calculate

Blitz Document is a useful tool with built-in templates for creating office forms. The templates help you quickly design and generate common and specialized business documents for a variety of purposes, including invoices, sales agreements, letters, and memos. There are "Sales Related Documents" like Invoices, Bills of Sale, and Sales Agreements. Businesses can use the templates as-is, but they're easily edited and customized for different needs.

Under the Common Forms tab in the Template menu, you'll find templates for frequently used office type purposes: faxes, letters, meeting agendas, and more. We really liked Blitz Document's … Read more

The iPhone app for Wolfram Alpha (iTunes store link) got approved by Apple surprisingly quickly, I was told in a breathless e-mail from Wolfram PR on Sunday. But the real surprise was the price: The app is $49.99.

The rationale is twisted.

"It's less than half the price of a graphing calculator, but it does more," the rep told me. By the way, "price of a graphing calculator" is a calculation that Wolfram Alpha can't compute.

For much, much less than the price of a graphing calculator, or $0.00, you can point … Read more

So you're a programmer deciding where to invest your energy. What's a better idea: the latest Apple device, where hot new games can mean big bucks and millions of users, or a calculator introduced 10 years ago?

Most go for iPhones and iPods. But another community thrives in its own way. These are the folks who spend hours trying to elevate their Texas Instruments calculators to a level far surpassing their modest roots.

Among their achievements: adding new features, creating new operating systems, connecting the calculator to keyboards and other hardware, playing a video excerpt from "The Matrix," and even running Nintendo Game Boy video games. Not bad for calculators such as the $100 TI-83 Plus, introduced in 1999 with a Z80 processor running at 6MHz, 24KB of memory, 160KB of flash memory, and a 96x64 pixel display.

Why all this work for projects that realistically are not going to reshape the future of computing? Much of the motivation parallels mountaineer George Mallory's rationale for climbing Mount Everest: "Because it's there."

TI's graphing calculators are programmable, affordable, and widely used in schools--a lot more approachable than a Himalayan peak. That doesn't mean they're easy. The calculators must be programmed in assembly language--a slightly more human-readable version of the very basic machine code the calculators execute, but hardly something more easily read and debugged such as C or Java. … Read more

Surveyors, environmental impact researchers, historical impact researchers, cell-phone tower site locators, and real estate developers--these are just a few of the folks who will find real value in this nicely featured application for plotting maps based on survey or GPS data.

Metes and Bounds launches a large window with a row of icon-buttons along the top, a vertical pane with some data controls on the left side, and a large drawing and editing pane taking up most of the window's real estate. A Drawing Wizard automatically opens at launch to prompt the user for the type of drawing he … Read more

Calculator hackers have figured out how to run independent OSes on TI calculators. Unfortunately TI wants to stop them. Why? We have no idea. Also we play fast and loose with physics when discussing black holes and Higgs Bosons. We also totally redefined the word mint. In a bad way, unfortunately.

Sidekick data restored? http://twitter.com/wcpreston/status/4848175078 http://twitter.com/ruv/status/4845969713

Wi-Fi is about to get a whole lot easier http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2009/tc20091013_683659.htm … Read more

The Electronic Frontier Foundation on Tuesday rebutted legal assertions by Texas Instruments that enthusiasts who figured how to install their own operating systems on TI calculators violated the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

In a letter sent to the processor and calculator maker, Jennifer Granick, civil-liberties director at the EFF, argued that TI calculator enthusiasts Brandon Wilson, Tom Cross, and Duncan Smith didn't deserve letters TI sent them August 27 demanding that they remove various online posts about installing alternative operating systems. The three had taken down the posts but plan to restore them October 26, unless TI supplies evidence of a violation, Granick said.

In the posts, the three discussed use of reverse-engineered digital keys that made it simple to install alternative operating systems on the TI calculators. Wilson and Smith posted the actual keys that could be used to perform the installation.

But none of that violated the DMCA's anticircumvention provision, which states, "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work" protected under the copyright act, Granick said. … Read more

Payroll Mate 2009 provides tools for managing your business's payroll. With its simple operation and great features, it's is a great option for users in charge of a small business' finances.

Even if you've never handled any company's payroll, large or small, Payroll Mate is easy to get started with. We were able to slip right into the interface and control everything with ease. The program's Wizard holds your hand every step of the way as it walks you through the setup and data entry stages. The Wizard is most helpful when entering a new … Read more

Home Loan Interest Manager Pro provides a tool for monitoring every aspect of mortgages. While the program can get overwhelming, it ultimately helps users understand home loans.

With the program's many command options, we smartly headed to the topic-oriented Help file. This, along with the program's wizard, showed us how to navigate our loan within minutes. We needed to have a lot of information present to fill out the wizard (Interest rates, loan amounts, duration of the loan, etc.), but it was worth the hassle since it laid the foundation of our mortgage. Some other options were much … Read more

It's no secret that criminals are stealing credit card and bank account data and selling it underground. But most people would find it shocking to learn just how little their sensitive personal information costs.

Symantec on Thursday is launching its Norton Online Risk Calculator, a tool that people can use to see how much their online information is worth on the black market. The tool also offers a risk rating based on demographics, online activity, and estimated value of online information.

I tried the tool when I was initially briefed on it a few months ago and was surveyed … Read more