(most people in the /. comments *completely* missed the point, but whatever)
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1) * in the 10-15 past years, thousands of persons who are nowadays
employed in the computer engineering / science field, got their first
significant C / ASM programming experience on TI-Z80 and TI-68k
calculators. Between many others, I did, and I bought a TI-89 ten years
ago, _because_ I had seen someone around me doing cool things in C.
TI, the market leader, reducing the functionality of their devices (more
than three years after its debut, the Nspire (CAS)'s BASIC _still_ isn't
on par with that of TI-Z80 and TI-68k calculators...), and crossing
those who expand the functionality through C / ASM, is somewhat of a
step in the wrong direction for the IT field.
Netbooks and a number of smartphones are programmable, too - but they're
devices _much_ more powerful than TI-Z80 (BASIC / ASM), TI-68k (BASIC /
C / ASM) and Nspire (BASIC only, in TI's views) calcs are, and they're
programmed in languages of higher level than calcs are.
As such, netbooks and smartphones don't teach young people about
lower-level aspects, about optimization (size, speed, power, and
tradeoffs in-between), pushing the platforms to their limits, etc.
Once someone has been spoilt with high-level stuff, easier to program
but significantly decoupled from the hardware, it's very hard
(programmers are lazy :-) ) to change minds to care about lower-level,
harder-to-program stuff.
2) * TI's attacks against the freedom to tinker with the devices paid (a
fairly large amount of money at that: the power / price ratio is lower
for the Nspire than that of, say, netbooks and smartphones) and owned by
their users. That many companies do the same is no excuse.
(Andy Kemp wrote)
> I think the point that was missed was that if TI were not seen to be
> preventing access to custom OS on the handheld then they run a
> serious risk of being blocked by testing agencies...
Nope, a number of commenters did bring matters related to testing
agencies, forbidden functionality, leveling the playing field, etc.
That said, installing custom OS on TI-68k calculators has been possible
for about 10 years (and was made seamless in 2009), and installing
custom OS on TI-Z80 calculators is possible as well... and it didn't get
any of those models banned for that particular reason, AFAICT...
(Andy Kemp wrote)
> Just look at what happened to the HP-39G which was banned after
> someone discovered a hack to enable to CAS functions...
>
> The only way testing agencies will be happy to allow a graphical
> calculator to be used is if they are confident they understand what
> it can and can't do. If we start getting custom firmware for the
> Nspire which enables CAS style features then many of these exam
> groups will just say the Nspire cannot be used anymore...
TI crossing the people who want to unleash the potential of their
devices (for themselves and for other persons), is making it _more_, not
less, likely that CAS features ever happen to be available on the basic
Nspire, as a side consequence or even as a retaliation...
(Luke Seltzer wrote)
> By contrast, I have always found TI tech support outstanding.
It depends on what you're asking, and which TI official tech support
you're using: TI-Cares, for one, is known in the community to be less
helpful than community forums.
--
A few notes. We know we aren't going to convince each other anyway.
> 1. when you pay for a TI-Nspire you're buying the hardware and a
> license to run the software. You're not authorized to reverse
> engineer the software;
You know, some rights to reverse-engineering are explicitly guaranteed
in many countries. Even in the US, under the DMCA, there's limited
rights to reverse-engineering. Yes, there is.
Between other things, the factorization of TI-Z80 and TI-68k public RSA
keys used for signature of OS and FlashApps was _protected_ by the DMCA.
TI's attacks on the keys' distribution were _illegal_. And the EFF's
list of DMCA abuses over the years grew one line.
(and those factorizations are a consequence of 1) the goal of making
alternative firmware and 2) TI not replying anymore to FlashApp signing
requests and thereby locking programmers and users out of updates to
such interesting functionality as the GTC on-calc TI-68k compiler)
> However, it's exactly the same thing with the iPhones, iPads, iPods,
> isn't it? You buy an iPhone and you're not allowed to hack its OS,
> are you? So, things like Ndless are, most likely, illegal.
>
> 2. the iOS is firmly locked, even more than TI-Nspire's. All APPS
> must be approved by Apple (TI-Nspire TNS documents need not be
> approved by anyone) and it has just about all the sins people
> keep blaming the Nspire's for. So, what's so exceptionally wrong
> with closing an OS? May not be my preferred option, but stil...
See the note in my previous mail, "That many companies do the same is no
excuse.". Of course one of the most obvious examples nowadays is iP* -
but that doesn't make such behaviour good for users !
> 4. Regardless of TI-Basic's ability (or lack thereof) a lot of
> stuff is being created. And there seems to be some correlation
> about complaining and creating: usually (notable exceptions do
> exist) those complaining don't create, those creating don't
> complain.
I'm one of those exceptions, though I'm more involved in TI-68k
calculators than in Nspire calculators ;)
> 5. [...]
> And yet, that's all you see showing up out there from the
> programmer communities that keep saying "give us programming power
> and we'll change the world": games. Games, games and more games.
Well, games are what make calculators desirable to end users. Plain and
simple. I saw that myself as a student.
It's the end users' loss if they play games instead of following their
classes...
> 7. Helpfulness of community forums: apart from hacking and ASM
> programming, ticalc.org's forum is almost near to useless;
~"Apart from X and Y, Z is useless": a fairly strange construct ;)
That it's not useful for your purposes does not mean that it's not
useful to somebody else. But then again, you're clearly not an end user.
> ti-bank's forum is actually useless;
Uh, that was a ridiculous demonstration of cluelessness, bad faith and
disrespect. Next time, I suggest that before posting, you just, er,
_look_ at the forum's topics ;)
Machine translation isn't great, but it's more than enough to see what
the topics look like.
Oh, and there are many other useful forums besides TI-Bank ;)
Lionel Debroux.
I'll start by noticing that the threshold for calling something
"flamewar" is low here, compared to the threshold for two community
forums. By those standards, Nelson's post and mine were gentle.
But just like other manufacturers locking down stuff is no excuse, that
other places are less friendly is no excuse either.
(Ross wrote)
> Well, I haven't fully read every reply so far, so I hope that this
> hasn't already been said, but I have a simple solution that TI
> could/should have used when they first released the TI-Nspire:
> Allow for their to be ASM/Flash/C programs on the calculator, but
> turn off that functionality in the Press to Test mode.
Indeed, I think that most agree that this would have been a good middle
ground between L's and Cs, in -TJ's terminology.
> I would be surprised if you could find any programs that were
> actually useful in the classroom but couldn't be done in BASIC.
For TI-68k, viewers of formatted texts (txtrider family, nowadays uView
and Hib-View) came to my mind immediately. The Nspire is different in
that aspect.
In general, yes, most math programs _can_ indeed be done in BASIC,
through the use of part() if nothing else does the job... but with a
performance hit due to the implementation of a high-level language,
instead of direct EStack manipulation based on official functions.
Direct access to the CAS functions gives more bare-bones programs,
you're limited only by the CAS itself.
(by "you're limited only by the CAS itself", I'm referring to the known
functionality limitations and sore performance spots of the CAS in AMS:
* the HP-49 / TI-89 comparison;
* Samuel Stearley's programs int2str, fastlist and the hail equation
writer, where he had to rewrite multiple routines that are slow in AMS;
* some workarounds in Kevin Kofler's gosper program.)
Years ago, I contributed to Mathtools a C reimplementation of MathTools'
BASIC implementation of Aitken's delta^2 algorithm, with a similar
footprint but higher performance. Where the TI-BASIC program needs to
call some form of sum on a list and create a temporary variable (eating
more memory), the C program can just call ROM_CALL_519
replace_top2_with_sum until there are 4 elements left.
(-TJ wrote)
> And can't the people who make the Ndless thing just find another
> way through the OS v1.7 and get on with it?
They have publicly demonstrated proofs of concept, months ago ;)
> So was the OS v1.1 the only way?
No.
> If an obstacle blocks a hacker's path, he/she is supposed to
> tackle it;
That's what we did for the TI-Z80 and TI-68k series, and keep doing for
the Nspire series :)
> not cry about it. Am I right?
Tackling the obstacles and complaining that they exist in the first
place are not mutually exclusive.
(Ross wrote)
> However, another tool called RunOS has been developed that is
> basically an Ndless program that allows you to install a new OS while
> maintaining Ndless.
What was demonstrated was the proof of concept for starting OS 1.7
non-CAS from OS 1.1 CAS.
(Ross wrote)
> However, that is illegal because, if I am remembering this correctly,
> it is similar to the signing keys incident where TI proprietary
> code/technology was being used to make it work.
Not sure what you're referring to: all TI-Z80 and TI-68k signing keys we
factored are stored in clear binary (no obfuscation or encryption), and
numbers can't be copyrighted.
Lionel.
--
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor
demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither
height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to
separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
- Romans 8:38-39 (NIV)
--
Eric Findlay
AKA Eagle-Man
On 22/07/2010 4:17 PM, Nelson Sousa wrote:
>
> For a fringe of the student population, it is. One can also claim that
> quantum mechanics is part of education and I wouldn't dream of teaching
> it to everybody, much less expect a school calculator to be able to
> compute approximations of the Schr�dinger's equation or include
> functions increasing and decreasing differential operators on wave
> functions of harmonic oscilators (for those of you not familiar with
> physics, this is about week 2 of the first course on QM I took).
>
> Cheers,
> Nelson
>
> On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 22:20, Samuel Lepetit <gsa...@gmail.com
> <mailto:gsa...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> Well, don't you think that ASM programming is part of education too ?
>
> On Jul 21, 12:40 am, Don Shepherd <sheph...@iglou.com
> <mailto:sheph...@iglou.com>> wrote:
> > The NSpire is, and always has been, for education. Not gaming.
>
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I think the library functionality better accommodates the people who
want to extend the functionality of the OS better than the 83/84 family
ever did, since you still had to scroll to the program name to run it
(even with ASM programs).
--
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor
demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither
height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to
separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
- Romans 8:38-39 (NIV)
--
Eric Findlay
AKA Eagle-Man
>> approximations of the Schr�dinger's equation or include functions increasing
>> and decreasing differential operators on wave functions of harmonic
>> oscilators (for those of you not familiar with physics, this is about week 2
>> of the first course on QM I took).
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Nelson
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 22:20, Samuel Lepetit<gsam...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Well, don't you think that ASM programming is part of education too ?
>>
>>> On Jul 21, 12:40 am, Don Shepherd<sheph...@iglou.com> wrote:
>>>> The NSpire is, and always has been, for education. Not gaming.
>>
>>> --
>>> To post to this group, send email to tins...@googlegroups.com
>>> To unsubscribe send email to tinspire+u...@googlegroups.com<tinspire%2Bunsubscribe@googlegroups.c�om>
>>> For more options, visit this group at
>>> http://groups.google.com.au/group/tinspire?hl=en-GB?hl=en-GB
>>> The tns documents shared by group members are archived at
>>> http://lafacroft.com/archive/nspire.php- Hide quoted text -
>>
>> - Show quoted text -
>
>
>
>
Only if it's in the same/similar instruction set, which, since it was a
PC program, it's most likely not. Not saying it's not possible, but I'd
wager it's not as easy/simple as you imply.
--
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor
demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither
height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to
separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
- Romans 8:38-39 (NIV)
--
Eric Findlay
AKA Eagle-Man
As an experienced programmer, I can tell you that it wouldn't
necessarily be that easy. They would need to make sure that every
command and every line of code is compatible with the Nspire OS. And if
it's not, they need to rewrite it so that it is. This could easily take
as much time as writing it from scratch. It would probably be wiser for
them to take the Derive algorithms and write the Nspire code for them
from scratch.
--
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor
demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither
height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to
separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
- Romans 8:38-39 (NIV)
--
Eric Findlay
AKA Eagle-Man
--
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor
demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither
height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to
separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
- Romans 8:38-39 (NIV)
--
Eric Findlay
AKA Eagle-Man
> And why do they have to learn ASM on the Nspire? If that's what
> they're looking to do, they should get an 83 or 84, or they could
> do ASM for their home computer (a little dangerous, though).
One of the possible educative reasons is that the ARM ISA is a modern
ISA, rather nice and easy to learn.
The 8-bit Z80 and the 16/32-bit 68000 are little used in the real world
nowadays; the x86 / x86_64 is more complicated than Z80, 68000 and ARM
as an introduction to ASM programming.
Lionel.
--
For short: most TI-68k & Nspire "ASM programs" are /not/ "programs whose
source code is written in assembly language".
The 68000 and ARM instruction sets are, unlike the Z80, well suited to
running the result of the compilation of higher-level languages
(especially C) to machine code. In the majority of TI-68k and Nspire
"ASM programs", there's a majority of C code, and a minority of assembly
language code (if at all).
I agree with mostly everybody: C is a better choice than assembly
language for both education and production use, for multiple reasons
(only to mention a few: gentler learning curve, lower development and
debugging time, better inherent portability although it's easy to write
C code in a non-portable way). I started with C myself, not with
assembly language.
Assembly language is directly or indirectly used to build things upon,
but directly read and written by a minority of people indeed, as
outlined by Nelson. Besides OS-level stuff (obviously), time-critical
code in CPU-intensive computations (math / gfx / sound / etc. code
kernels) after algorithmic optimization, severely resource-constrained
platforms, and such niches, remain best done (partially) in assembly
language.
Lionel.
Lionel.
I get so frustrated sometimes, that kids put more energy into trying to get around doing work than they would have if they just did the work. It seems that people are spending way too much time trying to hack the nspire and could spend their time on more productive pursuits. Leave it alone, it does what I need it to do and I would be more than a little annoyed if IB came out and said that it is no longer allowed on their exams because of some ridiculous hack that happened to compromise validity of the calculator.
I can only imagine what TI could put out if they weren't limited by the demands of the testing agencies.
If these groups want to do it better then get together pool resources and make their own calculator, make the code open source and then try to market it in a world where kids and schools will only buy what is approved by testing agencies.
My thoughts,
Dan
-----Original Message-----
From: tins...@googlegroups.com [mailto:tins...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Eric Findlay
Sent: Thursday, July 22, 2010 5:38 PM
To: tins...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [tinspire] Re: we made it to xkcd
I agree. And why do they have to learn ASM on the Nspire? If that's
what they're looking to do, they should get an 83 or 84, or they could
do ASM for their home computer (a little dangerous, though). There are
other options out there, not just the Nspire.
--
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor
demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither
height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to
separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
- Romans 8:38-39 (NIV)
--
Eric Findlay
AKA Eagle-Man
On 22/07/2010 4:17 PM, Nelson Sousa wrote:
>
> For a fringe of the student population, it is. One can also claim that
> quantum mechanics is part of education and I wouldn't dream of teaching
> it to everybody, much less expect a school calculator to be able to
> compute approximations of the Schrödinger's equation or include
> You say that the you were able to finish something "right as Ndless
> came out... [You were] eager to make sure the Nspire assembly
> archives wouldn't be completely without good software after
> the hack".
>
> But what makes your Gameboy emulator some "good software"?
That it's a technical achievement and that it's of some interest to a
number of users, say ?
> Why couldn't you have made something more "educational" or practical?
In the case of such a completely closed and undocumented piece of
hardware and software as the Nspire is, making something more
"educational", as you say, would have required _vastly_ more
reverse-engineering. That's an excellent reason.
The Nspire is currently in a situation comparable to that of the 92 in
its early days: pioneers of the platform had to find their way into the
OS (which was about three times smaller than the Nspire 1.1 OS and five
times smaller than the Nspire 2.x OS) to extract, or duplicate, useful
functionality, which couldn't be used so easily due to lack of a jump
table. This eventually led to Fargo.
Later, with other models of the TI-68k series, TI started exporting a
jump table, which grew over time, and made C/ASM programs (games
_first_, "educational" programs _later_ !) easier. Most of the additions
in later AMS versions are FlashApp-oriented or CAS-oriented, games don't
need them. It wasn't before 1999, with AMS 2.02, that the most useful
CAS routines were exported - and several additions to that set (e.g.
push_substitute_simplify, push_substitute_using_such_that) appeared in
AMS 2.04 and 2.05, in 2000.
And some oddities remain, like not exporting the XOR function directly,
while OR, AND and NOT have all been directly exported. The XOR function
does exist, and is used internally by AMS; it can be reached through
primary_tag_list.
Sadly, over the decade, TI changed sides again, and produced a piece of
closed software and hardware with an even worse screen than that of
previous models...
> Your Gameboy emulator is useless to educators and worst of all, it
> came out "right as Ndless came out."
> That was Nelson Sousa's main argument!
> Your "true skill" was used to make games... That's a fact.
You're coming back to an earlier part of the discussion between
especially Nelson and I:
* on the one hand, it's a cold hard fact that there are many more games
than science programs, on both the TI-Z80 family and the TI-68k family;
* on the other hand, it's another cold hard fact that being able to
access lower-level functions from assembly programs (whose source code
is usually written in C or ASM) does help making science programs. I
gave several examples, one of which I experienced myself.
And TI is, in the opinion of the open community, making a ("large" or
"small", it depends on one's side in the matter) disservice to users
(obviously), but to teachers as well, by trying to forbid that.
> Texas Instruments is trying to take control for a good cause;
At least, in the opinion of the minority of people that teachers are ;)
> so that "pioneers" like you wouldn't ruin the platform.
Pfft. That's trying to prevent the inevitable. As you should know by
looking at computing history, virtually all platforms are hackable, it's
a matter of time, skill, and sometimes equipment (e.g. the first Xbox hack).
All the more the people at TI have been notoriously bad for a decade at
making secure hardware and code on TI-Z80 and TI-68k platforms - and, on
the Nspire, as demonstrated by Ndless and Nleash, they keep doing so.
The only efficient protection they made in the Nspire was compressing
the boot2 with an uncommon format. This defeated efforts in opening the
underwhelming machine for nearly three years. Very soon after the boot2
compression fell and revealed ARM machine code, the OS was decrypted -
and from there, it took a short amount of time to get a proof of concept
of arbitrary code execution, which eventually became Ndless 1.
When the PTT LED has been tampered with, or when some form of CAS is
running on the non-CAS Nspire (the 89T CAS, or the Nspire CAS - as
mentioned earlier in the discussion, running the non-CAS OS on the CAS
Nspire was publicly demonstrated, and there doesn't seem to be
significant technical hurdles in doing the opposite), TI won't be happy
- but at the root cause, it will be _their_ own fault. As I wrote, TI's
behaviour is making it _more_, not less, likely that this happens.
Lionel.
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Ok, like, what the f*ck? Our math programs are all unstable, where did
that peice of s*it come from? They replicate what the OS does? I dont
think so, the quad solver app created by ti is worth nothing, the
ones I find on ticalc are much better!
[quote] An experienced mathematician can test these
products and determine which should be trusted and which should be
discarded. Unfortunately, the majority of the people who download
these third party programs are not equipped to make that
determination. As a result, inexperienced users download these
programs and think they are getting mathematically sound answers from
them.[/quote]
I am a user sometimes and I find most of the math prgms very stable,
useful, accurate, THANK YOU VERY MUCH!
I would like to thank all of the programmers for the Nspire, their programs will be making my classroom a more student centered environment. I understand the programming of the Nspire but do not have the time to invest to create such dynamic and powerful teaching tools. I agree with Marc and Nelson that this thread should die. This argument is not getting any of us anywhere. While I enjoy teaching circles in Geometry, it is not pleasant to be reading these posts that are just going in circles.
Pamela Baker
Fayetteville High School
Fayetteville, AR
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But I also insist on courteous professional discussion on this list, and some posts on this thread
are pushing the boundaries in this area.
Finally, the purpose of the list is for us to share our ideas and experiences on how to improve the
teaching and learning of Maths and Science through the use of the TI-Nspire calculator. While I
have found the discussion on this thread to be informative, the thread only marginally addresses
this purpose.
Cheers
Rex
tinspire list moderator