Post0421

Computers function more stochastically than I thought. In my operating systems class, I've learned about topics such as schedulers, virtual memory management, and device I/O. The decisions made by the OS, such as when and for how long to schedule a process, whether or not to swap a process's page to disk, depend highly on the existing load on the computer as well as quirks of the OS algorithms. This explains the fact that research on OSs is statistical rather than deterministic--an exponential number of configurations exist with respect to the number of processes supported. Furthermore, many parameters are chosen arbitrarily or based on "OS voodoo," as my professor put it; the existence of a concept like "OS wisdom" indicates how much like black boxes OSs are. Additionally, the idea that OSs at some point needed to be configured to support running processes indicates the imprecise nature of computers.