TI vs. Calculator Hackers

Nyall writes "So a bunch of TI calculator programming enthusiasts got together to factor the keys Texas Instruments uses to sign the operating system binaries for the ti83+ (a z80 architecture) and the ti89/v200 (a 68k architecture) series of calculators. Now Texas Instruments is sending out DMCA notices to take them down."

Comments

first post

[Anonymous Coward]

55378008

Re:first post

[marklark]

Is that you, Tommy?

Math

[daveywest]

Somehow, this just doesn't add up.

Re:Math

[Yvan256]

TI has a new calculator based on the original Pentium?

Re:Math

[Vintermann]

Calm down, joaommp...

Re:Math

[Hatta]

Yeah. I don't think TI factored this development into consideration when it released this product.

Re:Math

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Z80 is pre-x86 architecture, i.e. pre-pre-Pentium, and 68k is pre-Power PC architecture.

So technically, this should have sarcasmed with "oshwho".

Re:Math

[postmortem]

no, that would be intel's state-of-the-art graphics chip Larrabee.

Re:Math

[elfprince13]

As a long time member of the TI community, I have to say that I'm glad Slashdot is covering this. TI consistently works against the enthusiast community, and this is blatantly obvious in their new Nspire line of calculators. The 83+/84+ line has been their one concession to sanctioned assembly programming, and they still threaten legal action against anyone who starts delving into operating system stuff.

Re:Math

[Mister Whirly]

every time anyone has said "woosh" it's been non-funny and every other time it was just as deserving of its own "woosh"

whoosh

Re:Math

[Yvan256]

Intel Larrabee, coming soon*

* in 2031

Re:Math

[mckinleyn]

Then sign up for an account, get good karma, read daily, and go on a flamebait-hunting spree. Or, sign up for an account and turn off sigs.

Re:Math

[Mitchell314]

At least it will work for a year.

Re:Math

[joaommp]

"Calm down, joaommp"

wtf?

Re:Math

[cbhacking]

I'm pretty sure my TI-86 has a bunch of games written in assembly on it. I never learned to write them myself, or even what the architecture was, but there's a command (something like "asm()" ) that you had to use to run them.

Re:Math

[elfprince13]

It's z80. The 82, 85, 86 had to be hacked via a hex-edited backup file before it could be made to run assembly. The 81 only just not had exploits discovered to allow it to run assembly. The 83 didn't officially support it, but send(9prgmname was a sort of backdoor that allowed it. The 68K series is a little bit different story, but the differences in versions between hardware/firmware (my 68K terminology isn't quite up to speed), even in the same model make running assembly a pain in the arse. Look up "ghostbuster" (or something like that) on ticalc.org to see what I mean.

Re:Math

[toddestan]

And here I thought that everyone knew about the TI-82.99999993895874 by now.

Re:Math

[Nyall]

Wrong. The ti86 supported assembly out of the box without any need for a hacked backup.

Re:Math

[RockDoctor]

So technically, this should have sarcasmed with "oshwho".

Is that a bigend in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?

Re:Math

[Tailsfan]

Well hello.... The most popular use is programming stuff for the calcs.

Wikileaks link

[Brian Gordon]

I'm a lurker in that community and I have to say I'm extremely disappointed with TI. The community has had to reverse engineer every component of the hardware with no help from TI, and has done an amazing job writing development tools and mapping out which memory addresses do what.

Here's the wikileaks link to the keys.

Re:Wikileaks link

[Anonymous Coward]

And thousands of people will mirror it....

What will they do with people outside the US where the DMCA does not apply?

The ease of which students can make their own programs is one of the reasons my college asked us to buy TI-brand calculators and not Casio (which is the other choice they give.. hp is not supported at all :-p)

Meh...

Re:Wikileaks link

[Lumpy]

What will they do with people outside the US where the DMCA does not apply?

Get the US government to invade them?

Re:Wikileaks link

[Anonymous Coward]

And here's the Freenet key for the zip file: freenet:CHK@cua6vt6OGoe8dBOY2D4PR13jt~FvyvmHlMJKXPcXUgs,gFqVGC6lWjlSdE0cizGzWcyE5Y9f5J0QyWo-GNmLluY,AAIC--8/keys.zip

Re:Wikileaks link

[VernonNemitz]

TI is certainly mistaken about the reach of Copyright Law in this matter. Out of all the code in a calculator, which they might copyright, then according to that Law, it is:
A. Fair Use to publish two numbers!
B. Not Applicable if the numbers were never in the calculator code!

Re:Wikileaks link

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Even worse, how can publishing two primes which multiply into a particular third number be unlawful? It's just a math result, you HP crooks! :p Now get over it and design stuff that people want.

Re:Wikileaks link

[TrentTheThief]

I wonder if it's mirrored here: http://crystalwind.com/index.html

Re:Wikileaks link

[Hal_Porter]

How would you feel if someone published your social security and Visa card numbers?

Re:Wikileaks link

[dgatwood]

The DMCA doesn't protect hardware in the U.S., either. Since AFAIK TI doesn't sell copyrighted software that is protected by DRM, this is clearly not a DMCA violation, and unless TI's lawyers haven't read any of the cases that have clarified this beyond a reasonable doubt, it also qualifies TI for perjury charges for deliberately making a false DMCA claim---not that any attorney general will actually have the guts to make an example of them....

IMHO, all these folks need to do is file a proper DMCA counter notice and then go about their business. Of course, IANAL, and they should consider getting advise from one.

Re:Wikileaks link

[s73v3r]

I really wish you were right. Unfortunately, you're forgetting about the DMCA, under which, if anything copyrighted is encrypted, then it is illegal to break that encryption, and illegal to distribute the information on how to break that encryption. Even with the few exemptions that the Library of Congress has granted, they tend to exempt breaking the encryption, but not distributing the tools and information needed to break the encryption.

Re:Wikileaks link

[Manax]

I might be pissed, but I certainly wouldn't try to claim that they are violating my copyright, or claim that they are violating the DMCA (Ya know, there is that checksum digit in there...) or some other non-sense. I might make the claim (rightly) that they are attempting to commit fraud or identity theft, or facilitating such... but that isn't quite the same thing, now is it?

Re:Wikileaks link

[CastrTroy]

Probably because it has a full keyboard. Anyway, I can't really see why they would want to overwrite the OS for the TI calculators. You can write your own programs in assembly, or in Basic. I don't really see a need to overwrite the entire OS when it doesn't really stop you from running anything you want to anyway.

Re:Wikileaks link

[nmb3000]

what makes the TI calculators better than, say, Pi Cubed (and a few other apps) for the iPhone?

Primarily the fact that it is a calculator and not a phone. The TI-89 has better numeric capabilities, great graphing ability, and a nice display. It can also run for months on a single pair of AA batteries.

That, and it doesn't cost more than $800 a year to operate.

Is it the interface, dedicated keys? RPN?

Yes, yes, and no. I can't imagine trying to use a tiny little touch screen for any serious calculator use.

Re:Wikileaks link

[CyprusBlue113]

I'd be annoyed that the fraud protection is so pitiful that social security number is sufficient to do anything underhanded. Which I am.

Re:Wikileaks link

[stephanruby]

What will they do with people outside the US where the DMCA does not apply?

Put them on a hacker terrorist watch list and disappear them the next time they partake in a terrorist training camp (e.g. a math conference).

Re:Wikileaks link

[PRMan]

Find a minor country?

Re:Wikileaks link

[vintagepc]

Try to start your own, a la TPB?

Re:Wikileaks link

[afex]

I have quite a few apps for the iphone do different scientific and graphing calculator functions, and none even come close to the ease of use or speed of using my ti-89.

That, and my colleagues will have their calculators open, do the math, and turn them off before my iphone app even opened.

i will say, however, that i love the many EE related apps that do quick common calculations: current-limiter resistor calculations, resistor network calculations, wire gauge calculations, etc

Re:Wikileaks link

[TheRaven64]

It's not quite so clear cut in this case. If the software were encrypted, and decrypted by the bootloader, then it would be illegal to distribute tools for copying it and running it on other devices. This case is the reverse, however. It is the distribution of the key required to sign the software to run other code on this hardware. That can not be used for copyright infringement, so it is not covered by the DMCA.

Re:Wikileaks link

[jimicus]

In what way is requiring firmware to be signed with a particular key not DRM?

Re:Wikileaks link

[sumdumass]

Poor choice of words I guess. Major could be read as first world countries and third world countries doing substantial commerce with the first world countries.

Re:Wikileaks link

[HazMat 79]

Not to mention, where I go to college, you can use calculators only. Makes sense though with Phones being net capable.

Re:Wikileaks link

[Toonol]

Wow, freenet DOES have a raison d'etre other than illegal porn!

I'm kind of kidding, but posting of freenet links on slashdot ought to be standard procedure whenever something is DMCA'd.

Re:Wikileaks link

[gr8_phk]

In what way is requiring firmware to be signed with a particular key not DRM?

It is not protecting copying of the firmware, it's preventing the running of unsigned firmware. It's probably not preventing the copy of applications either. It's simply preventing "unauthorized" software from running on the hardware. It's a lock, not copy protection. See the garage door opener case for an example where this is not protected under the DMCA.

Re:Wikileaks link

[Brian Gordon]

Yeah why would you want to overwrite the OS when you can just write your programs from within Windows?

This opens the door for an open-source TI operating system. TI releases minor OS updates every few years and doesn't add much new functionality. Now we can do whatever we want and have it integrated completely with the home screen.

Re:Wikileaks link

[Mister Whirly]

Or persuade the country they reside in to go after them. (Sweden - I am looking at you.)

Re:Wikileaks link

[TangoMargarine]

That, and "because we can."

It's kind of sad, really, because TI seems to have been pretty lax about this sort of borderline-"infringing" stuff for a long time. You can download TI emulators and, with a little extra effort, *cough* ROMs. And they haven't done anything to break non-nostub ASM programs on the 83+/84+ line, charitably enough (okay, so that doesn't have to do with infringement).

Re:Wikileaks link

[dissy]

Since AFAIK TI doesn't sell copyrighted software that is protected by DRM

Selling software is not a requirement for copyright protection, nor for copyright limits to kick in when someone wishes to distribute it.

In that case, TI most certainly does distribute copyrighted and DRM protected software.
This whole project is specifically for brute forcing the encryption keys that DRM uses.

As BS as the DMCA is as a law, this sadly falls squarely under that law as a violation.

Personally, due to the fact I feel the DMCA is an immoral and unconstitutional law, I always ignore it. I just don't care. But might as well let the ISP/hosting provider have the paperwork filed so they can tell these people to fuck off and talk to a judge instead.

Re:Wikileaks link

[PCM2]

The TI-89 has better numeric capabilities, great graphing ability, and a nice display. It can also run for months on a single pair of AA batteries.

Actually, the TI-89 uses four AAA batteries, but the point is made.

Also, many colleges and standardized tests require students to use calculators rather than other devices because they are (at least nominally) limited to calculation. So far, at least, you can't surf Wikipedia for answers on a calculator. The TI-92 calculator is actually forbidden by some tests, despite the fact that it's functionally equivalent to the TI-89, because it has a QWERTY keyboard, which makes it a "computer."

Re:Wikileaks link

[Khashishi]

It's cheaper and more palatable to the public to just sign a treaty with them.

Re:Wikileaks link

[mckinleyn]

Here are the keys, sorry for the long post:

TI-83 (Plus):

n=82EF4009ED7CAC2A5EE12B5F8E8AD9A0
AB9CC9F4F3E44B7E8BF2D57A2F2BEACE
83424E1CFF0D2A5A7E2E53CB926D61F3
47DFAA4B35B205B5881CEB40B328E58F
p=B709D3A0CD2FEC08EAFCCF540D8A100BB38E5E091D646ADB7B14D021096FFCD
q=B7207BD184E0B5A0B89832AA68849B29EDFB03FBA2E8917B176504F08A96246CB
d=4D0534BA8BB2BFA0740BFB6562E843C7
EC7A58AE351CE11D43438CA239DD9927
6CD125FEBAEE5D2696579FA3A3958FF4FC54C685EAA91723BC8888F292947BA1
e=11

Re:Wikileaks link

[mckinleyn]

And more: (filter hates long strings)
TI-84 (Plus):

prp77 factor: 67070508990537181066342707695603050521324524613874331879259881495826493920589
prp78 factor: 186923771200711284770368041572205320486346816476524340240220962467860568859381

n=EF5FEF0B0AB6E22731C17539658B2E91E53A59BF8E00FCC81D05758F26C1791CD35AF6101B1E35
43AC3E78FD8BB8F37FC8FE85601C502EABC9132CEAD4711CB1
p=94489014C63CC9E1E1ADB192DBBDD1F78F90A630DA9C86EFC4CBCA44E5B4D54D
q=19D431AF2794229620B884E3750D622D1C74F2E4569DC15486FC8D5A3BCDFE2F5
d=2A3E1B2010F318D9BD7C7E19300980B055A0E2A9554B77E7142E23CDF7C7CA13C233A3D462FDFC
968B1F9CEAF2AC2CF305147992AD9E834192ACEBB517DB9941
e=11

Re:Wikileaks link

[mckinleyn]

Yet again (curse you, lameness filter):

TI-89:

prp76 factor: 2231124525637629443181963045297394875 (lameness filter remove this) 470510167130210300957267082210173784611
prp79 factor: 32268855342401474150182483974101012 (lameness filter remove this) 86362761128614350056368675111071170873486957

(these are factors of 719958345686847736367204386511 (lameness filter remove this) 6047229712788448020653515684 (lameness filter remove this) 330784137805088971433273011970552138 (lameness filter remove this) 960583799368215373582308591928985045059261105298431035818727)

Re:Wikileaks link

[izomiac]

I'd be amused if the calculator itself was used to factor the key. Then it becomes a copyright circumvention tool, and thus illegal if TI wanted to make a DMCA claim. (Not that such a thing would pan out in real life given lawyers, but I can still pretend for the sake of amusement.)

Re:Wikileaks link

[geminidomino]

You don't know offhand if the TI89 can calculate gamma values, do you? (I don't have my manual handy)

Re:Wikileaks link

[dgatwood]

No, this likely falls completely and totally outside that law. This project is not about brute forcing crypto keys used to prevent decrypting the firmware. AFAIK, the firmware and apps are not encrypted. This project is about brute forcing keys used to SIGN firmware. The only time a signature is covered by the DMCA is if it is used to prevent people from using illegal copies of software that for some technical reason could not be copied with such a signature (e.g. game titles installed on a hard drive). Since no TI-83+ hardware is EVER sold without a copy of their firmware, such an argument is moot. Anyone with access to the hardware also has a legally licensed copy of the firmware. Therefore, the signature does not prevent people from obtaining copies of the firmware illegally in any useful way, and as such, is not a copyright protection mechanism under the DMCA.

In short, unless TI uses DRM software resident in their firmware to protect OTHER titles from copying, this clearly falls WELL outside the realm of the DMCA. Bear in mind that there are legal precedents for what I'm saying here. Similar cases have been tried in the past (e.g. Lexmark). The courts have consistently ruled that such circumstances are not protected. Now if TI has an app store and sells applications that are coded to your particular calculator in some way, they would have a case. Otherwise, using the DMCA in this way goes way beyond silly.

Re:Wikileaks link

[dgatwood]

The claim that they are acting on behalf of the copyright holder, however, is in fact false, as hardware is not generally eligible for copyright.

Re:Wikileaks link

[joebok]

What if you want to live in a world where 2+2=5? I think you'd have to do an OS hack for that.

Re:Wikileaks link

[bigngamer92]

Wow, +5 Insightful. I really do fear for this nation I live in.

Re:Wikileaks link

[TrentTheThief]

You are both perceptive and inquisitive.

You will go far, provided you do not anger the gods of IT.

Re:Wikileaks link

[cbhacking]

The concept of using signed binaries on a calculator seems more than a little whacked to begin with. I mean, I suppose the TI-89 (and maybe the 83, although its hardware is far less impressive) has the ability to do asymmetric crypto, but why bother?

Re:Wikileaks link

[Carnildo]

You mean where they get caught distributing weaponse of maths instruction?

Re:Wikileaks link

[russotto]

In short, unless TI uses DRM software resident in their firmware to protect OTHER titles from copying, this clearly falls WELL outside the realm of the DMCA.

If I were an evil and nasty copyright lawyer, I could find a DMCA 1201 hook to hang this on. Even if I couldn't get DMCA 1201(a), I could go for DMCA 1201(b)

(1) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that -
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof;
(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof; or
(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof.

I'd claim the firmware signing key prevented people from making unauthorized derivative works of the copyrighted TI firmware, by preventing such unauthorized works from running.

It's a stretch, but the courts (and juries) are sympathetic to big corporations who look like Authority, not eeevil hackers, who look like people trying to weasel around the law.

Now, the DMCA takedown is a different matter. The keys are (supposedly) randomly generated; they can't possibly be subject to copyright. DMCA 512 covers only regular copyright violations, not DMCA 1201 violations. So the DMCA takedown was bogus.

Re:Wikileaks link

[beav007]

What will they do with people outside the US where the DMCA does not apply?

Get the US government to invade them?

Or offer them a Free Trade Agreement. Bloody John Howard. Caterpillar-browed bastard.

Re:Wikileaks link

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

A TI-89 runs on a 68k processor running at 12mHz and it' sbeen around since the early nineties has a better display and number crunching capabilities of a device built in the last two years with a 400mHz ARM processor and a PowerVR 3D chip.

I'd worry about floating point precision but... IT'S A FREAKING 68K. I know the nSpire is almost out but still...

Re:Wikileaks link

[QuoteMstr]

IT'S A FREAKING 68K

Your point being what, exactly? Newer isn't necessarily better. The TI89 is exactly powerful enough for what it needs to do.

Re:Wikileaks link

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Your point being what, exactly? Newer isn't necessarily better. The TI89 is exactly powerful enough for what it needs to do.

It was, powerful enough. It's now not that great anymore. The only upside to the TI89 is the CAS. 3D rendering is also a joke. It's a simple plane! My PSP's GPU can render this in *real freaking time*. The TI89 has the CPU from the Genesis. TI has a lot of balls charging what it does for the 89.

Re:Wikileaks link

[kabloom]

They sell flash applications for the TI-83+/84, and they do have some kind of DRM that they use to ensure that if you buy a flash app, you can only run it on the calculator you bought it for.

Re:Wikileaks link

[QuoteMstr]

It was, powerful enough. It's now not that great anymore.

Why? Has math changed, or merely your expectations?

Re:Wikileaks link

[Pig Hogger]

it also qualifies TI for perjury charges for deliberately making a false DMCA claim---not that any attorney general will actually have the guts to make an example of them....

You're in Texas there, boy.

Re:Wikileaks link

[compro01]

Actually, Lexmark lost, repeatedly.

http://www.allbusiness.com/legal/trial-procedure-suits-claims/5150099-1.htmll

Re:Wikileaks link

[TrentTheThief]

Your are neither perceptive nor inquisitive.

You will not go far and have angered the IT gods.

P.S., if you had really, truly looked, you would have seen the mirror.

Re:Wikileaks link

[alexo]

it also qualifies TI for perjury charges for deliberately making a false DMCA claim

Has anyone, anywhere was ever brought up on "perjury charges for deliberately making a false DMCA claim"?

Re:Wikileaks link

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I have no such things.

Re:Wikileaks link

[rubi]

What will they do with people outside the US where the DMCA does not apply?

Get the US government to invade them?

Why invade and have to take charge of the country when they can just pressure your government to do what they want?

Re:Wikileaks link

[Cal27]

:While 1
:Input "",X
:Disp X+1
:End

Re:Wikileaks link

[MrResistor]

The TI-89 is amazing, and I only have the old version. The reason TI can charge so much for their inferior calculators is that most college math teachers know how amazing the TI-89 is and won't allow you to use it. Otherwise, no sane person would spend that amount of money on an 83/84/86.

Worst move ever,

[Icegryphon]

If TI really wants to sell them calculators they would push the hobbyist market more.
Instead they stifle the enthusiast groups, but whatever I never really got into TI programming and hacking anyways.

Re:Worst move ever,

[qoncept]

I really have to wonder what dope modded the parent post as insightful. Enthusiasts aren't any manufacturer's target audience. There are (say) 10 million kids who need a graphing calculator for college or high school, and (say) 100 that are hacking them. Claiming those few are the key to success is just plain wrong.

Re:Worst move ever,

[MBGMorden]

I have to agree. I never got much into writing my own apps for my calculators (which have been predominantly TI - I started on a TI-83 in high school and moved to a TI-89 in college), but man on man did I download and install a lot of community apps. They really added a lot of usefulness to the machine (particularly the TI-83 whose built in feature set was very lacking compared to the TI-89). If those apps weren't available I likely would have looked for a calculator that did have them.

It's strange too that in these "there's an app for that!" times that TI would be trying to crack down on the 3rd party application community.

Re:Worst move ever,

[sunking2]

This is exactly why they are not a big fan. The reality is there is very little difference hardware wise in the lesser and more expensive models. If all you need to do is upgrade some software to get your cheaper model to behave like the more expensive then TI loses a ton of money. It's all about trying to get people to upgrade to a model with a higher profit margin.

Re:Worst move ever,

[evanbd]

Those few calculator hackers (there are a lot more than 100 of them; they're a minority, but not that small a one) aren't just a few users. They're busy writing games and other useful programs. Those programs appear on just about every TI calculator out there, and plenty of people who aren't even remotely enthusiasts or geeks are using them. The enthusiasts have a disproportionate influence on how popular the platform is, because they make it more useful for everyone.

Re:Worst move ever,

[hardburn]

Those 100 release things that make the calculator more useful to the millions of others.

TI is in the business of selling calculators, and only makes an OS for it because a calculator this sophisticated without an OS is just a circuit board. If a bunch of hackers wants to make a better OS, it's in TI's best interest to let them.

Re:Worst move ever,

[Jahava]

I really have to wonder what dope modded the parent post as insightful. Enthusiasts aren't any manufacturer's target audience. There are (say) 10 million kids who need a graphing calculator for college or high school, and (say) 100 that are hacking them. Claiming those few are the key to success is just plain wrong.

There are countless instances where enthusiasts, with or without support from the parent company, have been a source of significant innovation. Smart companies realize this and encourage that innovation, both for product advancement and as a vast source of design feedback. Even TI could take some very minimal steps to greatly enable enthusiasts (i.e. release these keys, or just not have them).

Look only as far as Blizzard Entertainment's Warcraft series for a very vivid example. Enthusiasts built massive tools and communities centered around modifying their games, and Blizzard engaged them and they responded by greatly opening up future releases. DotA started as a map mod and has progressed into its own complete video game. In expansions (and even moreso in new games), Blizzard has identified the enthusiasts' interests and worked to further enable them. Their appreciation of enthusiasts and community has them labeled as a Smart Company in my book.

If TI were smart, they'd make their calculators as open as possible. There's clearly an interest among the capable, and I'd infer from that a greater interest among the general populous. They could do workshops, partner with schools, market it as "open", and even recruit from the enthusiast base.

Ultimately, interest is interest; even non-enthusiasts appreciate the work: "Hey, I can load games onto this calculator!"

Re:Worst move ever,

[Microlith]

Well, aside from the obvious architectural difference separating the TI-82(83,84) and the TI-89(92) lines, there's also varying degrees of internal hardware differences between the models. Even newer revisions of the same calculator can have wildly different hardware (the 83+ for instance has internal flash that the classic 83 lacks entirely.)

My TI-89 is now 11 years old, I'm fairly sure the most recent 89 revisions are internally different to some degree from the older hardware. The only reason that TI is pissed about this is that it removes total control of the software load of the devices from their hands.

Re:Worst move ever,

[0100010001010011]

Because those '100' other features aren't certified, tested or controlled.

As someone said above, if you let in a ton of extra features, this won't be certified for use on standardized tests. When I took it the TI-89 was allowed on the SAT.

Imagine a hacker putting in 100x extra functions which could do almost anything the CPU could handle, including stuff the original TI-89 couldn't do AND that the SAT board doesn't want it to do. Is it TI's fault? Is the student 'cheating'?

It wouldn't be too hard to create an OSS calculator. One that ran a bare linux and you could hack to your heart's content. Good luck getting it certified for any standardized test.

Re:Worst move ever,

[0100010001010011]

This isn't about 3rd party apps. This is about signing for the OS.

TI doesn't care what programs you write, in assembly OR TI-Basic. They do care if you overwrite their OS.

Re:Worst move ever,

[qoncept]

What makes them so smart? Is TI selling more calculators because you can play games on them, or because some kid has to buy one to do his homework? I had a TI-85 in high school and played games all through whatever math class I was in at the time, but I would have had one regardless of whether it did anything other than my homework.

Re:Worst move ever,

[LarrySDonald]

The point isn't that they're the target market, but that they are somewhat useful and completely harmless. I hacked on every calculator I used (you have to do something while watching the dry as paint lectures and they're an allowed tool in school. Hey, perhaps I do think this English lecture needs some mathematical analysis, who are you to judge?) and I have no earthly idea how exploring their deeper workings did any harm at all to the maker. Also, this is the group that will (I've noticed) be asked what calculator you should buy. I bought all that were allowed in school pretty much, so that won't help you, but I was also the go to guy for 20 and by extension hundreds for "Ok, so what's the deal here? What should I buy?". It's crazy. I'm not sure what they're trying to prevent. They sell hardware and pretty much that only. They're not razorblade - they charge full price for the hardware they sell. What's the point in even trying to prevent people from doing what they feel like with it? Of course they have certain amounts of right to do so, just as we have every right to not buy their crappy locked down platforms, but it's hard to see where alienating the enthusiasts, which by secondary steps will alienate a ton more who asked them "So what about TI?" and got the answer "Assholes sued me for trying to write a better point graph fitter. Don't buy it" while gaining nothing useful.

Re:Worst move ever,

[PotatoFarmer]

In expansions (and even moreso in new games), Blizzard has identified the enthusiasts' interests and worked to further enable them. Their appreciation of enthusiasts and community has them labeled as a Smart Company in my book.

It's ironic that you use Blizzard as your example here, given that their response to bnetd established the precedent of using the DMCA to shut down reverse engineering.

Re:Worst move ever,

[hedwards]

Really, that's funny because who is it that implements software that the manufacturer didn't think of or didn't want to spend time on? It's kind of an odd statement to make, because having a thriving enthusiast community is something which sells an awful lot of units. People tend to be pretty jaded about certain things like marketing, having enthusiasts to make the recommendations and help out new owners is a pretty significant resource to have.

Re:Worst move ever,

[UncleTogie]

TI doesn't care what programs you write, in assembly OR TI-Basic. They do care if you overwrite their OS.

Funny, I don't remember agreeing to a EULA when I first opened the box and powered it up. Their right to ANYthing concerning their equipment ended when I bought it.

Re:Worst move ever,

[sexconker]

The testing board is retarded for allowing any calculators.

I've taken the SAT (and various SAT 2 tests, mainly the math and sciency ones).

1: Who the fuck needs a calculator for that shit?
2: If you DO need a calculator for that shit, STOP. Go directly to 1st grade. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

Re:Worst move ever,

[BrokenHalo]

If TI were smart, they'd make their calculators as open as possible.

Well, TI are not smart. For instance, I can see absolutely no logical reason why they have to restrict sale of their external QWERTY keyboard to US/Canada only. It's not as if it's ground-breaking or innovative technology. TI are just being bloody-minded for the sake of it when it would be to their commercial advantage to sell as many units as possible.

Re:Worst move ever,

[Jahava]

What makes them so smart? Is TI selling more calculators because you can play games on them, or because some kid has to buy one to do his homework? I had a TI-85 in high school and played games all through whatever math class I was in at the time, but I would have had one regardless of whether it did anything other than my homework.

My stance on the subject is that TI would stand to benefit financially to one degree or another from any and all of the following:

• Enthusiasts who prefer TI calculators because they are easier to explore
• Increased interest in a TI calculator because an enthusiast has built software for it that doesn't exist on other calculators
• Increased overall interest in TI calculators due to available software
• Increased quality of their product by observing the nature and intent of third-party changes
• Increased usage of their products by third parties (professors, etc.) who have co-opted their functionality into other areas
• Greater competitive edge through direct exposure to user feedback, also by monitoring enthusiast communities
• Increased sales of higher-powered (i.e., more expensive) calculators since they are capable of more resource-intensive modifications than the lower models
• Classes they can sell to schools about modifying their calculators
• Literature that they can sell on the subject of modifying their products
• Identification of quality persons from the enthusiast community for future hire

This is off the top of my head. As one who participated in the ticalc.org modding community when it was all Z-shell and assembly hacks, I can say for sure that I benefited from third-party applications and learned quite a lot by programming low-level software. A lot has changed since then, but I can attest firsthand to the benefits of an open TI calculator.

Really, though, what does TI have to lose? Has the enthusiast community as it stands actually harmed them? If so, I'm not aware of it.

Re:Worst move ever,

[Hatta]

Personally, I'm appalled that kids are still using the TI-83, and it still costs about $100. I used a TI-83 in high school, almost 15 years ago, and it cost $100 back then too. Haven't we had any advances in calculator technology since then?

Someone needs to get the DOJ on these guys for anti-trust violations. This is clear evidence of an abusive monopoly.

Re:Worst move ever,

[hot soldering iron]

If it looks and acts like a certified calculator, the testers won't know. All you would have to do is replace the circuit board in the case, and vuala! Stealth computer!

I know, I know, "All you would have to do ...." It's a lot easier said than done, but still not THAT hard to do. And if engineering students are involved, it's liable to happen. :)

Re:Worst move ever,

[Svartalf]

The concern in question is a legitimate one, but not one that is actually and honestly covered by the DMCA or any of the other laws on the books that I am aware of. If TI's going to be worried about that concern, they need to go about it in a completely differing manner than this one. It's not really going to fly and it's earning them enemies in the process.

Moreover, I question the need for a calc at an SAT or ACT test in the first place. My (admittedly ancient...) recollection of the sorts of questions on the test were not calculation but rather comprehension and mathematical reasoning problems. They were of the sort that once you followed through the word problem (which is what a good half or more was...) you could do the problem on a scratch pad of paper in no time flat.

Re:Worst move ever,

[QuantumRiff]

Exactly, only a few thousand iPhone users would be "enthusiasts", so obviously they are not apples target audience? That the millions of real users just need a phone? I am flat out claiming that the small number of enthusiasts are the keys to success.

Re:Worst move ever,

[HeronBlademaster]

Because those '100' other features aren't certified, tested or controlled.

So? All TI has to do is explicilty state on the box "We only support the TI OS. Use other OSes at your own risk." They're free and clear, and the great majority of users aren't going to install a different OS anyway.

As for other apps, well, people can already distribute tons of apps, whether or not you're running TI's OS, and TI doesn't seem to care about that.

Re:Worst move ever,

[644bd346996]

Speaking as a mathematician with Mathematica, Maple, Matlab, and an HP 50g at my fingertips, I always reach for the HP first for any problem I don't feel like doing on paper. Partly because I am in applied math, basically any symbolic problem I need to do can be handled by my HP, and the user interface is far superior. (Not to mention the startup time!) For plotting and numerical problems, MATLAB gets almost as much use as the HP due to the size of the problems.

Re:Worst move ever,

[hardburn]

I remember some trig on the ACT, particularly because I'm pretty sure I got a lot of points off the math section due to forgetting the definitions of sin/cos/tan when I took the test.

Problems with my memory aside, you're definitely going to want a calculator for those sections. Unless you want to provide a table of sin/cos/tan values like the old days (which have disappeared precisely because calculators are better at the same job).

Re:Worst move ever,

[MBGMorden]

I'm with you in general direction, but I'm not sure you could claim that TI has a monopoly. A majority of the market yes, but HP still commands a sizeable chunk of the market too. There's also the Casio graphing calculators as well. I got one of those a few years back just because they were on clearance for $15 and I figured "what the hell, I'll give it a shot". I've not learned much more than basic math on the thing, but from asking around I've heard from most people that the Casio's in general do pretty decent (and even before clearance deals they're often much cheaper than HP's or TI's) - it's just that very, very few people know the UI so if you buy one you're on your own to figure it out. That was the case in school with students who wanted to use HP's too, but the HP's have a much better/bigger online community than the Casios.

There's also graphing calcs out for the iPhone/iPod Touch as well that I've found interesting.

http://www.iphone-calc.com/wp/?page_id=67

It would never be allowed in an academic environment, but for myself, though I rarely need a graphing calculator these days, I'm certainly my likely to have my iPod with me than my TI89 :).

Re:Worst move ever,

[Hatta]

it's just that very, very few people know the UI so if you buy one you're on your own to figure it out. That was the case in school with students who wanted to use HP's too, but the HP's have a much better/bigger online community than the Casios.

In a lot of places you are simply not allowed to use anything other than the required TI calculator. I don't know what kind of deal TI has with these companies, but if it's not illegal it should be.

Re:Worst move ever,

[Monkeedude1212]

Claiming those few are the key to success is just plain wrong.

You'd be surprised. IPhone, Facebook, the Steam Community, Blizzard Games, one could argue that a major part in their success was having available tools for the developer community to create new content.

Developers can be an untapped resource in many cases. When someone comes along with a great Idea and implements it through your work - it only increases the value of your product. Guess how much you paid that Hobbyist?

The only reason to lock this kind of activity out is for security reasons.

I wasn't aware TI was under any kind of security threat, least not with their calculators.

Re:Worst move ever,

[Zerth]

Heck, you don't even have to go that far if an 86 is okay, just swap out the purple ALPHA button and rub off the 9 on the screen, most TAs go by color from a distance.

Re:Worst move ever,

[Alarindris]

So the price went down.

What cost $100 in 1994 would cost $143.47 in 2008.

Also, if you were to buy exactly the same products in 2008 and 1994, they would cost you $100 and $70.51 respectively.

http://www.westegg.com/inflation/

Screw calculator binaries; how about x64 drivers?

[gblues]

Texas Instruments makes damn fine graphing calculators, but would it be so hard to write a damn x64 driver? I can't use the USB interface with either my home PC or my laptop because both are running x64 (7 Pro on the desktop, Vista Home Premium on the laptop). And I'll be damned if I go back to 32 bits just to make the calculator happy.

I did googling and didn't find anything existing; has anyone tackled writing a homebrew x64 USB driver? I think all the information needed is already out there, but I don't have the time/motivation to write the driver myself (especially having never written a driver before).

Streisand Effect

[quanticle]

You'd have thought that Texas Instruments would have learned when the Blu-Ray consortium tried to stop the spread of the '09 F9 ...' key.

Re:Streisand Effect

[spinkham]

And just in case you forget how badly that went down, here's a reminder...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSQIoXf294E

Re:Streisand Effect

[EkriirkE]

What?

Re:Streisand Effect

[hansamurai]

Thought you would have learned too... that it was HD-DVD, and not Blu-Ray.

Re:Streisand Effect

[beelsebob]

Not forgetting this little beauty...
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Steganography

Exactly.

[zippthorne]

If they want to be as successful as HP calculators, they need to do more to encourage more enthusiasts...

Re:Exactly.

[plague911]

They are more successful than HP calculators. As a MS/Phd engineering student I haven't seen a HP calculator in 6 years except at a store.

Re:Exactly.

[schnikies79]

In my 4 years of undergrad and beyond (started as a EE major and switched to chemistry), I never saw a HP calc.

Re:Exactly.

[Hadlock]

I once saw an HP calc in the discount bin at office depot. Buried deep, under a pile of rubbish, scrawled on the back in angry sharpie it read:
 
Not a TI-83!
 
I left it there and went to find a TI calc

Re:Exactly.

[Curmudgeonlyoldbloke]

Hang on - it's 2009 and we're still arguing about calculators? Has this been going on since before the Amiga / Atari stuff?

(Comptometer ftw!)

Re:Exactly.

[644bd346996]

Students still need calculators, and handheld technology is progressing as fast as ever. Graphing calculators these days are just low-end pdas with keyboards and smaller screens. If anything, it's easier for graphing calculators to differentiate themselves these days. For example, HP's graphing calculators include ARM processors and SD slots while TI is still using 68k and Z80. On the other hand, the TI-89 has a much higher resolution screen than any HP.

Re:Exactly.

[BrokenHalo]

As a MS/Phd engineering student I haven't seen a HP calculator in 6 years except at a store.

I used to have a HP48G+ until it let me down too many times in various exams and other assessments over the first 2 years of my biotech degree. I really preferred the RPN input and really liked the firm, clicky buttons with the nice big fat "enter" key right under the index finger where it belongs.

I replaced it with a TI-89 which has been good, in that it is much faster. In some ways it's much more powerful, e.g. it does implicit differentiation and integration by parts if I want, amongst a host of other things. But if only I could depend on the HP I would still prefer it despite its deficiencies in functionality.

Re:Exactly.

[sexconker]

Students have never needed calculators to learn math.
And they never will.

Oh, you're talking about the STUPID students.
Carry on.

If I were to teach a math class at any level, there would be no calculators of any sort allowed.

Re:Exactly.

[virtualXTC]

I still have my HP48G (sitting right in front of me). I can't stand working with non-RPN calcuators.

Re:Exactly.

[Rob the Bold]

In my 4 years of undergrad and beyond (started as a EE major and switched to chemistry), I never saw a HP calc.

That's really sad. But from the looks of those on the HP website, I can see why. Some don't even have an Enter key. Most look like they're something else that's been re-badged "HP", except for the 35s which seems to have gone the new Mustang/Challenger/Camero/Mini Cooper route. The rest look as toy-like as the TIs.

Re:Exactly.

[clone53421]

If I were to teach a math class at any level, there would be no calculators of any sort needed.

That's how the good ones teach, anyway. A calculator would have been of very little help in most of the no-calculator exams I took. It was more useful on the homework, but you still had to show your work.

Re:Exactly.

[Khyber]

Yea, as if you're going to do astrophysical calculations by hand.

Give me a fucking break.

Re:Exactly.

[644bd346996]

Any decent math curriculum is going to require students to occasionally move beyond symbolic manipulation and use some concrete numbers. It is necessary for students to generally know what numbers to expect to come out of the square root, logarithm, and trigonometric functions. However, asking students to use slide rules and to look up values in tables on a regular basis is a cruel waste of their time.

Re:Exactly.

[amoeba1911]

My HP48GX was stolen when I was in college. I was almost done with school so I couldn't justify buying another one with my college money.

Luckily, I found an HP48 emulator for the Android. It's the next best thing even though it doesn't have infrared or sound like the real thing.

Re:Exactly.

[644bd346996]

The 35 is the only true HP style scientific calculator they are making right now, but the 50g is most definitely an HP on the inside, even though the keyboard is barely above TI quality. From my experience, the only advantage the TI 89 has over the HP 50g for a college student or professional is a higher resolution screen.

Re:Exactly.

[zippthorne]

I wouldnt' do astrophysical calculations on a graphing calculator either. That's what Matlab, Maple, Mathematica, Fortran, etc. are for.

All of those tools are better than a graphing calculator in every way except one: they're slightly less portable. Very slightly. If you're at a conference, you've got a laptop handy. Only a student in a classroom could possibly require a machine as portable (and capable) as a graphing calculator any more, and then only if the instructor didn't see fit to run the class in a computer lab on the days that computers are needed.

Re:Exactly.

[klapaucjusz]

Hang on - it's 2009 and we're still arguing about calculators?

Vi sucks.

Re:Exactly.

[sexconker]

I agree - there's no reason for tedious lookups or calculation. But you need to know how to do them.

Coursework and tests should use nice round numbers that play nice, or have the necessary information (log of X is Y, etc.) included.

And there's nothing wrong with slide rules - they help you visualize the scale - far more useful than a table or a calculator.

Re:Exactly.

[sexconker]

If I were teaching a class, my exercises would have nice round numbers and relevant information provided.

You're required to show your work anyway.

Re:Exactly.

[sexconker]

If you let them have a calculator, they will:

Play games
Cheat during tests
Think less about the process and more about the result

I'm talking all the way from K-12 and into college.
If a kid slaps F(x) = x^3 into a calculator, they see a fun little graph.
If you give them some graph paper and a pencil, they get a messy little graph and a lot of learnin' after a much longer time.

The time invested is very much worth the extra understanding.

Having them then graph x^3 + 5, X^3 -5, X^3 + 2x, etc. etc. labeling all the fun little points and lines is a complete waste of time.

Re:Exactly.

[treeves]

How did it let you down? I used to love HP calculators and had several. I still have a 41CX and a 48SX but I don't use handheld calculators anymore.

Re:Exactly.

[Registered Coward v2]

Hang on - it's 2009 and we're still arguing about calculators? Has this been going on since before the Amiga / Atari stuff?

(Comptometer ftw!)

Goes back to when Ogg and Trogg argued over the relative merits of charcoal or clay pigment for doing calculations on the cave wall. As technology progressed, the merits of flint vs rubbing sticks for starting fires become the next flame war.

Re:Exactly.

[zippthorne]

Whatever deficiencies the 48G+ had were more than satisfied by the good folks at http://www.hpcalc.org/

Re:Exactly.

[Omniscient Ferret]

As technology progressed, the merits of flint vs rubbing sticks for starting fires become the next flame war.

I see what you did there.

Re:Exactly.

[BrokenHalo]

How did it let you down?

It had a habit of randomly rebooting itself, or worse, locking up in such a way that swapping batteries and the other hard-reset techniques didn't work reliably. And of course, when I did finally get the machine to work, all my userland software would be gone and I'd have to restore it from backup.

I had to be really careful about lending the HP48 to anybody; since not everyone "gets" RPN straight away, attempts to use the machine like an algebraic device also tended to cause lockups.

Maybe my calculator was just a dud, but I just didn't need the hassle when I was already under pressure in assessments, so it had to go. The TI-89, despite its faults, has at least been 100% reliable.

Re:Exactly.

[Rob the Bold]

After seeing that god-awful HP-33, I did a little research into recent HP calculators. Looks like the 50g is actually an ARM powered device that emulates the Saturn processor so it's code compatible but faster and more modern. It also looks like HP has been farming out not just manufacture but also development of its pocket calculators to Kinpo (who also makes Citizen calculators) for at least 10 years. That kind of bums me out, that the only thing HP is contributing is the logo. I choose to blame Carly, since it's her fault that they spun off the test equipment.

DMCA Misrepresentation claim viable

[zavyman]

It's highly unlikely that the factors of an RSA private key are subject to copyright protection. Therefore the groups may have a viable claim for DMCA misrepresentation under subsection (f):

(f) MISREPRESENTATIONS- Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section--
    (1) that material or activity is infringing, or
    (2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification,
shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys' fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner's authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it.

Texas Instruments may just have Diebolded itself.

Re:DMCA Misrepresentation claim viable

[Nursie]

Copyright?

Wouldn't this be more likely come under the circumvention of cryptographic protection techniques which the DMCA also outlaws?

Re:DMCA Misrepresentation claim viable

[zavyman]

Two sections of Title 17 (Copyrights) are relevant. 17 USC 512 (safe harbor) and 17 USC 1201 (anti-circumvention). The notice is styled as one under 17 USC 512:

It has come to our attention that the web site www.brandonw.net, contains material and/or links to material that violate the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"). This letter is to notify you, in accordance with the provisions of the DMCA, of these unlawful activities. Pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA, we request that you remove any whole or partial reproductions of and/or disable links to the following:

...

I hereby confirm that I have a good faith belief that use of the Illegal Material in the manner complained of in this letter is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law, that the information in this letter is accurate, and that, under penalty of perjury, I am authorized to act on behalf of TI, the owner of the exclusive rights in the TI-83 Plus operating system software that are allegedly misappropriated using unlawful methods.

TI appears to be claiming that the copyright in the TI-83 Plus operating system software is infringing. This therefore appears to be a notice under 512(c)(3). Anti-circumvention is a totally different section of the copyright code, 1201. There is no takedown procedure for access control circumvention materials.

But with regards to anti-circumvention claims: It appears that TI is claiming that the signing keys circumvent a "technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." This is a term of art.

(A) to "circumvent a technological measure" means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and

(B) a technological measure "effectively controls access to a work" if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.

Are signing keys necessary to gain access to the TI 83 Plus operating system binary? As far as I know, no. My understanding is that they are only used to prepare operating system images for installation onto the calculator.

Re:DMCA Misrepresentation claim viable

[Microlith]

Considering these keys do not "effectively control access to a work" I'm sure that while they may try (the DMCA is the be-all and end-all of corporate beatdown sticks, used regardless of merit,) it's doubtful.

After all, these are signing keys. All they let you do is load a new OS or your own signed applications on the calculator (signed apps are something they've done since the 89 was released back in 1998) and bypass a number of community-developed workarounds to get assembly programs on the calculator, along with the special resources available to such apps.

TI has no valid DMCA claim here, but they're a GRAND OLE CORPORATION to our government and thus deserve more power and leniency than the average prole.

Re:DMCA Misrepresentation claim viable

[TrentTheThief]

And just in case, I think someone might have placed the keys, here: http://crystalwind.com/index.html

Re:DMCA Misrepresentation claim viable

[Cubeman]

The keys are not required to access the binary. There is no encryption; the keys are just to verify that the OS image hasn't been corrupted. The entire binary has always been completely accessible from both the PC side (before transferring) as well as on the calculator. Furthermore, the community has had the ability to load its own operating systems on the TI-83 Plus since 2002. TI had stated in 2004 that they had no problem with independent third-party OSes being loaded, as long as (understandably) no one distributed modified TI OS files. The only new development here is that third-party operating systems can now be loaded onto the calculators without any hacks or preparation. In other words, they can be loaded in a user-friendly manner like the TI OS is loaded, and transmitted from calculator-to-calculator without having to run a special program beforehand. This is a huge deal in gaining acceptance for third-party operating systems, because end users do not want to have to pull out a battery during validation or run a strange program before loading the OS. They'd rather just click and be done.

Re:DMCA Misrepresentation claim viable

[Dr_Barnowl]

the keys are just to verify that the OS image hasn't been corrupted

A CRC or hash would be good enough for that, no cryptographic signature required.

You only sign binaries to prevent tampering.

I suspect that TI define "loading software that isn't under our control" as tampering. A lot of this probably has to do with losing the ability to differentiate between models just on the software that is loaded on them.

Re:Screw calculator binaries; how about x64 driver

[Xtravar]

1. Get a USB traffic sniffing application
2. Run the TI driver on a Windows XP VM and record the traffic as you transfer files.
3. Write your own driver with libusb-win32 and pray that it works
4. Become hero to the TI community!!!

Two things. . .

[Fantastic Lad]

This is about calculator keys, right?

That shark jumping thing has just happened. DMCA, please go home now. You're drunk and you're scaring the remaining guest, the family dog and our kids are shuddering in their bedrooms in fear.

Also. . , you want a calculator hack? I'll give you a calculator hack!

Type the following number. . . "07734" on your calculator and then invert the screen for a pleasant surprise!!!!!

(Ooooh, it's so exciting and. . , welcoming!)

-FL

Re:Two things. . .

[superslacker87]

I like this one better:

There as 1 girl.
She was 16.
She did a 69.
3 times.

Know what she was?

11669*3=35007

Re:Two things. . .

[Megane]

Hooray for the clash of '70s memes with 2k memes!

Now to figure out a way to mix 710.77345 with Iraq.

Re:Two things. . .

[adamstew]

I like this one better:

There was a girl.
She had 69 boobs.
She had too, too, too many boobs
so she went to 51st street to see Doctor "X" 8 times and she came out:

6922251 X 8 = 55378008

Re:Two things. . .

[JustOK]

7734.40

Re:Two things. . .

[selven]

Real men don't need to turn the calculator upside down... 170085

Re:Two things. . .

[dissy]

Isn't Moores Law great?

We went from "58008" upside down, to using the embedded web browser to load porntube :P

Re:Two things. . .

[Eco-Mono]

Wow. I heard that story from a friend in, like, sixth grade and could only ever remember the last part. Thanks for reposting it.

subterfuge

[davidwr]

Someone in TI's legal dept. who knows what the Streisand Effect is wants these keys publicized.

Well, we can hope that's the reason.

Re:subterfuge

[ISoldat53]

TI made more money in the 80s and 90s on legal action than they did on selling products.

Re:Screw calculator binaries; how about x64 driver

[whoisisis]

Try TiLP 2. Made by said TI-homebrew community.

Re:Screw calculator binaries; how about x64 driver

[AresTheImpaler]

Have you tried installing a 32 bit OS on a VM, like say, virtualbox to talk to the calculator? I know it's not exactly what you want, but it might do the trick.....

Re:Screw calculator binaries; how about x64 driver

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately there is now a step 5:

5. Get defecated on from a great height by TI

Re:Screw calculator binaries; how about x64 driver

[Chris Mattern]

5. Get sued by TI.
6. ???
7. Profit!

DRM in a calculator?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm shocked to hear that TI is even bothering to sign things. What exactly could be in a calculator that you would want to protect from hackers or end users?

"Oh no, a virus has replaced all my Fourier transforms with Laplace transforms!"

Re:DRM in a calculator?

[ThePyro]

One of the reasons that TI signs things is to provide a form of copy protection for the 3rd-party applications which are sold via the online store. The calculator operating system will not run a flash application for which it does not currently have a license. The operating system binary is signed so that you can't tamper with it in order to disable the copy-protection. A modified operating system could potentially run flash applications without a license.

As far as user-created software goes, TI doesn't really care what you run on the calculator. It's only non-free flash apps that concern them.

Re:DRM in a calculator?

[ThePyro]

Standardized tests are another reason TI might want complete control over the operating system. If the operating system can be modified then sneaky students could hide all sorts of cheats inside the operating system. Forcing students to clear the memory of their calculators would no longer be sufficient to prevent cheating since information embedded in the OS would not be cleared.

Re:DRM in a calculator?

[Jesus_666]

More like: "Oh no, cheating software can be undetectably installed on TI calculators, thus they can't be used in schools and colleges anymore, killing one major source of revenue for TI!"

Re:DRM in a calculator?

[Schrockwell]

"Oh no, a virus has replaced all my Fourier transforms with Laplace transforms!"

You'd be surprised. These types of viruses are spreading at higher frequencies. It's only a matter of time.

Re:DRM in a calculator?

[clone53421]

Epic!

I've just lost...

[hj43us]

I've just lost any interest on using/buying any TI calculator. Well done TI lawyers! (Do they covertly work for CASIO?)

Re:I've just lost...

[cmdpwr]

Casio? Look into the HP 50g. The keyboard is not quite as good as the HP 48GX, but it's much faster. When I was in school, the HP 48 GX wasn't "supported", but I always found that I learned more by figuring things out myself anyway.

Re:I've just lost...

[ElSupreme]

++ for the HP50g.

RPN FTW!

Re:I've just lost...

[ettlz]

RPN FTW!

And RPL. Probably the best-engineered calculator run-time ever.

Re:I've just lost...

[Rob the Bold]

Casio? Look into the HP 50g. The keyboard is not quite as good as the HP 48GX, but it's much faster. When I was in school, the HP 48 GX wasn't "supported", but I always found that I learned more by figuring things out myself anyway.

Obviously, I'm getting pretty old here, but what does "supported" mean as you're using it w.r.t. a calculator? Is it like, "here's a problem to solve, and here's the keys to use to solve it, assuming you have a TI-83"? Please tell me I'm wrong.

Re:I've just lost...

[Hatta]

TI isn't interested in your business. People who buy TI calculators are forced to by TI calculators by their instructors.

Re:I've just lost...

[icebrain]

Sort of. If you had the "supported" calculator, the teachers would go over how to use various functions, and walk you through an example problem or two. If you had trouble, they'd help you. They didn't give step-by-step stuff on the tests or anything (which is what I'm assuming you're asking about), but they did tailor some things to the calculator. Often as not, they'd throw out problems which the standardized calculator couldn't do all at once (forcing hand work), but which a higher model could handle.

However, if you had anything else, you were on your own.

When I started high school, the TI-83/83+ was standard, except for calculus (which used an HP48, I think). I just used a TI-86 the whole time. It was better than the 83s, and didn't use RPN like the 48 (I don't care how fast it is when you get used to it, the difference is small and it's a lot easier to see what you're doing and catch a mistake on the TI. Oh, and the programs are better).

I never had the time nor the inclination to mess with asm programming, but wrote plenty of stuff in Ti-Basic... math, physics, and calc apps, druglords clones, a two-player chess game with castling and game-saving, etc. (I also specifically remember trying to put in a primitive form of DRM to keep people from modifying the opening credits on my apps and claming the work for themselves--essentially a convoluted series of gotos and number base transformations intended to confuse the simple search-and-replace types which quit the program if they changed the "written by:" line). Most of us had games and the like. There was one called "squarez" or something; it kind of resembled tetris but was terribly addicting.

Re:I've just lost...

[KingAlanI]

I recall one class for which the professor standardized on a particular HP model (because that's what he had and what the bookstore had) However, the dang functions/concepts were the same, I figured out things just fine on the similar-function TI I already had (if I didn't have one, I might have gone with the flow and gotten the HP. But damned if I was buying a second...:P

Its the usual castle gate mentality

[Viol8]

While the TI engineers would probably be happy to share the info, a bunch of management suits still living in the 1960s want to keep everything secret and in-house because they're sure They Know Best as to what everyone wants. Well we all know where this sort of blinkered thinking leads - users eventually just give you the finger and move elsewhere especially if a large part of your core market is the very type of hacker (in the old sense of the word) that they want to stop.

And who are they kidding anyway , these are just fscking calculators! They can't even argue that installing new stuff on them is going to lose them any income anyway. Its not like the average user upgrades his calculator OS every year!

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[TheRaven64]

The weird thing is that TI is actually quite good about open source support in other divisions. They make OMAP reference platforms available at very reasonable price (BeagleBoard, OMAPzoom) for open source hackers.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[644bd346996]

The TI calculator division is all about placating teachers and standardized testing agencies. If it's too easy to install custom software in a relatively undetectable fashion, then the calculators won't be approved for testing and classroom use.

It's not TI that's the control freaks - it's the teachers.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[PPalmgren]

This is exactly what I was thinking. Playing the devil's advocate, I'd be concerned if I worked for TI I'd be concerned about these kinds of situations. They make a killing off of the requirement in schools to use their calculators. When I worked for Staples during back to school season, we'd get a line to the back of the store for 3 days surrounding school starts and over 50% of the line was looking for a TI 83+, so we'd sell hundreds of them a day. I remember large programs 8-9 years ago in high school that had lists of problems with inputs for variables, etc. I doubt it'd be hard to make a program that brings up a screen like the TI83/89 empty program menu, since this is all teachers check for before SATs and the like. As much as I love customizability, if you were in their shoes, would you risk it?

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[ElSupreme]

I had a TI-83 in high school. I wrote tons of programs (although they all just used TI Basic) to do various math functions. I also made a "Memory Cleared" program. I hated clearing all my programs ever 3 weeks when a test came around.

I didn't use pre-made programs during my tests, I did make programs during the tests to do repeat processes. But I got to keep my Drug Wars and Indycar racer games, along with all my other math programs after the test.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[sjdude]

And who are they kidding anyway , these are just fscking calculators!

Perhaps TI's actions have more to do with what will happen if the calculators, when cracked, are turned into "computers". Due to export restrictions, could it be the cracked machines might violate export controls in places where TI can legally sell them as "just fscking calculators"?

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[fermion]

It is about teachers and standardized testing, and that is one of the reasons why the software in the TI calculator needs to be secure. But it is unlikely the primary reason. Prior to use on test, TI has an application that clear the calculator to essentially factory state. This application only runs from the calculator installed, and cannot be transferred to other calculators. This calculator could be modified to actually reinstall an OS, which would be time consuming, but the safest thing to do for testing. Control freak teachers do run the application. Most don't. Real control freak teachers don't even let students use a calculator because there is nothing a calculator can do that a students should not be able to do faster. It takes more time to put in the equation of a graph or table than to just find the roots or the regression equation by hand. The problem is those middle of the road teachers that have sympathy for the students who can't add two integers, but still want them to, at least in some cases, manipulate variables by hand.

The desire to keep the code secure is in a fact a desire to insure sales. For instance, the TI application for the computer is not free, and, IIRC, not site licensed. If the ROM were available, like it is on most of the HP calculators, then someone could easily develop an OSS application and make drive TI sales away. I know that some applications are available, but they require a calculator to download the ROM, and the solutions are not as elegant as the HP calculator.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[I'm not really here]

If it's that much of a concern, why don't the schools have a set of TI calculators that are available for standardized tests? Stagger the testing properly, and you don't actually need one for each student. This way, the student has their own calculator, can do whatever they want with it for homework, etc, but for testing purposes, they are required to use the school's TI hardware and software.

If the school is concerned with the costs involved, I'm sure they could work a deal with TI to receive the "in-class only" calculators for free or at cost. I mean, if you think about it, free (pirated) copies of Windows is the main reason for the success of the Windows operating system... most likely, having easy access to TI calculators in school would get students comfortable with them, and would likely boost TI's market share... it's a win-win situation, and TI can wholeheartedly support the hack/homebrew crowd at the same time without worrying the teachers.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[Anonymous Coward]

The TI calculator division is all about placating teachers and standardized testing agencies. If it's too easy to install custom software in a relatively undetectable fashion, then the calculators won't be approved for testing and classroom use.

It's not TI that's the control freaks - it's the teachers.

if you can program a machine to solve a problem for you...i say kudos...even if its on a test.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[nametaken]

$.

Always follow the $.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[HeronBlademaster]

They can't even argue that installing new stuff on them is going to lose them any income anyway. Its not like the average user upgrades his calculator OS every year!

But even if the average user did upgrade his OS every year, TI gives away their own OS updates for free; they make their money on the hardware, and allowing third-party OSes does not somehow remove the hardware requirement. TI would still be making the same amount of money.

The caveat is that TI also makes some amount of money (I don't know if it's big or small) from sales of add-on applications, and allowing third-party OSes would most probably dry up that revenue stream for some percentage of users. (Most calculator owners probably aren't going to install a different OS, but then, most calculator owners don't buy add-on apps, either.)

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[jslater25]

I too made a "Memory Cleared" program on my TI-85. I couldn't stand losing all info that I had meticulously inserted every time a teacher decided to give a pop quiz or test. At the time, my TI-85 served as a handy little black book and pda.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[s73v3r]

I don't know if I'd put the teachers that don't allow calculators on tests in the "control freak" category. When I was in college, some of the most laid back teachers were of that variety. Typically, they'd make up problems such that you shouldn't need a calculator to solve them, unless you really sucked at arithmetic, in which case they'd have some dumb calculators available.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[s73v3r]

Its possible something like that could work, but really only if the calculator on the test was the same as the calculator the student had been using, and knows how to use its advanced features. I've never owned a TI-89. One day, before a test, my TI-83+ started dying, so I couldn't use it. I borrowed an 89 from a friend, but really, couldn't use it for shit, as I had never used one before. I ended up doing most of the test by hand anyway.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[HeronBlademaster]

If it's too easy to install custom software in a relatively undetectable fashion, then the calculators won't be approved for testing and classroom use.

They're already disallowed by many teachers because students learned they can simply type their notes into the calculator. (Who needs to remember equations when the calculator stores them for you?) The TI-89 and TI-92 are not allowed in ACT tests because they're designed to allow note-taking (the 92 more than the 89, but still). (That particular requirement made my parents buy a new TI-83+, even though I already had a TI-89.)

Honestly I've always disagreed with resistance to calculator use. Why can't I use a calculator to do calculus, or physics? The hard part isn't remembering the equations, anyway; the hard part is remembering which equation to use. Storing the list of equations in the calculator doesn't magically make you know which equation to use, it just helps you remember what the equations are in the first place. Sure, you could probably type notes into the calculator telling you which to use when, but all that effort is going to make you learn it anyway, so it most likely wouldn't make a difference.

I always hated losing points because I transposed two numbers or something somewhere in the calculation (which would not have happened had I been using a calculator), or because I'm simply terrible at doing math by hand. I honestly have no idea how I got a 4 on that AP Calculus test.

If I were hiring someone for a position that required a lot of math, and he proudly declared that he never uses a calculator, I don't think I would hire him. I would want my employees to use calculators - even if only to check their work.

Um... end rant.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[Asclepius99]

There are two reasons I'd imagine this isn't easier. First, you would only have as many students taking a math test at one time as you have calculators for, which would affect standardized testing when usually the whole grade is scheduled to take the same test at about the same time. So you'd need to have several hundred calculators, at least four times as many batteries (TI-83+)), and to replace any broken ones. Can you imagine the complaints/lawsuits if a student's calculator's battery died or something else went wrong and it wasn't replaced immediately? You'd get all sorts of "My son's calculator's batteries died and it took them several minutes to replace them. All that stress of not being able to work and not knowing if he'd be able to finish the test made it so he couldn't concentrate anymore and so he failed. Clearly, this test shouldn't count for him."

As for market share, pretty much everyone I know at college still has their TI-83 or 89 from high school. And we come from several different states and school districts from within the same states. So I think at this point that's kind of like saying Apple cares about getting a larger market share of MP3 players.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[CastrTroy]

There's too much to check for anyway. If you require that the student has a TI-83, they can probably store any number of things in any number of ways. You could store a bunch of cheat notes in some variable. There isn't evough time to walk around to every students desk before the exam and check for the existence of programs anyway. There was 200 students in my Year 1 calculus course in university. They mostly showed up 10 minutes before the exam started. There was no time to verify that they don't have any programs on the TI. Also, there was some required programs to do certain questions. And there wouldn't be any time to verify that it was the proper code running and that there wasn't some special input, that would tell the program to go into some other section of the code, where tons of other functionaliy was available. So our math courses have basically 2 options with this. Make it so that you can do the exam on a TI-30, and only allow these or similar, so that you couldn't program them, and therefore cheat. Or 2, require that they use the TI-86, but design the test such that you assume they are cheating, and make it so that it won't help them anyway.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[644bd346996]

What non-free (as in payware) TI software are you referring to? The software to transfer apps to the calculator has always been free with the appropriate hardware, and I've always gotten the impression that verified teachers can get calculator simulators for free from TI. As for on-calculator applications, TI does sell some, but only to a very very tiny fraction of their userbase, and it seems that most people who have such apps get them bundled with special edition calculators.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[644bd346996]

The big problem with standardizing on a specific calculator model is that it makes it too transparently obvious that the test isn't properly testing any of the skills and knowledge that the class is supposed to impart in the first place. The test is no longer about math, it is about a calculator. Scores then reflect how efficiently and accurately students can perform certain algorithms with the calculator, with a woefully small contribution from identifying which algorithm the problem calls for. From such a test, it is really a small step to remove the student entirely. It just looks bad to do that.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[Anonymous Coward]

Or students should be expected to be able to do the problems WITHOUT a calculator.

You kids standing on that green patch on my property: you know what to do.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[StarsAreAlsoFire]

My TI 89 can ( thanks to my programming ) transform between Space-2, Space-3, Body-2 and Body-3 rotation sequences. It can transform any of those into a quaternion rotation sequence.

I have also written a function that will calculate a minimum energy transfer orbit. I don't remember the details, but it wasn't a simple Hohmann.

Hardly 'adding two integers'.

The guy who talks about ROMs has it. The TI-89 was more powerful than Mathematica when it came out. There is some incredible IP in there.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[vintagepc]

There's too much to check for anyway. ...There isn't evough time to walk around to every students desk before the exam and check for the existence of programs anyway. There was 200 students in my Year 1 calculus course in university. They mostly showed up 10 minutes before the exam started. There was no time to verify that they don't have any programs on the TI.

Which is basically why my profs just hit 'clear all' themselves and move on to their next student/victim

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a high school math teacher who did not allow students to use graphing calculators unless she got to clear the memory. I told her that she did not have permission to look into the electronic contents of my calculator, so she had to loan me a calculator from her classroom set.

A hacked TI would have been useful here, as I could have allowed her to [think she was] clear[ing] the contents of my calculator.

Oddly enough, she was the only teacher I had, K-20, who was ever concerned about students loading cheat sheets into calculators. I didn't even get "checked" for the PSAT, SAT, ACT, or GRE.

Here's my big question: my TI-89 is pretty damn powerful, and let's assume here that the teacher is not checking calculators to make sure they don't have any programs on them. Absent hardware modding the calculator and putting a Bluetooth module in it, how do you expect me to "cheat" with a calculator? PDF an entire textbook and store it in the calculator?

Ultimately, IMHO, cheating by cramming notes into a calculator is an exercise in futility. Teachers probably know it happens, and the time or two I've tried it, I learned more writing in the notes and wound up not needing them.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[TheRaven64]

I wrote a simple app for my TI-86 which displayed the 'clear all' menu but didn't clear anything. I showed it to my teacher, who admitted that he wouldn't have noticed if I'd used it in an exam. I didn't, but I have no idea if anyone else did. Unless you are going to carefully check if it is cleared, then it's easy to fake. My program, for example, let you go to the programs menu and displayed no programs, so you could validate that it had really worked. And it was under 100 lines of code in TI's dialect of BASIC.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[SuperMog2002]

I liked what my stats professor in college did: All tests were open book and open note, and you were allowed to use whatever calculator you wanted with whatever programs you wanted. The problems were tuned so that you wouldn't need a fancy calculator to do well, but if you knew this test was going to have Z-tests on it and you brought a program that could do Z-tests for you, more power to you. However, you darn well better be able to read the presented scenario and know off the top of your head that a Z-test is what you need in the first place. There was a strict 50 minute time limit, and if you were using your resources for anything more than a quick formula lookup or computation, you were doomed.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[klapaucjusz]

[some lecturers] make up problems such that you shouldn't need a calculator to solve them

You wouldn't believe how difficult it is to convince undergrads that they do not need a calculator to multiply 1024 by 4.

(Most students want to use their mobile phone as a calculator -- which is obviously forbidden during the test, we don't want them to be sending SMSes asking for help.)

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[klapaucjusz]

If it's that much of a concern, why don't the schools have a set of TI calculators that are available for standardized tests? Stagger the testing properly, and you don't actually need one for each student.

And spend two days on tests that could be done in four hours? Thanks, I'll pass.

If the school is concerned with the costs involved, I'm sure they could work a deal with TI to receive the "in-class only" calculators for free or at cost.

TI does indeed provide us with free calculators, if you manage to get through the mess that is TI's management. (Different managers appear to disagree on whether or not they are giving us calculators.)

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[gangien]

all mathematicians i've ever met, had advanced calculators.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[kestasjk]

Thanks, that actually explains this quite well and I was totally mystified.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[arb phd slp]

I've found that "completely open-book" is common in statistics courses. I don't think that is the case for other kinds of maths or science courses.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[644bd346996]

I know that TI doesn't do a lot of direct communication with teachers, but every high school math teacher I've met or otherwise dealt with has been able to decide which calculators, if any, may be used on their assignments and tests. On the other hand, I've never heard of a specific instance of a school-wide or higher level policy on calculator use, excepting the ones from ACT and the College Board.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[Toonol]

I think you've nailed the real reason. The requirement in so many schools for students to use TI-83s is reprehensible. It's one of the main reasons that $10 worth of technology is still being sold for $100. If TI had to actually compete, we'd get progress. Calculators have been stagnant.

It also hurts the learning process. I helped a lady who was taking an Algebra class at the community college... she was plotting curves, figuring slopes, and whatnot. The actual MATH TEXTBOOK she was working out of had images of TI buttons and a numbered checklist which described how to calculate slopes by giving the procedure to pull up the right menu on the calculator. She had no idea what the actual MATH behind the process was. It might as well have been describing how to solve the equation by running a Graphing Wizard in Excel.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[Brian Gordon]

Sounds reasonable enough until you start to pick it apart. TI calculators are more valuable because they provide less functionality? What about engineers and mathematicians? Their market should be about making calculations as easy as possible, not about educating little children.

TI should just sell the Playskool-branded calculator for middle school students instead of crippling their real calculators.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[stephanruby]

If it's that much of a concern, why don't the schools have a set of TI calculators that are available for standardized tests?

My school did that. It turned out it was way too expensive. TI calculators are designed to fail exactly 24 hours after their warranty expires. Better they go with Casio, or HP (assuming HP still makes calculators).

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[644bd346996]

Ah. I escaped the public school system before that was around (or at least before it made it to my schools).

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[Brian Gordon]

It takes more time to put in the equation of a graph or table than to just find the roots or the regression equation by hand

Matrix transformations? Solving linear systems? If these take you longer on the calculator then you're doing it wrong.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[Mister Whirly]

Well don't just leave us in suspense - what is the answer? I don't have a calculator with me today...

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[Brian Gordon]

I have a TI-89. I don't think it's all that incredibly powerful. There are just a lot of simple functions that are a great platform for doing complicated things.

The "power features" like the CAS are just flaky compared to other modern computer algebra systems. I admit the symbolic calculation functionality is awesome though.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[jimbolauski]

Real control freak teachers don't even let students use a calculator because there is nothing a calculator can do that a students should not be able to do faster.

Here are just a few things that a calculator will do much faster multiplying large numbers for instance Pi and just about anything.
Natural Log
Power if x or y are large, negative or complex then x^y will take more time
Trig sin, cos, tan, arctan, ... referencing a lookup table and then multiplying it will take much longer.
Matrix inversion
Thats all I got off the top of my head

You are right it is about teachers, if teachers were good at their job then students would understand what they are typing into their calculator to get the answer, most poor teachers fail to effectively teach the why in math so students become mindless zombies just entering numbers into the calculator.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[Brian Gordon]

In high school, I was able to get perfect scores every time because I would begin every problem by finding the answer with my TI calculator, then I would start to think about what kind of solution might lead to that answer. Easy stuff.

And did you turn out as a dumb sack of bricks or did you learn it?

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[klapaucjusz]

what is the answer?

42.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[clone53421]

If "2pi" isn't a good enough answer, I don't see why "6.2831853" is any better.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[Brian Gordon]

Actually, they don't sell apps anymore: all of them are free (gratis) to download.

Even eepro

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[SkipFrehly]

Things get very sticky at this point, though. Most advanced math classes for the controlling portion of students, in High School, and probably half of those in college, are going to be totally useless in their field. In HS my AP Calc teacher told the class that for students like us, it was only a matter of helping us develop our creative problem solving skills. Granted, a calculator isn't very creative, but it's still a novel approach.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[HeronBlademaster]

Ah. I haven't checked their website for several years (when I stopped using my TIs regularly).

So... that makes my point even stronger :)

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[Xveers]

This is oddly one of the main things that's driven into my Business Admin degree. In virtually every course we encounter where we have standardized math equations (mainly seen when doing mortgage and other time-value money work) we are introduced to the concepts and we do some questions on paper, and then we're shown how to use our calculator (a basic BA-II+ by TI incidentally) to do the same math. In many cases it's not the student's implementation of their solution that is a problem but instead their math. A simple error in copying a number or some other mundane "oops" that results in them failing a question. We're taught and trained to understand HOW the calculator does the dirty work so we can recognize when we get an odd answer (the calculator isn't our god after all, just a tool) but we use it to do a LOT of dirty work that vastly speeds up our time. For example, this was a question we had in 3rd year finance. It's not the ONLY question in the exam, I should add. Certainly not the hardest. Anyhow, a pizzeria has the option to buy a new oven or keep the current one. We have to take ALL the cash flows for the next 5 years on both options, bring them back to the present, as well as disposal costs and returns, amortizations, tax shields and more. With a non-linear cash flow to boot. Want to bet how many people did that stuff by hand? Yeah. Not many.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[HeronBlademaster]

I'm not saying calculators would have completely eliminated my mistakes. I'm saying they would have greatedly reduced the number of mistakes.

And yes, I completely agree with this:

In addition there is also the pedagogical aspect. How can you understand what calculus is if you have no idea how to actually do it?

I think the solution is not to ban calculators from courses entirely. The solution is to teach students to do it by hand first, and then teach them how to use calculators to do the same thing. Yes, that requires changing the course. That's why most teachers don't do it - they're lazy, and don't want to redo something that they think works fine.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[klapaucjusz]

Which is basically why my profs just hit 'clear all' themselves and move on to their next student/victim

I'm fairly positive we're not allowed to do that. We do have the right to ask a student to turn his calculator/mobile phone/mp3 player/whatever off, we are allowed to confiscate it and give it back at the end of the lecture, but we're certainly not allowed to clear the data off a studen't calculator.

Surprising as it may sound, students are human beings, and enjoy many of the same rights as we do.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[lgw]

Where I went to school, all match/science tests were "open everything", and usually take-home. The only thing off-limits was help from other people. I still remember my first such physics test: I was worried that I did poorly, since I knew I had missed about a third of the questions. Turned out my sixty-something result was double the mean. "Completely open book" just meant "really feaking hard".

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[Registered Coward v2]

The TI calculator division is all about placating teachers and standardized testing agencies. If it's too easy to install custom software in a relatively undetectable fashion, then the calculators won't be approved for testing and classroom use.

It's not TI that's the control freaks - it's the teachers.

heh. When I was in B-school, one of my proofs banned certain calculators from use on tests - including my trusty HP scientific because you could store things in memory. No problem, I brought in a slide rule and my other HP (11c) and got along just fine.

She seemed a bit perturbed when I pointed out that many calculators she banned had programmable memory as well.

Personally if I can't trust my classmates not to cheat I frankly don't want to be around them; everyone I knew would not program anything in if the prof asked them not to. As a side not, finance ain't rocket science, and I could do 90% of the math in my head or on paper faster than with a calculator.

As for standardized tests, the main advantage of a calculator is you didn't need to know how to actually solve the problem - plug in the middle value on the GMAT; see if your answer is higher / lower and by how much - bingo, select the right answer and move on.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[Registered Coward v2]

[some lecturers] make up problems such that you shouldn't need a calculator to solve them

You wouldn't believe how difficult it is to convince undergrads that they do not need a calculator to multiply 1024 by 4.

Even better, try to convince them that even though the calculator says 2 x 2 is 4.0000000000 that that's not a correct answer.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[WindowPane]

I noticed the same thing too. Even going back 20 years to the very first graphing calculators the prices have not changed much. The technology is so much more advanced now but the price and the screen quality seem to have stayed the same.

We need an open source graphing calculator project. OGCPC! (one graphing calculator per child).

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[bigngamer92]

"TI to receive the "in-class only" calculators for free or at cost"

I think you fail to understand how deeply entrenched the TI monopoly is. Sure most people equate computer experience to Windows knowledge but trying to find a graphing calculator that is non-TI in any High School is truly a mind boggling struggle. I have never seen a HP RPN calculator in real life.

How much does it even cost TI for that Hardware their selling? I'm sure a Game Boy Advance is packing more power than that of the TI-84.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[cbhacking]

How is the 89 suited to taking notes? I mean, sure it's posible, but I thought even the 83 had an Alpha key... I used to keep handy formulas (notes, I guess) on my 86 in the form of "scripts" that didn't do anything.

Only the TI-9x calculators actually had a Qwerty keyboard, which was definitely suited to note-taking.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[SkimTony]

2^12

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[HeronBlademaster]

How is the 89 suited to taking notes?

It provides an explicit "text" file type (rather than just BASIC program files), and its screen resolution is more friendly for note-taking than the 83 series calculators.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[Brian Gordon]

To be honest, if one cannot do 2X2 or 3X3 linear operations using small integers by hand in the same order of magnitude time it would take to type into t TI-8x and get a result, then one needs work on row operations.

Not when you have to apply multiple transformations to the same matrix

On a more serious note, if one cannot quickly do row operations, then how do you know the answer is correct?

More like, if you're not using a calculator to check your work how do you know the answer is correct :)

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[vintagepc]

Later, they just got smart and decided "no programmable calculators... so now we have just a basic one with no memory for any alphanumeric data.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[Alpha830RulZ]

And what was writing a successful spoof program? I think the OP met, at least in some meta level, the educational goals of the class.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[Alpha830RulZ]

I have a TI-89. I don't think it's all that incredibly powerful. There are just a lot of simple functions that are a great platform for doing complicated things.

Maybe it's just me, but I think that is precisely what power is. That is how I think of Linux and open source.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[Alpha830RulZ]

The solution is to teach students to do it by hand first, and then teach them how to use calculators to do the same thing.

I took physics in high school, in 1975, and that's how we did it then. Did something change? I can remember arguing the benefits of RPN with my class mates.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[Alpha830RulZ]

You're a fucking idiot if you don't recognize that this -is- a technical skill. You are no different than the Dilbert comic about designing a world wide client server network in seven minutes. Your comment is equivalent to calling you out because you use a device driver to access a disk without being intimate with it's code.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[rdnetto]

That sounds like my Yr 12 exams (I live in Victoria, Australia). Each math exam has a tech-able and tech free-component, and we can use notes and whatever calc programs we want on the tech-able portion.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[sr180]

I liked what our first year maths courses did. No calculators. First year maths and first year calculus should all be completable without a calculator.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[maxume]

I'm pretty sure the TI-86 sitting on my desk here did not come with an 11 year warranty.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[maxume]

I was under the impression that the qwerty (style) keyboard was the key issue. Browsing around, it looks like the SAT bans calculators for having a keyboard, and the ACT bans them for having a CAS.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[clone53421]

That sounds about like my first Circuits exam. I got something like a 33 (yes, out of 100), and it turned out that it was about as good or better than most everyone in the class. (Of course there was the one Indian girl who got something absurdly high and set the curve... you did say yours was Physics, right?) (She was in most of the same classes I had and always seemed to end up acing the tests, but oddly enough she often seemed utterly lost in the labs.)

It wasn't a take-home exam, either, come to think of it.

Boy was our prof's face red when he gave us back that exam. He was mad.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[clone53421]

Even better, try to convince them that even though the calculator says 2 x 2 is 4.0000000000 that that's not an acceptable answer.

Nothing incorrect about it. Whether or not you will accept it is, I suppose, entirely your prerogative (so long as your students are suitably informed of all your nit-picking rules before the fact).

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[UBfusion]

If 2 and 2 are measurement results, then 4.0000000000 is definitely incorrect, it should have the proper number of significant figures.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[Registered Coward v2]

Even better, try to convince them that even though the calculator says 2 x 2 is 4.0000000000 that that's not an acceptable answer.

Nothing incorrect about it. Whether or not you will accept it is, I suppose, entirely your prerogative (so long as your students are suitably informed of all your nit-picking rules before the fact).

Significant digits. I'd often get students who failed to grasp the concept that mere multiplication does not increase the precision of a measurement.

Often, it's a failure to understand the nature of the work they are doing nor having an intuitive feel for what the answer should be (as evidenced by their clearly misplacing a decimal as they enter numbers and putting down an answer one or more factors of 10 too large or small.); which is a result IMHO of too much dependence on technology - the machine *must* be right. My favorite example is when you give someone a $5 for a $3.49; they ring up $5 and then are lost when you hand the 4 additional cents.

Personally, as much as I like the convenience of technology the slide rule actually forced you to think about the results of calculations.

Nit picky? Perhaps, but there are times when precision is important, so learning how to do math properly lays the groundwork for later./P.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[clone53421]

If you're working on significant digits, that's fine. However, I've always been inclined to think that 2 = 2.0 = 2.000... to however many digits you care to string out. If you know your measurement is imprecise (all measurements are, to some degree), you're welcome to draw a line somewhere.

I tend to think that sort of practice will tend to cause rounding errors and then magnify them. I'd almost prefer to have a precise figure which I know to be slightly inaccurate than an imprecise figure which is almost as accurate as its precision allows, so long as I got the number from the correct algebraic manipulations (with little or no rounding error in the process). At the very end, I'll put it in a form that's reasonable, given the accuracy.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[clone53421]

Heh, posted my comment and then remembered I hadn't finished yet...

failure to understand the nature of the work they are doing nor having an intuitive feel for what the answer should be (as evidenced by their clearly misplacing a decimal as they enter numbers and putting down an answer one or more factors of 10 too large or small.)

Yeah, that happens all too often. I see it mostly as people not being willing to put the mental effort into understanding it and/or working the problem correctly.

too much dependence on technology - the machine *must* be right. My favorite example is when you give someone a $5 for a $3.49; they ring up $5 and then are lost when you hand the 4 additional cents

That's certainly part of it... and when I'm thinking of it I usually try to get the coins counted before I hand them the bills, so they can punch in the full amount from the get-go and the computer can tell them the correct amount of change I'm expecting.

Anyway, I'd still say that "acceptable" is the word you're looking for. Implying that you know more about the accuracy of a figure than you actually know (by expressing it using unnecessary precision) isn't incorrect, it's unacceptable. (Of course, I'm nit-picking over language, so who am I to talk? ;)

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[HeronBlademaster]

The qwerty-style keyboard is only an issue for the TI-92; the TI-89 is essentially the same, but it uses a more normal calculator keyboard (using an alt key for letters). Both use the same OS, as far as I'm aware; both are banned on the ACT, but I'd guess only the TI-92 is banned on the SAT.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[atamido]

My current calculus professor allows us to use whatever calculator we want on the tests, which is extremely useful as it allows us to check our work and see if we made some mundane mistake somewhere. As the answer provided by the calculator is rarely in a form that is even recognizable as the answers we get, this involves simply subtracting our answer from the calculators answer to get zero (or some other constant or variable).

Points are awarded based on work steps, so an answer without work gets you nothing.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[Zeroko]

On the TI-86, at least, the OS offered the ability to add a keystroke handler hook in assembly. That would make fake memory clearing easy. It could even trap & fake other things like checking the memory screen until a password is entered. I would be surprised if no one has written one yet.

& even on the TI-83+ (or even the TI-81 :)) you can always replace the interrupt routine & trap keys before they reach the OS.

Re:Its the usual castle gate mentality

[falcon5768]

Calculator use is almost ALWAYS dictated by a District wide policy. If you heard differently, you heard wrong. You can sneeze in a public school district without it being a district wide policy to cover their asses.

Re:Screw calculator binaries; how about x64 driver

[AndrewNeo]

I think #6 in this case is 'counter-sue'

This makes me wanna...

[MMC Monster]

...use some of my spare CPU time to help out. Any easy way?

Woosh

[zippthorne]

Perhaps you didn't see the "ellipsis of sarcasm" at the end of the sentence.

Re:Woosh

[Haxzaw]

"As a MS/Phd engineering student..." There are several clues in that statement as to why he didn't get it.

Re:So a bunch of...

[FlyingBishop]

It's a colloquialism. Deal with it. Contrary to popular belief, abstract, proper grammar has nothing to do with content or literary value. Now, there are awkward constructions, and there are incorrect usages, but this is a pretty standard colloquialism that in no way obscures the meaning of the text.

Are HS kids their target audience?

[davidwr]

If they were they would be a bit more aggressive with pricing - some of their competitors have graphing calculators for under $50 on sale.

If I were a large school district or state school board I would weigh that heavily when recommending what calculators to recommend or buy for my students.

Re:Are HS kids their target audience?

[sexconker]

If you were a large school district or state school board you wouldn't give a shit about the students or their parents. You'd give a shit about whether or not any calculator manufacturer will be throwing money your way, or, barring that, which calculators your teachers are most familiar with.

That's because HP calculators are too powerful.

[maillemaker]

I've been using HP scientific calculators since the 32S (the one that opened up like a book). At the time, in 1989, they were state-of-the-art, and math teachers had no idea that they could do definite and indefinite integration and differentiation.

Now, of course, math teachers have figured out that modern calculators are essentially full-blown computers. The last calculus course I took a year ago did not allow any calculators, but the last time I was in a math class that allowed them only TI calculators were allowed. I could not use my HP50G as it was too powerful and would enable me to cheat.

I think we've seen the end of high-end calculator development because the main market of those devices - college students - can't use them anymore in their classes.

Re:That's because HP calculators are too powerful.

[644bd346996]

While math classes like calculus and ODEs typically ban calculators from tests, there are still all kinds of chemistry, physics, and engineering classes where a 50g is both allowed and incredibly useful for homework and tests. More than any other feature, the efficient units system in the 50g really helped me in physics and was a great check that my calculations were correct.

Re:That's because HP calculators are too powerful.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I used an HP48 in my computational methods class and aced the exam. We had to show our work too, so I just programmed the calculator to perform the computations the same as you would long hand, and show each step of the process. All I had to do was copy each screen down as it went. I was finished the 2 hour exam in about 20 minutes. There is no more powerful a calculator than an HP.

Re:That's because HP calculators are too powerful.

[clone53421]

LOL. I'd say you deserved that grade.

Of course, I finished most of my exams in ridiculously short amounts of time anyway, so whatever.

My favourite class was "Discrete Structures" (IIRC). Nodes and connections, mailman problem, shortest path, graphs with weighted edges, etc. Everything was able to be solved with a simple algorithm, which had to be memorized. My note-taking consisted of working the problems on scratch paper in-class as the instructor walked us through them. I did not study my notes or the book at all outside of class. There were 4 exams. I got 100% on all four of them. The class was laughably easy, but mostly just because I was good at thinking in algorithms.

Re:That's because HP calculators are too powerful.

[HeronBlademaster]

I think we've seen the end of high-end calculator development because the main market of those devices - college students - can't use them anymore in their classes.

Personally I think that shows a fundamental flaw in our schools - we should be taught using the tools available to us, we shouldn't be taught to ignore those tools.

Re:That's because HP calculators are too powerful.

[644bd346996]

It's worth pointing out the the HP49/50 series CAS has a "step by step" mode that usually outputs enough intermediate steps to satisfy a lazy calculus teacher. It will inform the user when it is performing a substitution, though I believe the user is still required to tell the calculator when to use integration by parts.

Re:That's because HP calculators are too powerful.

[zippthorne]

Graphing calculators aren't a useful tool. They're a contrivance that students have to put up with because of other factors.

Namely: they're a small, nearly useless computer that fits in a backpack and can be dropped. They don't do anything that couldn't be done 100x as fast on a netbook. Heck, they don't do anything that couldn't be done better on a PDA or an eBook reader if it has enough juice to play mp3s.

Re:That's because HP calculators are too powerful.

[HeronBlademaster]

My point wasn't necessarily "We all need graphic calculators in school", it was "we need to be taught using the tools available to us", which happens to include netbooks.

Re:That's because HP calculators are too powerful.

[644bd346996]

Why would I choose a netbook over my HP 50g for math? A netbook would be over twice the price, twice the size, have worse battery life, no number pad, and wouldn't come with any math software on it. My HP, on the other hand, comes with a specialized keyboard and a user interface to match that make it very efficient to input equations. In fact, the user interface is so much more efficient that for simple problems, the HP is quicker overall than a desktop with a full size keyboard and a fast CPU. And I suspect that the kinds of problems that are slow to run on my HP would also be slow running on an Intel Atom that had Windows and a Java UI (I'm looking at you, Maple!) getting in the way.

Graphing calculators are very useful tools in spite of the preponderance of general purpose computers, precisely because they are specialized. Just because a tool is specialized enough that it doesn't include functionality relevant to you doesn't mean that it is useless.

Re:That's because HP calculators are too powerful.

[PCM2]

I had a periodic-table program for my 50g that was a lifesaver in chemistry class. Imagine typing in any chemical formula on the fly and instantly being given the molecular weight. And no, it's not "cheating"! The student gains absolutely zero benefit from adding up the weights of complex formulas during a two-hour college chemistry test. There are far too many other things to worry about. Actually, use of calculators in my class was completely unrestricted. You didn't even have to show your work! But if you didn't show any work, there was no way to give you partial credit if you got the answer wrong...

Re:That's because HP calculators are too powerful.

[Obfuscant]

Personally I think that shows a fundamental flaw in our schools - we should be taught using the tools available to us, we shouldn't be taught to ignore those tools.

When I have a hard question to answer in the real world, I use Google.

Imagine a world where nobody has to think about anything anymore. Who will be writing the web pages that I can go find the answers on?

Here's the point: when you are a student you are supposed to be learning HOW to do things and WHY they are done that way. HOW doesn't mean "press the following keys on my calculator", it means knowing what the physical interpretation is and the limitations and when to do what.

Here's one quick example. In chemistry, when solving concentration problems using equilibrium constants, there is a quick way that ignores decreases in concentration of some species and the long way that requires solving the quadratic equation. Knowing when you can use the short way and when you need the long way, and why, is part of what you need to learn in that class.

Here's another example: if you are given a circuit for an amplifier in electronics class and are asked for the DC voltage gain, yes, you could get the answer by entering all the components in a spice simulation and dividing the DC output by the DC input, but you won't know WHY the gain is what it is, or even how to change the circuit to get a different gain.

And here's an anecdotal story about why "using the tools available" in a learning class is not a good idea. I taught an undergrad analytical chem lab. One of the students forgot his calculator on quiz day. He begged to borrow mine. "It's an HP, it's reverse polish..." "No problem", he said. He took the quiz, and one of the problems was about the hydrogen ion concentration in a certain solution. The correct answer was somewhere around 10^-7 (pH of 7). HIS answer was: 1. One. 1.0000000. His minor mistake was pressing enter before pressing divide. His REAL mistake was not realizing that his answer was patently ridiculous, off by 6 orders of magnitude. But the calculator, his "tool", was beyond question. That's why "learning to use the tools" must FOLLOW learning to use the mind.

Re:That's because HP calculators are too powerful.

[HeronBlademaster]

I agree with you; teaching with the available tools can be done incorrectly. That doesn't mean it can't be done correctly.

Re:That's because HP calculators are too powerful.

[Sulphur]

With apologies to Charlton Heston: You'll have to pry my HP-48GX out of my cold, dead fingers!

Was Heston buried with his firearms?

Re:That's because HP calculators are too powerful.

[Obfuscant]

I agree with you; teaching with the available tools can be done incorrectly. That doesn't mean it can't be done correctly.

Teaching WITH the tools isn't the problem. The problem is allowing the tools to replace the thought process before the thought process has been internalized. The chemistry student had not yet internalized the concept of neutral buffer solutions and pH, so the answer that resulted in a neutral buffer solution being more acidic than concentrated HCl wasn't obviously wrong. And yet the "tool" gave him that answer.

I have no problem with people using a calculator to do math, as long as they aren't in math class being taught the processes that the calculator is replacing. Or to do chemsistry, as long as they aren't supposed to be learning the processes that the calculator is doing for them. Then the calculator is a tool and not a crutch.

Re:That's because HP calculators are too powerful.

[HeronBlademaster]

Well sure, and that's sort of my point. It can be (and has been) done incorrectly, allowing the calculator to replace the tiniest hint of effort. That's the wrong way.

I maintain that math can be taught in such a way as to teach students the concepts while allowing them to use calculators on homework and tests. (Even merely requiring students to show intermediate work would suffice to show they know how to do it by hand, while allowing them to check their answer on the calculator.)

Re:That's because HP calculators are too powerful.

[clone53421]

Here's another example: if you are given a circuit for an amplifier in electronics class and are asked for the DC voltage gain, yes, you could get the answer by entering all the components in a spice simulation and dividing the DC output by the DC input, but you won't know WHY the gain is what it is, or even how to change the circuit to get a different gain.

Ugh, you're giving me flashbacks... maybe my teacher just sucked at explaining it, because that was one of the very few things I just couldn't wrap my mind around. I was completely lost when it came to determining the gain on a simple FET, BJT, or op-amp circuit.

Re:That's because HP calculators are too powerful.

[clone53421]

Sure they do. Ever cook much?

Get the butter and frying pan. Put the butter in the pan (binary operation) and put it on the stove (unary operation). Get the potatoes. Chop them (unary operation). Add the chopped potatoes to the hot butter (binary operation). Wait, stir, flip, what-have-you, remove, serve, salt, eat (all unary operations). I could think of more examples, but I think I've made my point...

Exam answers?

[argent]

When I was in college, we weren't even allowed to use calculators with memory, and in some exams we had to use slide rules only.

Someone could be sneaking in exam answers in a ROM that didn't show up until you entered 1337 and hit "=" five times to hide it from the proctors...

Re:Exam answers?

[bluefoxlucid]

i've never been able to get exam "answers" :| Only methods for deriving them from the problem.

Re:Exam answers?

[Jose]

you clearly need to upgrade your calculator to the latest TI X-99999 with the hacked firmware, it knows the *answers* to all!

From a community perspective.

[Deathlizard]

I've been working with Ti calcs and the Ti community for years, and Frankly, I feel that Ti have been giving us programmers a slap in the face.

First off, they keep resurrecting the Ti-82 series of calcs with endless versions and case updates while killing off more capable OS designs like the 85 series. I have a feeling the 92 series (which inclueds the 89, 89ti, and Voyage 200) is next.

Then, they remove program editing from their windows app as well as letting it stagnate with documented link bugs still included.

Finally, they release the Nspire. The Nspire is such a leap backward from their previous calcs that they actually had to make a version that emulates the 83. (again with the 82 love) It has a neutered programming language. no draw support. no 3d support, removed math functions, no proper input or output channels, ETC. I don't know who this calculator is going to appeal to. K-12 don't want it cause its more expensive than an 83, Higher education doesn't want it cause it's neutered vs other calcs in it's class and programmers don't want to touch it cause it's basically useless with no SDK or useful programming language to speak of.

I could probably talk about the SDK and it's lack of updates and support as well, but I'd rather let the Ti Flash community programmers do the talking here.

I'm not a fan of the key facoring, because it's just going to make Ti clamp down on the community that keeps their calc business (and my hobby) alive, but I don't blame the Ti Community, Not when Ti listenes more to a 9th grade teacher whining about little Johnny playing games on his calc instead of the professor or engineer thats using his calc as a cheap portable way of processing a complex algorythm or data probe accqsition device.

Re:From a community perspective.

[Deathlizard]

I remember seeing a beta with the editor but after that I haven't seen anything else. My guess is that they laid off the entire staff since I haven't seen anything past Ti Connect 1.6.

Regardless, there is no good programming editor for the Ti outside of the archaic Ti-graph link. Some open source versions are ok (such as Daisuke-Edit) but they tend to crash or not get abandoned.

Did you ever consider writing an open source editor based on your original code, or is the entire code under NDA? I know this and a true 89 data editor would make my day.

Re:From a community perspective.

[Deathlizard]

I know I'm replying to this unbelievably late, but here goes.

I actually have one of these CD's. It was sent to me by ticalc.org for contributing before they pulled them off the shelves. To this day I'm surprised that this thing was released.

The biggest problem was that ticalc.org wanted the community to audit the games themselves. What you had to do was select the programs you made that you wanted on the CD and authorize ticalc.org to add it to the CD. They wanted the authors to also not authorize any program that had any inappropriate or copyright material in it. Most people given that choice just selected all and went on their way.

From what was authorized, ticalc.org should of audited the choices. from what I can tell, they either didn't or did a piss poor job of it. Just searching for Mario alone on the disk gets you a couple of hits. The porn was probably a lot harder to find, but It's probably a safe bet it's in the pictures section.

This is the main reason why ticalc.org has the "report inappropriate content" section in the archives now.

Re:Calculator vs. blonde

[adamstew]

Shouldn't it be "At least the calculator can work when the lights are on?"

Re:So a bunch of...

[UncleTogie]

So?

Re:Screw calculator binaries; how about x64 driver

[BrokenHalo]

Surely tilp can be compiled for x64?

No HP???

[volpe]

hp is not supported at all

I that they so shortsighted would be can't believe!

Re:No HP???

[arkane1234]

I that they so shortsighted would be can't believe!

uhhh.. what?

Re:No HP???

[krakass]

RPN, aka Reverse Polish Notation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation

Re:No HP???

[ancientt]

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation

Re:No HP???

[volpe]

Oh well, I figured everyone would get it. HP Calculators use "Reverse Polish Notation" (RPN), also known as "postfix notation". Unlike ordinary "infix notation" calculators, in which you put the operator between the two operands, HP calculators take both operands followed by the operator, thereby eliminating the need for parenthesizing an expression. So, where you might enter "5 * ( 3 + 4 ) =" on an infix calculator, you'd enter "5 [enter] 3 [enter] 4 [enter] + * " on an HP calculator. Every time you enter a number, it gets pushed on the stack. Every operator pops the top two items off the stack, performs the operation, and pushes the result on the stack.

One can write English sentences the same way if one considers the verb to be the operator, while the subject and direct object are the two operands. Thus, what I wrote was the RPN equivalent of "I can't believe that they would be so shortsighted!".

Re:No HP???

[Khashishi]

RPN is optional in most newer HP calcs.

Re:No HP???

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Funny! I have to say it wasn't immediately apparent until after your reply. You left out the operation keys:

With operation keys it may look like:

I [enter] believe [can] [not] they [enter] shortsighted [would be] [that]

Sorry if I kill a good joke...

Re:No HP???

[beelsebob]

I just assumed you were a native german speaker and were shoving all the verbs to the end.

Re:No HP???

[The Dancing Panda]

The joke wasn't completely lost, I promise. I chuckled.

Re:No HP???

[slacker22]

I love RPN especially on my 12c, it's so much faster than faffing about on one of those natural display type calculators.

Re:No HP???

[PCM2]

RPN is optional in most newer HP calcs.

...but you'd be a fool not to switch over to RPN as soon as you open the box. It takes about two weeks to master, after which you'll wonder how you ever used a non-RPN calculator before.

Re:No HP???

[Sulphur]

Do or do not, there is no try.

Re:No HP???

[naoursla]

I'm going to try to check your work.

We can construct a parse tree for a sentence by recursively grouping two groups into a single group. I believe the following is the correct parse tree for your original sentence.

{I {(can't believe) [that [they ((would be) (so shortsighted))]]}}

You want verbs to be the operators. "believe" and "be" are the verbs. "can't" and "would" are auxillery verbs. Those would be unary operators that act on a simple verb. But since a verb is acting as an operator, it is tough to enter a verb and then an auxillery. I'll treat the entire verb as a single unit (if I had a 'operate' button instead of requiring a symbol to operate then we could break apart the verb phrases). How does "that" fit in? I'm going to make "that" a unary operator to complete the predicate target. While I'm at it, "so" is an operator on a noun.

I -> (literal)
they -> (literal)
shortsighted (literal)
so -> ("so" + "shortsighted")
would be -> "they" + "would be" + "so shortsighted"
that -> "that" + "they would be so shortsighted"
can't believe -> "I" + "can't believe" + "that they would be so shortsighted"

I they shortsighted so would be that can't believe!
vs
I that they so shortsighted would be can't believe!

Pretty close, but I'm going to have to take points off for not considering grouping operations other than S-V-O.

Re:No HP???

[Ardipithecus]

you must mean
3 [enter] 4 + 5 x

been using it for a while

Re:No HP???

[LionMage]

RPN, optional on an HP calculator?

Heresy, I say!

(Actually, I think one of the HP calcs I used to own had an infix mode that you could switch to... which I never used.)

Re:No HP???

[Machtyn]

If you had written it in a stack, I probably would have understood it better. :^)
I
that they
so shortsighted
would be
can't believe!

Re:No HP???

[QuoteMstr]

GNU Calc (runs inside Emacs) is also an RPN calculator, and it's actually damn good:

• Choice of algebraic or RPN (stack-based) entry of calculations.
• Arbitrary precision integers and floating-point numbers.
• Arithmetic on rational numbers, complex numbers (rectangular and
  polar), error forms with standard deviations, open and closed
  intervals, vectors and matrices, dates and times, infinities,
  sets, quantities with units, and algebraic formulas.
• Mathematical operations such as logarithms and trigonometric functions.
• Programmer's features (bitwise operations, non-decimal numbers).
• Financial functions such as future value and internal rate of return.
• Number theoretical features such as prime factorization and
  arithmetic modulo M for any M.
• Algebraic manipulation features, including symbolic calculus.
• Moving data to and from regular editing buffers.
• "Embedded mode" for manipulating Calc formulas and data directly
  inside any editing buffer.
• Graphics using GNUPLOT, a versatile (and free) plotting program.
• Easy programming using keyboard macros, algebraic formulas,
  algebraic rewrite rules, or extended Emacs Lisp.

Re:No HP???

[Riven.exe]

One can write English sentences the same way if one considers the verb to be the operator, while the subject and direct object are the two operands.

It is interesting that Japanese language work in the same way: first you say operands (subject, object, time and place of action etc.) and then operator (verb or "to be"). Add to this hieroglyphic writing similar to math quantification and you get the most math-friendlier language on earth.

Re:No HP???

[LakeSolon]

I often read short (and sometimes not so short) sentences right-to-left (backwards) if my eyes happen to be to the right as I scan down from above. This is how I read your post, initially.

I didn't notice you'd done anything unusual until I paused to consider why your post was scored +5 Funny.

Re:No HP???

[volpe]

Obviously, I had to make some simplified assumptions about structure in order for the result to be easily recognizable. Thus, all auxiliary verbs became hard-bound to the main verbs as a unified whole. My goal was to have two such verbs, and only the verbs, be operators. I wanted it to be clear what I was doing, and not have it look like I was merely scrambling the word order. So, in addition to the above simplification, I punted on the word "that".

I greatly admire your painstaking quest for precision in humor. I salute you.

Re:No HP???

[pbhj]

Here's me thinking it was just transliterated Deutsch.

Re:No HP???

[snowgirl]

Actually, you missed something, well, actually, you just butchered the English verb phrases into a single operator. Better is to have:

I they shortsighted so be would believe can't.

The "that" serves much the same purpose of parentheses in math, in that it takes a sentence as a whole and makes it into a direct object... since there is no ambiguity such as that with RPN, one would be safe to remove it.

Note the use of unaries!

Re:No HP???

[UnknownSoldier]

> It takes about two weeks to master

Two weeks? My god man, what are you, an English major? :-)

--
"No, I don't watch Tell-a-Vision. I don't want to be told-a-vision of someone else's propaganda."

Re:No HP???

[PCM2]

Heh. I said to master. I'm assuming you're going to a math class twice a week, and you'll need to encounter a few different types of problems to really get a feel for how RPN calculators differ from the others you may have used.

Within their legal right

[smd75]

Ahh, see this is where DMCA is bullshit. It is within my leagal right to reverse engineer something, so long as I had no inside information in the process. The DMCA attempted to restrict the process, but should be legal. Why do you think we have competitors, Pepsi did it to Coke, Im pretty sure some computer hardware manufacturer did it to some other manufacturer, im confident some OS developer did it to another... its how the world works, and you cant stop it.

Re:Screw calculator binaries; how about x64 driver

[Khyber]

#6 would be counter-sue because there is no binding contract or EULA included with the calculator you bought, which means no contract to follow or terms of use to follow, and you have the right to make it work with your OS for the sake of compatibility.

Re:Screw calculator binaries; how about x64 driver

[Anonymous Coward]

Reverse engineering for the purpose of creating compatibility is an exception to the DMCA restrictions. That doesn't mean TI won't sue, but still...

Can the key be distributed to avoid DMCA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Aside of bad pre
I mean If posting a series of hex numbers constitutes a breach of DMCA because they happens to be a TI's public key, so can these numbers be broken and posted on several websites (a web ring)?
Would still TI claim that I breached DMCA because I used 0xXX on my website?

Re:Screw calculator binaries; how about x64 driver

[Bobb Sledd]

#7 ???

#8 Profit!!!

Streissand It

[areusche]

The keys are here http://diomedes.phear.cc/~chronomex/keys.shtml Download at your will!

Stop your whining and moaning - do something!

[Anonymous Coward]

When something bugs you like this does, go to the top, I say!

Here are the particulars of the head honcho. Let him know how you feel:

Texas Instruments Incorporated
Herbert W. Foster
Manager, Business Services
Educational & Productivity Solutions
Texas Instruments Incorporated
7800 Banner Drive M/S 3918
Dallas, TX 75251 USA

(972) 917-1522 / h-foster@ti.com

IANAL but TI is screwed now

[OrangeTide]

Sending out false DMCA notices opens up TI to some very serious penalties. And this point every member of the team can hire and lawyer and get TI to pay for it, plus be charged with some additional fines. The DMCA in this instance is not a gray area at all. There is no copyrighted being circumvented by this perfectly legal reverse engineering, and a kind of reverse engineering expressly allowed by the DMCA itself.

I am guessing TI executives decided they didn't like something, and forced their lawyers to make a very bad legal decision. Using the DMCA to bully people works, but only if you don't trip over the DMCA itself as TI has done.

Re:They have no choice.

[dave024]

Nope, I believe you can selectively enforce copyrights without risking losing your copyright to it. It is true for trademarks you must make an effort to enforce against people using your trademark.

Re:Screw calculator binaries; how about x64 driver

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure about you, but I have not had much success getting libusb-win32 to work with x64.

Re:Screw calculator binaries; how about x64 driver

[spire3661]

You could Virtualize 32 bit XP (windows 7 has this with a simple download), or dual boot. Other then the extended memory, why are you running a 64 bit OS anyways? I doubt your laptop has > 4 GB of ram.

People still use calculators?

[kindbud]

Is it because your horse-drawn buggy doesn't have an USB port to charge your PSA/smartphone/iPod?

Re:People still use calculators?

[kindbud]

s/PSA/PDA/

Speaking of creaky old tech. Storing this extra message is /.'s punishment for STILL - at this very late date in 2009 ffs! - not allowing users to edit posts. It's no wonder they think stories about TI calcs are newsworthy. /. is a haven for cavemen.

Re:People still use calculators?

[maxume]

It's an attitude, not a technology problem. And it is a good attitude, not a problematic one.

Also, do you really expect high school and college students to sit in class dicking with the POS calculator on their phone or PDA or whatever?

Re:Screw calculator binaries; how about x64 driver

[arkane1234]

"Just saying..."?

wow.. just.. wow...
Here I thought that some dizzy bitch on some newscast saying that would be enough to make everyone realize how stupid it sounds.
I stand corrected.

Calculus

[maillemaker]

>What the hell type of math course was that? So what the calculator could do integration but was
>there some sort of "show your work" where you would have to pencil out the non trivial
>integration problems as more than "calculator gave me the answer". I mean when you get
>beyond basic mathematics, computation matters less and concepts start to matter more.
>I really don't buy those asinine rules.

My college career spanned some 17 years and I have taken all of the calculus classes (1, 2, and 3) many times due to failing or as a refresher, so it's hard to say exactly which classes allowed it and which did not.

Early on in my college career, they didn't care if you used calculators because they did not realize they could integrate and differentiate.

The HP calculators can work in "step by step" mode that you can use to "show your work".

In the last calculus class I took last year, Calculus 3, they did not allow calculators at all.

And why are they so crippled?

[maillemaker]

>Graphing calculators aren't a useful tool. They're a contrivance that students have to put up with because of other factors.

You are exactly correct.

A year or so I bought the new HP50G. It is basically the same as the 48GX I had used for years before. Oh the screen is a little bigger, and has a little higher resolution, but technologically it is little different than the 48GX that preceded it.

So I asked myself, "Why didn't they make this thing more like a handheld computer?"

And the answer is: "Because they are already too powerful for college students to be allowed to use them so no one will buy them."

My HP50G is roughly 3 times the size of my cell phone. Imagine all the computational power that could be put into such a device? It could just as easily be a computer running Windows or Linux rather than a dedicated calculator.

But such a device would never be allowed to be used by students taking tests, because it would make every test open-book.

So calculator manufacturers are stuck on a fence. You have to make a calculator powerful enough that students want to use it, but weak enough that it doesn't get banned.

Re:And why are they so crippled?

[644bd346996]

I'm betting that the 50g cost about a third of what your phone would cost without subsidies.

Also, the technology under the hood is completely different. Instead of a 4Mhz custom CPU with a 4 bit data bus and half a megabyte of address space, you've now got a 75Mhz ARM SoC that could be running in the 200-266Mhz range if the batteries were bigger. The Linux kernel would run on this machine if it had more RAM. The tech industry has evolved so much that running an emulator on the new hardware is cheaper than fabricating more of the old hardware.

QUIT buying TI calculators. When i buy something

[zymano]

I fucking own it. i will install anything i want on it.

Everyone has a right to the inner workings of something they own god damnit.

Re:Screw calculator binaries; how about x64 driver

[Anonymous Coward]

TiLP works just fine

You'd lose money with me

[Perky_Goth]

I bought (well, my parents) two calculators when I needed them because I could install whatever I felt like at the time. Without it, I probably wouldn't have cared.
On the other hand, I see that what you sell is basically what I bought 10 years ago, so that tells me a lot about your business sense.
However, stagnated companies usually die, no matter how much they squelch. At least the OMAP is cool.

echo /dev/urandom

[EverStoned]

TI-83 (Plus): n=82EF4009ED7CAC2A5EE12B5F8E8AD9A0 AB9CC9F4F3E44B7E8BF2D57A2F2BEACE 83424E1CFF0D2A5A7E2E53CB926D61F3 47DFAA4B35B205B5881CEB40B328E58F p=B709D3A0CD2FEC08EAFCCF540D8A100BB38E5E091D646ADB7B14D021096FFCD q=B7207BD184E0B5A0B89832AA68849B29EDFB03FBA2E8917B176504F08A96246CB d=4D0534BA8BB2BFA0740BFB6562E843C7 EC7A58AE351CE11D43438CA239DD9927 6CD125FEBAEE5D2696579FA3A3958FF4FC54C685EAA91723BC8888F292947BA1 e=11

"High end" calculators?

[rdebath]

I haven't looked a 'high end' calculators in years, I use computers all the time. I kind of knew they were still around but really, these machines are terrible!

My expectations were, a modern cheap processor ... like the arm, possibly underclocked for power consumption; well looks like the HPs have that. An infinite amount of memory; well probably 64M each of RAM and flash. That's infinite for a calculator. And a small, but usable screen, probably 320x200x16(4) grayscale, (colour's supposed to consume a lot more power). And a pair of USB cables that allow you to connect to a PC or an external flash drive. The PC software would let you copy the entire calculator and run and program it on the PC (emulator) or the actual hardware.

Well, These TI's with a z80 processor, sorry you only use a z80 mask nowadays if you're a complete skinflint, "high end" gear uses processors that are easier to program. The 68k sounds reasonable; but it's probably a powerhog compared to the Arm (most 32bit+ processors are).

Probably the thing I'm most shocked about is the screen, those 132x64x2 displays are at least 15 years old and have never been big enough for a reasonable graph. But here we are stuck in the 90's or even the 80's.

Quite simply these machines should be two chips, a screen, a load of buttons, usb connector and a battery.
They should no longer be expensive; but are being sold for about the same prices as the smaller netbooks. Or this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GP2X_Wiz

They are all so very disappointing.

Re:"High end" calculators?

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

The TI-89 runs for weeks/months on a set of AAAs, boots quickly, and has a bunch of nice hardware keys that make it perfect for entering math problems.

Yes, it's too expensive. But it's a darn useful device.

Cal - Math Problems

[c0d3r]

I remember at Cal, they would deliberately give problems to solve that they know the calculator would get wrong.

A long time ago...

[okmijnuhb]

a classmate showed me a computation on a scientific calculator in about 1983, which caused the calculator to go blank for about 15 seconds before outputting the answer which might have been an error message.
Does anyone know or remember that one?

Re:A long time ago...

[toddestan]

Probably the factorial function, as that's about the most computationally intensive thing you can do on a non-programmable scientific calculator. Try 69! as that's the biggest you can do assuming that the calculator maxes out at an exponent of 99. Usually takes several seconds to several tens of seconds on slower calculators to run.

Re:A long time ago...

[rdnetto]

That's actually sort of like a program I wrote a few months ago to perform Euler's method for approximating solutions to differential equations. It was significantly faster than typing each expression into the calculator, so I gave it to a significant no. of my classmates. However, the DE we got in a SAC (it's like a minor exam) was more complicated then the ones I tested it with, and because the calculators we're in exact mode, it kept subbing in the old value as a fraction/exponential mix into the expression, which resulted in some really big expressions. It got to the third stage and froze, and most guys didn't know how to get out of the program.
I was able to patch it during the SAC, but needless to say, there were a lot of people unhappy about having their calculators freeze in the middle of an exam.

Re:A long time ago...

[SimonInOz]

1/0 maybe ......... that takes a while. It used to completely blow up my Sinclair Scientific

I'd confirm

[KingAlanI]

At my university, the stats professor even joked about allowing us into the exam room with, in his words, a "cheat sheet" (8 1/2" by 11" paper with formulas of the students' choosing - that made sense; choosing which formulae to include on your sheet was essentially part of the test/challenge.)

GP: By Z-tests, I'm assuming you mean using something like this:
http://people.rit.edu/~smam320/Tables/NORMTAB.PDF

That was the first course in the sequence; the 2nd class in the sequence (which I'm in now) is using the same concept, but in a bit more advanced manner; we're in a computer lab with access to Minitab and such.

By contrast, the calculus class (I only took one, didn't need to take more and won't be doing so) was quite anti-calculator. (To their credit, the problems were structured so that doing the grunt work by hand was at least somewhat plausible. :P)
My last econ prof (okay, don't call it a science if you want, but there was definitely applied math), half-jokingly limited us to "ten-dollar calculators"

Interesting thoguhts on notetaking

[KingAlanI]

Though I've never used it to crib for tests, I've found that, in general, I don't reference my regular-lecture notes much, but the act of paying enough attention to get them down is the learning exercise to some extent.

I had (and still have) some paid-notetaking jobs; the university has to offer that for certain students as part of the disability-services regulations. I had enough of those that I got in the habit, often taking some notes even if I didn't "have to". (In the past, I oftne just tried to run off of normal memory)

As a mark of progress...

[KingAlanI]

..One of my high school's old-hand math teachers recalls paying 100' hours worth of wages for a calculator, and that was worthwhile for him back then, let alone what you could get for workign ~2 hours these days.

students like regurgitation tests; network access

[bcrowell]

I'm a physics teacher at a community college, and I pretty much agree with your stat professor. All my tests are open notes. The thing is, quite a few students show up in college only knowing how to regurgitate memorized information. The professor's job is to push them into operating at a higher intellectual level, but, frankly, that's hard work for both the teacher and the students, and many students get upset about it. Some teachers prefer to go the easy way and just test memorization.

The real frontier here is that net access is getting more and more ubiquitous. Students think of their iPhone as their all-purpose Swiss army knife -- it's a calculator, it's a phone, it's a stopwatch, it's a flashlight. I should probably start walking around the room during exams and checking whether my students' calculator-ish devices have net access, although I'm not sure I'd always know from looking at them. Do I have to memorize what all the popular cell-enabled PDAs look like, and learn to distinguish them from calculators? Luckily, access to cell phone networks in my classroom seems pretty crummy, and the campus's wifi doesn't reach in there yet. That's going to change, though.

It does not run on SINGLE PAIR of AA batteries

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

AFAIK it runs on 4x AAA batteries

"Clean" Calculator approach

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

My instructor always bring about 30 "clean" TI-83+ before the exam starts, and distribute to everyone. You are forced to use the "Clean" ones.

Re:Screw calculator binaries; how about x64 driver

[Aphonia]

I believe the TILP project has x64 drivers. [ tilp.info ] (or atleast Romain Liévin (author of tilp) has some on ticalc.org )

Technical details: 512-bit RSA key

[this great guy]

As a crypto geek, I wanted to know more so I read the original post where "FloppusMaximus" disclosed the first key (for TI-83). It turns out that TI was using an RSA key of only 512 bits(!) This is extremely short: keys shorter than 1024 bits are considered unsafe, and in practice the largest semiprime ever factored was 663 bits (see RSA-200 challenge). Why was TI even using such small keys? It can't be cost, chips doing 1024-bit RSA cost less than $1. TI almost deserved what happened, if only to teach them a crypto lesson.

Re:Technical details: 512-bit RSA key

[mrnobo1024]

The TI-89 and TI-73 came out in 1998; RSA-155, a number of similar size to the TI keys, wouldn't be factored until 1999.

Re:QUIT buying TI calculators. When i buy somethi

[Alien Being]

I fucking wish I had a mod point. Damn it.

Re:Screw calculator binaries; how about x64 driver

[ThePengwin]

Yes he has to watch out for the anti-windows comments of the trolls.

Obligatory post of the keys themselves

[Pig Hogger]

...but obfuscated to thwart search engines. Just replace "[roman numeral]" by "arab numeral" (from 0 to 9 - the rest of hex numbers are unmolested). This are the OS signing keys for different Texas Instruments calculators. The key for the TI-[VIII][III] calculator was first published by someone at the unitedti.org forum in this message: http://www.unitedti.org/index.php?showtopic=%5BVIII%5D%5BVIII%5D%5BVIII%5D%5BVIII%5D. He or she needed several months to crack it. The other keys were found after a few weeks by the unitedti.org community through a distributed computing project. The keys make it possible to sign your own operating system for the Texas Instruments calculators. Texas Instruments now contacted several people with a DMCA notice to take down the keys from their websites. Some of the websites which got a DMCA notice are: unitedti.org, brandonw.net and reddit.com. One of these DCMA notices can be found here: http://brandonw.net/calcstuff/DMCA_notice.txt Here are the three keys: TI-[VIII][III] (Plus): n=[VIII][II]EF[IV]00[IX]ED[VII]CAC[II]A[V]EE[I][II]B[V]F[VIII]E[VIII]AD[IX]A0 AB[IX]CC[IX]F[IV]F[III]E[IV][IV]B[VII]E[VIII]BF[II]D[V][VII]A[II]F[II]BEACE [VIII][III][IV][II][IV]E[I]CFF0D[II]A[V]A[VII]E[II]E[V][III]CB[IX][II][VI]D[VI][I]F[III] [IV][VII]DFAA[IV]B[III][V]B[II]0[V]B[V][VIII][VIII][I]CEB[IV]0B[III][II][VIII]E[V][VIII]F p=B[VII]0[IX]D[III]A0CD[II]FEC0[VIII]EAFCCF[V][IV]0D[VIII]A[I]00BB[III][VIII]E[V]E0[IX][I]D[VI][IV][VI]ADB[VII]B[I][IV]D0[II][I]0[IX][VI]FFCD q=B[VII][II]0[VII]BD[I][VIII][IV]E0B[V]A0B[VIII][IX][VIII][III][II]AA[VI][VIII][VIII][IV][IX]B[II][IX]EDFB0[III]FBA[II]E[VIII][IX][I][VII]B[I][VII][VI][V]0[IV]F0[VIII]A[IX][VI][II][IV][VI]CB d=[IV]D0[V][III][IV]BA[VIII]BB[II]BFA0[VII][IV]0BFB[VI][V][VI][II]E[VIII][IV][III]C[VII] EC[VII]A[V][VIII]AE[III][V][I]CE[I][I]D[IV][III][IV][III][VIII]CA[II][III][IX]DD[IX][IX][II][VII] [VI]CD[I][II][V]FEBAEE[V]D[II][VI][IX][VI][V][VII][IX]FA[III]A[III][IX][V][VIII]FF[IV]FC[V][IV]C[VI][VIII][V]EAA[IX][I][VII][II][III]BC[VIII][VIII][VIII][VIII]F[II][IX][II][IX][IV][VII]BA[I] e=[I][I] TI-[VIII][IV] (Plus): prp[VII][VII] factor: [VI][VII]0[VII]0[V]0[VIII][IX][IX]0[V][III][VII][I][VIII][I]0[VI][VI][III][IV][II][VII]0[VII][VI][IX][V][VI]0[III]0[V]0[V][II][I][III][II][IV][V][II][IV][VI][I][III][VIII][VII][IV][III][III][I][VIII][VII][IX][II][V][IX][VIII][VIII][I][IV][IX][V][VIII][II][VI][IV][IX][III][IX][II]0[V][VIII][IX] prp[VII][VIII] factor: [I][VIII][VI][IX][II][III][VII][VII][I][II]00[VII][I][I][II][VIII][IV][VII][VII]0[III][VI][VIII]0[IV][I][V][VII][II][II]0[V][III][II]0[IV][VIII][VI][III][IV][VI][VIII][I][VI][IV][VII][VI][V][II][IV][III][IV]0[II][IV]0[II][II]0[IX][VI][II][IV][VI][VII][VIII][VI]0[V][VI][VIII][VIII][V][IX][III][VIII][I] n=EF[V]FEF0B0AB[VI]E[II][II][VII][III][I]C[I][VII][V][III][IX][VI][V][VIII]B[II]E[IX][I]E[V][III]A[V][IX]BF[VIII]E00FCC[VIII][I]D0[V][VII][V][VIII]F[II][VI]C[I][VII][IX][I]CD[III][V]AF[VI][I]0[I]B[I]E[III][V] [IV][III]AC[III]E[VII][VIII]FD[VIII]BB[VIII]F[III][VII]FC[VIII]FE[VIII][V][VI]0[I]C[V]0[II]EABC[IX][I][III][II]CEAD[IV][VII][I][I]CB[I] p=[IX][IV][IV][VIII][IX]0[I][IV]C[VI][III]CC[IX]E[I]E[I]ADB[I][IX][II]DBBDD[I]F[VII][VIII]F[IX]0A[VI][III]0DA[IX]C[VIII][VI]EFC[IV]CBCA[IV][IV]E[V]B[IV]D[V][IV]D q=[I][IX]D[IV][III][I]AF[II][VII][IX][IV][II][II][IX][VI][II]0B[VIII][VIII][IV]E[III][VII][V]0D[VI][II][II]D[I]C[VII][IV]F[II]E[IV][V][VI][IX]DC[I][V][IV][VIII][VI]FC[VIII]D[V]A[III]BCDFE[II]F[V] d=[II]A[III]E[I]B[II]0[I]0F[III][I][VIII]D[IX]BD[VII]C[VII]E[I][IX][III]00[IX][VIII]0B0[V][V]A0E[II]A[IX][V][V][IV]B[VII][VII]E[VII][I][IV][II]E[II][III]CDF[VII]C[VII]CA[I][III]C[II][III][III]A[III]D[IV][VI][II]FDFC [IX][VI][VIII]B[I]F[IX]CEAF[II]AC[II]CF[III]0[V][I][IV][VII][IX][IX][II]AD[IX]E[VIII][III][IV][I][IX][II]ACEBB[V][I][VII]DB[IX][IX][IV][I] e=[I][I] TI-[VIII][IX]: prp[VII][VI] factor: [II][II][III][I][I][II][IV][V][II][V][VI][III][VII][VI][II][IX][IV][IV][III][I]

Re:Obligatory post of the keys themselves

[Pig Hogger]

(reposted - darn default HTML posting) ... but obfuscated to fool search engines and snooping lawyers. Just replace the "[roman numeral]" by the proper "arab numeral". The letters of hex numbers are left the same.

This are the OS signing keys for different Texas Instruments calculators. The key for the TI-[VIII][III] calculator was first published by someone at the unitedti.org forum in this message: http://www.unitedti.org/index.php?showtopic=%5BVIII%5D%5BVIII%5D%5BVIII%5D%5BVIII%5D. He or she needed several months to crack it. The other keys were found after a few weeks by the unitedti.org community through a distributed computing project. The keys make it possible to sign your own operating system for the Texas Instruments calculators.

Texas Instruments now contacted several people with a DMCA notice to take down the keys from their websites. Some of the websites which got a DMCA notice are: unitedti.org, brandonw.net and reddit.com. One of these DCMA notices can be found here: http://brandonw.net/calcstuff/DMCA_notice.txt

Here are the three keys:

TI-[VIII][III] (Plus):

n=[VIII][II]EF[IV]00[IX]ED[VII]CAC[II]A[V]EE[I][II]B[V]F[VIII]E[VIII]AD[IX]A0
AB[IX]CC[IX]F[IV]F[III]E[IV][IV]B[VII]E[VIII]BF[II]D[V][VII]A[II]F[II]BEACE
[VIII][III][IV][II][IV]E[I]CFF0D[II]A[V]A[VII]E[II]E[V][III]CB[IX][II][VI]D[VI][I]F[III]
[IV][VII]DFAA[IV]B[III][V]B[II]0[V]B[V][VIII][VIII][I]CEB[IV]0B[III][II][VIII]E[V][VIII]F
p=B[VII]0[IX]D[III]A0CD[II]FEC0[VIII]EAFCCF[V][IV]0D[VIII]A[I]00BB[III][VIII]E[V]E0[IX][I]D[VI][IV][VI]ADB[VII]B[I][IV]D0[II][I]0[IX][VI]FFCD
q=B[VII][II]0[VII]BD[I][VIII][IV]E0B[V]A0B[VIII][IX][VIII][III][II]AA[VI][VIII][VIII][IV][IX]B[II][IX]EDFB0[III]FBA[II]E[VIII][IX][I][VII]B[I][VII][VI][V]0[IV]F0[VIII]A[IX][VI][II][IV][VI]CB
d=[IV]D0[V][III][IV]BA[VIII]BB[II]BFA0[VII][IV]0BFB[VI][V][VI][II]E[VIII][IV][III]C[VII]
EC[VII]A[V][VIII]AE[III][V][I]CE[I][I]D[IV][III][IV][III][VIII]CA[II][III][IX]DD[IX][IX][II][VII]
[VI]CD[I][II][V]FEBAEE[V]D[II][VI][IX][VI][V][VII][IX]FA[III]A[III][IX][V][VIII]FF[IV]FC[V][IV]C[VI][VIII][V]EAA[IX][I][VII][II][III]BC[VIII][VIII][VIII][VIII]F[II][IX][II][IX][IV][VII]BA[I]
e=[I][I]

TI-[VIII][IV] (Plus):

prp[VII][VII] factor: [VI][VII]0[VII]0[V]0[VIII][IX][IX]0[V][III][VII][I][VIII][I]0[VI][VI][III][IV][II][VII]0[VII][VI][IX][V][VI]0[III]0[V]0[V][II][I][III][II][IV][V][II][IV][VI][I][III][VIII][VII][IV][III][III][I][VIII][VII][IX][II][V][IX][VIII][VIII][I][IV][IX][V][VIII][II][VI][IV][IX][III][IX][II]0[V][VIII][IX]
prp[VII][VIII] factor: [I][VIII][VI][IX][II][III][VII][VII][I][II]00[VII][I][I][II][VIII][IV][VII][VII]0[III][VI][VIII]0[IV][I][V][VII][II][II]0[V][III][II]0[IV][VIII][VI][III][IV][VI][VIII][I][VI][IV][VII][VI][V][II][IV][III][IV]0[II][IV]0[II][II]0[IX][VI][II][IV][VI][VII][VIII][VI]0[V][VI][VIII][VIII][V][IX][III][VIII][I]

n=EF[V]FEF0B0AB[VI]E[II][II][VII][III][I]C[I][VII][V][III][IX][VI][V][VIII]B[II]E[IX][I]E[V][III]A[V][IX]BF[VIII]E00FCC[VIII][I]D0[V][VII][V][VIII]F[II][VI]C[I][VII][IX][I]CD[III][V]AF[VI][I]0[I]B[I]E[III][V]
[IV][III]AC[III]E[VII][VIII]FD[VIII]BB[VIII]F[III][VII]FC[VIII]FE[VIII][V][VI]0[I]C[V]0[II]EABC[IX][I][III][II]CEAD[IV][VII][I][I]CB[I]
p=[IX][IV][IV][VIII][IX]0[I][IV]C[VI][III]CC[IX]E[I]E[I]ADB[I][IX][II]DBBDD[I]F[VII][VIII]F[IX]0A[VI][III]0DA[IX]C[VIII][VI]EFC[IV]CBCA[IV][IV]E[V]B[IV]D[V][IV]D
q=[I][IX]D[IV][III][I]AF[II][VII][IX][IV][II][II][IX][VI][II]0B[VIII][VIII][IV]E[III][VII][V]0D[VI][II][II]D[I]C[VII][IV]F[II]E[IV][V][VI][IX]DC[I][V][IV][VIII][VI]FC[VIII]D[V]A[III]BCDFE[II]F[V]
d=[II]A[III]E[I]B[II]0[I]0F[III][I][VIII]D[IX]BD[VII]C[VII]E[I][IX][III]00[IX][VIII]0B0[V][V]A0E[II]A[IX][V][V][IV]B[VII][VII]E[VII][I][IV][II]E[II][III]CDF[VII]C[VII]CA[I][III]C[II][III][III]A[III]D[IV][VI][II]FDFC
[IX][VI][VIII]B[I]F[IX]CEAF[II]AC[II]CF[III]0[V][I][IV][VII][IX][IX][II]AD[IX]E[VIII][III][IV][I

Re:Obligatory post of the keys themselves

[RockDoctor]

...but obfuscated to thwart search engines. Just replace "[roman numeral]" by "arab numeral" (from 0 to 9 - the rest of hex numbers are unmolested).

That sounds like a challenge.
So, I grab a string from the middle of your post - "FEF0B0AB" - and ... either Google has been DCMA'd, or it hasn't indexed a page with that string in it.
Oh, hang on, you said that you'd replaced "arab" 0 to 9 with "roman" equivalents, which can't be right because your post includes zeros, and "roman" numbers don't include a zero. So, your statement of what you've done is inconsistent with your data, and I suspect that there's some other problem too.

Time to RTFA, I think.

Re:QUIT buying TI calculators. When i buy somethi

[zymano]

damn right.

Re:Screw calculator binaries; how about x64 driver

[whoisisis]

> I'm not sure about you, but I have not had much success getting libusb-win32 to work with x64.

Luckily the source is available, along with free and open source compilers for Windows.

Extra points for sending the compiled binaries to the project.

Any good RPN calcs left?

[AlpineR]

I love RPN and I have a HP 32 S II (~1994) that I treasure. I keep that at work and wanted another for home.

The closest I could find was an HP 35s which I hate. It requires scrolling just to see the exponent on anything but simple fractions. The STO button requires an extra shift and lacks a variable label. Common operations and constant are scattered irrationally around the keyboard.

Is there a modern calculator that can match the simple elegance of my HP 32 S II?

Re:o rly?! nothing?

[clone53421]

That's a perfectly acceptable answer.

There's absolutely no reason to write 3617561260.1171968 when 23.2^7 would be sufficient.

You are right!

[maillemaker]

It was an HP-28S I had:

http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp28c.htm

So you can see what you are doing.

[maillemaker]

>Why would I choose a netbook over my HP 50g for math?

So you can see what you are doing on a nice high-resolution color display. An on-screen touch-screen keyboard could give you whatever mathematical interface you desired.

Re:So you can see what you are doing.

[644bd346996]

Touch screens don't work for calculators. Tactile feedback is too important, because most data entry into a calculator comes when the user is looking at stuff written on paper. If you can't touch type even a few digits, then the device is basically too unusable to be worth carrying around for calculating purposes.

And while high resolution displays would be nice, I don't think it needs to be anywhere as big as on a netbook. A 4-5" display would probably be the largest that could be effectively used by a calculator with capabilities comparable to what's on the market today.

At some point this becomes impossible.

[maillemaker]

The problem is that at some point it becomes impossible to learn everything. For example, I spoke with a friend of mine who became a doctor. I said, "I'm amazed with all the advances in medical technology you can learn everything even in 7 years of medical school!" He said, "You can't." At some point, you are going to have to come to terms with the fact that the computer is, in fact, able to do the computations accurately and it doesn't matter if you know how it works or not so long as you can MOVE FORWARD making new progress on past assumptions. If the assumptions are found to be incorrect they can be fixed and software patched. Yes, the disadvantage is you don't fully understand the basics. The advantage is you can concentrate on applying the tools to solving new problems instead of wasting time trying to understand what is already assumed to be correct.

Tactile feedback on touch devices.

[maillemaker]

It is quite possible to have tactile feedback with touch screen devices.

I agree the touchscreen does not need to be as big as a netbook. The screen on the HP50G would be fine - if it were high resolution and color.