TI vs. Calculator Hobbyists, the Next Round

An anonymous reader writes "Texas Instruments has struck back against Nspire gamers and hackers with even stronger anti-downgrade protection in OS 3.0.2, after the TI calculator hacking community broke the anti-downgrade protection found in OS 2.1 last summer and the new one in OS 3.0.1 a month ago. In addition to that, in OS 3.0.1 the hacker community found Lua programming support and created games and software using it. Immediately, TI retaliated by adding an encryption check to make sure those third-party generated programs won't run on OS 3.0.2." But if you want it, you can get OS 3.0.2 here.

Well this is disappointing.

[superslacker87]

I remember when the community broke the TI-92. What did TI do then? Release an upgraded version of it and made it easier ton write in assembly. What happened, TI? I no longer need your calculator products, but this is a sad thing to see.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a professor who had that mentality. I showed him how to program a calculator as a freshman, and he not only said that I deserve that advantage if I can write a program to compute a riemann sum, but if I wrote the source code on the exam he would count it as showing my work and give partial credit if I got the wrong answer.

Re:Why?

[profplump]

Why are we teaching children to do jobs that can be done by computers? Computers are terrible and math and really good at calculation -- why don't we divide the effort (and hence the instruction) along those lines.

I'm not saying we shouldn't teach children to do arithmetic, but there's a limited amount of math instruction time available, and I don't think we should waste it being sure Johnny can manually calculate large bits of long division instead of teaching him what division might actually accomplish.

If you want to be sure Johnny understands the calculation, have him write a program for his calculator that does it. Once he can do that he clearly understands the manipulation required so there's no reason to make him keep doing manually it when there's a $0.03 device that can do the same thing faster and more accurately.

To me this all seems equivalent to teaching kids to farm using ox-powered plows rather than tractors -- yes, it's important to understand how it works, but it's not important to be able to actually do it efficiently once you've got that understanding.

An open comment to TI calculators

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I understand, your main business is selling calculators for use in exams. You want the teachers to know that the calculators haven't been tampered with.

May I make a recommendation?

Make an external unit that quickly wipes a calculator's memory and resets the programming to factory default. For teachers that need a standardized calculator, this will be a deep blessing.

The students can bring home the school's calculators, to get used to them. Before an exam, the calculators can be wiped and re-passed out among students.