What is an Operating System as Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2016-05-06
·
904 words · ~4 min read
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viewers may recognize operating systems as the squared rainbow or fruit themed
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logo that they stare at whenever they caress the love button of their desk and
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or laptop but the big and often ignored question beyond what makes us partial to
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our own particular brand of software is what the sam heck do these systems of
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operation actually do let's start at the beginning before the
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half-eaten fruit or surprisingly opaque window makes its appearance when every
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operating system turns on a self-sustaining snowball style process
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known as a bootstrap must complete an automated chain of functions that
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gradually increases access to system
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hardware and controls once this is done the os becomes
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completely responsible for detecting what it and all the other programs need
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from the hardware and then supplying that quickly but imagine a world where
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every program needed to be written to interact directly with every combination
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of pc hardware it would be chaos fortunately we don't need to live in
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that world and special pieces of software called device drivers which you
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can learn more about here are loaded as part of the booting process these enable
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hardware makers to write the code once and allow it to work on a wide variety
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of systems running the same or even sometimes just similar operating systems
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so you're booted and staring at the desktop what now as soon as you interact
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with your computer the software you're using will send out something called a
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system call which specifies a task a hardware component must perform in order
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for that software to continue functioning and to send further requests
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then once the operating system has registered these requests it then
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gathers them for organization and processing and that's important so when
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a program is first initiated and needs some system memory in order to get up
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and running it sends out a call which is received by the os memory manager once
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that call has been translated to the hardware's language the os then slots it
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into an active queue based on the amount of memory it feels is necessary
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otherwise known as its block size when the program is later closed the os will
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terminate the blocks which it had previously allocated for it and reserved
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them for other programs or just leave them empty if needed in this fashion the
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os is constantly receiving calls and
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altering cues using system managers for everything from processes to files to
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networks and devices so the question now becomes how does the os and its system
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managers determine which programs are the most important well it's based on
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what we click of course you see the second and often most confounding
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function of an operating system is to provide us with a graphical well usually
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a graphical user interface that includes everything from the sign in buttons to
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the taskbar design and even that annoying little beach ball that never
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stops spinning and if done correctly the ui basically
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gets out of the way so we can tell the computer what to put at the top of the
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queue maybe say for example by maximizing it on the whole screen
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the game the game not the stupid antivirus pop-up
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now i'm dead that's an example of multitasking behavior in your operating
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system gone terribly wrong by the way but without multitasking modern
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operating systems wouldn't be able to share resources between different tasks
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especially ones running in the background behind what you're actually
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focused on like we explained in this video here and everyone yes you nerdy
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accountant and you hipster coffee drinkers everyone's computer usage
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experience would be a very very different one
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speaking of different experiences fresh books imagine if instead of running your
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own business by sitting at your computer every night and sending out invoices and
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crunching numbers on spreadsheets what if instead of that you actually just
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spent your time doing the work that you wanted to be doing and you had a tool
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like freshbooks to invoice get paid and
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track expenses through the cloud it's an online tool that makes it so you can
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focus on the little details like you know actually doing the job and then
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making billing your customers as simple as okay well you know i'm a freelance
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guy let's say for example i'm gonna log my hours in my phone or other mobile
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device as i go throughout the project then at the end
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bippity boop i use this to bill it and then the customer can pay credit online
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so all the the entire transaction is just much much simpler so if you're a
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freelance worker or anyone working for yourself maybe start using a service
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that lets you feel like the boss that you actually are head over to
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freshbooks.com techwiki to get a free trial of their service and don't forget
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to enter Techquickie in the how did you hear about a section
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all right i think that's pretty much it guys thanks for watching like this video
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if you liked it dislike it if you thought it sucked leave a comment if you have suggestions for future videos and
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as always don't forget to subscribe and follow and all that good stuff