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.

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?

[HungryHobo]

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

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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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

[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:NO NOT MATH

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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: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.

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.