WIRED; It's Past Time for You To Ditch That Fancy Scientific Calculator

[Garth Wilson]

(08-09-2017 04:29 AM)Zac Bruce Wrote:  Out of interest, what do you use in place of google and why? I quite like the idea of DuckDuckGo, mostly because I'm a little uncomfortable with how much I let Google know about me.

Yes, I normally use duckduckgo.com, and I have my browser set to use it as the default search engine. Google keeps a record of what you've searched for (including voice searches), and a couple of years ago was caught red-handed handing over petabytes of user information to the federal government, information which, according to the 4th Amendment, is none of the government's business. About a year and a half ago, Google started using algorithms to censor-out search results that run contrary to the profits of the pharmaceutical industry, and last year in the election cycle, they heavily biased search results in Clinton's favor. Now they want to store your DNA in the cloud and also monitor your mental health. Google Chrome comes with an added capability: it allows remote technicians to listen in on conversations held near computers where the browser is installed. Duckduckgo doesn't do any of these things. I can give you a lot of links I have bookmarked on the subject, but this might not be the place for it.

Quote:I imagine that the time spent learning to program your calculator (not long, admittedly) [...]

It was a lot of hours, mostly before PCs were ubiquitous, and back when the internet hardly existed, and before smartphones; and what I learned is still useful. I still use my HP-41cx every day, and I've had my most-used programs in it continuously for 25+ years, without ever re-loading. In contrast, although I don't use a smartphone, my wife and son do, and they have to get a new one every two or three years, not because they just want to "upgrade," but because things gradually quit working. I started out with the 41 to control lab equipment on the workbench through the HPIL-to-IEEE488 interface converter, and it was much easier to program than PCs were at the time, and much smaller than a modern laptop.