Since may 2011, the TI-Planet admin team
(Adriweb, Levak, Lionel Debroux and me) has had privileged contacts with TI, but didn't stop working/newsing on Ndless and related things. We didn't sell our souls but tried to make everyone benefit from those contacts, both the TI community and TI.
It seems that we failed at trying to give TI a different opinion of the TI community, we have to admit it. :'(
Adriweb from the TI-Planet admins is currently in Chicago for the T3 conference and met Melendy Lovett, the 2nd most important person in TI.
Melendy Lovett told him they had to block Ndless to avoid having to deal with tools which for example, would run a CAS OS on a non-CAS Nspire, or which would attack the PTT mode.
(edit by Adriweb : These are examples that I myself refer to, I don't think she was the one to bring these examples in.
What she insisted on, and I think it's fair to write about this here, in order to have some objectivity, is that TI is liked "ruled" by its clients, and its main clients are teachers and schools. Meaning that they have to make what teachers want, and they listen to teachers and what they say. Since TI and the teachers are really close, TI can't really allow multiple opposite "development directions", and rather than do as what the community would like, they have to align with what the teachers want, most often. The thing is that there is a real trust relationship between TI and the teachers, and TI thus can't lose this trust by providing tools/devices that can (in the bad case, but since it's a possibility that cannot be marginal, it has to be said) not be trusted because some people can crack it and do things they normally wouldn't be able to do. As teachers want to feel safe about TI products, TI has to provide such products, that's why they try to block Ndless at each update : "protect the teachers" to avoid losing the trust they have established.)Except that no such tools exists. Did she forget everything that happened (or didn't happen) between TI and its community in the last 10 months?
The OSlauncher from Ndless2 from may 2011 just doesn't run with Ndless3, and no tool I know of has ever attacked the PTT mode on the TI-Nspire.
The TI community hasn't released such tools.
So are we accused of what we haven't done?
In my opinion, blocking Ndless for such reasons a mistake. Such blocking might bring hate on most TI forums in the world... And, it wouldn't surprise me if some people started to develop and release such similar tools now...
Be very careful when OS 3.2 is released, as it might upgrade your calculator without asking for your advice - indeed a "force update" option in the TI-Nspire software update request reply has been discovered, and has allways been set to "no" up to now.
See this TI-Planet news about Ndless 3.1 being blocked in OS 3.2:
http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=121287#p121287It's a sad day for the TI commmunity, as no way has been found up to now to Ndless OSes 3.0.1/3.0.2.
Meaning that TI might be very close to a secure OS, and just made a little error in the 3.1.0 OS update code.
If that error is fixed in OS 3.2 and if downgrading is blocked, that would mean that Ndless would disappear for months, years, or even forever.
As it still might be possible to downgrade classic Nspire to 3.1 by keeping (or reinstalling) Boot2 1.4 with TNOC or an RS232 interface, there is no such trick to bypass the downgrade protection without Ndless on a CX Nspire as far as I know.
What can we do?
Maybe just write to TI.
The message that should have been read by Melendy and her team can be found below:
http://tiplanet.org/forum/download/file.php?id=127Seems our message was not understood - so knowing what didn't work, you could try sending them different messages which could work.
It's our last hope: we have something like 2-3 months to convince them.
UPDATE (by DJ): Removed broken image link (and hoping this OS doesn't contain
this)
UPDATE (by critor): Fixed broken image link.
Update (by Adriweb) :
Here's a photo of me (and Peter Balyta). You can see my TI-planet T-shirt
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