Another 50G (disappointment) story
in [HP48]
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From: Berk Birand on 28 Sep 2006 01:36 On Thu, 28 Sep 2006 14:48:21 +1000, Jean-Yves Avenard wrote: > Well, all of those are rather good news anyway. The problems you've > mentioned are linked to your inexperience with HP calculators and the > fact that it's not a TI calculators. > > They just work differently [...] > There's quite a steep learning curve with HP calculators especially > coming from a TI background. HP calculators do work differently, it's a > different logic and they can do so much that it's hard to master all it > can do quickly. > I have no doubt that for EE the HP50 is the best machine available. > Whenever it comes to numerical evaluation, the HP is kind for its > accuracy and speed. That is exactly what I wanted to hear. I carefully read every single one of your answers, and will look into them. As I'm working my way through my Semiconductor devices homework, my opinions with regards to the calculator are steadily improving. I especially like the Equation Writer so far. I will start looking into the add-ons found on hpcalc.org, and try to get accustomed to the HP way of achieving things. I also realized that some of my disquietude towards the HP50g may be stemming from the poor manuals (both guide and manual) that came with it. Say, nowhere in those did I find anything about the HIST key, or the various functions for manipulating the stack. Overall, it doesn't give a rigorous explanation of the functions, and certainly doesn't do justice to the device. Finally, I'm glad that I have discovered this newsgroup, and I know that the experience of the people here will be very helpful on my quest to conquering the HP50g. Thank you all for your replies, let me get back to work... Berk -- Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com
From: Douglas Rohm on 28 Sep 2006 01:52 > Thanks for the reply, but I couldn't find the location of LS+. But it > seemed like your method of deleting variables is already longer than > what I used to do. I open the file manager, select each variable i > want to delete using ENTER, and then hit PURGE. It prompts me whether > I want to purge the variable, and I press the "ALL" soft-key to do so. > > What seemed unreasonable was the actual act of picking every single > variable that the equation created manually... LS = Left Shift. I can delete vars pretty fast this way.
From: TW on 28 Sep 2006 02:31 > * It doesn't have that many probability mass distributions. They got > Normal, Chi-square and a few others, but what happened to the Binomial > and the Poisson? I would especially expect them to have the cumulative > distribution functions for those. Also the cdf for the Normal > distribution is 'upper-tail' so to do P(X<x), I need to perform an extra > subtraction (1-P(X>x)). What is the reason for that, I don't understand. I'm sure others will chime in to discuss other parts, but I can respond well to this one. It has been a long time since I've looked at statistics on the TI-89/92, but when I was in high school 5 years ago you couldn't get any of those without downloading an applet that added the same things as those found on the 83 series. Has that changed so they are in the ROM now? If not, then the 50 has more statistics capability built in than the voyage 200. Anyway, I was in a statistics class in high school that had a picture of the TI-83 on the book cover. . . joy. So I threw together a library that would add all the commands found in the 83 for me to use. I also included several nice commands to perform lots of simulations and some other useful stuff. If you're interested in that, look here: http://www.hpcalc.org/details.php?id=4911 Stat Pro is the most comprehensive stats package available for any calculator. Get it here if you'd like: http://www.hpcalc.org/details.php?id=4442 And as to the upper tail vs. lower tail. . . if you need the upper probability and only have a TI calculator you'll have to perform an unnececary (1-P(X>x)) to get the answer. How inconvenient! :-) It is just a different way of doing the same thing. Why it was done that way? I don't know. Yes it does take a little longer to learn the "HP way", but once you do you'll run circles around your previous self using the TI system. (my opinion only :-) TW
From: laurent.joliaferrier on 28 Sep 2006 02:39 Berk Birand wrote: > * Probably one of the major disappointments was this bug I found in the > equation library. When you go in one of the sections (say, Projectile > Motion), and press the PIC soft-key to look at the supposedly helpful > picture, you can't change the equation anymore! After you press EQN, > pressing the up-and-down keys scroll the screen, instead of moving > through the list of equations. I tested it on my HP 50g. Same 'issue'. In fact the up- and down-keys scroll the screen even if you don't display a PICT before. You should use the NXEQ menu option to move to the next equations.
From: Berk Birand on 28 Sep 2006 02:40
On Wed, 27 Sep 2006 23:31:22 -0700, TW wrote: > > Anyway, I was in a statistics class in high school that had a picture > of the TI-83 on the book cover. . . joy. So I threw together a library > that would add all the commands found in the 83 for me to use. I also > included several nice commands to perform lots of simulations and some > other useful stuff. If you're interested in that, look here: > http://www.hpcalc.org/details.php?id=4911 > > Stat Pro is the most comprehensive stats package available for any > calculator. Get it here if you'd like: > http://www.hpcalc.org/details.php?id=4442 > Actually this will sound quite funny but I had just downloaded your stat library! I first tried out Stat49 by Guth, but that didn't have the distributions that i wanted either. Then I got yours, which seems to work fine. I couldn't get the interface to work though, as typing NSW didn't do anything. Maybe it doesn't work with HP50g? More probably I screwed up somewhere. BTW, my voyage 200 also didn't have these prob functions built-in, but TI has a List/Stat Editor on their web page that serves that purpose. It's distributed for free... Thanks for the answer, and a great library, Berk -- Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com |