Stews, Social Models And Operating Systems

Stews
I had forgotten all about BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopy) until I went shopping, last week in England, for neck lamb chops to make my mother a stew. There were none to be had. Only when I put together the looks of surprise when I asked for them did the penny drop. So I had to make do with neck fillet. Ah well....................

Coincidentally it was only a week or so ago that I finally realised that the French don't have stews, at least not like the English version. I've made numerous stews since I've been here and always called them « une daube », whilst recognising that they were not quite like a French daube. When Mana and Daniel came to eat before I left for England they disabused me : stews à l'anglaise were definitely not a French dish. Basically, the French don't cook meat with a wide mix of vegetables ; the « pot au feu » is perhaps the most similar dish but there the meat and vegetables are always served separately and the liquor is served separately again, as soup. So in future I won't attempt a translation: I'll call a stew a stew (a peculiar English dish).

Social Models
A couple of items in the press caught my attention while in England. One was a report that the police were deliberately not recording a percentage of crimes. Why? Well if you're being judged on the percentage of crimes you solve and can't raise the number solved you can always reduce the total number of crimes (and thus raise the percentage solved). I have often railed against the simplistic use of targets by the UK government and there was the perfect illustration; measurement systems tend to corrupt what is being measured. Surely someone in government must understand that; or are the opportunities for newspaper headlines all that really matter?

The other item concerned the cost of child care in the UK, which is becoming beyond the reach of those who most need it. It appears that Denmark and Norway have for many years had a national policy of subsidised child care so that women can more easily seek work. It occurred to me that those countries (and no doubt several others) might have some form of national social model that informs their governments policies. England must have one (by default) but I think could do with a consciously thought out one, although the ministerial system would mitigate against implementing any such over-arching concept directly. Still, it could inform.

The idea of a social model reminded me of arguments about computer operating systems in the late 1960s. At the time, there were two extreme approaches: Burroughs versus IBM. The Burroughs approach was to design a database, TP monitor and principal compilers and utilities as part of the operating system, tightly integrated. This had many advantages regarding performance and usability but could arguably be restrictive. The IBM approach was to have minimal functionality in the operating system: memory management, interrupt handling and not a lot more; everything else was designed separately and bolted on. That allowed maximum flexibility in the add-ons but threw up performance and usability problems in the system as a whole, albeit that IBM's System 360 did have a coherent architecture behind it.

Anyway, there's a clear link to social models. England would appear to have more of an IBM approach to social models, as does America. The Scandinavian countries seem to have more of a Burroughs approach as does France. The French model is visible primarily through legislation introduced by Napoleon but I've no idea whether there has been any attempt to develop it from there.

At the time, there was a similar argument with respect to hardware registers. The registers on Burroughs machines were deployed as a stack and could be used only as such. But Gordon Bell, then VP Engineering for Digital Equipment, insisted that registers should be explicitly addressable in his designs for the PDP-8, PDP-11 and Vax machines, free for software writers to use as they pleased. But that has nothig to do with social models.