Perhaps you're right, Les. Certainly, HP should fix things like that.
However, in all practical situations, that's a very small "bug". Especially, since you're aware of the bug, in a manual calculation, you can see you're about to hit the COS bug.
In a program, you could (if you really felt you needed to) program around it.
Maybe it's just me. I don't imagine people are taking cosines of angles that are nearly 90 degrees often enough where five digit precision is not enough.
Again, I wish HP had fixed this bug, but complex machines are often tough to have bug free. And, given that today HP has only a handful of people even in their calculator division compared to hundreds at earlier times (aka 15c heyday), it seems they do pretty good to me.
Just depends on what you mean by "unacceptably buggy". Are you using any version of Windows? Why? It has bugs that can crash the machine and give loss of data. :-)
You mention that you carry the 11c with you (a favorite of mine). But it has at least one bug in it too, depending on the date of the unit.
From [url]http://www.finseth.com/hpdata/hp11c.html[/url]
"HP did acknowlege a bug in the 11C, but never released a ROM version
which corrected this (I don't know why this popped into my brain last
nite after lying dormant for several years).
If you are entering a number with a decimal point, and then use the
back-arrow key to erase any (and all) digits to the right of the
decimal point AND erase the decimal point, the magnitude of the
integer portion of the number will be incremented by 1 when the ENTER
key is pressed.
For example,
1 1 . <- ENTER
should put 11 in the X-register, but 12 is entered instead.
Another example,
2 . 3 4 CHS <- <- <- ENTER
will put -3 in the X-register instead of -2.
I'm not sure if this also occurs when a function key, such as +,
is pressed rather than ENTER, or if this occurs on any other
Voyager-series models.
Again, depends on what we mean by "unacceptable". I know what Wayne consider's unacceptable. :-)
Gene