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TI vs. Calculator Hobbyists, Again

Posted by timothy on from the p0wning-the-market's-not-enough dept.

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."

9 of 417 comments (clear)

  1. How long since you were in school? by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    Palm trees and 8
    1. Re:How long since you were in school? by Legion303 · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

    2. Re:How long since you were in school? by Yoozer · · Score: 5, Funny

      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 :(.

    3. Re:How long since you were in school? by orangesquid · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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).

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      --TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
  2. Standardized tests by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    Palm trees and 8
    1. Re:Standardized tests by Miamicanes · · Score: 5, Insightful

      > 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.

  3. Then... why not release a hackable calculator? by IYagami · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  4. Re:NO NOT MATH by Compaqt · · Score: 5, Funny

    Don't tag me, bro!

    --
    I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
  5. funeral drone by epine · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.