- cross-posted to:
- calculators@midwest.social
- cross-posted to:
- calculators@midwest.social
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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.
So you’re saying mash both a bunch of times to be super sure?
Calculators are similar to a Dark Souls game. You always restart from the beginning.
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.
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.
That explains so much…
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.
…and may end with a shattered calculator.
And in my mind “CE” is “Clear everything”. I’m keeping OP’s method
doesn’t everyone know it stands for Celery Endives?
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.)
Why didn’t they just make one Clear and make another Backspace? The concept of erasing the last character had been in typewriters for a while by then, and this is far more obvious. Maybe erasing a single digit in earlier software/hardware was much harder than just clearing it all?
Some do that, too. Unfortunately the weight of tradition seems to enforce the C/CE/AC key preference.
Even the iphone built in OS calculator has the “AC” button unless you manually tap the entry window, then you get a backspace.
Because calculators used to use paper, and clear entry basically invalidated the line.
This kept the same interface for the really old paper calculator users.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/226285302528
http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/busicom_141-pf.html the granddaddy of calculators, and the one the Intel 4004 processor was designed for.
but we got digital typewriters that still used paper and those added the obvious functions like backspace and actual text editing tools, why didn’t calculators progress the same?
Thanks I was looking at the answer and thinking it didn’t fit my memory. i’m sure most of mine were ACs. TBF with things like VPAM coming in the late 90s, you did have backspace and all sorts of stuff like that.
I still remember doing linear regression in a stats exam on i think a casio fx-115W something like that . Excellent calculator - but just no, it was time for some things to be on a real computer.
That’s why it never worked for me. I assumed CE was Clear Everything.
Oh my God. Me too!
We three were on the same page.
I thought it was “Clear Eggs”. Always cleared my eggs… 🤷♂️
Should be replaced with a backspace icon and a trash can icon
You mean CE doesnt stand for “clear everything”? And here I thought more letters meant more clearing.
But sometimes CE is “Clear Everything” and it works exactly the opposite way.
deleted by creator
This person calculates.
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.
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
It’s solar powered so I just wait for night time to clear it then do the next problem in the morning
Mate, you can just put your finger over the solar panel until it slowly gets strangled
edging the calcy
Now we know the C stands for Cum and CE for Cum Edging
Hhhhyeah baby let’s multiply
What are you, my local DMV?
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.
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.
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.
I love that you bring a great technical and insightful answer and then just leave with that my calculator is probably posessed.
I do try.
Not very hard, but still.
I think this is actually still an issue. On PCs the space bar + up + left arrow keys conflicts on some keyboards. Try it: open Notepad, press two arrow keys and then space. Most of them works but if you hold up and left, it will not make a space.
This is annoying in racing games, when you want to accelerate, turn left and use the hand brake at the same time.
I don’t know the specifics, but there is such a thing as keyboard rollover. MOST KEYBOARDS—whoa, sorry. Most keyboards support up to 6 keys at once, but it might be that they’re still divided into sections with lower rollover numbers, such as the arrow keys and space. Some “gaming” keyboards support up to 25 though, so your best bet if this bothers you is just upgrading to a spiffier typer.
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.
ah yes, wait until you find out about the qwerty keyboard. Or better yet, the fucking ABCDE layout for some godforsaken reason.
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.
I think people exaggerate how bad QWERTY is. Studies have not consistently found an advantage for one keyboard layout over another, and some studies even show that typists can reach equivalent speeds even with randomised layouts. This suggests that experience and practice with a particular layout is far more important to typing speed than the particular placement of letters. Which is a good argument for keeping qwerty around.
(reducing the risk of mechanical typewriters jamming by not having two hammers next to each other be pressed at the same time),
This story is quite common but there is little evidence that it’s actually true. The designer of qwerty actually made a late adjustment to move R next to E (swapping it with period), even though ER is the second most common letter combination in English.
Even the keyboard design itself can effect typing results. Like typing on a really good mechanical keyboard is more comfortable than a shitty chiclet keyboard.
there are two big arguments for a denser layout, notably you move your hands less, which means you can type faster, statistically speaking. It makes it easier. Generally you see typing speed track roughly with this over time.
And since you move your hands less, it’s ergonomically better for typing, so you get less strain, you have better ergonomics in general, you can type longer, and even faster since there is less strain.
Different layouts optimize for different things, some optimize for efficient roll combinations, some optimize for switching between hands as optimally as possible. Some don’t really do any of that (qwerty) which also have a significant impact on typing.
I originally learned qwerty and touch typed at 60WPM, during a really boring job before smartphones and before we had internet to the desktop at work and I entertained myself learning to type again, but on dvorak
So after 3 months I was back to 60WPM
I really like that dvorak has all the vowels on the left of the home row, and t and h are on the right of the home row right where finger tapping cadence works for “th”
So my speed hasn’t increased, but my fingers don’t need to move as much for common words. I don’t think it’s worth it if you play games on the computer, many games don’t map keyboard controls well. Eg Minecraft moves everything to whatever key is in the same place as the qwerty key; 7 days to die doesn’t change anything, so you need to choose keys for everything, or if you’re happy with the defaults, just change the ones that conflict when you fix “wasd” to “,aoe”
Layout isn’t really about speed, it’s about comfort
I’ve been using modified colemak for like a year now and good lord it’s so much nicer to use: you just place your fingers on “arst neio” in my case and then 80% of the keys you actually use on a regular basis are within a tiny finger movement to reach.
And then there’s the fact that you’re almost always using a different finger for the next letter, suuuper smooth typing experience.
Well, they’ve sold the same product for about the same price since 1970, so it makes sense. I have no idea how schools can require a specific device from a specific manufacturer. It’s just straight up market control by a public entity.
Its to make sure that they don’t get a billion questions about what button to push next and not being able to complete homework because of button confusion. Does it still need to exist today? Probably no but good luck getting rid of a standard adopted by all manufacturers of textbooks.
The solution is mandate standards to be adhere too and any contractors must have no patents so any manufacturer can be used.
Curious to know why ? Basic functionality seems very obvious and friendly to me.
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.
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”.
basically: calculators should be like old digital typewriters, ideally with an easy to use scripting language built in.
But it has been changed a lot?
The most basic immediate execution four operation calculator might still look the same, but that’s because it’s a very simple thing and you can’t really get much wrong. For scientific calculators the UI has changed lots. As have the requirements. It used to be a specialist tool used to do thousands of calculations daily. An expensive thing that had to earn its keep. RPN and stuff like that made sense for people who could easily get back weeks of training in just a few years of being slightly more efficient while working. Now we have the natural order delayed execution thing, because the calculators are mostly for students. Who need the UI to be as easy to grasp as possible, because they won’t ever have to do enough calculations to benefit from a faster but harder UI. That doesn’t mean any of those approaches to UI is better or worse. Some things require instructions and making everything idiot-proof shouldn’t ever be the ultimate goal (check out modern computing for why!).
(check out modern computing for why!)
Because when you need to do a process a thousand times, you program it in an actual computer. Then you just have a specific interface for just your process that makes everything simple.
And the developer really only needs to understand the process for a couple months. Once it’s confirmed working correctly, you’re generally done with that piece of code.
Press both simultaneously, while twisting the joystick in a “C” motion, to launch a fireball.
That’s ki, not fire. 🤓
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.
It’s amazing how much better this game looks than a bunch of games that came out years after it.
Same energy as me holding Ctrl and pressing S seven times just to make sure.
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
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 😭
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
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻)
On an editor that auto saved and where Ctrl+S doesn’t do anything, yes been there done that.
Press Ctrl+M+R+S to <Make> <Really> <Sure>
The calculator on my phone has an “AC” button, further confusing the situation.
The AC button cools the air around you.
No, i used it immediately when i was arriving to an answer it heated me up
That’s so you can run it off the mains.
I think AC stands for All Clear
Oh yeah, that’s for calculating your armor class.
Software engineer: just turn it off and on again.
docker system prune -a docker compose up —buildThe “nuke it from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure” approach.
And then go get some coffee while my containers rebuild
Clearly nobody here does any serious calculator based math
Let’s be honest, if you are doing serious math, you’ll have a graphing calculator to do way more stuff, and the controls are much more like a mini computer (with a backspace key, and being able to delete individual lines of history, or all of the history with menus)
Not if ur university has dumb rules about what calculator u can us in exams.
TI lobbying colleges and exams facilities to force their crap and overpriced calculators down our throat
RPN gang!
Use R
neve!
Or uses a serious calculator.
I mostly use matlab
Ive been forced to use it a bit and it has so many weird quirks that are just messed up. Index start at 1. Sometimes u have to assign some function output to a variable before u can pass it as an argument to another function.
I far prefer to use python with numpy matlab and scipy
huhuhuhh, i do thaaat.
I actually did laugh out loud at this though.
C or AC = clear all
CE = clear entry
That said, there are variations based on brand and model.
I’ve definitely seen C and AC on a calculator, where I think the C does what’s supposed to be CE
Yeah, some companies seem to be allergic to standards, hence the need for the final disclaimer.
They should have gone with Clear Line instead of Clear Entry, because CE could also be Clear Everything… which is what clear does.
I always spam that ce button.
SO true lmao
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.
I mean that I get since it seems to ignore a single ctrl+c on windows regularly.
I just noticed I don’t have a hardware calculator…
And the software one I remember about is translated.
