Good but I have a question that may put a damper on things.

"Is it legal?"

Did we not all sign a form saying "I Agree ...." of which one condition was not to reverse engineer products....

(Note: In case TI finds and kills save these files to your computer immediately) smile

sorry, i just bought the calculator, didn't even signed the garanty...

It's not a matter of "Is it legal", It's a matter of "who cares, it's our hardware"

TI has no say in this. If they whine, they brought it upon themselves. What they COULD have done was make signing a "Stamp of Quality" like the nintendo seal.

If it's legal or not probably depends on what country your living in. I know for certain it is legal in Sweden. It all depends on what the copyright law of youre country looks like...

While I cannot guarantee that this is entirely legal here in the US, I have a strong feeling that it is. Regardless of whether or not its technically legal is the bigger issue of whether or not TI has a monopoly over operating systems for their calculators. Wasn't it something like this that got Microsoft into their antitrust case? While the Linux developer community is much larger than the entire TI community, and the fact that most (almost all?) of us are younger than 18, TI's restriction of calculator operating systems to their own is, in my opinion, a violation of antitrust laws, specifically some of the ones that Microsoft violated with cornering the PC OS market with the Windows series.

TI quite possibly has the opinion that they can do whatever they want on this issue because the TI community is all a bunch of kids (I know that there are several members of the TI community that are over 18, but its a very small percentage), and what are we going to do, convince the Department of Justice to prosecute a company? Or would we file a class action lawsuit? Neither of those would likely even be accepted as cases by the US court system. The above were not threats against TI. They were just possible courses of action that could be taken if TI becomes unruly on this.

If this does become a legal matter, particularly if TI takes the programmer(s) to court, be sure to have the source code on T-shirts, on paper, as html, and don't forget to take up speaking C, 68000 assembler, or both, at least until the trial's over. I wonder if having the binaries and/or hexes would help too if they were included with the source in/on those media.

Anyone have some asbestos and liquid helium I can borrow?

e of pi and the unimatrix's 45.59985035114 cents

but TI manufacturate the calcs, and they are not supposed to run an other OS. I don't think that it's against the anti-trust law.
Would you mind because your digital watch cannot run an other OS ?

Because this watch (click the url) has flash rom, I think that it would be possible to change the os on that watch.

The following Texas Instruments calculators have flash upgradability: TI-73, TI-83+, TI-89, and TI-92+. I do not expect TI to come under fire for antitrust, unless they try to put the authors of these programs under fire.

I also do not expect my watch to run an os different from the "os" built in. All that a watch "os" (its actually a hard-wired simple set of instructions) does is interpret the oscillations produced by a quartz crystal and count them to a given number (I think its something like 7000000 oscillations), and then roll over to the next second. It doesn't have any upgradability.

What makes this different for the flash calcs is that the flash calcs have the hardware capability to have a new, non-TI os installed without modifying or replacing any hardware. While there is little drive to replace the os on either the 73 or the 83+, there is a lot that could be done with the 89/92+ hardware. This is where the issue lies, not in largely unrelated technologies that have hard-wired programming.

e of pi and the unimatrix's 45.59985035114 cents

This watch (see above link) runs Linux. Is that an "os"?

TI can do whatever it wants with its own products. There is no "antitrust" aspect to this. From the Merriam-Webster Dictionary: "trust...6: a combination of firms formed by a legal agreement; esp : one that reduces competition"

TI, by not letting an "unsigned" OS be flashed to the calc, is simply protecting its status as the only source for the OS (and trying tp maintaining the integrity and stability of the product). TI has no intention for there to be any "competition" in the TI-89 (73, 83 Plus, 92 Plus) OS market. In fact, it doesn't intend for there to be any such market at all, AFAIK.

What about the TI-92's moduluar port? Couldn't there be some even-cooler-than-the-Plus-Module module? Or is the Plus Module the last module TI or anyone else will ever make? In Europe I also saw an "E" module, which was like a little update for the TI-92 before the Plus Module came out.

Since the TI-92 has been discontinued (along with the TI-81 and TI-85 BTW) I doubt that TI will release a new module for it. A new module would basically be a new ROM and because the plus module is flash upgradable there's no need for a new one.

i think that if ti was selling the os's and people were making and distributing there own free of charge then it would violate the anti-trust law but since ti distributes the os's for free and no profit is lost to ti i think making and distributing your own os's free of charge and altering the os's for the better is legal in the us.

The OS on TI calcs is very similar to internet expoler on windows. Windows ISN'T the reason why the DOJ sued microsoft it was because of IE. TI has a total monoploy on the OS. They include code to stop any one from using a non TI OS and making no compitishion. That act of including the singing is breaking anti trust laws. It would be like MS adding code to windows to blow up your harddrive if you tryed to install netscrape.

I really doubt anyone here could actually get TI for having a monopoly on their OS's. A monopoly is when a company has so much power over something that it squashes all the competitors. There are no competitors for TI calculator OS's, so they're hard to squash.

- Jeff

The thign is, is that TI is making any competition impossible to even start. So if anyone has come out with their own ROM(Wormhole), they can't do anything with it. If TI allowed it then there would be competition. Competition in the ROM thing is already set up to occur if legalized.

I wonder how many people are with me when I say that I feel so out of the loop. I haven't used MaxMem, nor have I played TI-Chess . . . let alone had the honor of having it crash my TI-89! I think I need to make it a point to reassert my standing in this place before schools starts.

Love, Stuart

Not to poke fun at you or anything, but do your have an 89?

Yes, yes I do.

With deepest sympathies,
Stuart

That's cool. They are equals, in almost every aspect.

One of my friends created a lot of BASIC programs. He never put a single ASM program on his calc. Then, the AMS crashed (I think he had 2.03), and he lost everything.

I did a complete reset before my AP test, and put only math stuff on my TI-89. Still, it crashed during the test (which sucked even more because the calc wouldn't let me archive some stuff, again a bug in the AMS).

You see, no need to feel proud; you probably never turn your calc on. :-)

Then again, you shouldn't say anything against the great work of Julien Muchembled and Thomas Nussbaumer. They rock, as you guys would put it.

If you have HW2, try putting HW2 patch on it. It worked for me.

In AMS 2.05, your calc can crash, and you don't lose anything! :)

That is largely correct, but not entirely. As with AMSes 2.03 and 2.04 (I haven't used 2.01), everything in the archive is intact after a crash. However, as with all AMSes with the possible exception of 2.01, everything in RAM is lost.

e of pi and the unimatrix's 45.59985035114 cents

Umm what does maxmem do anyway?