Fri, 9 April 2021, 18:37

My students,

I discovered on Wednesday (from a student question) that not everyone has
checked the syllabus since we revised it on February 22, and sent you all
email about it.

Most importantly, the second midterm exam was moved to April 21, so we still
have almost two weeks before the midterm.  My plan is to cover everything up 
to and including Input/Output on the second midterm.  Emphasis, as expected, 
will be on physical memory, virtual memory, cache memory, and input/output.

We will undoubtedly get into integer and floating point arithmetic before
April 21, but we will not have any test questions on arithmetic on the 
second midterm.

Right now, I am sure your immediate concern is getting Lab 4 done by midnight
Sunday night.  I wish you good luck in doing so.  As you know, step one is to
make sure you are starting with Lab 3 working correctly.  Please make sure
that is the case, and if you have problems with that, the TAs can help you if
you ask.  

Also, I should point out that we have run the cheating scripts for Labs 1,2,3,
and found six students who cheated; they will be penalized appropriately.
I mention it now in hopes that there will be no cheating on the rest of the
labs.  

The cheating script is very effective.  In fact, most of the cheating cases 
so far involved students who found solutions to the labs on the web and used 
them in creating their own solutions.  This was and is not permitted.  Please 
do not do it.  It is better to take a 0 on the lab than get caught cheating.  

Good luck with Lab 4 and the rest of the course.  There are still plenty of
opportunities in the course for you to show how much you have mastered, and
I hope you are able to do so.

Yale Patt