29 AM on October 19 [3 favorites]
A little dimensional analysis shows what's probably going on.
"30 x (1/16inch) in cm" asks for [quantity] in cm, so Soulver needs to know the units for [quantity] in order to make the conversion.
If it parses 30 x (1/16inch) as 30 x (1/(16 inch)), which it will do if unit names bind more tightly than arithmetic operations as they almost always should do, then the unit for the 16 is inch, so the unit for the 1/16 partial result is inch-1. That partial result then gets multiplied by 30, yielding 1.875 inch-1.
The conversion factor from inch to cm is 2.54 cm inch-1. If Soulver had a length in inch it could just multiply the conversion factor by that to make the inch in the length cancel the inch-1 in the conversion factor. However, the length it actually has is in inch-1 rather than inch, so to cancel out the conversion factor's inch-1 dimension and end up with a result in cm, it needs to divide the conversion factor by that length: 2.54 cm inch-1 / 1.875 inch-1 = 1.35466667 cm.
This is obviously not what the user thought they were asking for, but that's the trouble with "friendly" interfaces: most of them are no such thing, they're just window dressing.
Soulver is great for math-challenged folks like myself.
A computer is a device that will do what you tell it to, not what you meant. If you don't actually understand what it is that you're telling it to do, having a facility to tell it in a more long-winded way doesn't usually help. All it does is lull you into a false sense of confidence in the results.
The GNU units program apparently works the same way as Soulver for expressions including units, though it also tells you a tiny bit more about what it's doing. Here's a short terminal transcript:
stephen@jellynail:~$ units
Currency exchange rates from exchangerate-api.com (USD base) on 2024-02-18
Consumer price index data from US BLS, 2024-02-18
7235 units, 125 prefixes, 134 nonlinear units
You have: 30 * (1/16 inch)
You want: cm
reciprocal conversion
* 1.3546667
/ 0.73818898
You have: 30 * (1/16) inch
You want: cm
* 4.7625
/ 0.20997375
You have:
Having "reciprocal conversion" appear in the results is a red flag that Soulver, being all about the friendly and allergic to the technical, apparently just hides from you.posted by flabdablet at 7:29 AM on October 19 [3 favorites]
Further to the point: I've long believed that using computers safely and effectively requires some degree of familiarity with basic computing topics, and among the most basic are the idea of a file as a chunk of information that's stored somewhere and possibly given a name, and a folder as a metaphor for conveniently grouping files that are in some way related to each other.
The power of the idea of a file is that for a lot of purposes it doesn't matter what's in the file; there are lots of things it's useful to be able to do with files regardless of what kind of information they contain, such as giving them new names, making backup copies, moving them between folders, deleting them and so on. Most systems provide some kind of general purpose file browser tool for doing those things, and also provide some standard way to organize folders within other folders. To my way of thinking, training newbie computer users without getting them up to speed early on these concepts and tools amounts to professional malpractice.
It's completely true that most newbie computer users could give no shits about any of that boring theoretical stuff, and just want to crack on with whatever it was they got the computer for in the first place. It's also completely true that most four-year-olds just want to run straight outside into the snow without having to learn how to deal with stupid irritating grownup bullshit like shoes. But they need to know about these things for their own good and I'd argue that the same is true of files and - critically - where those are stored and how they're backed up.
Commercial realities and pressures being what they are, it's really really rare to find entry-level computer training that goes anywhere near files, folders and file browsers; almost all of them start with creating documents in Word and adding fancy font effects or something like that. The idea that stuff has to be stored somewhere and that it's worth being a bit familiar with how that's done is typically just elided; users end up relying on Word (or whatever) to put their stuff in some default spot and get it back via the magic of Recent Documents. And if you ask somebody who has been trained this way where they saved that document they've now lost and expect you to be able to find for them, they'll inevitably tell you "I saved it in Word".
When Apple was in the process of designing iOS, I'm absolutely convinced they looked at this lamentable state of affairs and said, you know what, nobody is ever going to fix this and anyway fuck training. What we'll do instead is, we'll make our "intuitive" new system actually work that way. Our prospective users are simpletons who will never understand what a file is, let alone a folder, so we'll just hide the underlying filesystem and pretend there's no such thing. Documents, music tracks, videos, messages, pictures - these shall henceforth be different kinds of thing, and when a user saves a résumé using Pages they will be told they're saving it in Pages and that's just how it's going to be. They want to edit it with something that sucks less than Pages? Fuck 'em. How dare they insult us like that.
Vagueness about the notion of where stuff is stored got even worse with the advent of iCloud. Jobs took the view that it shouldn't matter where your stuff is stored because ubiquitous networking will be able to get it to you regardless. Which is all very well, except that even in 2024, networking is still not ubiquitous enough for this to avoid endless truly infuriating failure modes, and Apple has not managed to build a garden Edenic enough to discourage everybody from wanting to wander beyond the walls. Files are necessary, as Apple's quiet inclusion of a file browser app in iOS 11 and its further uncrippling in iOS 15 eventually conceded.
All of which is a longwinded way to get around to the point that the same is true of any technology, from computers to chainsaws to calculators. Some degree of familiarity with the underlying fundamentals is just necessary. There is no amount of "friendly" or "intuitive" that can be slapped on top of any of this stuff to compensate reliably for a lack of that.
So no, if you've never actually arsed yourself to find out what the C button on a calculator is for, you don't get to say "fuck the C button". The UI defined by a calculator display and keyboard is a language. It's a simple language that a lot of people are fluent in, and simply deleting words that you don't personally have a use for does not make it better.
posted by flabdablet at 8:27 AM on October 19 [3 favorites]
The power of the idea of a file is that for a lot of purposes it doesn't matter what's in the file; there are lots of things it's useful to be able to do with files regardless of what kind of information they contain, such as giving them new names, making backup copies, moving them between folders, deleting them and so on. Most systems provide some kind of general purpose file browser tool for doing those things, and also provide some standard way to organize folders within other folders. To my way of thinking, training newbie computer users without getting them up to speed early on these concepts and tools amounts to professional malpractice.
It's completely true that most newbie computer users could give no shits about any of that boring theoretical stuff, and just want to crack on with whatever it was they got the computer for in the first place. It's also completely true that most four-year-olds just want to run straight outside into the snow without having to learn how to deal with stupid irritating grownup bullshit like shoes. But they need to know about these things for their own good and I'd argue that the same is true of files and - critically - where those are stored and how they're backed up.
Commercial realities and pressures being what they are, it's really really rare to find entry-level computer training that goes anywhere near files, folders and file browsers; almost all of them start with creating documents in Word and adding fancy font effects or something like that. The idea that stuff has to be stored somewhere and that it's worth being a bit familiar with how that's done is typically just elided; users end up relying on Word (or whatever) to put their stuff in some default spot and get it back via the magic of Recent Documents. And if you ask somebody who has been trained this way where they saved that document they've now lost and expect you to be able to find for them, they'll inevitably tell you "I saved it in Word".
When Apple was in the process of designing iOS, I'm absolutely convinced they looked at this lamentable state of affairs and said, you know what, nobody is ever going to fix this and anyway fuck training. What we'll do instead is, we'll make our "intuitive" new system actually work that way. Our prospective users are simpletons who will never understand what a file is, let alone a folder, so we'll just hide the underlying filesystem and pretend there's no such thing. Documents, music tracks, videos, messages, pictures - these shall henceforth be different kinds of thing, and when a user saves a résumé using Pages they will be told they're saving it in Pages and that's just how it's going to be. They want to edit it with something that sucks less than Pages? Fuck 'em. How dare they insult us like that.
Vagueness about the notion of where stuff is stored got even worse with the advent of iCloud. Jobs took the view that it shouldn't matter where your stuff is stored because ubiquitous networking will be able to get it to you regardless. Which is all very well, except that even in 2024, networking is still not ubiquitous enough for this to avoid endless truly infuriating failure modes, and Apple has not managed to build a garden Edenic enough to discourage everybody from wanting to wander beyond the walls. Files are necessary, as Apple's quiet inclusion of a file browser app in iOS 11 and its further uncrippling in iOS 15 eventually conceded.
All of which is a longwinded way to get around to the point that the same is true of any technology, from computers to chainsaws to calculators. Some degree of familiarity with the underlying fundamentals is just necessary. There is no amount of "friendly" or "intuitive" that can be slapped on top of any of this stuff to compensate reliably for a lack of that.
So no, if you've never actually arsed yourself to find out what the C button on a calculator is for, you don't get to say "fuck the C button". The UI defined by a calculator display and keyboard is a language. It's a simple language that a lot of people are fluent in, and simply deleting words that you don't personally have a use for does not make it better.
posted by flabdablet at 8:27 AM on October 19 [3 favorites]
I am 42 and prior to this article never understood what the C button was for. I knew it was the false AC, that would leave cruft in memory that would screw up my next calculation, but beyond that, it was never explained. Getting a graphing calculator was fantastic, I could now fix mistakes instead of needing to start over.
I'm of a similar vintage, and in many ways this change makes the app act more like my 20 year old scientific calculator (a casio fx-115MS). It has a "DEL" button that is a back-space, deletes the last entry, and an "AC" button to clear all memory. The calculator apps with the "C" button, which I only ever experience on computers as a simulation of a type of calculator I never owned, always screw me up.
posted by selenized at 9:19 AM on October 19 [1 favorite]
I'm of a similar vintage, and in many ways this change makes the app act more like my 20 year old scientific calculator (a casio fx-115MS). It has a "DEL" button that is a back-space, deletes the last entry, and an "AC" button to clear all memory. The calculator apps with the "C" button, which I only ever experience on computers as a simulation of a type of calculator I never owned, always screw me up.
posted by selenized at 9:19 AM on October 19 [1 favorite]
- Still using the TI-25 that my mother bought me in 1979. She walked over a mile to the dry goods store to get it, as we didn't have a working car at the time. I think I've replaced the button battery 2-3 times.
- I'm about to start a self-study of group theory. Does the new version of calculator.app do group theory? (j/k)
posted by neuron at 10:32 AM on October 19 [1 favorite]
- I'm about to start a self-study of group theory. Does the new version of calculator.app do group theory? (j/k)
posted by neuron at 10:32 AM on October 19 [1 favorite]
The first calculator I ever owned was from a brand I can no longer remember. It had a red LED seven segment display, and the keypad had C (clear) and CE (clear entry) buttons. CE just replaced whatever was in the display with a zero; C did that and killed the current calculation too.
It had a single hidden memory register, with MS, MR and M+ buttons for storing the current display contents, recalling the stored number, and adding the display contents to the stored number without disturbing the display.
C didn't clear the memory as well; the only way to do that was to use MS to store a zero in it (there was a dot in the display to show that the memory had something nonzero in it), so the sequence C MS got pretty heavy use from me.
The first Casio calculator I ever owned was an FX-510 scientific. It had a C button that worked the same as CE on the old machine, and an AC button that worked the same as the old C. As far as I know, the C and AC labelling was a Casio-only thing, but Casio were massively influential in calculators and a lot of soft calculators use that convention. But however they were labelled, there was almost always one button for killing just the current number being entered, and a separate one for scrapping the entire calculation.
The first time I saw anything like this recent Apple idiocy happen on an actual calculator, it was the appearance of models with a combined C/CE key. Push it once and it worked like CE; push it again and worked like AC. This pattern was pretty common on the commodity four-function large-size desktop calculators you could buy for five bucks at the supermarket.
You know what the real calculators didn't use, though? Fucking long press. That abomination started with digital watches, and has spread to phones via engineers so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
posted by flabdablet at 11:36 AM on October 19 [3 favorites]
press display shows 5 5 + 5 6 6 CE 0 7 7 = 12That machine did its arithmetic strictly in the order you pressed the keys, with no idea of operator precedence and no parentheses. This was almost universal in calculators at the time, so much so that it actually got used to detect cheating when students without much arithmetic clue had used a calculator instead of working stuff out on paper.
It had a single hidden memory register, with MS, MR and M+ buttons for storing the current display contents, recalling the stored number, and adding the display contents to the stored number without disturbing the display.
C didn't clear the memory as well; the only way to do that was to use MS to store a zero in it (there was a dot in the display to show that the memory had something nonzero in it), so the sequence C MS got pretty heavy use from me.
The first Casio calculator I ever owned was an FX-510 scientific. It had a C button that worked the same as CE on the old machine, and an AC button that worked the same as the old C. As far as I know, the C and AC labelling was a Casio-only thing, but Casio were massively influential in calculators and a lot of soft calculators use that convention. But however they were labelled, there was almost always one button for killing just the current number being entered, and a separate one for scrapping the entire calculation.
The first time I saw anything like this recent Apple idiocy happen on an actual calculator, it was the appearance of models with a combined C/CE key. Push it once and it worked like CE; push it again and worked like AC. This pattern was pretty common on the commodity four-function large-size desktop calculators you could buy for five bucks at the supermarket.
You know what the real calculators didn't use, though? Fucking long press. That abomination started with digital watches, and has spread to phones via engineers so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
posted by flabdablet at 11:36 AM on October 19 [3 favorites]
e.g. (5 + 15) - (10 * (5 - 3))
The result of this calculation should be "0", but it returns 20
...
Also the Apple calculator will not display parenthesis even in scientific mode, you just have to remember which buttons you pressed.
Both of these are fixed in macOS Sequoia.
But if you like, we can both lament that Siri will tell you that nine factorial is 945.
posted by pwnguin at 12:30 PM on October 19 [1 favorite]
The result of this calculation should be "0", but it returns 20
...
Also the Apple calculator will not display parenthesis even in scientific mode, you just have to remember which buttons you pressed.
Both of these are fixed in macOS Sequoia.
But if you like, we can both lament that Siri will tell you that nine factorial is 945.
posted by pwnguin at 12:30 PM on October 19 [1 favorite]
you should probably just buy a calculator. ... It's solar! It will never run out of batteries!
My own "hangs out on my desk" calculator is a venerable Sharp Elsi Mate EL-385 which I acquired when it was left on my office desk by a salesman back in 1989 or 1990 (when I had a "real" job).
It's a pretty basic machine, but it meets my simple needs (I never use the windows calc or my phone calc if the sharp is handy)...and it was the right price. It also still works fine lo these 33 years later. (There is a grubby one on ebay described as "This calculator is very rare and super hard to find" priced at $35...maybe if I play my cards right, mine can be the key to a comfortable retirement once that collector market takes off.) It is a "twin power" calculator with a solar strip and apparently also a battery which I have never looked at nor did I know was even there until I looked up the model online a few minutes ago. (The calc was apparently cheap enough new the salesman never bothered asking after it.)
I note that 4 of the 30 buttons on this machine are dedicated to clearing things: C, CE, a "protected" CA (has a little ridge around it to prevent accidental presses), and CM (to clear the memory function). The "fanciest" thing it can do is square roots.
(There is a "MU" button which I have never used and does not seem to do anything; I think it's supposed to be 'markup' but there is no order of operations that it does anything.)
posted by maxwelton at 12:38 PM on October 19 [1 favorite]
My own "hangs out on my desk" calculator is a venerable Sharp Elsi Mate EL-385 which I acquired when it was left on my office desk by a salesman back in 1989 or 1990 (when I had a "real" job).
It's a pretty basic machine, but it meets my simple needs (I never use the windows calc or my phone calc if the sharp is handy)...and it was the right price. It also still works fine lo these 33 years later. (There is a grubby one on ebay described as "This calculator is very rare and super hard to find" priced at $35...maybe if I play my cards right, mine can be the key to a comfortable retirement once that collector market takes off.) It is a "twin power" calculator with a solar strip and apparently also a battery which I have never looked at nor did I know was even there until I looked up the model online a few minutes ago. (The calc was apparently cheap enough new the salesman never bothered asking after it.)
I note that 4 of the 30 buttons on this machine are dedicated to clearing things: C, CE, a "protected" CA (has a little ridge around it to prevent accidental presses), and CM (to clear the memory function). The "fanciest" thing it can do is square roots.
(There is a "MU" button which I have never used and does not seem to do anything; I think it's supposed to be 'markup' but there is no order of operations that it does anything.)
posted by maxwelton at 12:38 PM on October 19 [1 favorite]
Fucking long press
Oh c'mon. Long press is a great add for devices with limited UI, like touch control of tablets or smartphones where you don't have other link overload methods such as a right click from a mouse. And it's useful on small dedicated devices, like small multi band radios that get a heck of a lot of functionality out of maybe 10 pushbuttons.
For some LED strip lighting I programmed a small microcontroller to be a one-button PWM dimmer. Short button presses cycle through 3 presets (low, mid, full), but if you hold the button, the dimmer slowly fades from the current setpoint to full, and back down to min, and back up, for as long as you hold the button. You stop when you have the light level you want.
/nerdy UI derail
posted by Artful Codger at 3:13 PM on October 19 [3 favorites]
Oh c'mon. Long press is a great add for devices with limited UI, like touch control of tablets or smartphones where you don't have other link overload methods such as a right click from a mouse. And it's useful on small dedicated devices, like small multi band radios that get a heck of a lot of functionality out of maybe 10 pushbuttons.
For some LED strip lighting I programmed a small microcontroller to be a one-button PWM dimmer. Short button presses cycle through 3 presets (low, mid, full), but if you hold the button, the dimmer slowly fades from the current setpoint to full, and back down to min, and back up, for as long as you hold the button. You stop when you have the light level you want.
/nerdy UI derail
posted by Artful Codger at 3:13 PM on October 19 [3 favorites]
>>>30 x (1/16inch) in cm
(Soulver returns answer of "1.35466667 cm")
>>I may be making a stupid error that I can't see now but I think the real answer is closer to 4.7625 cm
>4.76 is right (intuitively, 30/16 is a little less than 2 and there are 2.54 cm in an inch, so the answer should be a little less than 5).
1.35466667cm is 16/30 inches. I don't know how Soulver flipped that around.
Well that explains why my fence is so short.
posted by jeremias at 5:45 PM on October 19 [2 favorites]
(Soulver returns answer of "1.35466667 cm")
>>I may be making a stupid error that I can't see now but I think the real answer is closer to 4.7625 cm
>4.76 is right (intuitively, 30/16 is a little less than 2 and there are 2.54 cm in an inch, so the answer should be a little less than 5).
1.35466667cm is 16/30 inches. I don't know how Soulver flipped that around.
Well that explains why my fence is so short.
posted by jeremias at 5:45 PM on October 19 [2 favorites]
Commercial realities and pressures being what they are, it's really really rare to find entry-level computer training that goes anywhere near files, folders and file browsers; almost all of them start with creating documents in Word and adding fancy font effects or something like that. The idea that stuff has to be stored somewhere and that it's worth being a bit familiar with how that's done is typically just elided; users end up relying on Word (or whatever) to put their stuff in some default spot and get it back via the magic of Recent Documents. And if you ask somebody who has been trained this way where they saved that document they've now lost and expect you to be able to find for them, they'll inevitably tell you "I saved it in Word".It's fascinating how the conceptual framework for file systems has kind of slowly faded from the younger generations. I'm old enough that I learned to type on both a typewriter and keyboard and how to look up books in the library by both computer and filing cards. It was basically taken for granted that people would know how manual filing systems would work, then you had a generation or two of people who used PCs and were required to develop some competency in how they worked under the hood, and now you have the smartphone and tablets generation who got UIs that deliberately make everything frictionless and aren't even familiar with the mechanics of filing - it's just a black magic box to them.
posted by ndr at 11:53 PM on October 19 [2 favorites]
You say fascinating, I say tragic. Potayto, tomahto...
it's just a black magic box to them
which is exactly how the tech priesthood likes it. Democracy schmocracy.
posted by flabdablet at 1:53 AM on October 20 [2 favorites]
it's just a black magic box to them
which is exactly how the tech priesthood likes it. Democracy schmocracy.
posted by flabdablet at 1:53 AM on October 20 [2 favorites]
UIs that deliberately make everything frictionless
except they don't do that, do they? Frictionless is reserved for the specific use cases that the designer thought about. Want to do something they didn't think was worth implementing, like copy some specific chunk of text out of a SMS message and paste it into a web form? Sucks to be you.
We don't need frictionless, just a little oil, which is what training in basic unifying concepts amounts to.
I rate computer-as-appliance as the single most destructive idea that's ever come out of the IT marketing industrial complex. They're not fucking appliances, they're tools, and being offered only the choice between a glass bottle and an old shoe to bang the nails into the walls just sucks.
posted by flabdablet at 2:07 AM on October 20 [4 favorites]
except they don't do that, do they? Frictionless is reserved for the specific use cases that the designer thought about. Want to do something they didn't think was worth implementing, like copy some specific chunk of text out of a SMS message and paste it into a web form? Sucks to be you.
We don't need frictionless, just a little oil, which is what training in basic unifying concepts amounts to.
I rate computer-as-appliance as the single most destructive idea that's ever come out of the IT marketing industrial complex. They're not fucking appliances, they're tools, and being offered only the choice between a glass bottle and an old shoe to bang the nails into the walls just sucks.
posted by flabdablet at 2:07 AM on October 20 [4 favorites]
It's fascinating how the conceptual framework for file systems has kind of slowly faded from the younger generations.
This has struck me as really interesting, at work, where I often end up coaching the student interns on stuff. The office I work in is still very old school, with network shares (mapped to drive letters on some people's machines, like the "Z" drive or whatever) and the new kids these days have no idea what any of that is and can never find anything. They also don't have a sense that location matters in some deep way, which it does, because there are all sorts of ancient, bespoke, enterprise systems that rely on specific files being named specific things in specific places or everything breaks. Basically, going to work for me is like going back in time to 1998.
The kids just save stuff and expect the computer to handle those details and, if they move a file somewhere, that the computer will know that and adjust things as necessary. They also expect a version history by default (which is exactly the case if you use onedrive or any of the other cloud storage tools) and often don't save their files for long periods of time and leave documents open for days on end because why does it matter? doesn't everything have autosave and what is a file lock?
The other olds are flabbergasted by this, but to me, these are reasonable positions to take. To a large extent this is how the office 365 ecosystem is supposed to work now, and it is largely how cloud storage has worked for decades. But also, why should we be married to a set of metaphors devised when paper was king and everyone had a filing cabinet in their office? I'm in my 40s and these metaphors were already dated and didn't reflect my reality when I started into white collar work, that's certainly doubly true for the youths entering a workforce where even my old-school office has been almost entirely paperless for decades.
Also, the other day I found a box of old floppy disks in the storage room at work and showed them to one of the interns, she'd never seen one before, in person (she's 19). I aged a thousand years and crumbled into dust on the spot.
posted by selenized at 7:46 AM on October 20 [3 favorites]
This has struck me as really interesting, at work, where I often end up coaching the student interns on stuff. The office I work in is still very old school, with network shares (mapped to drive letters on some people's machines, like the "Z" drive or whatever) and the new kids these days have no idea what any of that is and can never find anything. They also don't have a sense that location matters in some deep way, which it does, because there are all sorts of ancient, bespoke, enterprise systems that rely on specific files being named specific things in specific places or everything breaks. Basically, going to work for me is like going back in time to 1998.
The kids just save stuff and expect the computer to handle those details and, if they move a file somewhere, that the computer will know that and adjust things as necessary. They also expect a version history by default (which is exactly the case if you use onedrive or any of the other cloud storage tools) and often don't save their files for long periods of time and leave documents open for days on end because why does it matter? doesn't everything have autosave and what is a file lock?
The other olds are flabbergasted by this, but to me, these are reasonable positions to take. To a large extent this is how the office 365 ecosystem is supposed to work now, and it is largely how cloud storage has worked for decades. But also, why should we be married to a set of metaphors devised when paper was king and everyone had a filing cabinet in their office? I'm in my 40s and these metaphors were already dated and didn't reflect my reality when I started into white collar work, that's certainly doubly true for the youths entering a workforce where even my old-school office has been almost entirely paperless for decades.
Also, the other day I found a box of old floppy disks in the storage room at work and showed them to one of the interns, she'd never seen one before, in person (she's 19). I aged a thousand years and crumbled into dust on the spot.
posted by selenized at 7:46 AM on October 20 [3 favorites]
why should we be married to a set of metaphors devised when paper was king and everyone had a filing cabinet in their office?
Because an eighth of an inch underneath the slick and glossy marketing bondo and polish lies an IT ecosystem composed entirely of all sorts of ancient, bespoke, enterprise systems that rely on specific files being named specific things in specific places or everything breaks.
We're already facing the situation of having too much legacy COBOL running for the available COBOL programmers to maintain, and this is but one tiny tendril of an extremely aggressive overgrowth of legacy kudzu. IT systems are just fundamentally brittle, the only way to disguise that brittleness is to add complexity, and that approach is already well past the point of diminishing returns.
You think specific files needing to be named specific things in specific places is bad? Try maintaining specific applications that need to be built against specific versions of specific libraries that can themselves no longer be maintained because the development systems used to build them have long since been superseded by versions with endless thickets of mutual incompatibilities.
Making our things "smarter" is just making us stupider. If we don't want to end up in a total hellscape of broken IT that nobody can fix, we ought to pull up our big girl pants and accept that at some level we need to deal with this shit the way it really is instead of the way Marketing's fantasy life says it is.
As my wise friend Don has observed: those who fail to understand networking protocols are doomed to re-implement them, badly, over port 80.
There comes a point where all the spackle we've added to try to insulate ourselves from reality generates more problems for more people than the reality it got put there to insulate us from in the first place, and my best judgement says that IT has already passed that point. We have been ignoring mounting technical debt for so long that we are now no longer capable of servicing it, the reckoning is happening, and it is ugly.
posted by flabdablet at 9:03 AM on October 20 [2 favorites]
Because an eighth of an inch underneath the slick and glossy marketing bondo and polish lies an IT ecosystem composed entirely of all sorts of ancient, bespoke, enterprise systems that rely on specific files being named specific things in specific places or everything breaks.
We're already facing the situation of having too much legacy COBOL running for the available COBOL programmers to maintain, and this is but one tiny tendril of an extremely aggressive overgrowth of legacy kudzu. IT systems are just fundamentally brittle, the only way to disguise that brittleness is to add complexity, and that approach is already well past the point of diminishing returns.
You think specific files needing to be named specific things in specific places is bad? Try maintaining specific applications that need to be built against specific versions of specific libraries that can themselves no longer be maintained because the development systems used to build them have long since been superseded by versions with endless thickets of mutual incompatibilities.
Making our things "smarter" is just making us stupider. If we don't want to end up in a total hellscape of broken IT that nobody can fix, we ought to pull up our big girl pants and accept that at some level we need to deal with this shit the way it really is instead of the way Marketing's fantasy life says it is.
As my wise friend Don has observed: those who fail to understand networking protocols are doomed to re-implement them, badly, over port 80.
There comes a point where all the spackle we've added to try to insulate ourselves from reality generates more problems for more people than the reality it got put there to insulate us from in the first place, and my best judgement says that IT has already passed that point. We have been ignoring mounting technical debt for so long that we are now no longer capable of servicing it, the reckoning is happening, and it is ugly.
posted by flabdablet at 9:03 AM on October 20 [2 favorites]
This is something that drives me wild at work. So many of the people in my office use Outlook as a file store. They never save a document out of outlook which causes all sorts of problems. I end up having to send all documents thru outlook instead of pointing at a network location because they can't find files that aren't in outlook. And for some reason everyone's mailbox is at the storage limit.
Then our 1 year email retention policy strikes and their documents disappear.
posted by Mitheral at 9:30 AM on October 20 [4 favorites]
Then our 1 year email retention policy strikes and their documents disappear.
posted by Mitheral at 9:30 AM on October 20 [4 favorites]
The obvious fix there is a script that finds all the mails that are about to be expired and re-sends them. I wonder if anybody has made that available as an Outlook plugin?
posted by flabdablet at 10:06 AM on October 20 [3 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 10:06 AM on October 20 [3 favorites]
I bet one could manage that with an excel spreadsheet.
posted by Mitheral at 10:09 AM on October 20 [2 favorites]
posted by Mitheral at 10:09 AM on October 20 [2 favorites]
So many of the people in my office use Outlook as a file store.
Count your blessings. You could have been a Sharepoint shop.
posted by flabdablet at 10:10 AM on October 20 [3 favorites]
Count your blessings. You could have been a Sharepoint shop.
posted by flabdablet at 10:10 AM on October 20 [3 favorites]
→
But an email needs at least a year in the inbox to mature. This ensures the reply will not split or warp.
The most organized person I ever met used to keep their important emails filed in folders under Trash. Every time we got new IT support, one of them would attempt to empty the all-important Trash. Since this organized person was our office manager and PA to one of the company's SVPs, this would cause a five-alarm panic call to the head of IT and the world's fastest restore job.
I should have asked if their first job had been in a stocks boiler room.
posted by scruss at 4:56 AM on October 21 [1 favorite]
Then our 1 year email retention policy strikes …
But an email needs at least a year in the inbox to mature. This ensures the reply will not split or warp.
The most organized person I ever met used to keep their important emails filed in folders under Trash. Every time we got new IT support, one of them would attempt to empty the all-important Trash. Since this organized person was our office manager and PA to one of the company's SVPs, this would cause a five-alarm panic call to the head of IT and the world's fastest restore job.
I should have asked if their first job had been in a stocks boiler room.
posted by scruss at 4:56 AM on October 21 [1 favorite]
an email needs at least a year in the inbox to mature. This ensures the reply will not split or warp.
For the tiny minority of mails that need to be dealt with more urgently than that, splitting can be reduced by drilling down to fit threaded inserts instead of just hammering on a top post.
posted by flabdablet at 10:09 AM on October 22 [1 favorite]
For the tiny minority of mails that need to be dealt with more urgently than that, splitting can be reduced by drilling down to fit threaded inserts instead of just hammering on a top post.
posted by flabdablet at 10:09 AM on October 22 [1 favorite]
BTW, it's been so long since Bogost wrote something that made me dismiss him out of hand (or at least so long since I read anything by him) that I can't remember what the original thing was, but if I needed a refresher reason, here he is in the Atlantic complaining about people giving out full-size candy bars at Halloween. No, really.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:51 AM on October 24
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:51 AM on October 24
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posted by gimonca at 7:30 AM on October 18 [15 favorites]