CST334: Journal Entry Week 8

We’re in the last week of CST334 and it’s a very short week. The question prompt is a little confusing this time since it’s asking what we learned in this eighth week even though there wasn’t any reading to do. We do have the final preparation slides, but that’s just reviewing units five to seven and isn’t anything new. I had to read the prompt a few times over because it’s confusing.

Persistence as it applies to Operating Systems is the concept of any data that persists for longer than the process that created it. This is most easily demonstrated by having a process write data to any form of non-volatile storage, like a hard drive. Persistence is ubiquitous in computing and I feel that it should’ve probably been covered earlier in the textbook because of that. If you want to get philosophical you could say that persistence also applies to students because the knowledge we learn in this course *hopefully* persists after we’ve finished this class. You could also use the other definition of persistence and say that the students who made it this far into the class had persisted despite the difficulties and complications they faced while completing the coursework for CST 334. Persistence isn’t permanence though and eventually all forms of written computer data will degrade and be lost, just like I’ll eventually forget about everything I learned in this course.