CS537: Operating system day 1

Interesting terminologies:

(1) turtles all the way down

The phrase comes from an anecdote told in the opening to Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time.

A well-known scientist (some say it was some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever", said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

The phrase is used to describe any system that appears to have dependencies that never end.

(2) revision control

Revision control, also known as version control or source control, is the management of changes to documents, programs, and other information stored as computer files. It is most commonly used in software development, where a team of people may change the same files. Each revision is associated with a time stamp and the person making the change. Revisions can be compared, restored, and with some types of files, merged.

Example: http://git-scm.com/

(3) core dump

In computing, a core dump consists of the recorded state of the working memory of a computer program at a specific time, generally when the program has terminated abnormally (crashed).Core dumps are often used to assist in diagnosing and debugging errors in computer programs.

In more recent operating systems, a "core dump" is a file containing the memory image of a particular process, or the memory images of parts of the address space of that process, along with other information such as the values of processor registers. These files can be printed or viewed as text, or analysed with specialised tools such as objdump.

The term "core dump", "memory dump", or just "dump". has become jargon to indicate any storing of a large amount of raw data for further examination.

(4) Plan9

Best OS developed out there according to my professor.

Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a research system developed at Bell Labs starting in the late 1980s. Its original designers and authors were Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, and Phil Winterbottom.

Plan 9 demonstrates a new and often cleaner way to solve most systems problems.

Designer items. Why you shouldn't buy any of them until you can afford it.

So, I have been addicted to browsing through the internet every night, looking at designer clothes, shoes and bags. It's not a very healthy addiction since i can never afford those items EVER.

You don't start doing something unless you know that you can continuously do that without having any bad consequences. Just like how your mum would advice you to not use moisturizer and cosmetics on your face when you are young to avoid your skin's dependence on these product, shopping for designer goods is the same. Once you start doing it, there's no returning. Although i envy Chiara from theblondesalad.com for having so many bags and shoes (all of them designers' items), i don't think that i'll ever be able to shop like her during this point of my life. Still, it's enjoyable to stalk her blog daily and see what outfits she wears daily :)

I personally do not think that spending all your savings on one or two pieces of designer's item is a comforting idea. Tempted as i am by the quality and the beauty of those products, i dare not push myself into that loop hole. God knows when i'll ever get out of it once i start buying those. I'll feel much safer with all my money still sitting in my bank account haha.

That being said, i might consider buying them only when it costs me 1/4 of my monthly savings.