Buy Now or Wait for Revision B?

[Michael]

Like I said: It's the decision of HP.

[parisse]

(06-20-2014 09:35 AM)debrouxl Wrote:  It's possible to port giac to the Prime, and make a special UI tailored to the Prime; but it takes some work, and nobody has yet started the path to native code execution on the Prime (or told publicly about it).

Not sure I understand what you mean by possible, but to make things clearer, giac *is* ported to the Prime, since it is the CAS of the Prime.
The TI nspire port is a little more complete, because the nspire-g++ compiler is a "native" compiler for giac (since it is g++ with ARM output) and also because I'm free to keep all commandnames visible to the user (an add-on is not the same as a builtin soft in terms of support, documentation...). The TI nspire giac port is also more reactive to bug reports (since I can release a fixed version as soon as I fix a bug), while the CAS is more integrated and tested on the HP than on the TI (where you must be prepared to see some reboots of your calc). I hope that integration will improve on both models.

[Michael]

So what is exactly missing? The/An UI?

[debrouxl]

Bernard, I meant a third-party Prime build of upstream giac, running either inside HP's OS as third-party native code, or under a Prime port of Linux
Nobody ever provided a proof of concept for either of those, as far as all of us can tell.

Michael: both the way to run a third-party upstream giac, and a third-party UI, are missing.

[Michael]

So i hope we talk about the same:
My vision is the complete XCAS (CAS, 2d, 3d, Graphs, Spreadsheet, programmation) on HP Prime.
Why? Because it's a complete mathtool package. All components work together smoothly. No patchwork like the current HP Prime.

And get rid of the 38g-stuff. These are concepts of the 90s without any touchdisplay-inspirations! The motto of the future is: more display - less keys! (see other handheld-devices)

[cutterjohn]

(06-19-2014 09:11 PM)Tugdual Wrote:  

(06-19-2014 08:09 PM)MathMan Wrote:  Completely agree.. As I said previously, I always seem to go back to my TI because I prefer using a physical keyboard

True for normal calculations but not for the geometgry app and regarding CAS you will want a plain 101 keyboard anyway. With the Prime keyboard you can expect:
- press 4 times average the Shift and Alpha keys before you find and lock the desired case.
- eyes bleeding with light orange and blue colors especially when light is low

Yep. Dedicated keys. Primary reason that I still bother with calcs...

Oh, BTW there's also Xcas pad for android as well, which is based on giac...

maxima on android
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.yhonda

xcas pad(hasn't been update in several months)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/detai...droid_xcas

...and octave...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/detai...com.octave

(for octave that is the base, you need to add other "apps" to get the complete experience... ALL are free...)

[EDIT]
You know from one dump of an earlier firmware that I saw with the file tree exploded, it looks like the prime is probable running wince(and I do) 6.0. If true why they picked such a craptacular embedded OS over Android anyways or even rolling their own mini linux distro, I don't know other than it's probably more readily lockdownable and since noone cared about it noone bothered to hack it except maybe some Chinese(for a while they used it in everything from GPS units to early tablets(which mostly also had an Android/maybe linux firmware as well).

So, no idea if it's possible to port native apps to the things. It would be mostly trivially easy IF they had used droid. Worst case would be unlocking the bootloader and rolling our own version ala cyanogenmod. (hoping for my oneplus one invite...)
[/EDIT]

[parisse]

Last time I checked, octave was *not* a CAS, it's numeric math. maxima is slightly slower than xcas (in my experience most of the time at least 5* slower), you can even test that on a Prime wrt a smartphone: try factor(x^202+x^101+1) for example. And of course the prime UI is much more advanced than the interface of maxima on android. If you don't know maxima, maxima on android is almost unusable, and even if you know maxima, it's not user-friendly.

[cutterjohn]

(06-21-2014 05:02 PM)parisse Wrote:  Last time I checked, octave was *not* a CAS, it's numeric math. maxima is slightly slower than xcas (in my experience most of the time at least 5* slower), you can even test that on a Prime wrt a smartphone: try factor(x^202+x^101+1) for example. And of course the prime UI is much more advanced than the interface of maxima on android. If you don't know maxima, maxima on android is almost unusable, and even if you know maxima, it's not user-friendly.

takes c. 4s on a nexus 5 w/Maxima on Android
xcas pad take c. 3s on nexus 5
hp prime takes c. 2s

...and just for ----s and giggles
fx-cp400 takes about 6s

Time difference is essentially negligible as initial runs on android version were slower, probably a caching mechanism involved, than subsequent runs.

prime's only real advantage was that it was fairly consistent from first run to last, repeated each 5x.

Conversely there are examples that I have run into where maxima on android was several orders of magnitude quicker at solving symbolic and numeric problems. As I mentioned at the beginning of the quoted posts, it's the dedicated keys on most calcs that keep them handy for me, although with the removal of more and more dedicated keys in favor of clunky menus they're rapidly losing that advantage, e.g. in the case of the fx-cp400 I think that it has already passed deprecating too many dedicated keys in favor of clunky menus(and it's relatively slow).

As to usability: not really no. The command names are pretty similar between most CAS systems, and on the prime it's a matter of digging through clunky hacked up menus v. oh hmmm... PDF/search or web dox... personally I prefer the latter as EVERY touch screen calc that I've used so far mostly has some hack job of a touch UI that clunky as f'all, e.g. prime and even worse fx-cp400

As to octave: the very last thing that I would ever do is use ANY CAS for matrix operations, especially numerical. Octave does have optional symbolic support BTW.

nexus 5 is Android 4.4.3

[Tugdual]

It is not all about speed. From my little experience, Maxima would return correct answers where the Prime would scratch its head and return answers like f(x)=f(x) which is definitely correct but not very elaborated.

[parisse]

factor(x^202+x^101+1) takes 11.6s on a Prime, you probably did not check with the right input or you did not make an exact factorization with integers coefficients. It takes about 40s. for Maxima on my htc smartphone, on the same phone Androcas (with giac kernel) takes 2.7s. You should not benchmark by doing several times the same input, since some CAS are not recomputing with the same initial input. For the classpad, I'm not certain the comparison is meaningfull, giac and maxima certify that the factors are irreductible over the rationals, the nspire CAS does not.
Also try factor(2**128+1) on maxima and ifactor(2**128+1) on the Prime.
If you have example where maxima is several times faster than giac, please give them, because it means that the giac implementation should be improved.
Now about the UI, just try a Prime (or a TI nspire or a Classpad) and compare with maxima on Android, with someone who is not a CAS expert. Or compare maxima on Android with wxmaxima! Even if you know perfectly the command syntax and you know what you must type in the commandline, you will have to switch keyboard from alpha to numeric several times, and if you make a mistake you don't have left and right arrow on Android. For me and probably for almost everybody, Maxima on Android is much much less usable than any CAS calculator.
About octave: I don't speak about numerical matrix operations, I'm speaking of all you can do with a CAS: algebra, calculus, arithmetic, exact and approx linear algebra... Octave is a numeric package. I just installed octave to test on my smartphone, now I run it, first I get a windows that asks for money (annoying), then all I get is a terminal output, no easy way to get help how to enter commands. It's not symbolic, if I enter x**4 I get x undefined. Perhaps you can plugin some symbolic soft inside but which one?
If you are mainly interested in doing numerical matrix operations with large matrices, then it's different, because the screen size of a calculator is not large enough, you will need file access to store data, and you have much less direct interaction with data. But this has almost nothing to do with a CAS comparison.

[parisse]

(06-21-2014 07:31 PM)Tugdual Wrote:  It is not all about speed. From my little experience, Maxima would return correct answers where the Prime would scratch its head and return answers like f(x)=f(x) which is definitely correct but not very elaborated.

Please give precise inputs.

[Tugdual]

(06-22-2014 06:58 AM)parisse Wrote:  

(06-21-2014 07:31 PM)Tugdual Wrote:  It is not all about speed. From my little experience, Maxima would return correct answers where the Prime would scratch its head and return answers like f(x)=f(x) which is definitely correct but not very elaborated.

Please give precise inputs.

Sorry won't be able to satisfy your curiosity because I didn't take record of this but will communicate further issues when/if they occur.

[parisse]

P.S. to cutterjohn: I just looked at what they call a symbolic package for Octave. That's not a CAS, it only gives basic symbolic expression, but no factorization, no symbolic integration, etc... That is expected since it is based on ginac which means Ginac Is Not A Cas, while giac means Giac Is A Cas.

[jebem]

(06-22-2014 02:41 PM)parisse Wrote:  P.S. to cutterjohn: I just looked at what they call a symbolic package for Octave. That's not a CAS, it only gives basic symbolic expression, but no factorization, no symbolic integration, etc... That is expected since it is based on ginac which means Ginac Is Not A Cas, while giac means Giac Is A Cas.

Thanks for your effort to show the HP-PRIME virtues, Parisse!

Despite the HP-PRIME so many reported "issues" - Meaning that it is not the perfect machine that we all would like it to be, still it is a excellent calculator to own and use on a daily basis, better than most of the existing competition.

As many others have commented here already, my request to HP is to keep updating the Firmware to fix the issues and improve the machine.

[Alberto Candel]

(06-22-2014 04:26 PM)jebem Wrote:  

(06-22-2014 02:41 PM)parisse Wrote:  P.S. to cutterjohn: I just looked at what they call a symbolic package for Octave. That's not a CAS, it only gives basic symbolic expression, but no factorization, no symbolic integration, etc... That is expected since it is based on ginac which means Ginac Is Not A Cas, while giac means Giac Is A Cas.

Thanks for your effort to show the HP-PRIME virtues, Parisse!

Despite the HP-PRIME so many reported "issues" - Meaning that it is not the perfect machine that we all would like it to be, still it is a excellent calculator to own and use on a daily basis, better than most of the existing competition.

As many others have commented here already, my request to HP is to keep updating the Firmware to fix the issues and improve the machine.

I second that. And having the HP Prime builders "readily available" here makes the Prime even more valuable.