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Hack your watch - Texas Instruments releases watch with wireless dev kit

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Re: Hack your watch - Texas Instruments releases watch with wireless dev kit

#11

Post by mahmud »

lsb wrote: post #8
Sukotto wrote: post #6

This is the same company that uses the DMCA to shut down calculator hackers and hobbyists? Screw them http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/14/145/145316.h...

Upvoted, but what the hackers and hobbyists was threatening was the entire viability of the calculators. Here's why. TI's generally pretty friendly towards people tinkering with the calculators. But what they were doing was breaking the signing keys of the operating system, so a teacher has no idea what the hell's running on a student's calculator at test time. No one wants that, so that calculator becomes forbidden.…

$100 for a calculator is monopoly price, and the fact that every American high-schooler is required to have one just adds insult to injury.

Re: Hack your watch - Texas Instruments releases watch with wireless dev kit

#12

Post by ShabbyDoo »

lsb wrote: post #8
Sukotto wrote: post #6

This is the same company that uses the DMCA to shut down calculator hackers and hobbyists? Screw them http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/14/145/145316.h...

Upvoted, but what the hackers and hobbyists was threatening was the entire viability of the calculators. Here's why. TI's generally pretty friendly towards people tinkering with the calculators. But what they were doing was breaking the signing keys of the operating system, so a teacher has no idea what the hell's running on a student's calculator at test time. No one wants that, so that calculator becomes forbidden.…

A start-up idea...

A calculator app which can be configured to only perform certain, allowed operations. Teachers could announce that the next test would only allow a particular calculator configuration, and students could run the calc app on their phones/laptops with those restrictions (or none if they didn't want to prepare well for the test). Then, at test time, the teacher passes out purpose built "calculators" running the calc app as configured by the teacher for that test. The calculator would be free, but the teacher kit would be sold to schools. What would be the hardware cost in bulk for a cheap device that could run one TI calculator-like app? If students today can be required to buy a $100 TI calculator, could they be required to buy a flash-able "calculator" device?

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