Windows 10 - Day 1

In article , Mayayana
wrote:

That's not debate or discussion. It's mere
bickering. Any attempt to make relevant points
or even discuss the same points gets lost early
on.

the problem is that there aren't any attempts to make relevant points.

it immediately turns into a bash session, just as what has happened in
this thread.

stick to the topic.

On 7/8/2016 11:55 AM, Ken Hart wrote:
On 07/08/2016 09:16 AM, PeterN wrote:
On 7/8/2016 12:08 AM, Ken Hart wrote:
On 07/07/2016 10:06 PM, Mayayana wrote:
| I have some programs on punched paper tape that I wrote on a Digital
| PDP-8 in college (1975 or abouts). Let's see your Mac natively run
those.
| After all, you did say "no matter what it is, a mac can natively run
| *all* of it."
|

I don't see why you keep baiting him. He'll talk
nonsense as long as someone keeps responding.
Nothing useful ever comes of it. More often
he just further confuses all issues under discussion
by making nonsensical, ignorant and tangential or
unrelated claims.


Actually, a friend and I are doing an analysis of him. We have gone over
his posts in some depth, and come up with a couple working theories of
his true persona. We also have his location pretty well narrowed down.
In order to firm up the analysis, it is necessary to "keep baiting him".
His responses tell a lot about him when taken in total.
I doubt that he even realizes how much information he has given out
inadvertently.
You might call this "stalking"; I call it saving humankind from the
likes of "nospam"!


Why would anyone care.
I guess you have a lot of time on your hands.

My friend is a psychologist, and is doing a research project.


OK!
When I have a lot of time, I try to understand quantum computing.



--
PeterN

On Fri, 08 Jul 2016 12:50:12 -0400, nospam
wrote:

In article , Eric Stevens
wrote:

The four function
calculator simply speeds up some of the computations. Indeed it might
be
argued that some people with a multi function calculator, don't really
understand the math behind the functions.

no.

Most definitely 'yes'.

definitely no.

a multifunction calculator simply speeds up calculations someone
already knows how to do.

it doesn't magically let people calculate things they don't understand.

A scientific calculator has functions like 'Log', Hyperbolic
Functions, Integration etc where the user can achieve results without
having the least clue as to what is going on. Financial calculators
have functions like 'NPV' (Nett Present Value) or functions to
calculate the cost of a ballon mortgage.

nonsense.

they might get 'results' but those results will be meaningless.

Nonsense

do you think people randomly press calculator buttons because of the
fancy sounding names on them??

I didn't say anything about randomly pressing buttons. But they know
(for example) that if they enter a list of annual transactions and
dates and then press NPV they get an interest rate. They know what it
means, they know where it comes from, they know how to get it with a
calculator but they couldn't calculate it with pencil and paper, even
with the aid of a four-function calculator. There are lots of
calculations like that.

How about the Sin of 1.72 radians. How would you go about calculating
that to 4 decimal places? Very few people would know how to do that.

nobody gets correct results without knowing what it is they're trying
to calculate.

But that's not what I said.

often, the calculator will give an error if the user entered invalid
data.

It's my observation that many
people using these functions on a calculator haven't the least idea of
how to do them with a pencil and paper.

they don't need to know how to do it with pencil and paper, but they do
need to know what the functions mean and what they're used for.

I remember reading a story about Gauss. He preferred to work them out
in his head. He found it quicker and easier than looking them up in a
table.

only because he had done the same calculation before and remembered
what the value from the table was.

Nope. He had freak calculating abilities.
http://www.storyofmathematics.com/19th_gauss.html

the world is much different than it was back then.

Surely you are not suggesting logarithms are different too?

today, we have computers that can do far more complex calculations than
anything he could have ever imagined.

Only after someone has told them how. After that, people can do the
calculations with the aid of the computer, even they don't know or
understand how to do them without the computer.

This is where we came in.
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens