First, Batman Smile

Batman was surprisingly good; the movie had a good (and reasonably complicated) plot, good acting (Heath Ledger did an excellent job as the joker), and even some good themes. Obviously, there was plenty of Batman beating people up, but it wasn't too much to make the violence seem pointless and endless.

Overall, if you haven't already seen Batman The Dark Knight, I would recommend watching it.

Now, for the TI-Nspire Sad

Yesterday, I got my free TI-Nspire in the mail (after it sat on my porch through a severe thunderstorm). Overall, I was incredibly disappointed.
* The programming capabilities suck. Even with the very latest operating system, you have a whooping 1 total I/O command (Disp), forcing you to get all input through parameters at the beginning of the program. Also, the commands that are supported are so limited that it is virtually impossible to do anything (for example, I thought I could build a simple program using strings, but there is no substring command). However, the program editor is nice (italicizes variables which are changed to standard font if they are a keyword).

* Everything is based on "Documents." If you want to find out what e^pi-pi actually is, then you have to go through several menus to create a new calculator document to find out. I personally dislike the document style interface, but I'm sure some schools do like it.

* Despite terrible software, the hardware is really nice. What could go wrong with a 240 * 320 16 level grayscale screen? And, there's plenty of memory (both RAM and archive) to use. Also, instead of having to press ALPHA plus a key to get letters, all of the letters have their own keys, which makes typing text much easier (except that there is little reason to type text...)

* The 84+SE Keypad is really nice, as it is an 84+SE with only a couple differences. First, it has OS 2.46 (a special TI-Nspire OS). Second, there is no way to just reset the RAM if something is stuck in an endless loop as far as I have been able to tell; you have to delete everything, which is quite annoying. Also, I'm not sure how the mini USB port works with it, but I haven't managed to get it to work yet. Finally, each pixel is a 3 * 3 block of pixels on the TI-Nspire screen, so everything is larger than on an actual TI-84+SE.

Overall, I wouldn't recommend buying a TI-Nspire, unless you want the TI-84+SE keyboard part (which probably wastes a lot of battery power).
Batman: I agree that the movie was excellent, I just saw it last night. I was particularly impressed with the effects and action, but I found the plot to be a hair too drawn out.

Nspire: That sounds about in line with other reviews I've heard. Why do you say that the 84+ keypad would draw a lot of battery, though?
KermMartian wrote:
Nspire: That sounds about in line with other reviews I've heard. Why do you say that the 84+ keypad would draw a lot of battery, though?


Well, for one, it is using a much larger / more complicated LCD (the OS decided to have grayscale stuff around the edge of the screen as well), which is going to require more batteries. Also, when you switch plates, the TI-nSpire has to load a new OS, making me think that it is using it's beast processor to run an emulated 84+SE instead of a 15mhz processor, but IDK about this point; it could be using some kind of alternate mode while running (however, pressing the reset button on the back is caught by the TI-NSpire, so it at least has extra interrupts running).

EDIT: also, the Joker had a lot of good lines in Batman; not the usual bad bad-guy one-liners
Well, for the typing part, it would make sense to a point if you wanted to utilize it to take notes, instead of wasting paper. Is the documents it makes a form of .txt file that the computer can read??
tifreak8x wrote:
Well, for the typing part, it would make sense to a point if you wanted to utilize it to take notes, instead of wasting paper. Is the documents it makes a form of .txt file that the computer can read??


Almost certainly not, given that documents are made up of several pages / problems / whatever TI decided to call them, some of which can be graphs, calculators, or spreadsheets. I think that it stores them as .tno, or something weird like that.

However, taking notes might be a decent use of this thing; if it were smaller, it might make a nice PDA - style device. It COULD be quite cool if you could program it...
Wait... How did you get one free? =P
Yeah.. I wants to know.
The Tari wrote:
Yeah.. I wants to know.
I third this motion, although I believe I saw a mention on IRC or perhaps somewhere elsewhere on the forum that it had to do with his father teaching math, perhaps?
Nope; I got it from a math competition Very Happy

The NC ARML team got 3rd place, so we all got free TI-Nspires, mathematica, and a couple other minor things.

ARML = American Regions Mathematics League; the top 8? teams (each has 15 students) nationally get free calculators. The competition is held simultaneously at 4 different University campuses (Penn State, some place in Iowa, Nevada, and Athens, GA) and there are a couple hundred teams.
KermMartian wrote:
The Tari wrote:
Yeah.. I wants to know.
I third this motion, although I believe I saw a mention on IRC or perhaps somewhere elsewhere on the forum that it had to do with his father teaching math, perhaps?

No, that was me. Razz
Ah, ok, at least I'm not going crazy and imagining things, then. What's your opinion on the Nspire?
  
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