324 Assignment 1 1. Main memory not suitable for long-term storage because it is a volatile memory, as any loss of power to the system will result in the stored data to be erased. Therefore, if your system loses power for whatever reason, you cannot get the data back and it is lost forever. Although disk drives can store more information permanently than main memory, they are also significantly slower which is a disadvantage. 2. The dining philosopher's problem is a metaphor where there are P philosophers, each with a fork to the right of them so that P is equal to the number of forks. Each philosopher needs at least 2 forks to eat and if they aren't eating, then they are thinking. The solution to this problem relates to operating systems because it illustrates synchronization issues and solutions to concurrent algorithm designs problems. This is true because each philosopher wants to eat (using two forks) at once, but there is not enough forks for all of them to do this, just like in parallel processes that all run at the same time. The solution here is to possibly interrupt or block some while others eat and then move onto the next person and so on - just like in synchronization issues.