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."
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
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
we weren't allowed used any programmable calculators or calculators which could store info.
Chisenbop? So you can count to 99 using two hands? Because bi-quinary arithmetic is so easy. I just count in binary on my fingers. I can count to 31 on each hand, or 1023 if I use both. Plus, binary arithmetic is easier than even decimal arithmetic and it's easy to run a basic full-adder algorithm over both hands and read off the result.