• themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    CE is Clear Entry. If you want to hit 2 x 4, but accidentally press 2 x 44, you can press the CE button before pressing = to clear the 44 but not the “2 x” part.

    C will clear all of it so you can start over at the beginning.

    Pressing CE twice may or may not clear entries in reverse order, depending on you calculator model.

      • tpihkal@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Calculators are similar to a Dark Souls game. You always restart from the beginning.

        • teft@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Calculators are similar to a Dark Souls game.

          If that were true then mashing buttons on your calculator would prevent any inputs from being processed for a few seconds.

          Fromsoft believes in punishing button-mashers.

          • LeadersAtWork@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Unless it’s Dark Souls 2 wherein you mash a couple buttons after being knocked down or rolling and manage to queue up your binoculars perfectly. This, in turn, allows you to get a really splendid look at your enemy’s grimacing face as he shoves a rather vicious and often seriously pointy metal object up your ass. All the while you’re frantically trying to roll away and accidentally toss back a flask. This manages to save you from an untimely demise until you notice that you backed up a little too much and that dude waiting to ambush took one last drag from his cigarette, flicked it away, and proceeded to club your head like he was Babe Ruth after a particularly hearty breakfast.

            Then on the way back to your souls some asshole named “Forsworn” gets in your way. God only knows what his problem is.

          • stupidcasey@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Oh, yeah I own that calculator. I bought it from amazon, it was an extremely cheap Scientific calculator with a gimmicky writing pad that tricked me into buying it.

    • Moobythegoldensock@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Problem is on some calculators C is clear all and CE is clear entry, on some C is clear entry and AC is clear all, and some have a C/AC or CE/C button where it’s press once to clear entry and press twice to clear all.

      So it’s safest to mash unless you really know your calculator, because the industry can’t get its shit together, and that’s the sole reason it died (I’m assuming.)

    • Ricky Rigatoni@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      And it all depends on the calculator. The one right next to me only has a CE button and it acts as a C button. So not even the people making them know what they do sometimes.

    • imPastaSyndrome@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Shit. I thought it was clear and clear everything. I guess this is why I also push both buttons rapidly and make sure to just retype everything

  • whotookkarl@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s solar powered so I just wait for night time to clear it then do the next problem in the morning

    • pretzelz@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Mate, you can just put your finger over the solar panel until it slowly gets strangled

    • dQw4w9WgXcQ@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I discovered that hitting something like C, CE and 0 simultaneously for some reason worked as an instant power off for my school calculator. Do calculators have such hidden off-buttons? Because I have discovered other calculators with other combinations.

      • petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        There’s actually a neat reason for this! The way that simple keys work, like those in a calculator, is by connecting a circuit and letting a small amount of voltage through. This is usually fine because the keypad is broken up into different rollover zones, which is how multi-key input works. But if you find and press keys that are all in the same zone, their voltages add up and can actually overwhelm the little cpu in there. Really old calculators were really easy to break because designers never thought users would need to press keys like division, multiplication, subtract, add, square and square root all at once, which as you can imagine, caused a massive power spike.

        Now, is any of this true? I have no idea dude, you’re calculator was probably fucking haunted or something. I’d have taken that thing to a seance with a ouija board immediately.

        • dQw4w9WgXcQ@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          I love that you bring a great technical and insightful answer and then just leave with that my calculator is probably posessed.

        • T156@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Now, is any of this true?

          Not really, since keys work by shorting the circuit. That’s why pressing multiple keys at once on your keyboard doesn’t cause it to blow up. It would just assume the button with the shortest circuit was pressed, and ignore the rest.

          It might cause weird things to happen with a mechanical or electromechanical calculator, since there were physical mechanisms engaged and disnegaged for each function, and might break/jam those, but not an electronic, and especially not a transistorised one.

          It’s more likely that hitting them all confused the CPU, or dropped the voltage down enough that it reset, just in case something strange happened, or to try and fix any bug that might have caused it to register all the buttons being pressed.

  • merc@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Calculators just have a bad user interface in general. It’s pretty amazing that the UI was established in 1970 and was never changed after that.

    • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.comBanned
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      1 year ago

      ah yes, wait until you find out about the qwerty keyboard. Or better yet, the fucking ABCDE layout for some godforsaken reason.

      • T156@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        In defence of QWERTY, it did a decent job for what it was designed for (reducing the risk of mechanical typewriters jamming by not having two hammers next to each other be pressed at the same time), but really oughtn’t have lasted past the point where the risk of jamming was not longer there.

    • red_pigeon@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Curious to know why ? Basic functionality seems very obvious and friendly to me.

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        If there is any nuance beyond a 4-function calculator with a single clear button, any nuance or deviation from any kind of standard will not be clearly explained.

        There’s never a backspace key, only two “clear” buttons that have nuance between them and little to no description as to which does what.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        For one thing, just displaying the latest number isn’t useful if you’re doing anything complicated. For another, many calculations involve using the same number over again multiple times. Some calculators have a memory entry, but many don’t. There’s a “C/CE” but there isn’t a backspace, so if you get one digit wrong, you have to start that entry over (and hope you chose the right option among C/CE/AC/CA/etc. If you accidentally hit the wrong operation key (multiply, divide, plus, minus) AFAIK there’s no way to clear the operation. A lot of common math operations involves parenthesized expressions, but if you’re using a basic calculator you have to instead enter things in an unnatural order. It’s pretty common to end up in a situation where the calculator is displaying B and you want to do A/B but you can only easily do B/A. Fancy calculators have a 1/X button to fix this, but if not you’re out of luck. Same with having B and wanting to do A-B but only being able to do B-A. You can fix that by multiplying by -1, but again, it’s a UI issue that you can’t just say “hold onto that number for a second because I want to enter another number and then use it”.

        • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          basically: calculators should be like old digital typewriters, ideally with an easy to use scripting language built in.

  • WhatYouNeed@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Press both simultaneously, while twisting the joystick in a “C” motion, to launch a fireball.

      • stupidcasey@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        There sure is a lot of overlap with people criticizing the technical interface of a calculator and nerds, wonder why that is? Oh well glad I’m not one of those nerds, now back to the clear button being so obtuse.

    • imPastaSyndrome@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I don’t think anyone’s ever been punished for saving twice. Right?

      This is where people give me examples where people have been prove me wrong. Please I want to know the sadness of others sadness give give sadness. Give give now sadness give

      • AmbientChaos@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Once I was working on some music and got so excited about how it turned out I hit ctrl S like 5 times, it corrupted the project and I lost it 😭

        • Thassodar@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Similarly I was working on a track and doing something super experimental that I was going to revert and accidentally hit CTRL S instead of CTRL A (automation), saving all the weird shit.

          Luckily I didn’t lose it, but CTRL Z-ing back to what I was doing prior was annoying because I did some things I wanted to keep on other channels

          (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻)

  • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    They should have gone with Clear Line instead of Clear Entry, because CE could also be Clear Everything… which is what clear does.

  • callouscomic@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I do it a bunch of times for the same reason I also CTRL+C a bunch of times when I need to copy on windows.

  • marcos@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I just noticed I don’t have a hardware calculator…

    And the software one I remember about is translated.