Mon, 22 Feb 2021, 1:47

My students,

I am finally out of the hospital and in an environment where I can send you
email.  Like you we are all suffering from this second nightmare to hit us, and
doing the best we can under the circumstances.  We have lost three lectures.
Many of you are in situations where it is impossible to study.  In hopes of
still making 460N a vital experience in your computer engineering education,
and recognizing all that you are going through, I have made changes in the
syllabus (course schedule).  The revised schedule will be on the web site
either later tonight or tomorrow.  I wanted to give you advance notice of some
of the changes I felt you should know about as soon as possible.

Problem Set 2, which contain all original problem set 2 problems, including
8,9,10,11, will be due before class on March 1.

I am moving Exam1 to March 10.

Lab 3 will now be due on Sunday night March 7 at midnight.

There will be no problem set due before class on March8.

My feeling is that moving the exam to March 10 will allow everyone to get past
this electricity/heat/water horror and get back to being able to do serious
work.  Since a major topic of the first exam involves microarchitecture,
setting the due date for Lab 3 to be the Monday before the exam should help
your preparation.  No problem set due that day since I want you to concentrate
on making sure Lab 3 is solid.  The week of March 1 we will study physical
memory.  Normally, that would make it fair game for the exam on March 10.
However, I will not have anything on Physical Memory on Exam 1.  I may or may
not have questions on it on Exam 2 or the Final exam.  Thus problem set 2, due
on March 1 represents how far in the course the exam will deal with.

Although the University has insisted there will be no lectures on Monday, they
allowed us to hold office hours.  So, no class on Monday.  Classes resume on
Wednesday.  TA office hours on Monday and Tuesday.  Please check the course
website for any changes in times.

I hope you are doing your best to stay safe and to stay warm and to study as
best you can.  If you have any issue that I need to know about, please feel
free to let me know.  I am very happy to have a one-on-one Zoom meeting with
you would find it useful.

Good luck with the rest of the course and with your other courses as well.

Yale Patt