17th May 2004, 10:17 PM
DJ, you crack me up. :)
XP is a pretty stable OS, but I have to poke fun at MS whenever I can. It's part of how my school trained me.
Just a little FYI, since I just finished my Operating Systems class... Like you said, a big key to having multiple programs running is limited by the processor- most of the time your processor is fast enough to time share and make all the programs look like they are happening instantly. Of course, if you have too many programs running, the processor can't keep up an you can notice slowdown. But RAM is a key as well, because if you have several big programs going, and together they want more RAM than you have, you have to do the whole virtual memory thing, and switching data from RAM to hard disk is slow and a big bottleneck. And of course you have the even bigger input/output slowdown, but if you have a process that needs I/O, the OS will be smart enough to block the process from running anymore until it's I/O is done and it is ready to continue processing. In the mean time all the other processes that can run get a little bit more CPU time, and everything works out great. Well, it works out great for the end user, but concurrency is a real pain in the butt for the OS programmer, especially if they try to play with threads...
And I don't really know why OS have so much trouble, except for the fact that they are the biggest programs you can imagine. I'm sure memory leaks are a big thing, but there is also soooooooooooo much going on underneath that after learning the little I have, I am amazed that this stuff even works at all. It was so difficult to get everything to work together in my OS project, and we had a toy OS. Most of the students didn't even come close to finishing, and some of these are guys who have been programming since they were 6 or 7. I still like to make fun of Microsoft, but I have a lot more respect for their programming skills than before.
I still have no respect for anything else they do, like marketing, business practices, ...
This wasn't to say "You're wrong" or anything like that, I just figured you would be interested, since you already know so much.
XP is a pretty stable OS, but I have to poke fun at MS whenever I can. It's part of how my school trained me.
Just a little FYI, since I just finished my Operating Systems class... Like you said, a big key to having multiple programs running is limited by the processor- most of the time your processor is fast enough to time share and make all the programs look like they are happening instantly. Of course, if you have too many programs running, the processor can't keep up an you can notice slowdown. But RAM is a key as well, because if you have several big programs going, and together they want more RAM than you have, you have to do the whole virtual memory thing, and switching data from RAM to hard disk is slow and a big bottleneck. And of course you have the even bigger input/output slowdown, but if you have a process that needs I/O, the OS will be smart enough to block the process from running anymore until it's I/O is done and it is ready to continue processing. In the mean time all the other processes that can run get a little bit more CPU time, and everything works out great. Well, it works out great for the end user, but concurrency is a real pain in the butt for the OS programmer, especially if they try to play with threads...
And I don't really know why OS have so much trouble, except for the fact that they are the biggest programs you can imagine. I'm sure memory leaks are a big thing, but there is also soooooooooooo much going on underneath that after learning the little I have, I am amazed that this stuff even works at all. It was so difficult to get everything to work together in my OS project, and we had a toy OS. Most of the students didn't even come close to finishing, and some of these are guys who have been programming since they were 6 or 7. I still like to make fun of Microsoft, but I have a lot more respect for their programming skills than before.
I still have no respect for anything else they do, like marketing, business practices, ...
This wasn't to say "You're wrong" or anything like that, I just figured you would be interested, since you already know so much.