Any war that has the USD no longer be accepted has significant existential risk, and besides if things devolve that much you should be worrying about any entity holding the gold for you or someone killing you for the gold you personally hold.
I suspect it would be maintained at the same quantization that it's delivered: pods. Pod has some unresolvable issue (things would have to go real bad), then eject it.
What maintenance do you have in mind, specifically, in a modular system like this would necessarily be?
If the argument is that off the shelf systems, designed within a context where humans are a Jira ticket away, won't work well in space, then I can agree with that. But, I don't think anyone is attempting that. Datacenter in space doesn't necessarily mean "standard rack computer in space". Keep in mind that redundant and self-correcting systems already exist in modern GPUs, with active rerouting around dead cores, detected with a BIST, at boot! These kinds of things are standard in financial systems.
And you are right that is possible. But the question is not, 'can you build a data-center in space', but rather is it cheaper to build it in space?
A data-center no matter where has 100'000s of connections, each connection is a failure point. And things that go on rockets that shake to an insane degree need to have lots of special attention paid to each such connection.
Heating again is 10-100x more difficult in space, again, it could be solved, but again, is it cheaper.
Same for transport, transporting stuff into space is 10-100x more expensive.
Same for lifecycle management, 10-100x more expensive in space. You need fuel and move around avoiding collisions and so on.
Same for mechanical complexity overall, a standard server rack on earth is complex (see Oxide) a 'space server rack' is likely 10x100x more complex.
So basically you have to re-engineer literally everything from the ground up for a new environment.
So the question is what is the argument for why you should bare this cost. The only argument seem to be constant sunlight, and maybe regulatory. Regulatory is not looking like it will be much easier in space, launch alone is a huge regulatory burden.
So really we are comparing setting up enough batteries to survive for a night or getting another constant source of power with all the cost mentioned above. I know what side I would be on.
> active rerouting around dead cores
That still means you have a dead core in your system. All you are saying is 'lets pay even more to launch extra capacity in case part of it fails'. And that goes for every part from the smallest core all the way up to the largest subsystems on the sat.
Or you can just order a replacement when you actually need it, like when you have a data-center on earth.
It'll be neat watching someone try, to see what kind of innovations come out of it. I suspect the same learnings would apply to more remote terrestrial datacenter (icy regions, ocean, etc, where people don't like to be).
Ti really needs to stop with the artificial product differentiation. There's no reason 15 years after the Nspire CX CAS came out that everyone of their calculators can't do CAS.
Wow, they used to be allowed back when I was in high school. It came in super clutch for SAT but much more importantly AP. Our school mandated the original CS CAS and drilled us on how to use it effectively and I got good mileage out of it through high school testing and college.
I lost it at some point and got the version 2 and I would occasionally use it for work. I wish it had USB-C because who has a mini-B cable for charging these days
As someone who also menu-3-1'd their way through the SAT, I'm surprised it was ever allowed. Super useful outside of school but knowing that a good portion of my classmates using Ti-84s were doing the same problems on paper felt rather unfair.
Ah yes, I had a 89 Titanium (bought with the funds from a math prize) that felt like sanctioned cheating for College Board exams. The year I took the AP physics test, there was a surreally difficult integral or differential equation that I owed completely to the calculator. I never did as well in math competitions since getting that thing, but no regrets.
CollegeBoard only seemed to realize recently, the ban on CAS calculators on the SAT, PSAT, and AP exams came last September if I remember correctly, maybe August or October
They let you write python programs as long as it’s from memory though. I wonder what the code golf looks like for a rudimentary python CAS. If you could evaluate the equation without needing to parse it, I bet you could get a lot of mileage out of a black box gradient decent routine. The analog circuit solver I wrote for my nSpire (without CAS) was ~11kB. https://github.com/deckar01/pylacc
Advanced calculators are in an unusual space with external constraints on it. Some of the features or differentiation they add serves the constraint of "if you don't, we won't let students use it in the classroom".
When a calculator is used in a classroom, there's a concern about people using the calculator to replace the skill that's being taught. So, for instance, there's space for a calculator with no CAS, for a class that's trying to teach you to do algebra. That is in some ways easier than "don't use this function of the calculator".
Yeah there's not really a purpose for advanced calculators anymore (apart from the niche market of people who just enjoy using them). Calculators are basically only a thing now to make it harder to cheat on exams. If you don't have that constraint, you might as well use Wolfram or Matlab or whatever.
Or, here's a wild idea - exam problems should be structured such that they do not require any advanced calculator.
Math problems should not require any calculator. Physics problems should require a scientific calculator. Overcomplicating the arithmetic shouldn't be the point.
That rules out classes of problem which we want to teach, or falls back to using lookup tables which is more arduous and limits the number of problems which can be put on an exam.
Teaching students to use lookup tables at all is a largely pointless exercise. Teaching students to graph or use statistical functions on an advanced calculator transfers very well to other environments.
> That rules out classes of problem which we want to teach
Does it? Could you give a contrived example of a high school problem that would be ruled out by a lack of a graphing calculator?
> Teaching students to graph
They should be able to plot any of the functions they'll be working with by hand, very quickly.
> statistical functions
If they are using statistics, they should be able to provide the relevant combinatorial coefficients as the answer (xCy, etc), without actually doing the computation.
Not to mention that scientific calculators all support basic stats functions.
You've already rejected elsewhere in the comments the style of problem these calculators are used for as either "more complicated than a high schooler is taught" or a "your teachers have wasted your time".
Which is fine, you have an idiosyncratic view of modern mathematical pedagogy (at least as it exists in the US). When you're a high school math teacher you can argue with your state dept. of ed. about it.
These calculators are also used at the undergrad level, fwiw, so the "high school level" (whatever limit you're putting on that, many high schools will accelerate students into undergrad stats and as far as Calc II), is not a factor in their use overall.
My linear algebra class used F_2 as our field probably half the time that it was specified. Realistically almost any course probably doesn't need calculators at all (or they could at least be kept for homework). If you're not teaching arithmetic, you keep the arithmetic simple. If you're not teaching algebra, you keep the algebra simple. etc.
It is not really classroom. It is more so setting testing standard that matches the standardised testing that schooling aims for. This ofc then extends to testing in classroom tests as that is best way to prepare students.
Not that any of this matter anymore as it can be entirely replaced with LLMs in near future.
I don't think it's been about costs or CPU for at least 20 years, but isn't it more that for kids to learn to do math, it's better not to have CAS always at hand? So that's why there are some in the lineup without it.
It's about ensuring "academic honesty" on exams. Also, it's nice to have buttons rather than a touchscreen. Also, there is something to be said about using a device with a different form-factor than the one on which a student also scrolls TikTok/IG and distracts themselves otherwise.
In National Stock Car Racing the cars are all nominally equal, that’s far from the case in F1 where some years a single competitor dominates partially from having chosen a superior technological implementation.
I don't really follow NASCAR, but from listening to my (huge fan) father-in-law, that word is doing some work. His best (or, at least, my favorite) are the creative ways teams find to bend the rules - or blatantly cheat! - to give their cars an advantage.
One that made me laugh: a team once packed their suspension tubes with lead shot to make minimum weight. On the first lap the driver pulled a lever that dropped all the shot onto the track, and then enjoyed an underweight car for the rest of the race! They're always looking for "legitimate" optimizations, too.
reply