Week 12

Last week of CSC104, we discussed about property rights associated with online profiles. Because of the Internet, individual thoughts and properties can be shared very easily. Many hard work in the field of literature, art, and software are being shared among people without permissions. Because it is free, people hardly think about the rights of the creators. This is really a big financial loss to them because they create such to make life of out it. It is very shameful for me to admit that 99% of my music library were downloaded illegal, because everybody does that, I don’t really feel as if I have done a crime.

Some websites allow users to see videos for free to attract users, but the issue of property rights is always a controversy.

The last thing I learned from Dr. Racket was filtering from a list. This is useful when you want to extract data from a list that share certain property. Overall I found Dr. Racket is a very useful tool in daily life.

CSC104 touches every part of computer science, and gave a really broad but general image of how the digital world looks like. 

Week 11

This week, we discussed a close-to-life issue caused by internet. Internet, on one hand, created a lot of convenience to hour daily life; but on the other hand, it steals our privacy secretly that one can hardly slip away from it. Many businesses had decided to sell their client’s privacy for profit. And this illegal act seems apply to a lot of people. For example, I occasionally receive calls or emails from unknown party. And the tendency of switching to online banking and shopping creates incentives for illegal acts such as hacking personal information. To protect us from information leaking, we are recommended to install protective software to stop malicious programs coming in. Protecting privacy becomes even more serious when it comes to government secrets. The war between government and spies is endless and require systems to update frequently.

This week’s quiz is similar to the last one, which was on recursion which I aced it. XD

Week 10

I prepared really hard for the second test, and even had a really detailed cheat sheet ready for it. But again, in the end, the cheat sheet doesn’t help with the short answer questions, at least not directly. However the questions I found are very practical that requires me to understand the concepts perfectly in order to answer them. The programming part was easy.

In lecture this week we went into the connections between computers and human lives. Apparently computers have replaced a lot of human labors in good and bad ways making productions more efficient. However issues arises together with it. I have to admit that I didn’t pay much attention in class because I was so busying at creating a perfect cheat sheet. :P

Week 9

This week we went even further to computer networking. As technology improves, the demand of computer operations evolves to sharing between various computers. This is when the idea of network comes to play. There are different methods of how computers are connected: ring-network, star-network, but network. Today the network connects machines all around the world. And when we mention the internet, we immediately associated it with the notion “www”. When everything becomes available online, the issue of privacy begins to rise, and every country seems to have different rules of regulations of the cyber space.

Recursion is a very interesting feature in Dr. Racket, and I am very proud to say that I have no difficulty solving those in-class exercises.

Week 8

This week we went from hardware to software. This is the point where I came to understand that Operating system acts as the main guide that provides a platform for users to operate tasks. Today, most computers choose to install Windows operating system, and because of its vast usage, many programs were first written for Windows. Other types of system include MAC OSX, and Linux. As well, I found the idea of time splitting very interesting. In fact, computers don’t operate functions at the same time as believed, instead, it give each function 1/20 second to run, creating this illusion.

The apply function of Dr. Racket was bit troubling to be. All I understood was that whenever you wish to carry out a function within a list you add “apply” in front of it.

We also have our first project due this week. Although the codes look very confusing, the task was actually simple 5 steps involving what we learned in class. The most tricky part was to play around the idea of lists and apply.

Week 7

This week we went deep into the structure of computers. Introductions to parts of computers really amazed me of how an ordinary machine can contain such a sophisticated system. Computers not only has a main memory, but also external storage devices that can expand the capacity of information storage. From magnetic tape to flash drive, the progress of how storage devices evolved showed a great deal of human intelligence.  

Some of the concepts are found difficult to understand such as Mortality of Moore’s law. From my understanding, the inability to make circuits even smaller is due to the fact of difficult reproduction and heat dismissing.

Second part of the class, we went through some concepts in Dr. Racket, and were introduced to color-listing. By switching the order of color components ( red and blue), we were able to reproduce a picture with altered color. This involves the use of bitmap – as I understood – map to every point in the image.

I found the programming part of this course easy for me, because most of it involves logical thinking. The quiz was fair, but the concept of bitmap was little bit blur when I saw the video in which the image got distorted.