memory

Data Transfer

~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

In today’s news, a fruit company continues marketing stuff to people who don’t need what they’re selling for the price it is being sold for – but who buy it because of the brand.

Wait, that isn’t a fruit company. Doesn’t matter. It’s a slow news day.

So I’ll build up some of what I wrote in Traffic here, since it connects two things that are often disconnected and siloed in these chaotic times. Yet there’s some technical stuff that most people don’t know about that may make you think of things a little differently.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

–Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981

You might be surprised just how much companies depend on trains, planes and automobiles to move data around. XKCD was asked about when the bandwidth of the Internet will surpass that of FedEx. The answer will likely boggle your minds: 2040.

Moving data storage devices is still the best way to move data quickly. It’s not cheap, but it doesn’t matter that much – we’re paying for it, after all, not them.

‘Sneakernet’ existed long before the Internet for much the same reason. The joke originates from around 1975-1976.

“…one day a plumbing contractor’s backhoe dug up and broke the underground cable that carried ALL of the JPL-to-Goldstone data and voice lines through Fort Irwin, and it would take at least a day, maybe longer, to repair. So someone was designated to drive two boxes of 12 reels each of magnetic tape down to JPL, and quickly. The first available vehicle was a white NASA station wagon. Hence the punch line: “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes hurtling down the highway”.

Rounding off the numbers, twenty-four reels of tape at 170 megabytes each is 4080 megabytes. Three and a half hours is 210 minutes. 4080 megabytes divided by 210 works out to about 19.4 megabytes per minute, or 32.3 kilobytes per second (258.4kilobits per second) – over 100 times faster than a 2400 bps data circuit of the time. Note that the incident above involved only 24 reels – which didn’t come anywhere near filling the station wagon, in fact the two boxes of tapes didn’t even fill the front passenger seat. (as an aside, a station wagon is known as an estate car or estate in other parts of the world). Incidentally, that conversation was the first time your contributor ever heard the term backhoe fade used to describe accidental massive damage to an underground cable (compare it to the term rain fade used to describe a fade-out of a point-to-point microwave radio path due to the absorptive effect of water in the air)…”

Stanley Ipkiss, Reddit post.

It’s a very tangible way of viewing how data is transferred too, and perhaps reinforcing the anxiety of seeing a backhoe in your area. Much of what is done on the internet these days is streaming, and I think maybe the present generations coming up may not immediately understand life without streaming. When we kept things on our hard drives and floppy disks, back when they were hard and floppy respectively.

So with that settled in everyone’s mind, let’s talk a bit about what’s being marketed as artificial intelligence, which is not really that much artificial intelligence as it is a bunch of clever algorithms using probability to determine what in it’s thesaurus/image library you would like to see when queried. Where do they get that thesaurus/image library?

Us.

I’ll get into this in the next post.

Broken Time.

~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

This space was going to be intentionally left blank as I spend some time on Memorial Day, but then this I was reminded by a vibrating watch that I had to write something here – a reminder.

Reminders allow us to remember to do things, which is also a fitting thing to write about given that it is Memorial Day.

The day itself sits comfortably on American calendars, itself a technology from the Roman Empire era. It allowed scheduling and organization. In time, it enforced scheduling and organization and to some today, it is a tyranny. Deadlines make wooshing sounds as they rush by.

The technology that I was reminded by is voluntary, I set it up and of course it doesn’t have settings to take public holidays off – and if it did, it might not work because where I am located, Memorial Day is not a public holiday. The world outside of the United States trudges on.

Much of the reminders I get these days are involuntary. Some software company wants to update something just about every time I touch a different device. The poor woman at the optical center who wants to remind me of needing to check my eyesight this year calls while I’m in the middle of talking to someone.

Reminders can be interruptions, as the reminder was today for me.

When I was younger, I recall seeing those older than myself sit quiet for periods of time, lost in thought or memory – or both. It was an inordinate amount of time, I thought, to be so long without motion and observation. As I grew older, I learned the time is never enough, there’s always something that shakes us from the moments of deep thought, of reflection, of revisiting events, of studying problems and possible solutions, or simply taking a moment to be human.

We don’t talk about the time it takes to be ‘simply human’ that much, and we have neatly shoved it into the realm of the introverts that the extroverts scream outside of. It’s necessary, and while technology pushes the frontiers of productivity employers push the frontier of the clock, tapping their watches insistently as they look at us.

The difference between a reminder and an interruption is the importance of the what you are doing versus what you needed to be reminded of. If you’re rushing to get online to check for an email about a deathly sick relative, that interruption from Microsoft is likely a very negative experience.

“You’ll upgrade my operating system to the next version of Windows for free? That news on Aunt Samantha can wait! Screw that lady!”, simply doesn’t seem to be something would think in such a situation.

It does seem that in my lifetime, we get interrupted more than reminded. That could also simply be my anecdotal experience as I grow older, but it does seem to me that Pavlov might have a lot to write about these days.