From: Janet Davis (jlnd_at_cs.washington.edu)
Date: Sun Mar 14 2004 - 09:29:39 PST
As a reminder, the final exam will be held in our regular classroom (MGH
241) on Wednesday, March 17 from 8:30 to 10:20 AM. The course web page
includes information on the exam format and a practice exam. You may pick
up solutions for the practice exam and the homeworks outside my office
door.
Thanks for your feedback on Friday. Most of you who gave me feedback
liked the memory matrix exercise because it helped you organize what you
learned, helped you recall what you learned, or helped you see what you
need to spend time studying. I also received a few suggestions to improve
the exercise, which I'll take into account when I use the exercise again.
It was helpful to me to see what you learned this quarter. I particularly
liked these two summaries:
"Networking requires a lot of coordination from resource allocation and
small networks to growth and scalability of the Internet. Many things
need to be considered to make the net work. :)"
"Networking is simple in purpose, elegant in design, and devilish in the
details."
Questions you asked:
What is the grading curve?
- Grades will be computed on the basis of points earned according to the
distribution among the assignments given on the syllabus, rather than on a
bell-curve. I will adjust all grades upward if there are too few high
grades or too many low grades. I will not adjust any grade downward --
your percentages on the homeworks and fishnet projects give a lower bound
on your grade, assuming you do as well on the final. Extra credit will be
factored in after grades are computed.
Can we have a list of book problems that were covered in quiz sections?
- Harsha and Evan covered slightly different problems in quiz section -- I
don't have a master list. However, there is a selection of extra practice
problems in the practice exam posted to the course web site.
How our we going to find out our fishnet 4 and final exam grades?
- I will provide a way for you to look at your papers.
Could you give a simple, one or two sentence description of each layer?
- Link layer -- provides connectivity on a single, small network (which
may include bridges, but generally uses a single kind of medium). An
example of a link layer function is medium access control; Ethernet is a
link layer technology.
- Network layer -- gets packets across the Internet. IP, the Internet
Protocol, is the protocol which lets us forward packets from one network
to another. We also have ICMP, routing, buffer management and scheduling
policies, and support for quality of service guarantees.
- Transport layer -- provides an abstracted view of network communications
to an application, on top of the services actually provided by the
network. For example, UDP presents the same abstraction to the
application as is provided by the network (that is, unreliable datagrams),
while TCP presents the abstraction of a reliable bytestream. Functions
like end-to-end congestion control are also implemented at this layer.
- Application layer -- what this does is up to you. Applications include
web (HTTP), email (SMTP), audio streaming, ... you name it. Naming (DNS)
is usually considered part of the application layer as well, since it is
used to provide human readable names as opposed to providing end-to-end
connectivity.
Are you sure these assignments should be in ruby? It's much harder to
debug than C.
- There's a tradeoff -- ruby's type system (and other features) make it
much faster to write code, but I agree that it can be harder to debug.
I've gotten some suggestions about making ruby debugging better, which I
am planning to look into. (Let me know if you have any tips.)
What did you think of this class as a whole?
- I'm impressed by the work done on the projects, I had a lot of fun
working with you in class and in office hours, and I learned a great deal
about teaching! I will miss you and I wish you the best of luck in the
rest of your time at the University and in moving out into the world.
-- Janet Davis jlnd_at_cs.washington.edu http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/jlnd/ _______________________________________________ Cse461 mailing list Cse461_at_cs.washington.edu http://mailman.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/cse461
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