Interesting Links for 20-09-2015

[andrewducker]

• What happens when you get your period in space?
  • (tags: space menstruation women history )
• Doctor Who companions - a data story
  • (tags: data drwho )
• Lady Gaga's anti-rape video
  • (tags: music rape viaBartCalendar )
• How you tell children they have HIV
  • (tags: hiv children )
• Facebook will now be able to show you ads based on the porn you watch
  • Those of you

Comments

[steer]

The article about stalled progress. I think they miss the point but the actual point is there within the article.

1945 to 1971. Just about everything that defines the modern world either came about, or had its seeds sown, during this time. The Pill. Electronics. Computers and the birth of the internet. Nuclear power. Television. Antibiotics. Space travel. Civil rights. This is arguably true, except most things mentioned actually started before that period -- nuclear power 1942 (fermi pile), antibiotics actually 1911, space travel arguably the V1 rocket program, television 1926, civil rights I'm not even going to try, computers 1943 (Colossus). Electronics I guess you would think of the transistor (1947) and the pill seems surprisingly quite short in its conception (sorry). Not sure how the internet gets on that list. However many of these things had their largest impacts much later (nuclear power, computers, the internet for sure, the others arguably). From the 1971 perspective, if you were of a certain political mind you might

[andrewducker]

Yeah, lots of things that constantly seem to be on the verge of transforming society/humanity. If we get genetic augmentation, VR, 3D Printing, etc. working really well then we'll be into another new age.

And I think that it's clear, looking back, that civil rights in the 60s was only a single step on a long journey that we're now taking more steps on.

(Basically, I thought the article was provocative, but flawed, and figured others would be better able to point out the flaws. So thanks for that!)

[steer]

I certainly agree with you about Civil Rights. Sometimes it's amazing how far things have come but mostly it's amazing how much further they have to go.

[andrewducker]

Civil Rights are here. They're just unevenly distributed :-)

[steer]

(laugh) But I would also argue, incomplete as well. I think we had this discussion before: there's probably a number of behaviours you and I think acceptable that from the perspective of the 25th century will seem as moral as slave ownership and apartheid.

[andrewducker]

Absolutely. I will be shocked if many people in the 22nd century think that eating dead animals is ok.

[steer]

Incidentally, a quick look down this

[andrewducker]

Is DMA between machines sensible? Definitely fascinating.

And yes, lots of fundamental stuff going on. Which raises the question of what date you count things from (as you mentioned above). And I think the original article definitely cheats there in where it allocates items to.

[steer]

In essence the entire networking stack is a way of getting bits from the memory of my computer to the memory of your computer -- it's just very convoluted -- packetise the bits, encapsulate in a later 4 (TCP) header a layer 3 (IP) header a layer 2 (MAC) header then on receipt strip the headers and join the packets. In essence, however, something leaves my TCP buffer and arrives in the same form and the same order in yours... so a standard networking stack already takes data from my computer's memory and puts it in your computer's memory.

Obviously you can put firewalls in between to filter out undesirable stuff -- but then just switch the photonic model to be DMA to the firewall that filters and does DMA to your machine if it is OK with what is sent.

Obviously, its undesirable to simply trust whatever lands in your TCP buffer -- but there's already a number of ways that computers deal with the problem of untrusted and potentially malicious information incoming to your machine.

[andrewducker]

True, yes.

In which case, how does the photonic method make TCP/IP irrelevant? Do we not need to route light to the correct computer?

[steer]

To be honest, I don't know the answer to that. I think the experiments I'm thinking of link only two computers but I don't know enough to answer beyond that.

There is optical switching but it's weird and unrelated (still using standard networking stacks with layers on top).

[andrewducker]

Gotcha.

I think that's where I got confused - if we were doing without a network stack at all, I assumed we'd be piping stuff directly into memory locations in the other PC, which is clearly very dangerous. If you find out more, and can explain it in words I'd understand, I'd be interested.

[steer]

To be honest, it was probably mistaken of me to introduce the idea starting with transfer between computers -- that's the bit I'd been to a presentation on. In general the idea is replacing electronic components with photonic ones and that is already practical and working for many uses. I'll keep my eye out for a readable up-to-date "where are we with photonic computers" guide.

[fanf]

RDMA is used for iSCSI.

I wonder how to do something like that when the other endpoint is not trusted...

[fanf]

Medicine. It's normal now to do a DNA analysis of a biopsy to verify the cancer has been properly dealt with. This would have been a hugely expensive one-off a decade or two ago.

Electric cars and photovoltaics and renewable energy. Heading towards MacKay's sustainable energy without the hot air.

Ubiquitous pocket computers and cheap global connectivity. Wikipedia, video on demand. Only started about 20 years ago, impossible to imagine we could actually do it 40 years ago.

[steer]

Good calls. You could argue that pocket computers are "the same but smaller" actually though they required a bunch of tech breakthroughs to get them to that size, display quality and power consumption (AMOLED displays for one).

We seem to be (I hope we are) seeing the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel economy which dominated the last century. That is huge. The individual inventions that contributed (improvements of storage of power, collection from different sources etc) are various -- but only to the extent that they are in the "Spaceflight" example given.