TI Calculator DRM Defeated 234
josath writes "Texas Instruments' flagship calculator, the Nspire, was hacked to allow user-written programs earlier this year. Earlier this month, TI released an update to the OS that runs on the calculator, providing no new features, but only blocking the previous hack. Now, just a few weeks later, Nleash has been released, which defeats this protection. The battle rages on as users fight for the right to run their own software on their own hardware."
Obligatory xkcd (Score:5, Funny)
Re:why? (Score:4, Funny)
If you're going to allow calculators at all, graphing calculators are definitely the best option. My TI-89 has scrollback, symbolic computation (I would die without free variables), pretty printing, copy and paste, and algebraic factoring/expansion.
Unless you're in 7th grade or something, all of those make it much easier to focus on the real problem rather than getting caught up in the algebra.
Just fake the UI (Score:4, Funny)
In my school, one student who wrote his own little programs in Basic and didn't want to loose them due to an exam, wrote another program that faked the normal UI and displayed a menu where you could 'reset' the calculator even though nothing really happened. You could only tell by one small detail (a tiny bar on the upper right corner, indicating a program was currently running) that it wasn't the real deal. None of the teachers realized that.
And that was done with a normal Basic program. I guess if you code directly in Assembler, you can do much more.
Re:why? (Score:2, Funny)
yo dawg! we heard you like to calculate things while your on your calculator! so we put a calculator in your calculator!
so you can calculate.....