Slashdot Mirror
TI vs. Calculator Hobbyists, Again
Deep Thought writes "Texas Instruments, already infamous thanks to the signing key controversy last year, is trying a new trick to lock down its graphing calculators, this time directed toward its newest TI-Nspire line. The TI-Nspires were already the most controlled of TI's various calculator models, and no third-party development of any kind (except for its very limited form of TI-BASIC) was allowed until the release of the independent tool Ndless. Since its release, TI has been determined to prevent the large calculator programming community from using it. Its latest released operating system for the Nspire family (version 2.1) now prevents the calculators from downgrading to OS 1.1, needed to run Ndless. This is TI's second major attack on Ndless, as the company has already demanded that websites posting the required OS 1.1 remove it from public download [PDF, in French], obviously to prevent use of the tool. Once again, TI is preventing calculator hobbyists from running their own software on calculators they bought and paid for."
us mathematicians DO NOT use calculators. We don't do arithmetic. Don't tag this math.
Go for HP then. (learn RPN!!)
And even then, if I want to hack it, I'd go for a Palm or software in an iPhone/ Android. The processor and raphics in these things runs circles around calculators.
I understand for some occasions (tests, etc) it has to be a calculator, but I doubt it would be allowed to run modified software.
Time for discreet calculators is almost over.
how long until
Why use TI
HP make better calculators (with RPN), and they encourage the community.
Seriously - why are they trying to stop this? It's not like there is a huge app store (phones) or a huge market for pirating apps (nintendo ds/psp) where they would lose money by allowing this. Can somebody explain the reasoning behind their unwillingness to allow hobbyist applications to me?
I couldn't have survived high school without something to keep my mind occupied. I constantly programmed on my TI-83+, and I couldn't imagine NOT having the ability to script tasks or create random programs for fun. The TI-83 got me into programming, and it's helped me hone many of my logic skills!
I came, I saw, She conquered.
Where even calculator manufactures are trying to control how we use things we pay for. Why do they even care how we use them after we pay for them?
I understand for some occasions (tests, etc) it has to be a calculator, but I doubt it would be allowed to run modified software.
Which represents a TREMENDOUS market for TI, one that they are not going to give up on so easily. You may doubt that modified software will be allowed, but nobody is looking at checksums before you enter a testing room. The assumption is that you have not modified your calculator, and if that assumption is shaken, it will mean the end of a lot of calculators for standardized tests. If I were to try to guess why TI is fighting these hackers, I would say that it is all about the standardized tests, where TI calculators are exceedingly popular.
Palm trees and 8
Learn it.
Love it.
Never look back.
TI is not "preventing calculator hobbyists from running their own software on calculators they bought and paid for." They are selling calculators that are exceptionally difficult to run your own software on (a stupid move), but they are doing nothing to prevent you from doing do so should figure out how. If you don't like that don't buy one. None of your rights are being infringed. You got what you paid for and you are free to do with it as you will.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
There is a huge market for graphing calculators because of standardized tests, and those tests have specific requirements on the limits of the calculator's functionality. If you can modify the calculator's firmware, then you can make a run around those rules -- the inspections of calculators rarely involve turning the calculator on, and even if it did, it would be trivial to disguised hacked firmware. These standardized tests rely on a perception of fairness and accuracy, which creates a requirement for standard calculator firmware, which means that a major part of TI's calculator business is created by the un-hackability of their calculators.
Palm trees and 8
Same thing like any other vendor (except open source ones) is trying these days.
Apple controls software installation through iTunes (and very rigorous rules). Amazon, Apple and Google can remove software from your hardware. ...
TI is only trying the same stunt
Who the [expletive deleted] would want to mess with a TI?
You're much better off using an HP.
RPN got me into stack architecture, FORTH, Smalltalk and lots of other things.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
the company has already demanded that websites posting the required OS 1.1 remove it from public download [PDF, in French], obviously to prevent use of the tool. Once again, TI is preventing calculator hobbyists from running their own software on calculators they bought and paid for.
If I'm parsing the "their" correctly, TI is preventing hobbyists from running hobbyist software? Perhaps, but TI is also trying to prevent hobbyists from running a buggy version of TI software. A little objectivity is a good thing.
Why should TI prevent hobbyists from running buggy or out of date software?
Palm trees and 8
Well, not the schools specifically. But that schools are TI's primary market for graphing calculators, and they have a huge markup due to using outdated hardware, so they're going to want to push them.
Unfortunately, schools require the calculators to be crippled to prevent their use for cheating (which could be non-math related cheating...), thus ensuring that students will learn to lean on devices that they will never see in their subsequent careers in industry or research.
If the portable math-machine really were something that people felt they needed, you'd see iPhone apps that were actually useful: the hardware is far more capable than the piddling processors they're putting in the math-class toys, or you'd see the prices of dedicated hardware drop into the $10-$20 range that scientific calculators have been in for decades.
Graphing calculators, at the moment, seem to have little more purpose than to bilk schools out of money from well-meaning but ill-informed "technology initiatives."
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Write your own hobbyist OS. Someone needs to disassemble the 2.1 OS then translate it into accurate and detailed pseudo-code. After that, another team needs to take the results of the first step and write it again using the pseudo-code as the map. Once that works achieving a high level of compatibility, then focus on improvements that will better enable functions and features.
Alternatives and other issues aside, a real hobbyist solution is to build one's own OS.
What's the point of TI going to such measures to lock down the calculator? How does people running their own programs hurt TI? TI does not sell apps do they? Look at one of the big selling points of devices like the iPhone: the ability to buy and/or develop your own software for it, the choice of thousands of third party apps make the iPhone and other similar devices very appealing.
So, what does TI have to gain by locking down the calculator???
BTW, I used to be a big calculator use, both HP and TI, but now I've found a very nice and far more capable replacement: a nice netbook, running Ubuntu with Mathematica!
And even then, if I want to hack it, I'd go for a Palm or software in an iPhone/ Android. The processor and raphics in these things runs circles around calculators.
Battery life in my HP 48GX runs circles around your Android. It sits in my desk, and any time I need it, it works; battery life is dependent on how long you actually use it- there's little standby drain. I cannot remember the last time I replaced the 3 alkaline AA's.
Also, I bet your Android doesn't get faster after you've charged the battery! :-P
Please help metamoderate.
Yet another reason to get an HP. Just looking around the office, Most engineers use HPs. Looking at the breakdown therein, the more competent engineers tend to us HP while the warm bodies tend to use TI. There are a few exceptions but not many.
So what? As everyone else said, there's no point in buying a TI to do real math and graphing—just buy a laptop and put Sage/Octave/R/whatever on it. The point of a TI is that it's a portable device with presumably circumscribed functionality well known to teachers and proctors. Whether or not I think this is the way exams should be conducted, why shouldn't TI feel free to pursue this market?
Clearly it would be bad if every device were like a TI calculator or iPhone, but as long as they are niche players, I see no problem in their actions. If anything it's the Ndless community that's being counterproductive here.
I've been around the calculator community for a few years now, and I have enjoyed many of the community's creations. It is a shame to see TI attempt to crush their most devoted customers...
For scientific calculating just use a Casio FX-82, which sets you back about two dollars (no kidding). Most models have over 130 scientific functions.
If a problem can't be (easily) solved with that one, there's Mathlab or one of the many clones. I can't imagine someone trying to do symbolic algebraic manipulation on a tiny screen without a full keyboard.
Graphing calculators? I just don't get it, there is nu business case for them, yet everyone thinks they need one.
Back then we didn't even have calculators and it was tough to write a crib on your slide rule.
I still have my slide rule. You never know when civilization is going to collapse and you can't get calculator batteries for your non-solar powered ones.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I mean, if there is enough market for a hackable calculator, then TI should sell another model which its user could load software into.
"Or in other words, we have to expect our students to have a skillset that was abandoned decades ago. Worse, we may have to abandon requiring numerical answers all together, and switch to something more abstract -- the last time that was tried, it was a miserable failure (see: new math)."
I can still do it all by hand, or using a slide rule and interpolating tables is not hard. It
all got us to where we are today, it cannot be denied. Space flight, slide rules and log tables.
Computers... you guessed it, and when batteries fail, what ya gonna do? Call Ghost Busters???
The real test is not how well you can push buttons, the real test is how much you know and how
much you can derive, from the given data !!! NIGGAHS!!!
When I was in high school, Zshell (an exploit that allowed running native Z80 assembly on a TI-85) was all the rage. The exploit and various apps (mostly games) spread virally throughout the school. I did some Z80 assembly programming myself, and it was a learning experience arguably more useful to my career than anything I learned in high school...
Years later at college, when my old 85 had been handed down to a younger sibling, I found I needed a graphing calculator for a physics class. I bought a TI-89 and was impressed to see TI allowed it to run native software, no hacks required. (There were still hacks, to get around a few limitations such as code size, but even these limitations were relaxed in later firmware versions.) I spent far more time programming the calculator than actually using it as a calculator.
Now they're back in their lock-it-down mode? Shame. It always disappoints me when manufacturers go out of their way to make their devices less useful--and in this case, a less capable learning tool, for budding programmers anyway.
It's sad that TI are having to do this. When I was at school we basically had the choice between Casio and TI85 graphing calculators. Casio were far more popular until people discovered how to run assembly mode programs (and games) off the internet. Then everybody wanted a TI. TI even supported this at first by adding assembly mode into the TI86.
Unfortunately by the time I got to finals at university, graphing calculators had been banned because of the ability to store (and hide) extra programs and information. I guess that by locking them down, Texas are trying to prevent this becoming more widespread. Texas are in a no win situation. They don't want to go after their customers but if they don't they might not have any customers at all!
By using very simple convention, you can put the entire equation program from graduation physic. Naturally the equation are useless without knowing how to use them, but still. In QM (my graduation) they allowed all books, calculator, whatever you wanted. It did not help *a bit* as long as you did not udnerstood what this was about and how to reason your way out of a paper back.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
TI has a product that is sold and intended for the educational market. Normally I would wonder why a manufacturer would go out of his way to lock down functionality, but in TI's specific case, in that they are selling specific models for the educational market which can be used in tests, I would think TI reasons for locking down the functionality are valid.
I was in college 30 years ago and programmable calculators were out of the reach of most students but I knew a few students who had programmable calculators that were used as crib sheets. A lot of professors stopped allowing calculator use on tests since they had no way of checking each calculator for crib notes. Having a calculator whose functionality is locked down gives those professors and students a way of using calculators on tests while reducing the chance to cheat. By the way, I used a TI sr-10 in college, very limited functionality.
TI does not lock down all of there models, just the ones intended for the educational market.
My son's high school allows 1 model for use in all upper level math and science courses. It is a TI graphing calculator. I think that this situation is a reasonable compromise.
Yeah, I know about school, but...
I have the HP41cx on my iPhone and it is great. All my old programs work just fine.
I haven't given a thought to creating elaborate programs or operating systems to go on it, but given the dramatic shift to touch screens with iPhone & now iPad, the days of dedicated hardware seem gone.
If we are going to advance students capabilities, it is going to take open systems that lets students create crap, fail and try again.
That is the ONLY WAY YOU LEARN!
These are little tiny computers There is a perfectly good Windows machine in the Xbox360 that's locked ? Or Wii homebrew/PS3 Linux? Why not release office for Xbox360? This is a retarded thing. Literally they retard and limit devices sold to us and have been for years.
"TI is preventing calculator hobbyists from running their own software on calculators they bought and paid for." so, stop 'buying and paying' for them, and they will change their policies in short order.
In secondary schools in Hong Kong, we never have graphing calculators, neither for class nor for exam. What we usually have is a CASIO fx-3650P or if you want to pay cheap like me, a Sharp EL-506V. If you can't even draw high school level 2d graph by hand yourself, then your maths skill is just not on par. If you really need to draw complex 3d graph or such in university, then you have a full-fledged computer, with MATLAB or Mathematica, available after class.
Could somebody tell me what force you guys in America needs graphing calculator in class in the first place?
If you don't like that don't buy one. None of your rights are being infringed. You got what you paid for and you are free to do with it as you will.
Nicely done. You got a passing grade in the free market school cheer ("Viva caveat emptor!") and DNF in every aspect of the situation worth discussing. You've clearly set yourself ahead well ahead of the obese peloton walking their bikes up the intellectual incline with loud proclamations that TI has no moral right to make a stupid decision (which as you rightly point out is their eternal privilege).
With any nose at all for controversy, you might have wondered out loud who TI regards as their real customers for this product. In a shocking development, it might not be the high school students (or parents thereof) who actually shell out their hard won cash. There's a challenging concept to swallow for a transactional reductionist.
TI might regard their customers for this product to be school board administrators who hold the power to set curriculum standards which induces teachers to set exams that are biased toward the success of students buying a particular TI product, abused of most of its generative learning potential by the grasping grubbiness of TI corporate headquarters.
In an educational system that prizes testability over learning, perhaps this is exactly what the true customer demands.
But as you point out, if you don't like it, you don't have to buy one. It's not like the customers of the school board (ostensibly the students) have any say in the educational product they consume, supposing they actually got together and groused publicly. It is their disempowered cash after all, that turns the main propeller.
But then, as your stellar argument has it, if the school system is corrupt you don't have to attend. There's the beauty of libertarianism. You've got a perfect retort for everything, in the world as it ought to exist.
Of the ten or more creative ways to look at this situation, caveat emptor drives the hearse.
I can't help thinking that this behavior is a repeat of TI's attempt to control the software market just as it did with the TI 994A, years ago (in 1979-81 for newbies). I hope this locking down their calculators is limited to the educational market.
TI could create another model for modding.
Bert
Tin ear, tin hat, tin whistle, tin spire - is this the image they want?
Standard tests restrict which models can be used and TI maintains machines to fit this purpose. The other is legal patent protection of ideas, Intellectual property.
Currently the case is that many calculators are running modified software, yet they are still allowed. Why is TI still afraid? Don't they know the reality?
This whole thing makes absolutely no sense to me. I mean, what the hell, TI? I can at least understand the point of view of say, SONY, when they try to block people from running homebrew on the PSP... But I don't really see TI being worried about PIRACY on their CALCULATOR. What the hell are they even thinking? What's the rationale behind this ridiculousness?
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
I don't know if this has been mentioned in the comments yet, but I would like to point out that by banning third party ASM/C programming on the most recent TI calcs, Texas Instruments is blocking a generation of students from learning how to program on their own and gaining important knowledge about programming and computers that is very helpful in the future. Many students get their first insight into programming with TI calculators. Learning a lower level programming language, such as TI-BASIC or C, can be a very valuable tool for learning higher level languages. Many people here are asking why we don't just hack an IPhone. Although we can hack an IPhone, this device costs much more and is much less available than TI calcs. In schools across the United States, many students get to use TI calcs by either being made to buy one or using one provided by the school. They are there to hack. Why shouldn't we do so?
If you ask the TI-89 to derive x^2 -24x*y(x) + 16y(x)^2 -400x-300y(x)=0 it will give a "Warning: May produce false equation" and then give the wrong answer. Why is this?
For not much more than $170, you could get a netbook that would give you access to SAGE Notebook, and much else besides.
$170 for a crippled computer is a ripoff.
These calculators are insanely overpriced.
Several of my friends in high school learned Z80 assembly thanks to the TI calculators, which they found to be useful in teaching them programming. For some reason, we didn't have an AP Computer Science offering at my school despite it being a new school which boasted state of the art tech at the time.
Seriously, why design tests which need calculators? Even graphing ones!
Why not limit calculations to easy mental math?
They say anything one does once past the event horizon can only hasten the descent.
What a one sided version of what is a huge issue.
In the education field if you can't control cheating what the hell good is testing doing? That is what this is all about and yes there is a whole lot of collateral damage going on because of it. But the kicker is that it's all so stupid.
You implement a key sequence that will reset any TI, Casio, whatever calculator to it's factory settings. Hell even a little button under the battery cover. Whatever. When someone walks into a testing center they present their calculator and the steward hits that button.
But what about the programs that the user might have had on their calculator you might ask? Well they backed them up before going to take a test where they knew they were going to have their calc wiped. So when they get home they resync their calc and they are back to where they were.
This issue is such a non-starter if there was just some common sense applied that it makes me very sad.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Design the calculators and OS to allow full hackability.
But provide a hardware reset button that can reset it to a known hack-free state (i.e. official TI software)
Satisfies all the hobbyists who want to mess with the calculators.
And it allows the exam supervisors in the cases where they dont want people to bring programs/hacks/notes in to reset the calculators to a known-safe state with the hardware reset
So even though the entire point of calculators is to automate certain mathematical functions, the article can't be tagged math? Mathematicians are not the only ones using math.
This is the same thing I say to people who bitch about the iPhone.
Calling attention to the things that TI is doing is all fine and good. but unless people are also encouraged to purchase other products, it is nothing more than impotent whining.
Don't buy TI's products. Don't buy products that depend heavily on technology from TI.
Publicly proclaim in as many venues as possible your decision not to buy from TI, and your reasons.
I'm sure everyone here has a blog. Create a little logo that says "I don't buy TI" that links to a write-up on what the company is doing.
This is how the market punishes bad actors.
Get to it!
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Back in highschool, I wrote my own periodic table of elements, and a geometry theories tool that let me pass my tests.. Teachers had no idea I could program the calculator.. lol
If I understand correctly, one cannot write their own software for the iphone or ipad. All such apps must have Apple's blessing. That's one reason why I own a Blackberry. Come to think of it, I can't understand why either company would care??
They are allowed to this kind of practices. The Law enables them to take such an abusive action. Nowadays every device contains intellectual property in a way that is practically impossible to tamper with the thing and do grassroots incremental innovation. The big IP companies has us by the balls. They are bullies using coertion by the government to abuse of the natural right to property. Imaginary property isn't property. We should fight patent and copyright laws, because they are the cause of our current lack of freedom. Technology and art should be yanked out of soulless corporate beasts, and Law should change to best serve individual freedom.
The obligitory...
You had slide rules?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
One of my favourite classes in college was a math class (cryptography and number theory) in which the teacher wrote a program to generate a unique test (and unique homework) for every student in the class. You were allowed any resource you wanted including bringing a laptop with internet access, completed homeworks, notes, a portable printer, etc. You were even allowed to consult with your neighbour if they were willing to spend their time helping you.
It was incredibly refreshing not to have arbitrary restrictions regarding how to solve the problems on the test. Almost everyone simply brought their homeworks in and solved the problems on the tests by looking at similar problems they had solved earlier (including me), but some people went the extra mile and actually wrote tools to solve the problems for them which the teacher was entirely ok with. Few if any people ever asked a neighbour for help even though they were allowed.
My son just turned b.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
What, are they prepping for an app store too? I still have an old TI-85 I used in high school and collage for Calculus it feels like a brick in your hand compared to todays modern electronics, but it still works well if you don't mind waiting a few seconds for it to compute a complex calc function.
There's more to math than mathematicians. Your mathematics isn't the only math people do.
--
make install -not war
This boondoggle costs TI money, and not just in bad marketing. It costs money to lock down your platform. What does TI get out of it? Is TI afraid that people will use some FOSS operating system that flourishes on TI, to run the same apps on some competing HW, so people will buy the competing HW instead of the TI calculator? If not, what the hell is TI screwing its shareholders for by wasting this expense with no revenue to gain from it?
--
make install -not war