The Calculating World with Wing and You

HP Blog platform changes

2008-05-22T15:01:00Z

Better Blogging experience

I want to let you know that HP Blogs will be migrating to a new platform over the next week. As of tomorrow, May 23, I won't be able to post my blog and receiving any comments submitted. Please hold your comments until June 1 when our new site will be live.

Personalize your HP Calculators!

2008-04-30T22:28:00Z

Personalization is one of the big trends these days. I proudly personalized my HP 2710p notebook and iPAQ Smartphone with cool stickers and accessories. However, I wonder how many of folks also personalize their calculators besides putting a name tag there at best.

Check out the HP calculators skin from the link here (http://www.skinit.com/devices/calculators/hp_calculators)

I just love my “collegiate” look 35s!

Math is fun, isn't it?

2008-04-28T04:49:00Z

Math is fun?

As a first timer, I went to the annual event of National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in Salt Lake City, Utah. What an experience to see thousands of teachers coming across United States to learn about the new technology to help increase learning and teaching productivities and share their experience!

When I flashed back to my school days, all I could remember were burning the mid-night oil to memorize numbers of math formula with the rule to plot the graph or doing endless numbers of science homework to memorize all the outcomes of the experiences. While I was amazed how powerful our brain can be, I had to say the learning wasn’t quite fun at that time (and I hope these types of training does not have the side effect of limiting my creativity and imagination to achieve the impossibilities today).

If you are the teachers or students out there reading this article, would you mind to share with us how technology make the learning and teaching more fun?

How many calculating applications do you use?

2008-04-01T01:12:00Z

I have couple calculating applications installed in my notebook for professional and personal uses. Instead of creating a -Excel spreadsheet, I found that some of these customized calculating applications are convenient, intuitive and ease of use. So, I went to download.com last week to see how many calculating applications for PDA or PC currently available out there for free download or purchase?

I was starting to think about you as the calculating user.

Have you ever download one of these calculating applications in your PDA/PC?
What calculating applications are your favorites?
What you wish you had in your calculator?

Graphing calculators

2008-04-01T01:11:00Z

How many of you have actually used the graphing calculator in the past? And how many of you are still using the same graphing calculators you had in the past? We see that folks who bought the financial calculators for schooling are still using the same calculators in their daily life. I am trying to figure out the correlation for the graphing calculators? If it is low, what are the root causes?

Shed me some lights!

HP Solve

2008-02-25T15:09:00Z

Have you read HP Solve?

A newsletter that is designed to help students, teachers and professional to learn calculation concepts, get advice to help them succeed in the office or the classroom, and announce new HP calculating solutions and special offers.

Please take a look at our 1^st edition of HP Solve

Sign up of your monthly newsletter here from our HP calculator club!

Invent

2008-02-15T20:01:00Z

I was in our Headquarter building in Palo Alto this Monday. Right outside of the executive office, we have a large window display filled with many calculators we invented since 1968. While the world now is filled with many converging devices, PDA, PNA and other gadgets that I would like to have, I would rather have all these cool little classic calculators as my collection for the last 40 years. And, Yes, 2008 marks the 40-year of HP pocket calculators history.

There are few cool video in HP.com if you folks haven’t watched that before. Please point to the highlighted words and enjoy the clip!

Death of the slide rule

Golden Calculators Award (Celebrating 35 year since the invention of the world first programmable scientific calculator)

Have you post your personalized HP calculating video in the you-tube for us to enjoy as well?

Memoir or Trivia?

2008-01-25T21:27:00Z

I always enjoyed all the contest of trivia questions many of you like to put together to showcase your domain knowledge. Richard and Jake, two of our long term HP calculator loyalists, did the same. They put together some highlights of our calculators’ present and past for our CES tradeshow few weeks back. I thought it would be great to share them with you. Are you using your calculators for game playing while learning math as mentioned below?

HP Calculators: Past & Present

· The HP-12C calculator has been in continuous production longer than any other calculator, and it has been manufactured in more countries, all around the world, than any other calculator.

· High-end HP graphing calculators provide a customization capability (common on HP calculators for decades) that is not found on other calculators. Any program, function, operation, or complex application may be executed by a single key press at the discretion of the user. Even the key choice (shifted, etc.) is a user choice.

· A great source for accurate technical high-end HP calculator information is: http://www.hpcalc.org/

· The best source for older HP calculator information is: http://www.hpmuseum.org/. This is also an excellent source for photos, manuals, and user community “chatter.”

· The HP 48 series has one popular Usenet newsgroup: comp.sys.hp48 which is the best place on the Internet for technical discussions about HP calculators – especially most high-end programmable models.

· The HP 50g runs on an ARM processor which may be programmed directly in ARM code to run extremely fast and perform computational feats that only a large computer could do just a few years ago.

· RPL (used on high-end HP models) is a more advanced form of RPN making it the most efficient user interface ever devised for a calculator.

· Game playing is the most important aspect for the average student for a calculator. School, teacher, and parent considerations usually prevail.

· Calculators co-exist with palmtops, laptops, PDA’s, and cell phones as a billion plus dollar business because they are still the most effective and low cost way of solving mathematical problems

· Battery life is nearly impossible to calculate for modern calculators because they digitally turn on and off various portions of the circuits being used at millisecond speeds. Unless you specify the exact conditions, any measured current drain value will be wrong and not useable to estimate battery life. This is typical of most modern microprocessor based products.

· One of the mathematical problem types yet to be solved by a calculator is one that solves compact tensor notation problems. Further advances in graphing, symbolic math, and algometry will probably occur before advanced math compact tensor notation will be seen on a calculator.

Is it just the American Phenomenon?

2008-01-16T21:54:00Z

I was spending my Christmas and New Year holiday with friends and families in the Far East. Certainly, one of my conversations with them was around RPN. Below are few findings with my un-scientific survey with small sample groups (80 individuals from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japanese in different professions)

Are you aware of RPN? 9%-Yes, 91%-No
If yes, are you using it currently or in the past? 20%-Yes, 80%-No
How did you hear about RPN in the first place?

Most of the folks first learned about RPN were during their own studying in the United States or through their friends there. Then I went to different specialties stores or retailers to ask whether they sell any RPN calculators, I would see the wonder look in most of the experienced salesman.

While no conclusion can be drawn from my survey, I start to wonder whether RPN is just the American Phenomenon or something else.

What is your thought on this?

20 minutes of your time NOW save you 20 second every day of your life

2007-12-17T06:20:00Z

Do you still remember the time pressure you were facing in the CPA, engineering or math exam of trying to get a right number by crunching through all those complicated formula with all many plus, minus, multiple and divide sign? Oh, and those parenthesis and brackets that you need to be aware of in your calculation.

I do. I also remember how my 12c saved me many key strokes and time to solve the bond calculation through the amazing RPN feature.

From time to time, I wonder how many students today recognize the benefits of RPN that many of your parents were growing up with. Do they even realize they are doing some of the RPN function in many of their scientific calculators by performing a sine calculation? For those who are programmers or engineers (or want to be), do they even know the power of RPN and stack-based programming with VB Script, Java script?

Do a google search about RPN? You will see there are many user testimonials about RPN. You may even find some tips about how it can help you to program simple formula for your next CPA exam.

A little quiz for you – who invent RPN? Hint: http://www.hp.com/calculators/news/rpn.html

Let me know how you use RPN on your daily life?

Welcome to my Blog

2007-10-09T16:35:00Z

People use electronic devices every day but rarely do they feel passionate about the product enough to create clubs. I have found that a calculator is an exception and users become so attached to it that it is a part of how they identify themselves. There are many user groups on the web customers have created on their own and thousands of viewers are involved in the forums and discussions on those pages.