It’s a ritual across the globe: somewhere
between sticking the kettle on and
complaining about last night’s match,
you’ll probably click the button on your
ageing company Personal computer and wait while it
slowly thinks about turning on. Rather
than take it for granted, though, it’s
worth taking a couple minutes to realise
a few of the things that your poor robot
slave does without you ever knowing.
Everything you see or hear
on the internet is actually on
your computer
All your computer-whizz friends
probably delight in telling you how
having a ‘library’ of videos is so 2008,
that no-one torrents any more, it’s all
Netflix and iPlayer and ‘The Cloud’,
whatever that means. But, you might
want to remind them: every time you
stream a video or the week’s latest Top
40 off the web, it’s actually, technically
playing off your computer.
See, every internet media file has to
make a local copy of itself on your
machine, first. Ever wondered what
that white buffering bar means on
YouTube or Netflix? It’s the amount of
video that’s been copied to the local
cache, a.k.a. the amount you can still
watch if your internet decides to up and
die.
Counting Starts at Zero
At a base level, every computer’s just a
really big, complicated calculator. But
thanks to the way its intrinsic circuitry
works – with lots of little logic gates that
are either ‘on’ or ‘off’ – every action
that takes place at a base level is
happening in binary, where things are
either a 1 or a 0, with no shades of grey
in between.
This actually translates up to a neat bit
of programming trivia – in the computer
science world, all counting (with the
rather notable exceptions of Fortran
and Visual Basic) starts at zero, not
one.
It actually makes a lot more sense –
ever thought about why the 20th century
refers to the 1900s? It’s because when
historians decided on the dating
system, they weren’t clever enough to
call the very first century (0-99AD) the
0th century. If they had, we’d probably
have far fewer confused school children
the world over.
Bits, Bytes, and Size
Next time you complain about the pitiful
memory capacity of your old 8GB iPod
Touch, it’s worth remember what makes
up eight whole gigabytes. Computer
science grads will know that in every
gigabyte, there’s 1024 megabytes; 1024
kilobytes in a megabyte, and 1024 bytes
in a kilobyte. Breaking it down to the
lowest level, you’ve got 8 bits in a byte. Even a floppy disk has a fair few of
these
Why does that matter? Because on a
flash drive, each bit of data is made up
of eight separate floating gates, each
comprising two physical transistors,
which can basically record themselves as
either a ‘1’ or a ‘0’. (Want to be
impressed ever further? Each floating
gate actually relies on quantum
mechanics to work.) That means that an
8GB iPod Touch – the one you were
laughing at a minute ago for being puny
– has, according to my back-of-the-
napkin maths, 549,755,813,888
individual gates arrayed inside that
svelte aluminium body. Mighty clever
engineering indeed.
The distance data travels
A quick experiment for you: click this
link, which should take you to Wikipedia.
With one click, you’ve just fetched a
bunch of data from servers in Ashburn,
Virginia, about 6000km away. Your
request has travelled from your
computer, through a local Wi-Fi router
or a modem, up to a local data centre,
from there onwards (under the Atlantic
Ocean, if you’re in the UK), all the way
to Virginia, and back again – in around
0.1 of a second, depending on how good
your internet connection is By comparison, your body takes around
0.15 of a second for a signal to pass
from your fingers, up your spinal cord
to the brain, and back down again.
The work that goes into a
Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V
One rather under-appreciated fact
about solid state drives (SSDs),
regarded as the gold standard for fast,
reliable storage, is the amount of
copying they have to do. When you want
to copy some data from one bit to
another, it’s not just a matter of
shuffling the data from one part of the
drive to another.
Because of the complicated way a SSD
works , over-writing a block of old data
with some shiny new data isn’t as simple
as just writing the new stuff in with a
bigger, thicker Sharpie. Rather, the
storage drive has to do some
complicated shuffling around.
No-one ever accused SSDs of being too
simple In practice, this can
that writing
a tiny 4KB file can require the drive to
read 2MB (that’s thousands of times
more data that the 4KB file you’re
trying to write), store that temporarily,
erase a whole tonne of blocks, then re-
write all the data. It’s rather labour-
intensive, so think before you juggle
your files around next time.
Code isn’t as clean as you
think
The majority of us put faith in bits of
technology you don’t quite understand –
be it committing your life to a 747, or
your dirty pics to Snapchat’s auto-
delete. When you do you generally tend
to assume that the code’s been
scrupulously examined by teams of
caffeine-fuelled programmers, with
most of the niggling little bugs found
and nixed.
The truth seems to be quite the opposite.
One Quora user pointed out that buried
within the source code for Java, one of
the internet’s fundamental bits of
code, is this gem:
/**
* This method returns the Nth bit that is
set in the bit array. The
* current position is cached in the
following 4 variables and will
* help speed up a sequence of next()
call in an index iterator. This
* method is a mess, but it is fast and it
works, so don’t fuck with it.
*/
private int _pos = Integer.MAX_VALUE;
It just goes to show that even
programmers rush things to get home
for the next installment of Game of
Thrones sometimes.
What is the Main Cause of a Heart Attack? What is its Solution? A heart attack is the blockage of… Read More
In the vast economic arena, one term that often takes center stage, inciting extensive debates and discussions, is the "debt… Read More
De-Dollarization: The Changing Face of Global Finance The financial landscape is in a state of flux, with an intriguing economic… Read More
The curtains closed on a dramatic Bundesliga season with Bayern Munich standing tall once again, clinching their 11th straight title.… Read More
The Unfolding Story of Celine Dion's Health In recent news that has left fans across the globe stunned, iconic singer… Read More
As the echoes of the recent NBA season start to fade, the attention of enthusiasts is firmly glued to one… Read More