Comments on: mmm, parabolic.

mmm, parabolic.

delmoi — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 21:22:14 -0800

AJAX graphing calculator with a google-earth style interface.

By: lupus_yonderboy

lupus_yonderboy — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 21:29:10 -0800

um, perhaps it's just me. but a *server side* graphing calculator seems the height of stupidity! You, the user, have a general purpose computer that can perform hundreds of millions of calculations a second -- why not use that rather than forcing hundreds, thousands or millions of users to share the same central computer. (Specifically, the site is monster slow for me...)

By: smackfu

smackfu — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 21:47:02 -0800

I put in x^15 and I think I broke it.

By: delmoi

delmoi — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 22:15:24 -0800

but a *server side* graphing calculator seems the height of stupidity! You, the user, have a general purpose computer that can perform hundreds of millions of calculations a second It doesn't seem to slow for me. I just thought it was interesting. Although yes, quite redundant. Most of this "Web 2.0" ajax stuff is horribly redundant and foolish, and amounts to basically hacking HTML to do basic interactive interfaces that computers have been able to do for decades.

By: delmoi

delmoi — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 22:16:18 -0800

Also dosn't have a list of operators.

By: iconjack

iconjack — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 22:17:05 -0800

Conjecture: The smallest positive integer n for which xⁿ breaks the grapher is 9.

By: cerebus19

cerebus19 — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 22:23:20 -0800

Also dosn't have a list of operators. Yes, it does.

By: casconed

casconed — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 23:25:11 -0800

i just put in x^3434 and it was fine.

By: Tryptophan-5ht

Tryptophan-5ht — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 23:45:38 -0800

really cool, but a transparent gif with just the axii (?) would be really tiny and wouldn't have to be re downloaded... also, rendering a 800x800 chunk of the graph would also be rediculously small with gif compression and wouldn't necessitate downloading 12 new images every time you move the graph. There's lots of ways this could be improved. i mean, hell, why not just absolutely position 1px elements to draw the graph client side?

By: sourwookie

sourwookie — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 00:17:48 -0800

Whew! Just in time! The battery on my TI-85 just died.

By: delmoi

delmoi — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 00:20:37 -0800

Maybe new browsers can have a javascript bitmapping engine :P

By: Jimbob

Jimbob — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 01:27:08 -0800

Indeed, why not just use SVG, since as I understand it every browser worth mentioning supports it. People looking for "Web 2.0 Graphing Calculators" aren't going to be using Netscape 3.

By: Jimbob

Jimbob — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 01:32:31 -0800

(For instance)

By: aubilenon

aubilenon — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 02:57:21 -0800

jimbob: that shows me a bunch of XML in ie 6. I assume it's suppoed to actually render something?

By: Jimbob

Jimbob — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 04:04:50 -0800

Sorry, I didn't include IE 6 in my list of "any browser worth mentioning".

By: cardoso

cardoso — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 04:46:56 -0800

Sorry, I didn't include IE 6 in my list of "any browser worth mentioning". Anyone does?

By: russm

russm — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 05:24:16 -0800

jimbob - wow, I really wasn't expecting to get preached at by an AJAX demo...

By: elpapacito

elpapacito — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 05:38:18 -0800

It's also pretty useless for calculus

By: RussHy

RussHy — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 05:54:35 -0800

Wow. A single link to a pedestrian application. Must be n00b. Sure hope delmoi doesn't see this, he'll tear them a new one.

By: Brian B.

Brian B. — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 09:31:42 -0800

www.graphcalc.com has a pretty nice free download, and fits on a floppy.

By: influx

influx — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 09:54:53 -0800

This isn't AJAX - it's not asynchronous, and there's no XML or XML-like client-to-server communication going on. It's just Javascript's Math object (so the calculations are performed on the client, not the server), a bit of DHTML, and GD (or similar) rendering the graph as a gif. I wish people would stop calling any old bit of Javascript AJAX.

By: influx

influx — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 09:55:52 -0800

Oh, I missed the gmaps tileserver type stuff. I am an idiot.

By: neuron

neuron — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 15:22:03 -0800

The Apple Graphing Calculator Story

By: spazzm

spazzm — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 18:18:47 -0800

Isn't this exactly the sort of thing a Java Applet or Flash would be perfect for?

By: spazzm

spazzm — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 18:22:56 -0800

For example.

By: spazzm

spazzm — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 20:39:37 -0800

Conjecture: The grapher breaks for xⁿ for all n >= 9 and mod(n,2)=1.