Oh my, this is not a pretty sight :|

Oh man, who voted for that! Looks like something done in two minutes in Paint :(

Obviously they cheated. It's ugly :-/

obviously... "searing fire" and "binary matrix" were tons better

almost all of them were better than the winner (despite 3 of the same design *cough* solar flare *cough*)

Hey wait Searing fire took texas, that means DA getting an 84+, no?

Correct.

He hasn't heard a damn thing from them about it though.

I don't see how the heck that piece of junk that won, won...

(and you DO hear that on US network television! They even allow bitch now)

Is it just me, or does that design fail to aesthetically please?

dunno, only thing I know is that I got a seizure this morning while looking at it

Whose, the winner's?

Yeah, I think that's the stupidest waste of $1000 I've ever seen... :(

probably would have been cheaper to pay an engineer to do it in like 5 minuts.

Worse then just a $1000 plus calcs, theres also the bandwidth wasted for 1000s of entrys and veiws. plus some guy got paid for the cruddy designing software. It could be several 1000s of dollars for somebody to write math rox in fugly green. That money could have gone to a scholarship fund, or used for a school in need of calculators, or something more charitable.

Not to mention that WITHOUT the flash tool, most of us could have made something FAR superior in GIMP or PS in about 10 minutes. >:(

Have you seen the one Spencer Wohlers made? I don't remember where it is, but it rocked. Then he found he couldn't upload it because it has to be done in the Flash program.

I know, I've made stuff in GIMP in about 30 seconds that's infinitely better than that, even though I'm not an expert at image editing or anything.

You know what? I'm the one who made it and you all made me cry back then so now I'm setting it straight. Also for everyone else who is trolling me these calculators went to a school district out side of Detroit that REALLY needed them.

I'll be the first to admit that the design is poor because do you really expect a 13 year old with no training with computers to be able to make a good design? There was no cheating involved that I am aware of, just a community of people who wanted to help the students of one of the schools. Don't be hating I was just trying to make my school better.

Well, give TI a few days. ;-)

I think I voted for searing fire...yeah, that one was good.

The question is: How much did she pay TI in order to win the contest?

It is ugly. I don't think it's that they cheated, though, it's that the whole voting system was screwed - basically a measure of who has the most friends who are willing to visit the site and cast a vote every day.

I bet those who voted for it didn't see the blue fractral one and didn't see the green text on it... so with that it would look just like that other one.... I bet the person who created the orginal graphtis is angry.

OMG That piece of crap won $1000 while someone else's hard work gained them nothing. Seriously, there were some really good covers but that one won. I'm disgusted.

Ya, I liked the solar flare one. I bet TI is angry too. Now they have to sell this crap.

OMFG....OMFG.....Michael A is gonna be pissed.

Somebody writes math rocks(they misspelled it) on the fractal background and they get f'ing $1000. What kind of motivation is that for those who actually tried?!?

We were better off with a programming contests they had.

the text on it wasn't even well contrasted to the backgound

and quite uguly

Shows how stupid some people are. I can't believe anyone actually voted for that. It's so obvious that they cheated. I'm disgusted.

>> Looks like something done in two minutes in Paint :(

Except you had to use TI's crappy flash-based editor.

DID THEY USE THE SAME VOTING SYSTEM (as a month ago) ???
If they did.... SCORE! WAY TO GO CHEAT THE VOTING SYSTEM!
Yeah, well... I didn't expect much in the way of conducting a proper competition, COME ON! Designing stickers* for calculators!?!

Was there a flaw? I don't know what you are referring to so please explain.

They actually used a much more open system. Instead of using an email address, they used a COOKIE! Wow, how easy is this -- turn cookies off and set Opera to reload the page every second. Or just use a Java program (someone posted one on the MC forums) to do the dirty work for you. OR ... you get the picture.

Seriously, that's how TI knew you had voted, with a cookie?!!??

Why didn't someone tell me about this earlier? :-)

Even if it wasn't so easy to get around their system, the idea behind it was faulty in the first place. Why are you limited to one vote every day, instead of just one vote total? Where's the logic in that???

Obviously, this was all a marketing stunt. The one vote a day limit encourages users to come back and vote, essentially increasing the traffic on their site. The thinking goes, if you offer one vote per day, and people keep returning to the site, then maybe they will explore other parts of the TI website and maybe decide they need to buy a new calculator or accessories (*cough* GraphiTI "graphing adhesives" *cough*)

That's true, I should have thought of that.

Oh don't worry, I found this on the TI site:

Please note: All votes were reviewed closely and verified for validity before grand prize winner was named.

They know what they're doing. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO.
I voted for Searing Fire, myself. Seriously, about half of these finalists suck beyond all reason and there was probably something going on at the school, too, like the teachers got the whole class to vote every day for a month or something.

Yeah, that's probably it...

Or it's that they got more people who voted (almost) every day for them, as opposed to us here, who probably didn't vote for their favorite design EVERY SINGLE FREAKIN' DAY. How unfair...