Ahhhh....I found a bug in my school's computers and I didn't get a free computer!

You're always going to find a bug in any computer..

This actually made it into my small-town newspaper... Must have been a slow news day.

Same here. It was also in my newspaper.

Yeah, this was noted in #tcpa; interesting story. Although students should learn to convert decimals to fractions, the "massive-recall" reaction is a bit excessive, imo.

Conversions:
Fractions/Decimals

Hmm...

Don't you think TI would have found the bug if it had only been two keys?

I guess TI wasn't careful enough. I'm going to try to find a hidden function on my 89T, and make it into the news! The free calc wouldn't be bad either...

Find one besides the self-test and remote control debug features and now we're talking..

Shift, alpha, and diamond activates F4 on an 89Ti.

Weird...must be due to the key matrix.

Well I couldnt agree more. Makin it onto the news and getting a free graphing calculator wouldnt be bad :) .
Hey but couldnt you just use like if you wanted to figure out what this fractions decimal was by simply doing this:
:Disp "Frac->Dec."
:Pause
:ClrHome
:18/30
:Disp "Answer"
:Disp "processing.."
:Text(13,6,"And The Answer"
:Text(23,8,"0.60"
Or couldnt his middle school just do it as a fraction like shown in my sample program :). Besides why didn't they just us ti 73's and ti73 explorers in the first place.

It probably had something to do with regulating tests so that they had to use their brains more to calculate the answer. I wouldn't be surprised if other children knew of this bug and just used it to their advantage... not that I'm saying this kid sold out on all his fellow classmates by telling officials and getting a calculator; while the rest of them have to resort to using their brain more so from now on. Oh dear god...

Well, the reason they couldn't use that program is because the TI-30X isn't a graphing calculator. ;-)

iused to have one, gave it to my brother when I bought my 84+SE

That's fraction to deciaml. The decimal to fraction key was the one that was disabled.

Enough with the smilies... Didn't I tell you that last time? And, you can't program a TI-30

hmmm... i think they disabled the key correctly... but as most of digital keyboards several key combinations may cause the entry of a key not pressed... for example on ti-89 i think you can press 4 keys by only press 3 keys of the corners of the same key matrix square... :/ usually this is hard to solve...

It sounds like it would be easier just to remove the code for that key from the ROM. Or make a calculator without that feature.

that costs money if they just disable the key then the calc is cheeper to develope.

I suppose some who have spent time doing ASM programming on calculators might find this familiar-sounding. :-)

Very familiar...