Well there's also what I'd call the "insane" category of professors. Like I said typically the entire grade is your final exam over here and I had a notorious statistics professor who was just an *******.

Failed the test the first time and the second time I got ~65% and was among the elite group of 6 out of iirc >250 that didn't fail. That's just unacceptable lol GTFO land.
Pretty sure he won a couple of lawsuits though.

Hi guys, I'm trying to retrieve PS's lobby table names but I'm failing, do you have any advice?

I'm not sure I would agree with that. I've encountered bugs as a user and then a few days later no longer encountered them because they were fixed.

So if a bug in the test software gives you wrong grades, is it okay because by the time you use the software for some other test, the bug may be fixed? What difference does it make to you whether the programmer or the professor made an error? Better experience the second time around may or may not make the first experience go away. Also, not all software is used multiple times. Consider TurboTax 2013.

I once had a professor who curved across years. He thought we were smarter than previous years' classes so we deserved higher GPA's.

Other than that, I think I've seen one professor grade on a true curve.

candy,

In a test's case where the professor decided to grade tests using a poor system there is no next time around under most circumstances and the price you pay could be many thousands of dollars and a fairly large chunk of time.

You can't relate this to something like turbotax. I know nothing about this field of software but I imagine there are extremely rigorous tests and audits in place. In addition to that maybe there's a clause somewhere which protects the user from being accountable due to mistakes in the software?

Sort of like if 80 million dollars appears in your bank account out of the blue due to some bug in the system it's not yours to keep.

A slight change in grade in a single class is not worth anywhere near many thousands of dollars - if it was worth that much to you personally, you should've studied harder as to cover all bases and/or spend more effort schmoozing the people who are writing and grading the tests. I TA'ed and graded for a bunch of CS classes in college. Taking one of them for example, a class of about 40 (intermediate CS class at a top school) where I was one of four graders including the professor, I got paid about $40 for grading the midterm and the final combined which comes to about $2 a test, plus some free pizza and soda (sorry about grease marks). This is more than a decade ago, but grades are necessarily contrived and unfair and the $2 you're paying the grader to grade the exam isn't going to buy you some kind of perfect fairness. College students don't study as though grades are all that important, graders don't grade as though grades are all that important because the truth is, they aren't.

Either way, this is irrelevant - this whole tangent is about you thinking professors making a mistake is worse than a programmer having a bug in their code.

What if there's a bug in the test/audit code? If TurboTax misleads you into missing some deductions or paying more taxes by misclassifying your situation, you could be out thousands and no one will ever know that anything went wrong. It's not like you're required to pay the least amount of tax possible. And that's small time stuff - you don't think people have lost millions based on bugs in financial models?

Our professor "curves" our tests by adding 10 points. So instead of 100% I got 110% on my midterm lol

Grades are important at my school, especially when you're looking to transfer into a heavily impacted program at a prestigious CS school.

In the aggregate, grades can have some importance, but in the aggregate, grades are going to reflect some combination of ability and effort. Grading irregularities aren't going to make a big difference in your overall GPA, a small difference in GPA isn't going to have a big impact in the quality of school you get into and and going to a slightly worse school isn't going to make or break your career.

Yea, I know, but I have a 4.0 and it would piss me off royally to get a B in this class because of 1 stupid test.

If you're doing Cs I wouldn't be hanging on so hard to a first year 4.0

My experience getting my CS degree at a university that curves was the exact opposite. Class averages would be ssooooo low because literally nobody studied because they knew no one else was studying either. I was getting 40's on exams and at the end of the year have a B+. Pretty sad.

candy,

If the test/audit code is busted then you can't do anything about it. I guess in this case ignorance is bliss. Maybe down the line they'll find the bug and do something to compensate their users. Seems like they would have to do that or their software would get a massive bad rep.

Failing a test as a student has direct consequences. Your assessment is correct though. I also feel like programs dealing with money directly are held at a standard much higher than a typical open source project.

Although not all money related programs are immune to crazy bugs. I vaguely recall the Diablo 3 auction house (which had a real money aspect to it) had some really naive bugs and that was a huge project with tens of millions and possibly even 100m+ worth of development/design behind it.

derada4,

Interesting. That would make me upset too as a potential student. It somehow de-values you a bit.

So I am doing a networking project where we have to send a file from one process to another using datagram sockets, and a certain % of the time we have to introduce a 1-bit "error". Would this method be the correct way to flip one bit within my my byte[] that represents the payload? The payload is 16 bytes, so I would generate a random number from 0 and 127 to decide which bit to flip. Working with bits in Java is such a pita.

I worked on software that generated patient lab reports for clinical trials. That's one you really need to get right the first time.

Looks right but if pos is outside of the payload boundary then you are not going to like the results. Also since payload is a pointer you don't need to return what it points to in fact I wouldn't.

Edit:

int index = pos >> 3; // instead of pos/8

int bitPosition = pos & 7; // instead of pos % 8

The way you did it isn't wrong and may communicate intent better not sure. Also not sure if compiler would see a pos / 8 and just do shift right instead. I'm guessing probably not but not sure.

Why does this matter? You can't say competition from other devs.

I would have also thought that conceptual the leap from x86 -> ARM is much smaller than other higher level languages.

It probably is but there is still a big difference in my view.

I assumed you were referring to x86 architecture and assembly language. If so you really are not going to find that much use for that kind of skill for the x86. Outside of some BIOS startup code and a few scattered things Windows does there isn't really anything happening at the level of software in my view.

For The ARM architecture on the other hand there is a fair amount of "bare metal" software development happening that requires a deeper knowledge of the processor architecture. Even in RTOS type development there are occasions where for instance development of drivers for hardware components requires having a deeper knowledge of the processor architecture. The x86 chips just aren't used that much for embedded work especially bare metal type work.

I think there is a lot of difference in the processor architectures FWIW. The x86 architecture is considered to be register poor (for lack of a better term ) by many is just one example. The addressing modes are "funky" too in my view. I find the programmers model to be what I would call unorthodox, again for lack of a better term. I think Intel is a great company so don't get me wrong.

I would also change pos and all other int declarations to unsigned int. Finished beating this to death .

Thanks for the answer.

Isn't the architecture and the assembly hand-in-hand? I figure if you can wrap your brain around one architecture, then the next one will be a bit easier. They are mostly derived and reduced from each other.

The assembly book I'm finally getting back to takes plenty of pot-shots at the architecture, but at the same time, from a historical perspective, it may well be the best that can be done in the short history and many iterations of the various formats, but I don't know enough to say one or two on this subject.

Obviously, I don't want to work on BIOS. I don't think I'll ever do serious development on 'dose again, but at the same time, the resources are there, so why the heck not and what can it really hurt anyways to learn about Endian, bits, and registers? FWIW, I use Linux for this stuff anyways.

Thanks. It is always best to learn to do things the right way and follow best practices. The teacher I had for our intro Java classes was very good at making us do things correctly, and it has helped me a lot now getting into the 300 and 400 level courses.

But I am not aware of Java even having unsigned int? I thought int was only signed?

You know more about Java than I do I'm sure. So it doesn't I'm sure but if it did . Your assignment was quite similar to C/C++ code for doing this. The reasons to use unsigned int

-- You don't have bit positions in a payload that are negative.
-- Right shifts of negative numbers will keep the sign bit a 1 IE they are arithmetic shifts as opposed to logical, at least they should be.

I would do some sort of check for a valid bit position input.

yea java only has signed ints, I'm pretty sure.

I think a 4.0 at the CC level is entirely feasible. I have finished all my general ed credits (except calc 2) with a 4.0, so unless calc or C++ proves insanely difficult, I think I can do it.

Certainly not gonna beat myself up if I don't, it was just a goal of mine to transfer with a 4.0

design patterns...for my project i was originally going to do model-view-controller but have ended up with view/controller being in the same class. The logic doesnt halt any of the view and the view doesnt really do that much (its just one poker table).

what kind of design pattern would this be called? :S doubt there is one lol