Slashdot Mirror
TI vs. Calculator Hobbyists, the Next Round
An anonymous reader writes "Texas Instruments has struck back against Nspire gamers and hackers with even stronger anti-downgrade protection in OS 3.0.2, after the TI calculator hacking community broke the anti-downgrade protection found in OS 2.1 last summer and the new one in OS 3.0.1 a month ago. In addition to that, in OS 3.0.1 the hacker community found Lua programming support and created games and software using it. Immediately, TI retaliated by adding an encryption check to make sure those third-party generated programs won't run on OS 3.0.2." But if you want it, you can get OS 3.0.2 here.
Why on earth would TI want to do this? Seems they are just shooting themselves in both feet.
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
I mean... Why? Why doesn't TI acknowledge the love that people have for it's products and create an API or something? If you constantly beat down the enthousiast crowd, I would think you shoot yourself in the foot in the long run.
I remember when the community broke the TI-92. What did TI do then? Release an upgraded version of it and made it easier ton write in assembly. What happened, TI? I no longer need your calculator products, but this is a sad thing to see.
I run Ubuntu skinned to look like a Mac on a PC. Go figure.
Thus making these TI products even less desireable.
Which calculator is powerful and Hobbyist friendly? Is there something out there that does allow hacking and programming?
I've said this a couple of times now but if manufacturers are so keen on not allowing the hacker community to do whatever they want with their property, why don't they just license the damn things? Seems to be a better way to get users to not tamper with the electronics (at least legally) and provides a legal recourse should they do so.
Outside of warranty, what incentive is there for a company like TI or Apple to continue to build better mouse traps when the hacker community usually just cracks it within days for the sheer fact that TI and Apple don't want them to?
We don't live in Shouldland.
Which calculator is powerful and Hobbyist friendly?
Archos 43. Or any other Android-powered device for that matter. But don't expect to be able to use it on standardized tests.
This kind of behavior is why my wife got a HP 50G for her birthday, rather than the TI-92. As far as I know, HP doesn't care one whit about what you do with their calculators, just as long as you give them money for the initial purchase.
I've said this a couple of times now but if manufacturers are so keen on not allowing the hacker community to do whatever they want with their property, why don't they just license the damn things?
Companies do "license the damn things", but sometimes only to other established companies. One example is Nintendo, which requires a dedicated secure office and a previous commercial game on another platform out of any licensee. And even when they do license to individuals, people complain about the $99 per year fee to run your own programs on your own hardware that Microsoft pioneered (App Hub) and Apple standardized (iPhone developer program).
The HP series of graphing calculators allow hacking and programming.
On the 50g, you can write in RPL, Saturn Assembly, C and ARM Assembly. It uses an ARM processor to emulate the Saturn processor that came in the 48.
While the 50g is not as nice physically as the 48gx in terms of keyboard, it's miles ahead of the 49. Stay away from the 49 and the 48gII.
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BMO
... and working hard to stay that way...
Why would I want to buy a product from a company that so hates it's customers?
http://www.libreoffice.org/features/calc/
http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/
http://maxima.sourceforge.net/
http://www.scilab.org/
http://www.scicoslab.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_programming_language
Fuck desktop calculators. Fuck nostalgia from 70s engineers and programmers who think RPN is the shite because it works like a computer stack. Repeating anything if you get even the slightest thing wrong, or heck, even checking it is a time consuming nightmare on any desktop calculator. Spreadsheets and programmable math environments have FAR superceded dinky desktop calculators.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I remember being FORCED to buy a TI graphing calculator in order to pass a college mathematics course. I remember all we needed it for was to plot graphs, which could have been (and probably should have been) done on paper. I didn't really learn anything by using it, except how to use the calculator. I used it for a couple months and then promptly sold it when I was done with the course.
What a scam by my college and TI.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
So it's a programmable calculator, but users are not allowed to actually programmed it?
I think calculators started to such around the point where the target audience was students doing exams that impose certain restrictions on calculators, instead of engineers.
Half of the utility of a calculator is a decent keyboard and layout. Sorry, but an HP48 from 1993 or 41cx or even a 15c from the 1980s wipes the floor with all PDAs and phones.
Indeed, there is going to be a reissue of the 15c this June.
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BMO
Fuck desktop calculators.
And then you go on to list a bunch of software that turns a desktop computer into a desktop calculator. Have you any recommendations for a counterpart to Maxima designed to run on a handheld device?
>all desktop applications
Yeah, try dragging a PC or even a laptop with you as you swing a machete with 40-50 pounds of gear on your back.
Or try stuffing a PC into your toolbox.
Not everyone works behind a desk.
You're an ivory tower weenie. Shut up.
--
BMO
Why waste your time hacking a calculator that looks like it's from 1999?
I answered that in this comment.
forgot sage.
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
Okay, so a source-self-replicator is nice - it got me thinking - how about a self-replicator with an awareness of it's generation-count?
long x=0; char*f="long x=%u; char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,x+1,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,x+1,34,f,34);}
Each successive generation is identified by x
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
Sounds like a plan, please tell the administrators that I need to have a laptop for taking my exams....
MORON.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Hmmm. Have you just been unfrozen?
>all desktop applications
Yeah, try dragging a PC or even a laptop with you as you swing a machete with 40-50 pounds of gear on your back.
Or try stuffing a PC into your toolbox.
Not everyone works behind a desk.
You're an ivory tower weenie. Shut up.
--
BMO
How old are you? 3? How am I suppose to respond to "You're an ivory tower weenie. Shut up.". Schoolyard taunt? Grow the fuck up.
Last time I checked a hiking backpack and a small laptop were an option for most. You can even get toughened notebooks. You'd know that if you ever held a machete you arrogant ass. But I somehow don't see an image of you walking through the jungle with a machete in one hand and your HP or TI calculator in the other even semi realistic.
Go troll somewhere else, and make it believable.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Why do companies so despise their customers?
I just bought a pork joint, now the instructions on the packaging are very clear on how to roast the thing but I was going to dry rub it and then smoke it for a few hours. Does anyone know if pork comes with DRM to stop me doing that or will I get a DMCA takedown notice halfway through smoking?
I am disappointed with TI. My first programming language was TI-BASIC on the TI-83 Plus. My second was assembly for the Z80 processor on that calculator. Both were supported by TI (the program used to transfer assembly programs from a computer to the calculator was produced and distributed by TI). It is the reason I chose to pursue computer science in college, and has made me the happy programmer I am today. It is sad TI does not want to allow today's youth the same opportunity through the same means.
The TI-84+(SE) is the best for programming - lots of possibilities, lots of existing programs, and very few limitations. They aren't the most powerful ones when it comes to math, but they're good enough.
I own one of those, and calculators were *never* allowed in my avionics classes, besides 4-function ones
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Ditto, I still use regularly my HP48G, best calculator I've ever owned hands down. Once one masters the reverse polsih notation there's nothing better to do calculations.
Your head a splode
Haven't people got anything better to do than hack a calculator? Hasn't TI got any better ideas than worrying about calculator hacking? Sheesh.
Rather than watching this fascinating game of ping pong year after year, when will someone finally make a move and introduce a scientific calculator that runs on an open platform?
Instead of whining about what TI won't let you do, why not apply those skills and help create a calculator that will let you do whatever it is you want to do?
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
>You'd know that if you ever held a machete you arrogant ass. But I somehow don't see an image of you walking through the jungle with a machete in one hand and your HP or TI calculator in the other even semi realistic.
It's called land surveying. Get out of your basement.
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BMO
the law says you can hack your phone (for any app) and unlock it (for any network) as well.
If you think you can toughen a laptop, with a 10+" screen, large keyboard, large LION battery, heatsinks, fans, and all, up to the same standard you can with a 2" by 4" calculator, you are sadly mistaken. Larger more complex devices are by nature harder to ruggedize, especially when the screen gets large enough to be able to flex and break.
Not to mention ruggedizing it (adding a solid steel frame to the screen, for example) would add quite a bit to the weight and cost, so all of a sudden we're talking about a $1500 laptop weighing 3kg, vs a $100 calculator weighing 250 grams. And for what gain? To use an OS not designed for mathmatics, on a device with 1/50th of the battery life?
>all desktop applications
Yeah, try dragging a PC or even a laptop with you as you swing a machete with 40-50 pounds of gear on your back.
Or try stuffing a PC into your toolbox.
Not everyone works behind a desk.
You're an ivory tower weenie. Shut up.
Another tough guy on the Internet. I've done it, and I was a Cav Scout for six years.
In the Army you're almost guaranteed to have a guy hauling computer equipment nowadays. And they've had guys hauling electronics back when it was made with vacuum tubes.
For a while, I was the CO's RTO (radio / telephone operator) and while training our unit was stuck with old SINGCARS radios. (Not surprisingly, all the newest stuff goes to the front lines.) These are the big 20 pound radios that get loaded into a pack, and were probably pretty cutting edge in the '70s. But I loaded that into a ruck, along with another 20 pounds of crap, and a rifle strapped to my leg, and then jumped out of an airplane.
Some people would bring laptops and playstations on training exercises if there was a lot of downtime and the command didn't care. Obviously you'd wrap it up in trashbags, but it's just like taking care of anything else that's not waterproof.
When I deployed, I took my laptop with me all over Iraq. Nothing toughened or any of that crap, just a regular MacBook Pro. A few times I popped it open to blow out sand w/ compressed air while doing the same to clean my rifle.
We obviously had tents full of computer systems. Some of them were in big green tough containers, but there were plenty of regular PCs, too. It takes some doing to get all that stuff set up, power is a PITA, the horrible sand there requires constant cleaning, but you can certainly do it.
It's cool if you can hack into something and re-purpose it, but...
TI is not selling you a bag of programmable chips or a development platform. They are selling a finished product. They have every right to put hardware and software together any way they choose and if you buy it you should expect it to work as advertised. If you manage to put your own firmware in it and pwn the device, then it essentially becomes the bag of chips and you can do what you want. But now you must support it, not TI. Don't expect to install their OS releases and keep your custom code. They have no obligation to legitimize modifications to their device.
As far as I can tell (starting college this summer) I'm not even allowed to use an Nspire. Has to be a ti-83 or 84 (plus/silver) I think 89s are allowed too but not sure. My mother-in-law bought what I expect is an nspire (hasn't found it yet ;) for my sis-in-law who never used it, but I bought an 84plus on ebay for the class. (this will be for an algebra class)
I wonder if we could build an open source calculator that would be compatible with various TI builds. I can imagine even in low quantities you could get the price under $100.
Why don't they just ask exam questions that require an actual understanding of the subject instead? Oh wait, the teachers don't understand it well enough themselves.
Casio calculators provide some programmability. There's an official SDK for the FX-9750, and unofficial support for writing your own programs on the newest FX-CG is in progress.
TI's own response to that development was the Nspire CX, which basically adds a color screen to the device without addressing any other complaints.
What would Bill Cosby say??
That makes sense for software, but for hardware couldn't they simply demand you give it back at the end of the license term? That's what's always happened for me with DSL and cable modems. Once or twice they've told me they were waiving my requirement to return it, making it mine.
>You'd know that if you ever held a machete you arrogant ass. But I somehow don't see an image of you walking through the jungle with a machete in one hand and your HP or TI calculator in the other even semi realistic.
It's called land surveying. Get out of your basement.
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BMO
How many fucking people do land surveying? How many more do Science, Finance and IT in an office? Your ego trip about doing something outdoors is pathetic. Get a fucking clue.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
If you think you can toughen a laptop, with a 10+" screen, large keyboard, large LION battery, heatsinks, fans, and all, up to the same standard you can with a 2" by 4" calculator, you are sadly mistaken. Larger more complex devices are by nature harder to ruggedize, especially when the screen gets large enough to be able to flex and break.
Not to mention ruggedizing it (adding a solid steel frame to the screen, for example) would add quite a bit to the weight and cost, so all of a sudden we're talking about a $1500 laptop weighing 3kg, vs a $100 calculator weighing 250 grams. And for what gain? To use an OS not designed for mathmatics, on a device with 1/50th of the battery life?
Last time I checked there were specialised laptops for the battlefield, carried by troops.
No calculator is going to allow you to check or fix mistakes with the ease that even the simplest spreadsheet software will. Punching in long tedious calculations by hand is not something anyone should do in this day and age.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Calling what I listed "a bunch of software that turns a desktop computer into a desktop calculator" is about as asinine as you can get.
Then I must have misunderstood what you meant by "desktop calculator". You may have meant a four- or five-function. Please allow me to clarify my point: a desktop computer running Maxima or Octave or NumPy is confined to a desk.
It is well worth carrying a small laptop instead of a pocket calculator for all the added power you get
Unless you're in an environment that forbids possession of small laptops. Much of TI's market has to spend seven state-mandated hours a day in such an environment. In addition, a dedicated calculator starts the math application within one second of turning the power on, unlike (as I understand it) a laptop computer.
[quote]It is well worth carrying a small laptop instead of a pocket calculator for all the added power you get, unless you're doing simple arithmetic.[/quote] No, it isn't. Unless your level of geekdom is over 9000, that is.
Absolutely. If I go down to the supermarket I might have to compare unit prices, total cash etc - so a small calculator in my pocket is a good idea. I am unlikely to come across anything needing a laptop's power or find it worth carrying one. At geek levels of 8500 or more you may well not be able to resist trying to optimise the queuing at checkouts or simulate the airflow for optimum placement of air-conditioning outlets, freezers and doorways.
For that simple arithmetic use the calc on your mobile phone - you're not going to want to carry a TI or HP calc around just to add grocery bills.
You're right, that's what I do usually. I do take a calculator if I am doing something like buying carpet and tiles and need a lot of calculations, its much more usable than my built-in phone calculator.
Since when does "How many people do X?" become an argument for "Fuck X."
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The TI-89 and TI-92 are essentially embedded Maple with a decent keyboard interface, much faster for most tasks then even a laptop with full Maple installed.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
TI totally blew the consumer market. Back in the 80’s it was the gawd awful TI-99/4A computer, horrible hardware and software but totally neutered by TI’s patent protected methods of locking down the software so that it had to be bought through them, so no outside markets developed. Apple is playing the same game today with the IPad and IPhone. Interesting to see that TI, after all these years, still hasn’t gotten the message that when someone buys a computer they want the ability to run programs on it, ANY program they want, not just the ones that the company ‘authorizes’. The very best software has ALWAYS come from hobbyists, doing it in their spare time. Linux came that way, even Apple 1’s were hobbyist hardware and software, directly out of the computer club scene.
I suppose it depends on the school and the professor, but in every class I've taken so far where I'm allowed to use a calculator on the exams, I've gone out of my way to ask if anyone cares what calculator I use, and no one does, so I've happily kept my HP 50G through all of them.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The only troll here is you.
Where do you get off raging about how calculators and other handhelds are fucking useless and then hopping up and down about how great desktop applications are when people do real work with calculators because a laptop is completely fucking unsuitable for the environment or job?
Why do I need a fucking laptop in the shop to run a CAD program so I can calculate a dimension a client left off a drawing when I can simply take the calculator and run my COGO program? Or similarly (in my other life) save time by not having to cut down a fucking tree that's in the way?
Similarly, my cousin Sue is not going to be lugging a fucking laptop through a fucking swamp (she's a biologist) to do data collection. Not gonna fucking happen. She's going to use her HP48 and a fucking notebook and a machete (or sandvik bush axe). Because even a Panasonic Toughbook can't take a tumble down a cliff (the HP will).
No, fuck you. Take your troll thread and go the fuck home.
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BMO
Hmm $3000 for a rugidized laptop v.s. carrying a frigging calculator. Different tools for different folks. Personally I think my Voyage 200 is the cat's pajamas. Laptops just aren't small enough and don't carry the battery life for serious unaccompanied work in the field. Now if they could put the TI CAS onto the Kindle 3G, or better yet an early version of Mathemtica, that would be the cat's trousers.
I also love the fact that we can get into a shouting match over calculators.
-Color is for fagots. Real men program on black and white screens, while chopping paths through jungles while being chased by cannibals.
Why is TI trying so hard to keep people from hacking their calculators? It's a calculator! It's not like this is some system-critical piece of equipment. It doesn't even hold important user information. It's a freaking calculator!
>totally miss point
The point, sweetie, is that if I'm gonna haul a total station and a couple of wooden tripods (aluminum ones suck for vibration), water for the day, and lunch on my back, I'm not going to increase the weight with a fucking laptop if I don't have to.
Nobody except the most insane will bring a laptop in the field if it's not required.
Come at me, bro.
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BMO
HP 50g?
Sounds to me like TI is run by a bunch of ego-maniacal Texan control-freaks with typical ego-maniacal control freak personalities. I mean it's not like a pocket calculator is even that *relevant* anymore. Christ, bc on the unix command line can practically do everything your basic TI can do. For everything else there's your basic run-of-the-mill desktop calculator. Seems like TI should be focusing on how to stay alive, rather than frustrate it's users. I don't understand how they are even in business.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
It makes no sense for a company to be issuing software updates to stop people from playing with hardware they own outright. How can it possibly injure TI if someone plays a homebrew game on a TI calculator? In a troubled economy, how can a company squander resources on hardware they have already sold? This is like a baker who sues you for making toast with his bread! It's absolutely ridiculous! Don't investors look at this say, "TI, what the duck are you doing?"
No calculator is going to allow you to check or fix mistakes with the ease that even the simplest spreadsheet software will. Punching in long tedious calculations by hand is not something anyone should do in this day and age.
That;s why calculators let you program in basic. You then just punch in the variables and get an answer. And you can in fact create simple spreadsheets on a TI graphic calc and visualize them by *gasp* graphing. Every graphing calculator has a memory where you call back to see and edit at least the last dozen calculations you did. Learn how the tool actually works before you criticize it. And the battlefield is not the back country. Soldiers carry up to 100 pounds of gear for short periods. If they are carrying a laptop it's because they absolutely need a laptop, not because their too stuck up to carry around a calculator, they would love to lighten their load if they could. A laptop while powerful is simply overkill in many situations. Why use a chainsaw when a pocket-knife will do, especially when you have to carry your tool to the workplace?
Just FYI, I am pretty sure they make specialized calculators for surveyors, even tougher than HP equipment. A friend of mine worked on them, one of the amusing problems he described was waking the device up from 40 below. (Wake up with a slow clock, figure out the temperature, based on that, slowly boost the clock rate as the batteries warm up from the current draw).
And though I have never worked as a surveyor, I HAVE been paid to hack through a swamp with a machete, so that my parents would not need to pay the surveyors 5x what they were paying me for the very same work. I would also use an HP calculator for that, which does affirm the usefulness and durability of HP calculators, but doesn't exactly support complaints of "I can't hack my TI calculator".
HP 15C FTW! Best evah.
Graphing is for pansies. Landscape is where its at!
I'd at Matlab to the list. For a student, it costs less than a TI calculator, and the package you get is worth over $5000 (Matlab + Simulink + toolboxes).
>all desktop applications
Yeah, try dragging a PC or even a laptop with you as you swing a machete with 40-50 pounds of gear on your back.
Or try stuffing a PC into your toolbox.
Not everyone works behind a desk.
You're an ivory tower weenie. Shut up.
-- BMO
How old are you? 3? How am I suppose to respond to "You're an ivory tower weenie. Shut up.". Schoolyard taunt? Grow the fuck up.
Last time I checked a hiking backpack and a small laptop were an option for most. You can even get toughened notebooks. You'd know that if you ever held a machete you arrogant ass. But I somehow don't see an image of you walking through the jungle with a machete in one hand and your HP or TI calculator in the other even semi realistic.
Go troll somewhere else, and make it believable.
Dude. You just told Bear Grylls to grow the fuck up. Better get your house in order. You are not long for this Erf.
The OS designed-or-not for mathematics is not compelling. fdlibm, good stuff.
I don't understand TI's behavior. It would seem that an enthusiastic hacker backing would get lots of calculators sold.
The only possible thing I can think of is that there is no hardware difference between their cheap calculators and their expensive calculators and they don't want that fact exposed.
Any ideas why TI is doing this? Why is it in their economic interest?
My "dumb phone" includes a calculator.
And now that I check, my Audiovox 8610 from Virgin Mobile USA has a four-function calculator too (Menu 8 3). Thank you for the tip. But I guess for a scientific or higher calculator, I'd need to upgrade to a smartphone.
I cannot believe the CS crowd that still uses TI calculators, or that anyone takes them seriously. Where I went to school, algebraic calculators were for high-school kids and English majors. If you were math, science or engineering, you had an HP and used RPN. Anything else is kids stuff.
Ditto ditto on the 48G! You can pry it from my cold dead hands! ... Though I rarely use it ;)
Atlas Shrugged : Thematic Story
As far as I understand, your main business is selling calculators for use in exams. You want the teachers to know that the calculators haven't been tampered with.
May I make a recommendation?
Make an external unit that quickly wipes a calculator's memory and resets the programming to factory default. For teachers that need a standardized calculator, this will be a deep blessing.
The students can bring home the school's calculators, to get used to them. Before an exam, the calculators can be wiped and re-passed out among students.
TI calculators are a few hertz, with a few kilobytes of memory, and a black and white screen utilizing terribly low resolution. and these things cost a fortune. By comparison, people have cell phones with color screens, capable of making phone calls, storing far more data, and utilizing far more faster processors for around equivalent prices. While there are apps to turn some cell phones into graphing calculators, are there any graphing calculators out there that actually have a worthy amount of memory, speed, and screen resolution?
Good luck getting your point across. Some (well, a lot of) people just don't get the "less is more" idea nor that most times a specialized tool will beat a general one.
If they can't put linux on it it's not a tool basically.
You're missing the best one! Sage, at sagemath.org, is comparable to Mathematica in features and has Python, a real programming language, instead of some toy bullshit.
Fuck desktop calculators.
Battery life. I use two calculators (not as much as I did in the field), both HP models. One gets months out of a single set of AAA batteries. The other has had the same little button cell for a couple of years now.
Visible in sunlight. You can read the simple LCD display in the bright sun. If I'm outside working in the bright sun, a typical laptop is not going to work - even if it had infinite battery life.
Theft. No one has ever tried to grab my calculator. Laptops have to be watched with a keen eye, even at work.
I use MATLAB and Excel like crazy at work indoors, and no calculator would approach those tools - but I'm not sure what you have against calculators... they certainly beat the pants off of hauling a laptop and charger around all the time. A lot of people still work outside and on construction sites where lack of power, dirt, water, theft, and other factors make laptops a huge liability.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
> I am pretty sure they make specialized calculators for surveyors, even tougher than HP equipment
Not really. There are dedicated data collectors, but look at this:
http://www.stakemill.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1618
.
Basically, it's a 50 with a bunch of software, ruggedizing, 1700 foot bluetooth, and better batteries. It's pretty sweet. The price is eye-watering for joe consumer, but not if you compare to other data collectors.
I've written my own COGO software since the 80s on various programmable calculators. It's helped with both land surveying and machining (which is why I said toolbox back there). My 48 has been through thick and thin - dropped off rocks, skidded across the shop floor, etc. If I had to replace it, I'd get the 50. My ideal calc would be the 50 with a 48 keypad.
>not replying to the overall thread about not being able to hack the TI
I know, it's just that the kid back there got my hackles up.
TI calcs are pretty much useless to me. Until TI implements RPN and RPL, I'll never buy one.
>humpin' through a swamp with a machete so you don't have to pay the surveyors to do it.
If only more people did this.
"No, I don't wanna pay for a woodcutter"
"Oh.... oh kay..." (you really want to pay for 3 people to waste their time cutting bull briars (my scars, let me show you them) instead of measuring your property? really?)
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BMO
A specially marked hobbyist version, and a locked down certified exam version? That way people who want to tinker can get the open version, people who need to use it in an exam can use the certified version and TI doesn't have to play cat and mouse trying to prevent people from hacking it.
Ignore the "not really" bit up there. I was thinking of something totally different and edited badly.
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BMO
http://xkcd.com/768/
Why do people still buy TI calculators?
Last time I checked there were specialised laptops for the battlefield, carried by troops./quote
My statements stand, you will NEVER be able to get a laptop weighing several kilos and over a square foot of material, as well as a non-embedded OS, to be as Rugged as a TI-82, which costs around $40 or so on ebay right now (unless your pricetag and materials start to get rather exotic). TI82 needs no cooling, has no moving parts, and has an embedded OS. I am not aware of the OS being able to be permenently disabled with anything other than a hardware failure.
As for fixing mistakes, I really suspect at this point youve never used a basic graphing calculator. Somehow correcting mistakes was never a problem in high school on the TI-8x line of calculators; they always made it a cinch to work things out.
First of all, TI has been gouging customers with their calculator prices for years. It's the exact same thing for the same price as it was 10 years ago and further back. If I bought a TI in 01 for $100 then the one that gets bought in 2011 better be ten years ahead in technology for the same price. It's not. So who's surprised that they're gonna start screwing their customers more? I'm not.
Relying on Windows | Linux graphical drivers et al to be functional-- along with all the other unnecessary-to-math- cruft that comes along with the OS-- in order to do calculations doesnt seem like its less reliable than an embedded single-purpose OS? Or perhaps that it might be slower and clunkier to shoehorn switching between functions in the math program onto the general purpose OS?
I would guess they are preventing these changes in their calculators to preserve their status as a preferred calculator at high schools and Colleges. I would speculate they are preventing possible cheating on tests with their locking down of the calculators. Completely understandable as if they aren't the preferred calculators in schools, they lose most of their revenue stream.
Wow, I'm glad that my TI-89 from literally 1998 still works perfectly... I use that thing *all* the time at work. I would be furious if I could no longer use the eigenvalue and eigenvector solving software. Did they cripple it in any other ways since then? As is with the stock OS I can solve fairly complex integrals without even simplifying them...
Shouldn't they be happy people are doing things with their calculators? these things are expensive and way underpowered compared to phones these days. I think they should encourage software development for these things.
Their customers are the schools, standardized testing companies, colleges, etc that still only allow these sorts of calculators (and not smartphones, etc) precisely because they are "locked down" and only support a known set of functions (or can be put in a testing mode that does this).
If the protection is broken and TI doesn't respond, their real customers will start prohibiting TI calculators and then their market will dry up. After all... who uses one of these outside of high school / college situations? I carry a graphing calculator program on my phone that does everything these calculators can do.
It seems like adopting a different design would be a win-win for everyone; have test mode firmware that is digitally signed and protected. When certain buttons are held down during a reboot, the hardware physically prevents access to the user-programmable firmware and will only run the test mode firmware. When not in test mode, have zero restrictions on what software can run. I doubt most people using these as small computers will care - they have full access to the hardware and can do what they want with it. Plus the primary "customers" get a locked down test mode that guarantees no tampering.
Or schools could go another route... order "school" editions of the calculators that have permanently burned firmware in ROM that only supports the features they want. The only way to change the program is to physically swap the ROM chips. Then the school can just provide the calculator and be certain no one is using it to cheat.
This is all reminiscent of the PS3/OtherOS issue. If Sony had just left well enough alone, there wouldn't be any need to attempt to bypass the security system.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
I think the actual mathematics are pretty much unaffected by all the cruft. I know that experts did the math on the HP calculators (I've met some of those people, I think I worked with some of those people). Experts also did fdlibm, also did gdtoa, and they've been extensively tested. If you go open source, gcc is pretty good on arithmetic (because it is used and tested by many people, including math weenies).
Interesting thing is, this does not argue for hacking your calculator at all, because "hacking" is at least as bad as "cruft" in terms of introducing unreliability. If you fear the cruft, you should fear the hacking, too. The testing required to get this stuff right is non-intuitive, and I actually am an expert.
This will show you my age, but back in the day, I had a TI-55 and every time I went to Kansas City to take an FCC test, they made us remove the batteries and turn it on without the battery, as to make sure we didn't have any short cut formulas pre-programmed. Ah....the "good ole days"....LED display, short battery life, not much functionality. Oh well, it made us THINK a little more I guess. 73's
The only people wanting to do things to their calculators, are the only ones willing to put their calculators in any kind of jeopardy by erasing software and whatever. Those not interested, or scared, won't. TI is behaving very much like SONY in this regard. It was stated quite a while ago but I will repeat it here: there might be very smart people working for your company, but you don't have all of them. Its almost certain in fact, that there are more smart people not working for your company, than there are people in your company. People who sell bricks, or shovels, or beer long ago stopped worrying about what people were going to do with their product. TI sells calculators (and chips and whatnot). The calculators have software on them. Software is usually changeable (one of the reasons they call it software, and not hardware). People who are bent on changing it, will change it. They have time, patience, and numbers greater than all of the people who work for TI. Some do it for practical reasons, others do it for sport (the challenge of doing it). In any event, SONY and TI will never be able to stop them. The real question is why they would want to in the first place.
Im referring to the fact that booting up a PC has a remarkably long and complex chain of processes that must execute correctly for you to be able to use it at all-- BIOS functioning, hardware initializing properly, working VGA, working controllers, non-screwed up MBR, non-screwed up bootloader, non-screwed up core system libraries....
There are scads of things that can and do go wrong with Windows computers. Roughly 50% of my job is essentially helpdesk stuff, where i get to see all the ways that computers malfunction (and only about 1/4 of the time is it user error). The more complicated you make something, the more ways it can fail; PCs may be more capable than that calculator, but theyre also orders of magnitude less reliable (esp if theyre using rotational media).
How many times have you gone to turn on a TI or HP calculator and had it spit out "Please insert System Disk" or beep several times at you and fail to power on?
and they are doing the same with the ti-84, although on a lesser scale. with the ti-84 they are making the crummiest OSs you would think a 8-year-old wrote it >.>
Its time to go back to when men were men and engineers used slide rules....
Pretty much impossible to hack and re-program.
HP's newest offerings are the 20b and 30b financial calculators. When you open the battery door on those calculators, you'll find a JTAG connector that allows you to rewrite the whole calculator firmware. Its use is documented and encouraged, and on the Museum of HP Calculators forum, there are HP insiders showing how it's done.
Right now, some dedicated hackers are working on a new firmware for the 30b that will make it into a very powerful programmable scientific calculator. See http://sourceforge.net/projects/wp34s/ . It's very usable already, and I am looking forward to the finished version. Visit the aforementioned forum for more information: http://www.hpmuseum.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/hpmuseum/forum.cgi .
I don't carry mine around any more as I don't really have the need, but I do use the Droid 48 emulator for my Android phone. Runs the original roms (that HP have released, kudos to them). Ah, the memories, and having a proper calculator on your phone that you can trust to boot. Recommended.
Stefan Axelsson
Serious Question: Why the hell do they even care if people use those things for whatever they want? With Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo I get it, but... calculators?