Vista calculator - WTH

[Loose rivets]

What the heck?? One of us is insane. Anyone else know if it's making use of some as yet, undiscovered mathematics?


Me on Sony Vista and wife's is just the same on her HP. Okay until one uses %, then goes barmy. Has to be closed and restarted to clear. And, last but not least, the Scientific setting doesn't have %.

Things they teach kids in school now, maybe this is the new math. :ugh:

[Blues&twos]

Works OK in W7, although % button is greyed out in Scientific mode....

[al446]

No probs here

[Loose rivets]

When I get home I'll try the W7 version. Seems odd that such a blatant fault wouldn't have been fixed.

[gizmocat]

M$ has NEVER been able to sort the % as expected, neither in Calculator or Excel. (There are workarounds with Excel though). Best advice, buy a pocket calculator that performs with % the way you want it to. :ok:

[Loose rivets]

So strange that I've never noticed. Probably because I own a calculator that behaves as I expect it to.:}

Pity though, sometimes easier to pop one on the screen rather than turn the lights on and fumble in the desk draw.

Seems even stranger that people that write a major OS can make a toy that displays total nonsense.

[batninth]

No problems here either, what did you do to get it to misbehave?

I'm wondering if it is a insidious virus posted by a very evil mind. Think about it, a virus that takes over the calculator (& posts itself on to other machines on your network) and isn't anything obvious for AV to find. It sits there doing nothing until the bunch of salesmen in a business, or MPs, go to do their expenses when mayhem ensues. :}

[Loose rivets]

What did I do? Very simple calculations...nothing seemed the same as multi generations of pocket calculators.

Closing the program it seems is the only way to clear.



This is the FireFox upgrade upgrade moment.

C

1,000 * 10 % It worked! but then + = produced 100,000 then 200,000 with each press of = (never 10,000)


Could it be that F-fox was affecting it? Just doesn't seem feasible.

[batninth]

LooseRivets

Nothing to do with Firefox, I can reproduce that. I've looked at the help files but am at a loss to explain.

I'd suggest the patent batninth quick and easy "Be a computer guru" method - drink lots of Irish whiskey & you'll find that after a while it all makes sense. Same works if you're stuck with a group of computer people, drink the Bushmills (other Irish Whiskeys may be available & should be sampled) and you'll find in no time you sound just like them.

Looks like a MS bugette

[Loose rivets]

Thank goodness for that. One is not alone.


Oh, and by the way, Mindy says Hi.

[kenhughes]

I think Microsoft had far more urgent problems to sort out with Vista than the calculator. :)

But I'm not following your math here: 1000 * 10% is 100,000, not 10,000. (10% of 1000=100. 1000*100=100,000).

So your first answer should have been 100,000 then pressing += adds whatever is in the answer window to itself 100,000+100,000=200,000. Pressing += again should give you 400,000, and so on.

The calculator in W7 works exactly the same way BTW.

[bnt]

I thought 1000 * 10% should give you 100? That's what the Windows XP calculator tells me. 10% just means 10/100 = 1/10, so 1000*(1/10) = 100.

Something like 1000+12%=1120 works too. In this case (+ or -) you want the % function to take the percentage of the first value, but that doesn't happen when multiplying or dividing by a fraction. I have other calculators that do the same thing, it's clearly by design.

What I've noticed is that, as the maths gets more serious and scientific, the percentage function tends to disappear. My TI-89 calculator has it, but it's buried at the bottom of a menu and barely mentioned in the manual. I also use MATLAB (and its Open Source cousin Octave (http://octave.sourceforge.net/)) and it doesn't have any percentage functions. (The % sign is used to "comment out" instructions.) I think it's kinda assumed that you can convert basic percentages in your head before you even get there e.g. enter 1200 - 13.5% as 1200 * (1 - 0.135) = 1038

[Saab Dastard]

I'm with kenhughes on this - both of my XP systems function exactly as he describes.

SD

[Keef]

My Win 7 does the same.

If I press 1000 * 10 % it displays 100.
If I then press = it displays 100000 which I don't understand. I think it's saying that 1000 times 10 percent of itself is 100000 which I suppose is OK, but it's counter-intuitive for me. I didn't expect the % sign to "execute".

it's obvious enough what it's done that it doesn't confuse, though.

[batninth]

Hmmm, comes down to how the calculator has been programmed to do %ages.

Just polling around, I found Scientific Calculator (http://www.calculator.net/scientific-calculator.html) which seems to work as bnt suggests. However Thank You kenhughes, the formula you suggest makes sense too.

All said, I guess we can agree that there are different ways of reading it, and that our chums in Redmond do have more important things to worry about

[Loose rivets]

Having never owned a calculator that didn't use x * n% then += to sum the percentage to x, I guess I didn't search out the very straight forward method above.

I thought 1000 * 10% should give you 100?

This (my old method) works perfectly today and part of yesterday. It is exactly what didn't work when I first posted. If the Rivetess hadn't followed through on the opposite side of the table, I'd have thought I must have been mistaken. She is a much calmer and analytical person. Most of the time.;)




"never showed 10,000" I have no idea why I wrote that.:(


And Keef's: it's obvious enough what it's done that it doesn't confuse, though.

Sadly, only to people with brains.


What is certain, that wife and I, on two different machines, seemed to have a spell getting nonsensical answers. Next day, most things seemed normal. I'd updated FF, but she hadn't, so that got that out of the equation...not that it should ever have been in it.