3 ms·
At least when I was in college, there was an approved formula book that was allowed in exams. Need the formula for the moment of inertia of a shell sphere? The
by michaelt 2y ago
At least when I was in college, there was an approved formula book that was allowed in exams.
Need the formula for the moment of inertia of a shell sphere? The coefficient of linear expansion of gallium? Fourier series of a sawtooth wave? If you've somehow forgotten the formula for the mean of a sample? It's all in there.
There were of course some things that weren't in the formula book - and if you had to look up every last thing, you'd face a lot more time pressure in exams.
- WalterBright 2y agoCaltech exams were open book / open note. The books didn't help much :-/ as the exams were not about regurgitating knowledge. I never bothered to memorize anything at Caltech, yet I wound up with an encyclopedic knowledge of things like trig identities. Sort of like I wound up knowing most of the x86 opcode encodings, although since I later abstracted that, it has slipped my mind a bit.
- professoretc 2y agoPrefixes come first, 1 byte each, order doesn't matter except that REX, if present, must come last. Then the opcode, 1-3 bytes. Followed by Mod R/M byte, if present. Followed by SIB byte, if present. Followed by address/immediate, 1, 2, 4, or 8 bytes, if present. Ugh; there's a reason why I'm switching my architecture course to MIPS32.
- WalterBright 2y agoOne day I realized I could just look at a hex dump and see some (not all) of the instructions in my head.