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nonevent99

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nonevent99 last won the day on September 17 2007

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  1. Hey, everybody. I'm really happy right now and thought I would share my list of application results that have been accumulating. Here's the breakdown: In chronological order of response, Univ Texas Austin - accepted Carnegie Mellon ISRI - accepted Univ Illinois Urbana/Champaign - accepted Mass Inst of Tech - rejected Princeton university - rejected Oregon Graduate Inst - accepted to Master's (they had no $$ for PhD) :o Since CMU was my first choice, I'm happy. Unless they blow it during their open house (or if Illinois does an awesome job during their open house), I'll probably accept the offer from CMU. Thank you very very very much to everybody who practiced with me. I particularly want to thank Wood and AlbaLed--they are two incredibly smart, caring people who deserve to get into a great school. God bless all TM'ers everywhere. :)
  2. I hope you don't feel too bad. It's normal to be rejected by MIT. [xx(] You have a whole bunch of options, since you earned the opportunity to attend Drexel, WPI, Clarkson and Maine. So you have a lot going for you! I really hope you enjoy getting to go to graduate school. It's a rare blessing--very few people will ever get to attend graduate school, let alone with financial aid. If you continue to apply yourself, you'll do great.
  3. ;) Good job! We're all very happy to hear your good news! You'll probably have an awesome time at Stanford. My boss used to work near there, and he says it's chock full of smart people and reasonably nice weather. Best wishes.
  4. Random thoughts while reading through your postings... 1. I'm just as irritated as you all are, most of all because ETS provides such a limited amount of practice material, and because it doesn't reflect the test. More on this below. 2. I hope that, some day, we will be the professors--assistant, associate, postdocs, tenured, whatever. And I hope that, some day, all of us will remember this experience and choose to discount the GRE. Heck, some day, maybe we'll be writing the departmental policies, and I hope we will all seriously considering telling applicants not to even send scores. 3. It is reasonable for ETS to try out questions on their applicants. It's the best way to know whether the questions are "like" existing questions. But mixing them into the test is not the right way. The right way is to do what they do for the general test, which is to break it up into little chunks, each with a distinct time limit, and then make something a practice problem iff it is within a certain chunk. (And, of course, you don't tell applicants which chunk is the test chunk.) The folks at ETS must be really stupid, lazy, or (most likely) cheap not to have thought of this before now. 4. My biggest beef is with the fact that the practice materials don't match the real thing. I took the exam twice (Nov 03 and Dec 02). In neither case did the real thing match the practice materials. (Fortunately, they did resemble one another!) In other words, all we have is an outdated piece of work from 1996. 5. Now, I know that a lot of people around here are darn smart, and you can really tell from their posts that they know what they're doing when it comes to CS. You know who you are. And yet a bunch of us got crummy scores. You know what that tells me? That tells me the test doesn't measure the right things. I hope that when you are in a position of power, and can choose how your department should weight the GRE, that you will tell ETS to stuff it. Transcripts and recommendations have got to be a much better way of determining proficiency and potential.
  5. Dude, there was a lady SCREAMING at the top of her lungs outside our test room in November. And another guy with a really loud car radio. (They were high schoolers.) BRING EARPLUGS. Bring kleenex. Bring aspirin. Bring extra pencils. Bring an mammoth eraser. Get your sleep.
  6. randhawa- I took the dec test last year and didn't get my scores till late January. I forget the exact date and don't remember the exact number of weeks. Sorry. murboy- My suggestion is that you make sure you get a good night of sleep the night before. Maybe even take the entire day off work or school or whatever. The immaterial aspects of the test (like dozing/daydreaming during the test, having a cold, etc) can cost you hundreds of scaled points, whereas at this point, there is little you can do to improve your score by hundreds of points. So I'd suggest paying a lot of attention to what your body is telling you the day before, and take good care of it so it will take good care of your brain so you can do a good job on the test. And, of course, pray!!!
  7. Dionysus-- The question asked for a "grammar", not a context-free grammar, specifically. There are grammars more general than context-free grammars, and many of these are more powerful than context-free grammars. Wood gave an example of one, above.
  8. Well, this proves my point regarding the useless nature of standardized tests. Judging from your activity and comments on these forums, you're clearly an astute and talented student, more than capable of excelling in graduate school. Don't overreact. Control what you can, and knock 'em dead with the rest of the application. The subjective parts like your personal statement speak volumes. Make it count. Good luck. I couldn't agree more.
  9. A "cache" in this context is a piece of hardware between the CPU and the memory chips that holds a copy of some portion of the memory. That way, when the CPU requests some memory, the cache can deliver it (which takes only nanoseconds) rather than letting the memory chips service the request (which takes maybe ten times longer). But the cache is much smaller than the main memory chips. For instance, if memory has N slots and the cache has n slots, n will be much smaller than N. In a "direct mapped cache", each of the N slots in memory can be cached in exactly 1 of the n slots in cache. For example, memory address 1 can only go into cache location 1. In a "k-way set associative cache", there's a choice: each of the N slots in memory can be cached in k different locations. For example, in a 3-way cache, memory address 1 maybe can go into cache locations 1, 1025, and 4097. There are specific formulas which describe how to figure out these specific locations, and these formulas apply to most but probably not all computer systems. Fortunately, I would be surprised if you need to know the formulas for the GRE--you probably only need to know what a set associative cache is, and leave it at that. Good luck on the test.
  10. Hi, everybody. Thank you for your kind congratulations. I didn't even know your post was here until Wood told me! I don't know what nonevent99 means. :o I guess I just thought of it when I was filling out the sign up form. RE my 500 posts, I can only say that it was lots of fun studying with all these great people, particularly Alba and Wood, who also each have plenty of posts of their own! And I can say that none of their posts were fluff--they were all intended to either encourage other people, or to help teach. The folks in the CS AGRE forum are absolutely exceptional people, and I'm blessed that I get to work with them. They are kind-hearted, hard-working, and committed. I hope that every one of them gets into the school of their choice!!!!!
  11. 1. I'm sure you did fine. Keep in mind that you don't lose points for questions you don't attempt. 2. I got 22 wrong last year and still got an 800. 3. You got a great general score already. 4. We all panic during exams. Some of us (myself included) have problems filling in the right bubble once the correct answer has been identified. 5. Bad stuff happens to most of us during exams. For instance, at the high school where I took my test, some kids came by with a loud car stereo (with sub-par lyrics), and some girls came out and started SCREAMING. I mean at the top of their lungs. For over half an hour. I suspect it hurt all our scores. Bad stuff happens to most of us during exams. If, despite these points, you still think you did lousy relative to the rest of the CS universe, then consider: Aren't you the one who's always reminding us that the GRE isn't the most important part of a grad school application? Start grinding away at that SOP. Do something to impress your boss or other recom writer. If, despite that point, too, you're still feeling bad, then consider: I took the test a year ago and wasn't satisfied with my score, so I bagged grad school for a year and tried again. There's always a next time. If, despite all this good advice from your friends, consider: You're a great person. You don't need to impress anybody, including the grad school committees, in order to have a worthwhile life. I've very grateful to have met you, just for who you are, and not because of your academic prowess. We all like you, and I hope that makes you feel better about yourself!!!!
  12. Thanks everybody for all the help on this site. It made the medicine go down so much more sweetly! There's no way I could have been so motivated without you all. Thank you, thank you, thank you. :)!
  13. What is the big-O runtime of the following function, as well as the big-O value of the function? function f(n, p) { if (n return f(n - p) + n^p; } Let's see. In terms of running time, we iterate over this roughly n/p times, as n goes down by p each time. So the runtime is O(n). I think basantikaveeru is right that f(n) is O(n^(p+1)) How about this one? function g(n, p) { if (n return g(n/p) + n^p; } Here p goes down by a factor of p each time. So the runtime is O(log base p of n). Note that since we are dividing by p, p > 0. Using the master theorem, g(n) = O(n^p), since log base p of 1 (the leading coefficient of the g(n/p) term) is 0. n^p is clearly bigger than n^0, so the n^p term dominates. Good luck, folks.
  14. My notes could very well be in error!!! Here are three URLs that say the same thing, though: http://lamp.epfl.ch/courses/progavancee00/part9/synchron2.pdf http://vc.cs.nthu.edu.tw/cs3423/os7-2002.ppt http://www.csun.edu/~cputnam/comp322/OpSys7.html
  15. Excellent as usual! Live your dreams. :)
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