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."

Comments

Why bother?!

[JamesP]

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.

Re:Why bother?!

[Anonymous Coward]

+1

If you use graphing calcs and own an ipod touch or iphone, I suggest checking out this.

Its $0.99, ands beats the pants off of the ti83/84 series (pinch zoom rocks for function graphs!)

I did a demo in one of my classes last semester and (not surprisingly) all students which own such devices said they'd rather use this instead of a standalone calc. we're thinking of buying a set of calcs for instructor checkout during exams, thereby eliminating the need to force hundreds of our students to shell out $100+ for a calc they'll use for a semester and then forget about
 

Re:Why bother?!

[__aasqbs9791]

IIRC HP quit the calculator business.

Really?

Sure, and a PC runs rings around Cell phones. That does not make them great calculators however, as it's the tiny math related buttons you want.

Something like these is probably what the OP was talking about.

What would HS have been like

[KingArthur10]

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!

How long since you were in school?

[betterunixthanunix]

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.

Re:How long since you were in school?

[Journey72]

Other schools may be different, but at mine, on any test that we took in math class, our teacher would reset our calculators to its factory defaults.

Re:How long since you were in school?

[HungryHobo]

we weren't allowed used any programmable calculators or calculators which could store info.

Re:How long since you were in school?

[JamesP]

I graduated in 2004.

Funny enough, in my university there were ZERO TI Calcs, we would all be in HP48/HP48+ and beginning to see the 49s... (not in US, as you may have guessed)

But I've seen TI calcs (in France), people would use TI-92s and entry-level models, still, there was one HP48 in my class there.

[quote]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.[/quote]

Makes sense... Still, I'd guess they would ban the 'fancy' calculators.

At the same time, people would not check the fact that some people had entire tests solved on their 48G+ (I had the 48G)

Re:How long since you were in school?

[betterunixthanunix]

I graduated high school in 2005 in the USA, and graphing calculators were actually encouraged in many courses, and allowed on some standardized tests.

At the same time, people would not check the fact that some people had entire tests solved on their 48G+

I saw the same thing on the TI-83, and it was not just tests -- I saw people storing entire textbooks (which surprised me, since I thought the calculators had limited memory). Somehow, this never seemed to catch the attention of the teachers...

Re:How long since you were in school?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

"This slide rule has obviously been tampered with! So said the teacher!"

"A slide rule? Luxury! When I was a school boy we only had an abacus!"

"Ha, that's nothing! When I was in school we weren't allowed to count using our fingers!"

(With apologies to Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen sketch)

Re:How long since you were in school?

[pmc]

(With apologies to Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen sketch)

When I were a lad it were the Three Yorkshiremen sketch.

On't radio.

Re:How long since you were in school?

[Anonymous Coward]

Standardized tests should never include calculators. They are to test knowledge of concepts, not button pushing skills.

Re:How long since you were in school?

[Legion303]

That's right, kids, in the real world you won't have access to reference materials and may very well need to solve equations in your head to save your life, MacGyver style.

In elementary school I wasn't allowed to count on my fingers because the teacher thought it was more important to know addition tables by rote instead of relying on other learning methods. So I learned to visualize counting on my toes. I wound up with a B.Sc. in theoretical mathematics. They sure showed me.

Re:How long since you were in school?

[maxwell demon]

In elementary school I wasn't allowed to count on my fingers because the teacher thought it was more important to know addition tables by rote instead of relying on other learning methods.

Of course. After all, you could lose your fingers in an accident, and if rely on your fingers to count, you'll be lost. :-)

Re:How long since you were in school?

[Hellahulla]

OK, I was a smart ass and brought in a slide rule, the physics instructor let me use it, I think because he thought it was funny. It was useful as a double-check.

Hey I did that, we weren't allowed calculators so brought my Granddad's old slide rule for a joke and was allowed to use it. Thankfully I knew how to use it and it wasn't just there as a funny looking ruler :)

Re:How long since you were in school?

[jamesh]

Standardized tests should never include calculators. They are to test knowledge of concepts, not button pushing skills.

If the calculator allows you to focus on the concepts being tested instead of basic arithmetic then isn't that a good thing? Looking up trig tables and doing the multiplication by hand doesn't strike me as a good way of testing the concepts of trigonometry. And while there are many ways of showing an understanding of the concepts other than seeing if you get the right final answer, it's by far the easiest measurement.

If basic arithmetic is the thing being tested then by all means, ban the calculator from that test, but a blanket statement of "standardized tests should never include calculators" is kind of dumb.

Re:How long since you were in school?

[DoctorPepper]

I graduated from high school in 1977. The very first time I saw a calculator was in "A" school in the Navy, later on that year. I bought one at the Navy Exchange, can't remember the price. It was a Casio calculator, I can't remember the model number. We used to get drunk and use it to play music on our stereo in the barracks room. Tune an FM radio to an unused frequency, lay the calculator on top, and just press the buttons. The radio would pick up the frequencies, demodulate them, and play them back.

It was fun, but the music was somewhat limited ;)

Re:How long since you were in school?

[Lehk228]

they used the menu in the calculator, the on my TI-86 i had created a replica menu that lookd like the home screen of the calculator and the only differenc were a set of busy dots in the top right corner.

i wasn't using this to cheat, but to keep the games i had from being deleted since the hours in between tests were one of the primary times i wanted to have my games with me.

Re:How long since you were in school?

[Aboroth]

Well now in social situations when somebody asks you how many chicken nuggets you want, or how long you have been with the company, you don't look like a retard when you put your hands up and start counting fingers.

Seriously? You can't see the value in forcing kids to learn how to count in their heads? And you can't tell that your teacher helped you figure out how to improve your mental visualization?

Just. Wow.

Re:How long since you were in school?

[bsDaemon]

The calculators will be destroyed by the zombies to strengthen the brains of the humans, thus increasing their nutritional value to the zombies. DUH.

Re:How long since you were in school?

[Yoozer]

For zero and negative numbers, I always had to ask the poor fellow who lost parts of his hand in a bandsaw accident. I couldn't bring him to school either :(.

Re:How long since you were in school?

[NormalVisual]

Well now in social situations when somebody asks you how many chicken nuggets you want, or how long you have been with the company, you don't look like a retard when you put your hands up and start counting fingers.

The sadistic side of me thinks it would probably enjoy seeing someone do that, but with Chisanbop.

Re:How long since you were in school?

[Gr8Apes]

Well, in many of my classes we weren't allowed anything but a pencil for a test. Everything else was provided.

In others, you could bring a calculator, however, since they were multi-step problems, you still had to write everything out. The calculator was really only good for checking that you'd correctly manipulated the numbers.

In a couple you could bring in anything you wanted. You were given 3 hours. The average score was under 45% with the maximum being barely 80%.

You actually had to understand the material and be able to problem solve with what you'd learned.

Re:How long since you were in school?

[BrokenHalo]

When I went to school, we used books of tables or slide rules. (I still have a nice log-log decitrig rule, but that's another story).

But when I went back to university a few (OK, ten) years ago, my profs made a point of not knowing or caring what calculators we used. The only restriction was that it should not have a QWERTY keyboard.

Re:How long since you were in school?

[orangesquid]

My HS math teacher spent her spare time designing her tests carefully so that no calculators were needed. If you got down to the end of a question, and you had messed up and ended up with something that *would* need manual calculation, you didn't have to work out the calculation--you'd just lose the point(s) on whatever theoretical part you screwed up, and that was it.
No calculators were ever allowed---nor were they needed.

I learned one hell of a lot of math.... including vector calc and laplace transforms senior year (finished ap calc bc junior year along with 11 other kids, so that teacher wrote course material for a calc 3 class).

Re:How long since you were in school?

[Anonymous Coward]

the teacher could wipe those bitches clean in five seconds ... Oh, and she could program.

Do you have her phone number?

Re:How long since you were in school?

[adonoman]

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.

Re:How long since you were in school?

[Runaway1956]

So, you had to convert from dactylonomy to what? Phalangonomy?

Re:How long since you were in school?

[interkin3tic]

Well now in social situations when somebody asks you how many chicken nuggets you want, or how long you have been with the company, you don't look like a retard when you put your hands up and start counting fingers.

Chicken McNuggets come in 6, 10, and sometimes 20 or 50 quantities. So if you're in a McDonalds and counting is involved in your chicken nugget order, you're doing it wrong. And if you're ordering the 50 piece "party bucket" you're probably also doing "avoiding heart disease" wrong too.

Seriously? You can't see the value in forcing kids to learn how to count in their heads?

I see more value in allowing children to come up with their own solutions and find what works best for them. They'll do it anyway, as I did and GP did. Show me a study that demonstrates finger-counting actually impedes math skills and I'll shut up, but I suspect this is just a poorly-researched "It's how I learned it so it's the right way and it's how you'll learn it" relic. One that probably turns more kids off of math at an early stage, before the really fun math.

Re:How long since you were in school?

[adonoman]

Who said anything about converting. My wife sends me to the store to pick up 1100 eggs. My shoes are size 1001, I'm 101' 1011" tall, and I weigh 11000011 lbs. My kids are 111 and 101 years old. Although, it does confuse teachers when the kids tell them they just celebrated their hundred and eleventieth birthday.

Re:How long since you were in school?

[bsDaemon]

The sad part is, I don't know whether I was marked insightful for the math part or the zombie part... meh.

Re:How long since you were in school?

[vegiVamp]

Got a good tutorial somewhere for binary arithmetic ? I'm familiar with the notation, but blisfully unaware of how to do actual maths :-)

Standardized tests

[betterunixthanunix]

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.

Re:Standardized tests

[betterunixthanunix]

Look, I agree completely: don't allow calculators. The problem is that you then have to change the entire curriculum around. For example, a typical physics problem will involve computing a few sines and cosines, but without a calculator, students must either:

1. Learn how to read trigonometric tables
2. Learn how to compute sines and cosines by hand

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).

Or, as you mentioned, we could have the schools give students calculators. This would require a change to the education budget, since schools would become responsible for buying and maintaining calculators; in some areas, such as the city where I grew up, that would be a major expense and a difficult thing to do (politically).

As I said, I agree with you, but I see why schools are not doing these things: it is not convenient.

Re:Standardized tests

[Miamicanes]

> Then either don't allow calculators at all or provide standard calculators.

Or require students to use a specific model of calculator, with their names printed on the back. Before each test, collect the calculators, shuffle them, and hand them out randomly. Statistically, absent wholesale class-wide collusion, your problem is solved.

Re:Standardized tests

[icebraining]

They're called scientific calculators as opposed to graphic calculators, as far as I can tell. I used one of those for my calculus class, they cost $10 to $15 nowadays.

Re:Standardized tests

[wonkavader]

Actuarial exams already require the calculator you bring to be one of a very specific models.

Re:Standardized tests

[NormalVisual]

Plus you get the entertainment value of watching the face of the one kid that *did* hack his calculator as it's taken from him and given to someone else.

Re:Standardized tests

[Paradigma11]

And then the face of the kid who gets somebody else's calculator where the equals button doesn't work. And maybe the face of the kid who is tech savy and figures out he got the cheaters hacked calculator, as he may ethically ponder - cheat myself and get a better grade, or turn in one cheater who without their cheating instrument will probably be toward the bottom, but if they are turned in they may be removed from the curve all together.

If he is smart enough to reverse engineer how the hacked calculator works in the time of the exam he most likely won't need to cheat anyway.

Re:Standardized tests

[TheRaven64]

Actually, there's an option 3: Allow answers with sin(x) components. Let the student leave them in until the final step. With a calculator, they'd then generate an approximation. Without one, they'd just provide the accurate answer. For common sines and cosines (e.g. quarter of a circle), they should be expected to know the answer without a calculator. For other values, they can just leave vulgar fractions and sine values in the answer - they've already demonstrated that they know the concepts, and having them enter the values into a machine and then copy out the answer doesn't give you anything more.

Re:NO NOT MATH

[Anonymous Coward]

Get your hand off it, you'll go blind if you keep doing that.

Totally agree

[crovira]

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.

Not a justification

[betterunixthanunix]

Why should TI prevent hobbyists from running buggy or out of date software?

Re:Not a justification

[betterunixthanunix]

More like, "they want to do something else, and need the old firmware in order to do it." Why should we care about copyright if the copyright holder is not even bothering to distribute the work in question?

Re:Not a justification

[betterunixthanunix]

you're entitled to distribute it (if you can get it in the first place)

If I can get it in the first place. Did you give it to me, or did I illegally enter your home and take it?

If you give it to me, ask me to not give it to others, and then I choose to be an asshole and give it to others, then that makes me untrustworthy, but that is about it. You cannot claim that as someone who produced some creative work, you have the absolute right to dictate that some group of people is allowed to have it, and some group is never allowed to have it. In fact, we have a requirement that copyrights expire and that creative works enter the public domain for that very reason: people who make creative works are not gods.

Re:preventing hobbyist software?

[Richard_at_work]

Actually, from the sound of it, TI are preventing the hobbyists from distributing software that TI hold the copyright for and the hobbyists do not have permission to distribute - can't really see an issue there.

The problem is schools!

[zippthorne]

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."

Re:Whats wrong with the world?

[zippthorne]

Because they want to sell them to schools and students. Only naïve students and administrators would actually buy their somewhat useful, but priced way beyond their utility in today's market, devices.

Re:Why?

[betterunixthanunix]

You can load up the calculators with textbooks and example problems, or programs that show you step-by-step methods of solving certain classes of problems (not kidding, I saw such a program implemented in Python once).

Re:Why?

[Cwix]

http://sat.collegeboard.com/register/sat-test-day-checklist#calcPolicy
http://www.actstudent.org/faq/answers/calculator.html

Both the SATs and the ACTs allow graphing calculators. The SATs are actually more lenient prohibiting only calculators with a qwerty keypad, the ACTs ban the TI-89/92(+) Series or calcs because of the CAS (Computerized algebraic solver IIRC)

Then... why not release a hackable calculator?

[IYagami]

I mean, if there is enough market for a hackable calculator, then TI should sell another model which its user could load software into.

Re:Then... why not release a hackable calculator?

[Anonymous Coward]

They do. Tons of them. Nspire hackers seem not to realize they're trying to break into the one model that TI wants to keep down for testing security reasons, when they've sold to and supported the homebrew community for years with the rest of their lineup. It's ridiculous.

I thought TI had seen the light...

[yeremein]

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.

Re:I thought TI had seen the light...

[Lehk228]

actually the next iteration in that family, the TI-86 allowed native execution through the ASM(PROGNAME) command.

Re:I thought TI had seen the light...

[Antisyzygy]

I think that most scientists, physicists and mathematicians are using matlab, mathematica and C/C++ to do the majority of their calculations these days. I work exclusively with C/C++ and matlab. A graphing calculator has nowhere near the capability of Matlab, but I suppose it is much more expensive for a license. However, most companies and universities will get you a license to do your work.

Re:Why?

[hedwards]

OK, that does make a lot of sense. And you're right about the SATs, now that I think about it, the restriction was on calculators that had a QWERTY keyboard on them.

But then again, I recall having a professor in college that let us have unlimited notes, books and pretty much everything except each other and the internet. On the basis that you wouldn't finish the test if you were making too much use.

It's sad

[RScullion]

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!

Re:NO NOT MATH

[rockNme2349]

we mathematicians DO NOT wee calculators. We don't do arithmetic. Don't tag this math.

Re:Why?

[mystik]

In HS, when wee were doing matrices, I got bit by the 'show the work' requirement.

So I wrote a program onto the calculator (TI-85) That would 'show the work' that I could transcribe to my test.

*I* didn't consider it cheating, because If I could describe the algorithm to a computer in a programming language, I felt that I had sufficiently mastered it, and any additional assignments were simply busy work.

Re:NO NOT MATH

[Compaqt]

Don't tag me, bro!

funeral drone

[epine]

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.

Solution

[kanweg]

TI could create another model for modding.

Bert

Re:NO NOT MATH

[tagno25]

we mathematicians DO NOT wee calculators. We don't do arithmetic. Don't tag this math.

that would be s/us/we/g

s/us/we/ would be
we mathematicians DO NOT use calculators. We don't do arithmetic. Don't tag this math.

Re:NO NOT MATH

[digitig]

Um, no. Without set theory you don't have math. Without math you don't have arithmetic.

Re:No,

[drooling-dog]

Well, no one is suggesting that TI doesn't have the right to cripple their products if they so choose. People here are merely pointing out that they are doing so, and criticizing them for it. That way we can all be informed consumers, and refuse to purchase the product if we so choose. So isn't that a good thing under your free market principles? Or are you upset because you think TI has some right to operate under the cover of darkness, and customers who are fooled have no right to complain publicly?

Re:NO NOT MATH

[digitig]

The kid counting his candies is still establishing a bijection between the candies and his fingers whether he knows it or not. Anyway, my point was that thinking "arithmetic is the base operations for math" is a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of what math is for somebody who claims to be a mathematician.

Re:NO NOT MATH

[ailnlv]

mod +1: pedant

Re:NO NOT MATH

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

us mathematicians DO NOT use calculators. We don't do arithmetic.

Unless we're doing integration, in which case we call it "quadrature" to save face.

Re:NO NOT MATH

[inKubus]

That reminds me of a pretty funny thing I saw today. There's a group on Facebook advocating that police have to yell "Pikachu!" before tazing anyone. What a country.

Re:What's the point of graphing calculator?

[FoolishOwl]

Could somebody tell me what force you guys in America needs graphing calculator in class in the first place?

Texas Instruments is that force. I'm surprised that wasn't obvious.

XKCD

[masher_oz]

The obligitory...

I live in a hex household myself

[elrous0]

My son just turned b.