Qwerty.55 wrote:
I don't think that it's necessarily TI's social responsibility to encourage or promote programming through their calculators.
It's certainly not their corporate responsibility, but I do feel that large corporations have certain social responsibilities as well. Do you disagree with that fundamental opinion, that corporations are beholden to the consumer in areas other than delivering a high-quality product in exchange for money, or specifically TI's responsibility?

calc84: But you are not the typical user. Would you be with us in the first place if your TI didn't have BASIC programming capabilities? How did you get started with programming?
calc84maniac wrote:
I personally would get the TI-Nspire CX. I'm not too interested in Basic programming on either one at this point; I'd rather do C and assembly programming. Neither calculator officially supports C/asm, so both have to be hacked. I'd much rather take the one with the ARM processor (much more fun to program in than SH3 imo) and 64MB RAM. Plus, the "aircraft carrier" comparison doesn't really apply to the TI-Nspire CX. Razz
The Prizm allows something that's similar to apps on the TI-84+ (but with simpler signing/checksums AFAIK), which is a decent way of running assembly programs. The Nspire does not have any assembly program support at all unless it's jailbreaked, so I'd say the Prizm is quite close to officially allowing assembly, unlike the Nspire.
And indeed, even though we haven't figured out the checksum polynomial yet, it's trivial to fake it by padding out the program contents to match a known checksum. As I said FTA, the Nspire via TI officially disallows any kind of development, and TI has made their position towards third-party programming very, very clear.
KermMartian wrote:
Qwerty.55 wrote:
I don't think that it's necessarily TI's social responsibility to encourage or promote programming through their calculators.
It's certainly not their corporate responsibility, but I do feel that large corporations have certain social responsibilities as well. Do you disagree with that fundamental opinion, that corporations are beholden to the consumer in areas other than delivering a high-quality product in exchange for money, or specifically TI's responsibility?


Well, TI does in fact do that in other areas. They do in fact donate money and materials towards electronics labs and such. Obviously, it's a form of marketing to them, but still.

Programming isn't really TI's area, so I think all that they *ought* to do is precisely nothing besides product development. At the moment, though, they actively discourage it.

@calc84, can your ARM processor run standalone programs without requiring an OS hack like Ndless? Wink
What's really great about the Prizm's way of running assembly programs is that the user doesn't notice that we're doing fancy stuff behind the scenes to avoid the checksums - the user just has to send the add-in to the calc like a normal Casio add-in.
I wouldn't call it "fancy," per se... Razz
Definitely agreed at JosJuice. If a user can just transfer a file over from another calculator (or just plug in their Prizm as a flash drive and load on a file) and everything just works, many, many more will be willing to do so rather than to go through the process of applying Ndless. In addition, I'd imagine many users would choose not to apply Ndless for fear of warranties and other scary things.
KermMartian wrote:
Definitely agreed at JosJuice. If a user can just transfer a file over from another calculator (or just plug in their Prizm as a flash drive and load on a file) and everything just works, many, many more will be willing to do so rather than to go through the process of applying Ndless. In addition, I'd imagine many users would choose not to apply Ndless for fear of warranties and other scarry things.

"Going through the process of applying Ndless" is also just transferring a couple of files, really. Open the installer, and it "just works". Not really too much difference (and it's a lot easier than hacking a TI-85, I'm pretty sure).

Also, I kind of like the touchpad layout. Dedicated letter keys are nice, plus the touchpad itself has lots of possibilities for use in software (analog controls?)
But again, those are all specific features of the Nspire hardware. I am sure if Casio had the same development budget as Texas Instruments, they could implement the same variety of features. I'm more worried about the fact that TI doesn't want you to use the touchpad in software, hack their calculators, and indeed that Ndless has to exist in the first place. And I still haven't heard your story of how you got into programming.
I got into programming by making math programs on my TI-84+SE (which I'm pretty sure the TI-Nspire is quite capable of at this point)
calc84maniac wrote:
I got into programming by making math programs on my TI-84+SE (which I'm pretty sure the TI-Nspire is quite capable of at this point)
I understand your reflex to defend TI; I usually do the same. I just feel like they have no interest in having anything to do with us anymore, so I don't see why we should promote them out of principle. I would happily buy a CX if TI started showing a different attitude towards the vast majority of its users, the students who make its business possible. Surely you didn't just program math programs, you must have also written some games.
calc84maniac wrote:
I got into programming by making math programs on my TI-84+SE (which I'm pretty sure the TI-Nspire is quite capable of at this point)

yes, it is, but you cannot really make anything a normal user would want to use `-`
KermMartian wrote:
calc84maniac wrote:
I got into programming by making math programs on my TI-84+SE (which I'm pretty sure the TI-Nspire is quite capable of at this point)
I understand your reflex to defend TI; I usually do the same. I just feel like they have no interest in having anything to do with us anymore, so I don't see why we should promote them out of principle. I would happily buy a CX if TI started showing a different attitude towards the vast majority of its users, the students who make its business possible. Surely you didn't just program math programs, you must have also written some games.

Yeah, I do see where you guys are coming from, I'm just trying to play some devil's advocate here. It's no fun if there's no opposing viewpoints in the discussion. Razz I do agree that TI-Nspire should have more capable built-in programming. Though, which is better math-wise -- the TI-Nspire or the Prizm? I don't really know how the math functions of the Prizm shape up.
Qazz, agreed. Smile Anywho, Qazz suggested I post some form of this essay/letter on the TINspire Google group; what do you guys think?
The math functions of the Prizm are almost identical to those of the TI-84+ series.

Also, Kerm, could you post a link of the Google group discussion back here?
Qwerty.55 wrote:
I don't think that it's necessarily TI's social responsibility to encourage or promote programming through their calculators.
I agree that they have no inherent obligation to encourage programming through their calculators. However, normatively, they ought to. As a company that markets a product for use in the math and sciences, they ought to encourage mathematical and scientific inquiry. Yes, some students will use the functionality to cheat; but that's no reason to stop promoting legitimate usage of their devices. I think part of this in on the educators as well. They don't want students to play games on their calculators while they are supposed to be doing school work. This is obviously a problem, but I don't think that trying to lock down the technology is the right way to solve the problem. The problem starts a lot earlier than high school; it shouldn't even be a problem at the high school level. There's a lot of reform that needs to be done to the school system to promote the right level of academic interest. That's outside the scope of this post though, obviously.
The point is: TI has no responsibility to foster and encourage young minds, but they ought to.
That's fair enough, Merth, I can live with that statement of the problem. I'd even take it one farther and say that when they fail to do so, they let down their target demographic. Qwerty, it's http://groups.google.com/group/tinspire .
Some discussion from #prizm on EFnet: http://pastebin.com/BNrXPBYn
souvik1997 wrote:
Some discussion from #prizm on EFnet: http://pastebin.com/BNrXPBYn
Thanks for that, Souvik. I do think that after I got in touch with TI, that we should also talk to Casio and see what their position on the matter is.
I've always been a huge fan of TI, and I can attest to how important of an influence a graphing calculator makes in seeding interest. To quote myself directly from a conversation I had yesterday (before I knew anything about this post): "But hey, it's all about the TI's. I swear, there is a correlation between people who come from both computer and TI programming experience that brings out some of the best". But I've noticed this pattern of decline over the years, and it really is disappointing. I cannot even visit their site (education.ti.com) now without getting upset because of how their target audience has become consistently more naive! Developer information has all but vanished, documentation had been flat-out REMOVED, and their technical specifications are embarrassingly not technical -- it's like they don't expect anyone visiting their site or reading their manuals to have any technical intelligence or interest! I could go on about how embarrassingly empty their manuals have become (you do not design a programming language or a device with a zillion functions and NOT document it!), and how they publish application features in place of actual specs (no mention of processor type or speed -- seriously, where do they expect one to find that information is NOT on their website?). You'd think over the years that they'd add better technology for the same price, or at least lower the price of the TI-83+ (old technology) after roughly a decade.

I realize that it's not TI so much that I support, it's the T.I. community -- sad that T.I. basically shuts itself out from that! C'mon T.I., at least PRETEND to support what is MOST of your fan-base!
  
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