Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Cache explained to non computer junkies

Sometimes I try to explain my wife Michal, who does not work in the field of computers, and did not study any computer related degree all kinds of issues I use at my work, or subjects I am being exposed to.

While living in Tel Aviv, we used the closets that the landlord left us and they simply could not contain all the clothes Michal and I have.
Michal kept many of her clothes in her home town Holon, as after she and her sisters left her mom's apartment, there is lots of place there to store clothes, so I took the opportunity and explained her about caching. Our conversation started like this:

Yair: "Where do you keep the clothes you want to wear?"
Michal: "In the closet"
Yair: "Why don't you keep all your clothes in Holon?"
Michal: "It would take me long time to grab something to wear, so I am keeping clothes close to us, in Tel Aviv".
Yair: "But in Holon you have a greater storage area, so what kind of clothes do you keep here?"
Michal: "The clothes I wear the most"
Yair: "And what if you decide to buy a new set of clothes and start wearing them quite often?"
Michal: "I will evacuate the clothes that I use less to Holon"

As you can see, Michal's parents apartment in Holon is the secondary stroage, the closet in Tel Aviv is the cache, and Michal even used a "Least recently used" policy to evict clothes to Holon, whenever she wanted to insert new clothes to our closet.

This shows once again, that principals that are used to solve computer related problems can be applied to everyday life - or maybe this is the case, as after all - computers were made by.... humans!

1 comment:

  1. Nice !!! , i will use this in my cache lecture this week see: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032455682&Culture=he-IL

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