MIS 3305 Lecture 18 Computers - Software w/ Case Study

MIS 3305 Unit 3

Operating System (OS)

software designed to control computer hardware and make its resources available for users and other software (applications) - often comes in bundled with utilities

Device Drivers

pieces of software designed to help OS talk with specific pieces of hardware

Application (Apps)

Includes databases, email, browsers, video games, business productivity

suites, video/music players, text editors, etc - A version is needed for each operating system

How do we get computer software?

programming languages

Programming

assembling a set of instructions or a computer to read and execute

Programming Languages

allow us to talk to a machine in predictable way they understand

Compiled Languages

You send instructions to a compiler (special program), then it converts your code to 1s and 0s that work in OS/hardware combo (can run without a complier

Ex. C, C++, Rust, Go

Interpreted Languages

You give code to an interpreter, converts code when it runs (interpreter is needed to run the code) - it’s much slower and not for speedy applications

Ex. Python, JavaScript, Ruby, PHP

JIT complied languages

between interpreted and compiled languages (runs faster than regular interpreter languages

Ex. Java

Safe vs unsafe languages

unsafe languages can screw up your memory

Python (safe)

General purpose scripting languages for many different applications (ML - easy learning curve)R

R (safe)

specifically for statistical processing

C/C++ (unsafe)

can interface directly with machine - you can allocate your own memory

made by Bell Laboratories

JavaScript (safe)

Web programming languages - ugly, but widely used and supported

C#.NET (safe)

Microsoft open source modern version of Java

COBOL (unsafe)

used in most financial transactions (ATMs) due to accuracy and working code base

Microsoft Windows OS

for desktops & laptops, has large share of enterprise market

dominates the business world

Apple OS

macOS: laptop/desktop
iOS: phones/tablets

has niche and growing segment of market in developed/personal use market

has built its own “walled garden” - vertical integration and polished branding

Android

Open-source mobile platform made by Google (based on Linux) - for every non-apple tablet or phone in developing countries,

Linux

made by Linus Torvalds - has 40M+ lines of code, used by top 500 supercomputers in the world, has 3 different flavors

higher performance, less memory system

Debian (Linux Flavor)

super stable, slow to update, never breaks

Fedora (Linux Flavor)

made by RedHat - frequent updates, test features for free, enterprise licensingA

Arch Linux (Linux Flavor)

SteamOS is based on this, updates extremely frequently, max performance, unstable