More Zonkyness

Author: Mike Meredith

  • Apple’s “Walled Garden” App Store – Good Or Bad?

    If you get yourself one of Apple’s iThingies (an iPhone, iPad, or iTouch) you are officially restricted to installing software onto it from the selection in Apple’s App store. Which is hardly news, as is the news that geeky types do not like this – which is why the iThingies have been “jailbroken” to allow the addition of unauthorised software.

    At this point I would like to point out that I am not an Apple hater – I own an iPhone 3G and intend to upgrade to an iPhone 4G (when it comes out). I also use a Macbook Pro as my work laptop. I like Apple products. But Apple gets and deserves some criticism …

    Much of the criticism of Apple’s software model for the iThingies has revolved around the continual censorship of the applications allowed into the App store. This is fair enough, and indeed Apple has made itself a laughing stock with inconsistency applied standards with applications rejected for breaching conditions not applied to other applications. In addition even Apple’s published standards can be become more restrictive leading to situations where you can find it impossible to restore an application that you have paid for!

    But despite these disadvantages, the App Store method of software distribution does on the surface offer something genuinely advantageous to the average consumer. The applications in the App Store have been verified by Apple as being appropriate for use – reducing the malware problem considerably. One of the regulations is that applications should not be capable of interpreting code (approximately) which reduces if not eliminates the damage a compromised application can cause.

    But a single source of applications is limiting and potentially dangerous. Indeed it can even be considered to be a restriction on trade as Apple is the gatekeeper (and insists on a rather large toll) for any developer who wants to develop for the iThingies. Perhaps ordinary consumers do not care about this especially when you consider that many applications have a very reasonable cost.

    But it is still of some concern. The restrictions make experimentation more difficult.

    But perhaps more seriously it prevents tinkering by ordinary consumers. This can be an advantage but is also a significant disadvantage as the very people who developed the iThingies would have tinkered with consumer devices as children on their way to becoming developers. By restricting tinkering by children we restrict the size of possible people who go on to become the techies of the future.

    The obvious counter to this are the existence of other devices that are far more open – even equivalent devices to Apple’s iThingies such as the various Google Android devices. But if Apple’s App store model is successful enough (and it certainly seems to be heading that way), we could find ourselves with the same model being extended to not only competitors to Apple’s iThingies, but to more general purpose computing devices – netbooks, laptops, desktops, or even servers.

    We could end up in a situation where the only devices you can buy are devices that can only run software sanctioned by the vendor. A dangerous possibility.

  • Sockets, Cores, And Threads: The Modern Processor

    One of the irritating things about reading or listening to people go on about CPUs or processors is how inaccurate they can be. In particular the complexity of modern processors allows for multiple “virtual processors” which many people seem to think are equivalent to each other. Not so! Some are and some are not.

    In the old days you would have a socket on the motherboard of a computer into which you would fit a rectangular or square thing with lots of sharp legs on the underside (the chip) which was the processor. And yes I’m totally ignoring the period before single-chip processors when a chip might contain only a small part of a processor! One socket, one processor, one core (although you rarely if ever heard that), and one thread.

    Although multi-threaded processors came before multiple cores, we will look at the later first.

    One of the disadvantages of single processor computers was that for servers, they frequently did not have enough processor power. The solution was obvious – add more sockets so you could have more than one processor, although making the solution work was very difficult. Once multiprocessor servers came into use the cost of them was slowly reduced over time until they started being used at the high end of workstations where it become obvious that a multiprocessor machine for a single user was helpful in getting work done. Even though it was a rare piece of software that was written to take advantage of multiple processors.

    At the same time, single core processors were becoming faster and hotter and it slowly became obvious that the old way of making computers faster was simple not feasible over the long term. Those who look into the future could see that if things continued as they were going, computers would rapidly become too hot to run easily. There was an almost collective decision that putting more than one processor onto a single chip was the way to make future computers “faster”, although there remains the problem of making software utilise those multiple cores properly.

    Today you are most likely to encounter a multi-core chip going into that socket in your computer. This is more or less the same as the old multi-socket workstations and servers. Each “core” on a multi-core chip is roughly equivalent to an old single-core processor chip. If you have two cores inside your computer, your operating system will see (and hopefully use) each as a separate processor.

    Now we come to threads, and this is where it becomes even trickier. Inside a single-core processor, there are a number of different units used to run your software which were often idle when running software. Each piece of software is made of of millions of instructions, and the processor runs a single instruction at a time. When a processor runs a single instruction, it has to go through a number of different stages which each use different units. At any time during the execution of an instruction, some of the units will be idle.

    A variety of different strategies were tried to utilise these idle units, but the easiest to understand was one of the more complex to implement. This was to make a single-core processor pretend to be a multi-core processor and run more than one (usually two) pieces of software in what became known as “threads”. However whilst a simplistic piece of software may identify these threads as “virtual CPUs”, they are not quite the same – a processor with two threads will be slower than a processor with two cores (and no threads).

    The “problem” with threads is that when two pieces of software attempt to run on the same processor, they will each try to grab a selection of units to use. These units change over time of course, but there is still a strong possibility that the two threads will both try to grab a single unit – and one will have to be stopped.

    In many cases this performance difference between threads and cores does not make a noticeable difference. Almost all software spends far more time waiting for things to happen (for a bit of a file to come off a disk drive, for a user to press a key, etc.) than actually doing anything. However there are some software workloads that are significantly affected by the minor performance hit of threads – sufficient that it is even possible to improve performance by turning off threads!

    This of course is an overly simplistic look at the issue, but may well be enough to convince some that threads and cores are not equivalent. A processor with 8 cores each of which can run 4 threads, is not equivalent to a processor with 32-cores. More sophisticated operating systems could well schedule software to run in a way that unused cores are referred to running software in a thread on a processor that is already being used.

  • Hung Parliament? Good or Bad ?

    There is a suspicion that the elections in the UK just might result in a hung parliament where no party has an overall majority. In other words no party has more MPs than all the other parties put together. In such a situation, a government formed from the largest party tends to be quite nervous as it can be thrown out by its enemies if they all manage to agree.

    The preferred option is for a coalition to form out of two or more parties who can swing (if all their MPs obey the party whip) an overall majority.

    However in either case, the government is not as stable as it would otherwise be. Hung parliaments usually have a poor reputation because they typically do not last very long and spend more time arguing amongst themselves rather than actually doing anything constructive.

    At least in the UK. In Europe, hung parliaments are common enough that coalition government is the norm rather than the exception.

    The Tories – after the first “presidential” TV debate where Nick Clegg was surprisingly effective – are suddenly banging on about how dangerous hung parliaments can be. Ignoring those scum-sucking lying politicians for the moment (at least as far as we can), are hung parliaments actually good or bad ?

    Well the truth is that they do not happen enough in the UK for us to know. We do know that hung parliaments in Europe are quite common and that it does not appear to be a complete catastrophe there. Of course there will be those who point at countries like Italy and ask whether we want a government as unstable as they have. But I will also point at Italy’s economy and say that it doesn’t seem to have done much harm – Italy is the 7th largest country in the world in terms of GDP.

    It is entirely possible that a hung parliament in the UK will cause a momentary loss of confidence by the financial markets, although those that panic are eventually going to be counter-balanced by those with cooler heads that realise that the UK is not going to go bust just because it has a potentially unstable government. It is likely that the economic effect of a certain cloud of volcanic ash will have a greater effect than a day or two of instability in the economic markets.

    If we can avoid being distracted by the probably relatively minor economic problems of a hung parliament, we can look at more interesting aspects of one.

    This will be an opportunity to get a government which does not let either of the old major parties (Labour and Tory) have everything their own way. Of course a coalition government will have one or other comprising the largest part, but another party – most likely the Liberals – will have a big say.

    The likely result of such a hung parliament is significant electoral reform because the smaller parties are more interested in it than the old school parties who do quite well out of our archaic and undemocratic electoral system. Sure you hear of Tory and Labour plans for electoral reform, but what they plan is tinkering around the edges, and the Tory plans revolve around making the political system cheaper with the effect of making our current system even less democratic than it is at the moment.

    If the thought of a hung parliament is currently making you consider one of the big two parties, perhaps you should reconsider – a hung parliament is not quite as bad as the politicians of the big two will have you believe, and the increased chance of genuine electoral reform is worth taking that risk.

  • Volcanic Ash Disrupting UK Flights

    So this morning I wake up to find that UK flights are severely disrupted (apparently all domestic flights have been cancelled) due to volcanic ash being blown south-east from a volcano in Iceland. Nature is demonstrating again that it can severely disrupt the activities of people!

    People may be wondering why something as apparently trivial as volcanic ash could disrupt something as large as an aircraft. Well this “ash” is not quite the same as the normal ash we are familiar with – volcanic ash is particularly nasty stuff being comprised of tiny amounts of rock and glass which can quite easily stop aircraft engines and cause damage to the aircraft. Nobody wants to be in an aircraft when all engines stop!

    The ash is currently high-level so it is not apparent from the ground although there’s a chance of having some interesting sunsets.

    (later on)

    Now it appears the whole of the UK airspace has been closed to all air traffic until “at least” 7am tomorrow morning (Friday).

  • Universal Suffrage In The UK

    It is a curious fact of history that the UK’s Representation of the People Act 1918 is remembered for being giving universal suffrage to women. What is less known is that it also gave universal suffrage to men! Before 1918, and what is known as the fourth reform act, men were only entitled to vote if they had some form of property entitlement – either a freehold of sufficient value or a leasehold of sufficient value. This meant that around 40% of men had no vote at all, although the suspicion is that for various other reasons many of the 60% could not in fact vote.

    This in effect meant that only rich women were disenfranchised – poor women were disenfranchised for being poor in the same way that poor men were.

    Whilst the 1918 did not make the right to vote equal between the sexes, the real answer to the question “how long did it take for women to get the vote after men did” is somewhere between 0 and 10 years for the UK. Women aged 21-29 had to wait until 1928 to get the vote.

    Even more curiously, before the much needed Reform Act of 1832 (which amongst other things abolished rotten boroughs with ridiculously small numbers of voters), there was actually no legal impediment to women voting. It was probably exceptionally rare that any women did vote except possibly in towns where the electorate was restricted to the membership of certain guilds (women could and sometimes were members of mediæval guilds), but in theory it could happen. The Reform Act of 1832 was the first act which explicitly restricted the right to vote, to male property owners.

    So in effect it was only for less than a 100 years that women were denied the vote in this country; before 1832 the overwhelming majority were denied the vote for being poor.

    Added: It turns out that there were some women who could vote before 1832. See http://www.historyofwomen.org/suffrage.html

    Added2: It appears that an anti-feminist blog entry is pointing at this site as evidence. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion of course, but this blog post was not intended to be anti-feminist. It was intended to make two points :-

    1. The time difference between universal suffrage for men and universal suffrage for women in the UK was a lot less than is commonly believed.
    2. And that before 1832, it was possible that women could (and according to the first amendment to this post, did) vote although it was probably very rare.
    Through The Doorway