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Comment by ancarda | Hacker News Reader

A loading screen and telemetry? For a fucking calculator?

What happened to software...

But what about growth and engagement? I wouldn't be surprised if some idiot's performance metrics are tied to how many people "engage" with the calculator.

Next step: contextual ads. “Looks like you are trying to calculate your taxes. Click here for $10 off of Turbo Tax!”

At least it’s not a subscription model for £6.99/month like almost all of the apps you find on the app stores that used to be either free or a one-time £X.

You get the addition and subtraction for free, but you have to upgrade via in app purchase for multiplication or division. It makes sense because those are advanced features the average user wouldn’t need anyway.

Yes, and if the average user really needs it from time to time, they can use + several times.

Besides you can multiply for free, just add N number of times. Multiplication is a quality of life improvement, not a necessity

I see that you tried to look for a calculator app for iPad (no, there is still no built-in one).

That's because you're supposed to pull out your iPhone to use as a calculator.

Calcbot does a pretty good job of Not Sucking. I think it's a couple bucks, I don't know, I paid for it ages ago.

Did you find PCalc?

Try this:

https://apps.apple.com/ae/app/rpn-30/id1451413517

I still cannot get over that. A calculator with ads.

I defs paid for the ti-calc emulator, but that gets me my ti-89 experience, and the emulator didnt cost me 200 bucks

Sqrt() is a subscription service if you want more than 2 decimal points

There are now cars where the heated seats are a subscription service. https://www.autoguide.com/auto-news/2020/07/bmw-wants-to-tur...

i don't want to live on this planet anymore.gif

That gives me the feeling there's good business in modifying BMWs to connect the heated seats wires to a physical switch with a light on it

That's piracy. You wouldn't download a car [seat]!

I would say, "unbelievable!", but sadly, yeah this garbage is only going to grow like a cancer.

So, no. Not for me.

They give the seats for free, they must monetize them somehow, understandable

Need more than 5 decimal points? Contact us for pricing.

math obsessed kid bankrupts parents by purchasing digits of pi.

They stopped charging for it. At least for the upgrade when it launched.

The user became the product.

Windows collects user behavior and sells ads.

You can still buy whatever they call Windows LTSB this week if you hate this.

Buying LTSB is extremely difficult and annoying. It's not just a matter of entering card details and getting back a product key + ISO.

folders in Windows have loading bars now. Folders with nothing but text files in them. It's insane.

Explorer UI is capable of showing loading animation for folder contents since it was first publicly released. It makes sense not only in context of potentially slow devices, but also because "Folder" is not an "Directory" but an somewhat arbitrary COM object and thus showing contents of folder can lead to a lot of potentially slow operations.

IIRC somewhere along the line of all the Win32 windows versions the loading animation got somewhat broken and explorer window was more likely to get simply unresponsive instead of displaying loading animation, but that is another story.

Folders in Windows can be network locations or internet locations without any guarantees on their access speed, makes sense to show to the user that it's still doing something.

A big part of that loading bar, outside of network ops and slow drives (and remember, today you don't have floppy drive noise to know if it works or got hung), is for things like sorting and getting file icons and other attributes right. This can take non-trivial amount of time.

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