Page 11 - Technology Facts

Why are calculators with QWERTY keyboards banned from standardized tests?

Most high-schoolers know what a TI series calculator is. For those who don’t, it is a graphing calculator made by Texas Instruments. This series of calculators includes the TI-89, the TI-92, the TI-92 Plus, and the the Voyage 200. The TI-92’s came out in the mid and late 1990s while the Voyage 200 came out in 2002. There is one big difference between the TI-89 and the later series, though.

The TI-92s have a QWERTY keyboard. A QWERTY keyboard is the most common modern day keyboard layout. The name comes from the first six keys appearing in the top left letter row of the keyboard and read from left to right. It goes back as far as some of the first typewriters in 1878. However, while the success of the QWERTY keyboard has been proven, it didn’t work out so well for the TI-92 series calculators.

Since they had this type of keyboard, they were classified as “computers.” Students, then, were not allowed to use these calculators on standardized tests like the SAT or AP exams. The TI-89 on the other hand is acceptable because it doesn’t have a QWERTY keyboard.

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In 1995, Newsweek predicted doom for the Internet!

The Internet is pretty crucial to our everyday lives. Everything from work, entertainment, and communication utilizes the Internet and its resources. In 1995, Newsweek wasn’t so sure the Internet would last. It was thought to be a fad that’d run out, I guess. They stated that a store in the mall does more business in an afternoon than the Internet did in a month. Today, that isn’t so. People shop for groceries online and for their books and college books. People shop for clothes, furniture, and just about everything else on the Internet.

The article complains about how silly it is to think we’d buy books straight from the Internet, because it’d be a hassle carrying around a clunky laptop of computer. Boy, were they way off. The Kindle hadn’t yet been introduced, obviously. Another topic picked at was computers in the classroom. They scoffed that computers and the Internet would be utilized in schools. Well, bursting the bubble now: kids can do their entire K-12 education online and half or more of their college online, too.

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Blowing into old game cartridges didn’t actually help at all!

If you’re old enough, you probably remember when you popped in a game into your game console only for the game not to boot up properly. You knew what to do right? Take it out, blow on it to get the dust out and put it back in, and it worked like magic.

Guess what? You were actually harming your game. Instead of blowing dust around, you were introducing moisture into the game and making it rust little by little. What actually helped was taking the game out and putting it back in. The reason games failed to boot was because the cartridge didn’t connect fully, and taking it in and out helped until you got the right position.

A guy ran an experiment to figure out the damage you made. Check it out here.

A German court has ruled that the Internet is crucial to every day life!

You might have decided that the Internet was crucial for your life already, but now at least you can cite legal precedent for it. Here’s what happened: A man was trying to get compensation because his ISP failed to provide connectivity between December 2008 and February 2009, so he sued the company.

The case went to court and the court ruled that because access to Internet was a vital component of people’s lives and economic activity, he was entitled to as much as $67 per day the he did not have access.

Interestingly, he also tried to get compensation for not having fax access, but they denied it, because they said faxes are only a faster way to send text and photos, which you can do by mail.

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The Space mining industry will get started in 2015!

It sounds like something out of science fiction but the business of mining asteroids is going to get started in just a couple of years. Now, before you think of people in space suits and pickaxes, we gotta give you some bad news: human jobs aren’t coming yet.

Deep Space Industries is planning on sending probes the size of laptops to some of the 1700 near-Earth asteroids. Those probes will identify what kinds of metals and gasses the asteroids are made of. Then larger spacecraft will be sent to mine them and sell them to Mars missions and builders of orbiting space platforms.

Want to learn more? Check here