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At university I had an introductory C course where one assignment was to write a program that searched a 4x4 array of booleans for groups of cells set to true. Groups had to be rectangles, powers of 2 in width and height, and could wrap (i.e. they could go off the right edge and back on the left edge). We had to submit our programs by e-mail and printed form one week later. The prof. marked the paper versions and the TA ran and tested the digital. One slight problem, if you used the university owned printers, they charged for print outs. A few pence per page to cover costs and stop people abusing the rather nice high quality printers the computer faculty had.
I’d always enjoyed programming and whilst C was new to me, using another language wasn’t a big problem. As I worked on it I realised the problem wasn’t as straightforward as I first thought, but I spent a few hours on it that evening and had a solution I was happy with.
Penny was a student on the course whose approach to academia was memorization. She didn’t consume, process, and apply concepts. She just remembered them. Her favourite subject was maths. While the rest of us were struggling to derive some formula, she’d have just committed the process to memory.
Penny was complaining a lot on this programming assignment. She didn’t understand why the assignment was so hard for an introductory class. I didn’t judge. I know some people find programming hard, but I didn’t feel I could help her much without jeopardising my own mark. There’s only so much uniqueness in a small program and if she just copied my solution we’d both get penalised for plagiarism. I did mention to her the cases I’d found tricky to get right was when two groups overlapped. If one group completely covered a smaller one you’d only report the bigger one, but if not you’d report both groups.
I heard, through her boyfriend, that that week had involved many long evenings working on this assignment, but she turned up at the next class solution in hand. Obviously stressed, she carried a pile of paper of several hundred pages. She had written a program that consisted of an if-statement for every possible group size and location. About a hundred different possible groups. Each condition written with constant value indices into the array. To cope with the overlapping groups problem, checks for smaller groups also checked that no larger group also covered this area. No loops. No search algorithm. Just a linear program of if-statements.
Apparently debugging this has been a nightmare. Cut and paste errors everywhere, but when I’d told her about overlapping groups aspect it had blown her mind. There always seemed to be a combination she hadn’t accounted for. Multiple times she thought she was done, only to find a corner case she’d missed. And just to kick her when she was down, she’d paid for multiple printouts, each one costing about £10 only to find a problem afterwards.
This consistent A grade student who sailed through everything by relying on her memory had been broken by being asked to create an algorithm rather than remember one. She got credit for submitting a solution that compiled and solved some cases, but I doubt the professor got past the first page of that huge printout.
Penny had worked really hard for that D.
https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/Manjaro:A_Different_Kind_of_Beast
Although Manjaro is Arch-based and Arch compatible, it is not Arch.
Manjaro package repository
Stable branch - There is no solid rule indicating when Stable branch is snapped from testing. It can be anything from one to four weeks…
Testing branch - Testing branch is snapped from unstable at irregular intervals - …
Unstable branch - Unstable branch is synced several times daily from Arch stable
Manjaro Unstable is Arch Stable
I would expect Steam to report Steam OS as Steam OS.
They managed to differentiate Manjaro to it’s own entry after all. It’s Arch based too.
I’m quite impressed Arch comes out on top
wewbull@feddit.ukto Linux@lemmy.ml•Just wanted to show off the lowest end hardware I ever ran Linux onEnglish2·14 days agoMone might even had been a Cyrix too. Honestly I struggle to remember. My dad bought straight Intels and I bought the clones (cheaper) I can’t remember which one I first started on, but both got it eventually.
wewbull@feddit.ukto Linux@lemmy.ml•Just wanted to show off the lowest end hardware I ever ran Linux onEnglish5·17 days agoComplete with cow-print box?
wewbull@feddit.ukto Linux@lemmy.ml•Just wanted to show off the lowest end hardware I ever ran Linux onEnglish69·17 days agoI think my lowest was a 33 MHz 486sx (maybe DX) with 8MB of RAM.
I wouldn’t want to try it today though.
wewbull@feddit.ukto Linux@lemmy.ml•why didnt Enlightenment desktop recieve much adoptionEnglish7·17 days agoWhen it was first developed it was too heavyweight and too customisable. The effort needed to theme it was huge and a lot of the popular themes were poor from a UX point of view.
Still E16 was usable, and then the development of E17 started about 24 years ago. People are still on E16 you say?
wewbull@feddit.ukto Programmer Humor@programming.dev•Interviews as seen by HR and the candidateEnglish1091·26 days agoI’ve never understood why the HR people always see “not asking questions about the company” or “not demonstrating knowledge about the company” as such a red flag.
People are looking for a job, not a cult to join.
The Linux Unplugged podcast did something similar to an old Arch based server. Only one year out of date, but they had a similar experience.
Your problem isn’t Arch. It’s the fact that the Weyland experience is still under development and so not stable release to release.
This will be true on any distro.
If your solution is to freeze your distro in a certain point in time, don’t type
pacman
anymore.
mascot is a furry face in a black leather mask
That’s what you see?
I think a few Rorschach tests might be in your future.
wewbull@feddit.ukto Linux@lemmy.ml•Is there a way to monitor memory bandwidth utilisation?English3·1 month agoDepends on two things
- What performance counters your CPU has.
- What you consider to be a memory load.
Tools like
perf
on Linux can get you access to your processors performance counters and you’ll be able to see how many “events” occur while a process is running.What’s an event? Well they can be configured to monitor all sorts of things in the CPU. Instructions executed, Interrupts, page table misses, and on some loads / stores.
Memory systems on a CPU aren’t straightforward though. They contain multiple levels of cache, each of which reduces the number of accesses which go to the next layer. So depending on which level you measure, you’ll get different numbers.
Javis, his AI assistant, did all the work.
wewbull@feddit.ukto Programmer Humor@programming.dev•It's those damn coding gremlins I tell yaEnglish12·1 month agoRight side looks pretty good to me.
wewbull@feddit.ukto Linux@lemmy.ml•Migrating to Codeberg — 2025 — Blog — GNU GuixEnglish3·2 months agoSo more like a charity status?
You need to meet it’s bigger brother, the swan.
Where I live we get white swans, Canadian geese, and Egyptian geese. Egyptian are smaller and absolutely fine. Canadian will get angry and tell you to fuck off Swans are 50% bigger and will run you out of the county.