Hmm ... okay. This story seems awfully familiar ... the same idiots from NJ, for one thing ... :)

Nik, who is mourning the loss of his dear TI82.

And Charlie Sullivan was in the other article, too, I thought.
Or maybe that was another one. Either way :)

--BlueCalx

Mention of Ticalc.org = Good
Paying for calculator programs = Bad
And in responce to the last comment made by that fairtest bimbo... She says something like <paraphrase> "It provides no advantage, the formulas are written on the test cover sheet" </paraphrase> well, guess what you moron, you missed the point, it does the problems faster and more accurately. You could know every freakin formula known to man but if it takes you a while to do them and you make mistakes, you're looking at a lower test score. Common sence people, use it ;)

Its common sense not sence :)

And it's "it's" not "its."

And it's freaking, not freakin. I mean, use some common sence!

Do not start a sentence with a conjunction. :-)

and sense was misspelled again...

Way to go, Sherlock!
It was supposed to be a joke in reference to the original mispelling.

Also, it should be "response", not "responce" (as long as we're all nitpicking :-).

As I sit here, 6 months after I made this post, I apologize for my complete lack of correct grammar.

I can't believe my ears!

I don't think this news item should have been posted in the first place. First of all, this article isn't even done by the Houston Chronicle, it was "loaned" from the New York Times. They're the same two guys, and it's just plain old news.

~ferich

This article is exactly the same as the one printed in the New York Times. They quote the same reporter as the source. There's just no pictures. This isn't even newsworthy, but then again, only 2/7 of the items on my front page ARE newsworthy. Maybe ticalc decided to post this in order to revive their image. When somebody says something bad about them, they want to be able to say "hah, we were in a newspaper, so there". I'd call this propoganda if we were talking about a Communist regime. But then again, it's ticalc.org, so maybe we are.

Are you completly off your rocker? Communist? Uhh, communism is an economic philosophy... I'd take another look at your textbooks if I were you. Or perhaps you could clarify how exactly a news story about ticalc.org is communist, or posting it or whatever has to do with an economic philosophy.

Please, stop acting like a 2 year old on these boards... Plenty of people have to wade through your random and nonsensical rants... And read up on communism, PLEASE! At least then your points won't be dismissed completly out of hand... I'll help you write them if you need some help.

Communism in theory is a complete philosophy about people taking over and then everyone being equal, and it greatly involves economics. But in practice (such as was the case in Russia), it is about censorship and people being far from equal and thus in practice it is much more of a political thing. When most people speak of communism, they speak of the "Russian" version, not the "pure" version.

I'm not referring to this news article alone as being communist. I'm referring to ticalc.org's entire policies as being communist. They delete articles which are offensive to them (censorship of media), they dispose of those who are opposed to their ideas (Bryan Rabeler), and now that they're looking kind of bad, I'd say they're trying to "remphasize" that they were mentioned in a newspaper (propoganda).

They have all that it takes for me to call them communist. And if you still don't believe me, then take it on faith, because having been part of the staff I know all about their central planning committees and other such nonsense. Pretty soon I'm going to write an essay about that.

But I'm sure that this is a big waste of my time, because they'll probably censor this whole thread too.

A) Stop worrying about them censoring these threads. I wish they would, but they never do. Despite the fact that nearly every post by yourself or Bryan refers to being deleted... If they implemented an open moderation system I can garuntee you your comments would be at the bottom and out of sighte. One can only hope.

B) The company I worked for this summer had a central planning committee, it was called their board of directors. Damn, they must be communist. Geez, they even had a PR department, which I now see is a communist propoganda machine. Oh wait, every single sucessful company seems to have these terrible 'central planning committees'... They must ALL be communist... PLEASE... You need to stop being paranoid and start opening your eyes a little to the world around you... The HR department of any resonable company will see you out the door in no time if you've got this crazed and pathetic attitude. This whole communism thing is so rediculously off-base it is not even funny. How about calling the ti-staff authoritarian... That at least has a chance of having some real meaning...

C) On a more serious note, I happen to be a card carrying member of the ACLU. I take civil liberties very seriously... Some of what you are talking about is insulting quite frankly. Our civil liberties insure a number of things... One of these is to run a business or group how we want to without approval from others. If the people in the group feel something is wrong they can quit without getting shot, and if the bosses think someone is doing a bad job, they can fire them. It is these freedoms that makes America what it is today... If there are contractual obligations that have been broken, that can become a matter for criminal law. Otherwise, if you're fired, remember that plenty of smarter, kinder more productive people have been fired all over this country, people with families to support, and college loans to pay off. I look at Bryan and his histronics at being let go and I think pathetic. When you go all nutty and start calling ticalc.org communist I think you forget that plenty of others have lost plenty more in the every day mill of life.

D) Looking kind of bad? This site looks good to me, the traffic stats look incredible to me. I can however think of a couple of people left looking bad :). After their departure ticalc has become one of the slickest sites around. And they deserve every bit of press they get. It's been nothing but a success it appears to me, and after having read some of the posts from Bryan and others, boy, reminds me of some of the terrible people I've had to work with, which thankfully have been few. Immature, grasping, always taking the cowards way out and sniping instead of showing a better way to do things.

Good luck with the paper their Kirk, I hope you post it on some website somewhere so I can take a look at it. How much Comparitive Politics have you had so far?

A) An open moderation system would be good. It's been suggested before. I am NOT going to stop worrying about them censoring the threads, because if they're going to censor the threads, they shouldn't have message boards in the first place.

B) That is a company of bunches of people... a volunteer organization of 8 people does not need 4 people running the lives of the other 4...

C) Yes, you can run a group however you want. But in the case of ticalc.org, the public's opinions are directly related to success. Particularly, if the file archives and the news items (the most visible aspects of the site) degenerate, then people will start visiting other sites. This is where Bryan and I differ a bit. Bryan wants to make ticalc.org look as bad as possible. I just want ticalc.org to return to the quality that they had about half a year ago.

D) The traffic stats are incredible. I suppose. When you consider that the new layout is larger, not to mention excessively bloated animated screenshots all over the place, the GB transfer data is not very surprising. Requests is also a somewhat deceptive way to measure site traffic. A more appropriate method would be to count the requests for the root directory (this is the method used by most sites in one form or another). As mentioned above, there has been a noticeable deterioration in the file archives. VERY recently, the news postings seem to have gone extremely downhill, especially in the past 7 items.

E) I'm going to add my own point. Posting this stuff on the comment boards is necessary. Why? Simple. If you email a bunch of staff members, they get mad at you for "not using the aliases". If you email an alias though, your message is conveniently forgotten. The comment boards are the only way to reach the staff since they like to tune out other forms of communication.

I leave this thread intact and reply with great reluctance. But allow me to respond to a couple of points.

B) I hope there's been more to your life than ticalc.org.

C) You've got a very unique way of expressing concern. I can't say it resembles encouragement in any sense of the word.

D) Our new layout has no background image, no menu image, and requires 2 less requests for the front page since there aren't any frames. The week after the new layout went up, stats rose only marginally, and have since more than doubled. Our traffic increase can't be blamed on the new layout.

E) We will not be "forced" into action if you post demands in public instead of emailing us with suggestions. We're not the government -- while we definitely want to satisfy our visitors, it's not injustice if we don't meet your personal requests or do so as quickly as you'd like. We try to, but we're people with other things to do as well.

To anybody else who'd like to add to this: Email us with your thoughts and suggestions. We want to hear them, but not in the context of a public attempt to force our hand.

Chris

Yep, 3/8 articles are newsworthy now. Amazingly, all three have been on Dimension-TI many many many hours before. You guys don't even find your own news now. I'm sure Dimension-TI doesn't care if it's here and there, but IT'S EVERYTIME!!! It's annoying as hell. I just hope this doesn't not-get-read. I did post it kinda late :P

[A] You have conveniently left out point A. Interesting.

[B] The coordinators like to make your life miserable. I've noticed that. I repeatedly said "I DO NOT WANT TO BE BACKUP FILE ARCHIVER" and what do you know, one day I'm told you better go do the file archives because Bryan's behind. It took you guys a month to get somebody else to do the file archives.

[C] There is a difference between concern and encouragement... concern may be about you, me, the site, or the TI community... concern certainly doesn't require encouragement...

[D] Difference in requests? Maybe. But you didn't used to have a bunch of animated screenshots in your news. That has to drive up both bytes transfered and requests.

[E] I'm not forcing you to take action. I'm forcing you to read the things, and I'm also making it obvious to the public that this is the only manner in which you can be contacted, because you ignore all other forms of communication.

Point A was a suggestion! I didn't have anything to say. And I don't have anything more to say right now.

Chris

Gosh... I almost hate to get started on it, but... Communism is a social philosophy. The politics and economics that drive modern communist states are only in place to meet an end (full communism). Read more about the egalitarians and proletariats, social dictatorships, and full communism (which does not exist.) You'll see it is a SOCIAL ideology.

Tip DS

Communism Sucks. If it was for communism, there wouldn't be graphing calculators in the first place: TI, HP, Casio, ... None of them is Russian. USA rulz and may all communists burn.

Yes and no. Sputnik forced USA to start with space research, space research required smaller computers, this led to integrated circuits, and now we have TI, HP, Sharp and Casio calculators *. But former USSR did not realize that life is created by ordinal things, they focused to big things, like spacecrafts, oil industry, electric energy, factories with much employees, supersonic jets, military parades, and noone tried to solve problems of big queues in shops, high police pressure, low salaries, limited trip capability ...
---------
* It is interesting point that all four companies stayed on the top of scientific calculator production for 20 years, which is not case with home computers.