Government Bailout Of The Airlines? Hell No!

 Politics  No Responses »
Apr 232010
 

Now that the ash cloud is no longer looming over the UK and Europe, and aircraft are criss-crossing our skies again, it is time to look at some of what has happened.

Of course the airlines are complaining about all the unexpected expenses they have had to undergo and are beginning to hint that the governments (and Europe) should think about paying out some form of compensation. Sounds reasonable doesn’t it ? After all it was not the fault of the airlines that they could not fly and it certainly cost them lots of lost business.

Well hang on a minute. It was hardly the fault of any of the governments that a volcano in Iceland blew up and spewed ash across the skies of Europe. So why should we as taxpayers bail out the airlines?

There has been a hint that the relevant authorities were being a bit cautious closing the skies because of the ash cloud. Well perhaps, but they were only following established procedures. If the airlines think that the governments were being too cautious when it comes to the safety of passengers, perhaps they should have complained about it well before now.

And it seems a bit peculiar that the airlines are complaining about a risk to their business that is known well in advance. The single-man ice cream van that sets up shop on the seafront every day is not likely to get compensated by the government because the weather is bad one summer, so why should the airlines get compensated for something that is very similar ? If your business has a particular risk you have two options.

You can shoulder that risk and use whatever funds you have available to get through the rough time.

Or you can buy an insurance policy that keeps you going through a rough time.

There is another aspect to this that need considering too … airlines are supposed to pay for accommodating inconvenienced passengers on the second leg of their journey, and to arrange transport when it becomes available. From the EU website FAQ on the volcanic ash cloud situation (the “you” means “you the airline customer”) :-

  • You have the right to either reimbursement or re-routing
  • You have the right to information – there is an obligation for airlines to inform you about rights and flight schedules
  • You have the right to care- that means food, drinks, accommodation as appropriate

It is hard to get concrete evidence on exactly what the airlines are doing in this situation; many airlines are paying through the nose to treat their customers fairly. But there are plenty of indications that other airlines are either ignoring their obligations entirely or trying to get away with the minimum possible.

Looking around the Internet you can find plenty of indications that various airlines are :-

  1. Refusing to pay for any accomodation
  2. Putting an arbitrary limit on the length of stay that they will pay a hotel for – 3 or 4 days.
  3. Not providing information. Even going so far as to close their desks to avoid passengers.

Some are worse than others – the worst offender seems to be Ryanair. Which is understandable given they first tried to insist that their responsibility began and ended with merely refunding the cost of the ticket. They rapidly backtracked from this, and tried to claim that their statement was misunderstood. Yeah right!

Of course because of their actions many of us are of the opinion that Ryanair are a bunch of money-grabbing vampires with nothing but contempt for the people who travel in their cattle-class shuttles. And there are a few other airlines that are not a whole lot better

Some of the other airlines are saying that the European Union should compensate their costs for taking care of the stranded travellers. Well that might be a reasonable request if the airlines had been fully compliant with EU regulations regarding the care of the stranded travellers.

Perhaps the EU should offer to compensate the airlines solely for the cost of customer care only for those airlines who took proper care of their customers. A difficult task but perhaps it could be accomplished by simply compensating those airlines who have received no complaints that have been found to be reasonable. As for Ryanair, “No fscking chance” 🙂

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

 Computing, iPhone  No Responses »
Apr 232010
 

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

 Computing  No Responses »
Apr 192010
 

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 ?

 Politics  No Responses »
Apr 182010
 

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

 General  No Responses »
Apr 152010
 

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).

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