Trucks, tubes and truth – event-driven systems
xtdb.com
xtdb.com
Interesting, but this list is somewhat incomplete. Two other methods of "moving things around" not covered in these stated categories include a.) Projectiles, and b.) Teleportation.
The latter is still in it's infancy. While the former may invoke thoughts of missiles and bullets from guns, really it's any matter/energy that is transmitted using energy without a container (i.e. clouds transmit water, antennas transmit radio waves, etc.).
>>Setting aside the complexities of time and identity for a moment, every fact must be three-dimensional, the smallest possible unit of information. [Article cit. 3 & 4] A three-dimensional fact might be represented as a proposition, a triple, or an attribute assigned to an entity. These are equivalent.
I had trouble with the statement that "facts must have three dimensions," so I checked the citations only to find zero reference to this '3D fact' assertion or what that actually is supposed to mean.
If someone can verify and support this assertion, or an example, please let me know. The post appears interesting, but I can't read any further without knowing that the basis of what follows stands on solid footing. The missing categories of "transporting things" leads me to believe that this paper is documenting an incomplete thought.
(There are also projectile streams, typically of liquids. These generally extend only short distances.)
Teleportation has not yet reached alpha stage.
"Buckets" may be thought of as discrete bundles, "pipes" as continuous flows. Even where the buckets are the individual items being moved, or where the flow exists without the pipe (water in a channel, wind in air).
Appreciate the response. I dissagree, respectfully, but I guess it really depends on how the author defines the term "bucket", which isn't explicitly provided in the article. By common definition (1) and also based on the context used in the article, a "bucket" is a type of discrete vessel (container) and is discrete from the contents (payload or 'thing') it carries. Conversely, a projectile has no container. Additionally, a projectile doesn't necessarily need a discrete size. Atmospheric moisture or electromagnetic energy are examples of things that we consume which move through space in a continuous stream, but these things are not necessarily confined to a vessel or pipe.
To more clearly differntiate the three:
Bucket System == Container + Payload + Energy imparted on the container & payload.
Pipe System == Container (i.e. pipe or guide) + Payload + Energy imparted on the payload alone.
Projectile System == Payload + Energy imparted on the Payload alone.
Clearly we rely on the atmosphere to transport water in the form of clouds, and we can rely on this mode of transport to deliver drinking/farm water even though clouds are not contained in a transport vessel, because humans have learned to leverage weather patterns. We harvest drinking water (thing) on land from the atmospheric pool of moisture originating from oceans. Similarly, we harvest radio signals (things) from antenna transmission in space (directed or distributed), but these transmissions are not contained and transported in any vessel. RF transmission (thing) along a waveguide (container) would fall under the pipe system definition. In wartime, propaganda leaflets (things) dropped from aircraft would fall under the projectile definition. Solar panels collect photons (things) projected from a light source to power electronics. All of these examples are things that are transported (naturally or synthetically) without the use of any container.
Under the definition you provided, I could say that a slug of water in a pipe system is a "discrete bundle", so it's unclear where are we trying to draw the line or what the core significance is with this definition of "bucket".
All that being said, I have no idea if this ultra-precise delineation between modes in which humans transport things is really germane to the original article. Maybe all that's needed is to differentiate between discrete and continuous transport modes. I was just stating that, for me, the ambiguity in this particular declarative statement prevented me from investing more time to finish reading what I felt began as an interesting line of thought.
[I]t feels like I can categorize almost anything this way. Gas lines and propane tanks, water mains and plastic buckets, UNIX streams and files, sewers and composting toilets, waves and particles, Law and Order episodes, queues and hashmaps, verbs and nouns.
Projecectiles are particles -> projectiles are buckets.
It's not the containerisation which matters, it's the discrete vs. continuous flow.
All analogies melt if you push them loudly enough. There are, for example, slurry pipelines, conveyor-belt transports, and rapid-fire cannon which deliver a constant stream of bullets. I'd be willing to consider these to express bucket-pipe duality to some extent.
But a single projectile from a single cannon? Little bucket of reach-out-and-touch-someone.
Those are all events that you might need to keep track of in some contexts (editors for example or debuggers). So there is nothing that will never be represented as events. The fact that somebody issued a command is an event that you might need to keep track of in some systems. An example is fraud or security pattern matching. In other words, an event is anything that has happened that you need to keep track of. It can be the fact that a single bit has changed, all the way up to high level system wide events. It all (as per usual) depends on your specific context and business requirements. So any attempt to nail down what is an event and what isn’t independently of context is a waste of time. A key press might be an event we care about in one context and not at all in another.
Not true. Facts/information/data doesn’t exist without being represented in the physical world. When you tell somebody a fact, you are taking facts/information/data physically stored in your brain, copying it to a new physical medium (sound waves), and then again copying it to a new physical medium (the other persons brain). What is unique about facts/information/data is that it can be stored/represented in an almost infinite number of ways and that we can copy it from one physical state to another. However it doesn’t exist outside of the physical world. You can’t even think about this without using your physical neutrons to store what you are thinking about.