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Programming

The Toughest Programming Question for High School Students on This Year's CS Exam: Arrays 45

America's nonprofit College Board lets high school students take college-level classes — including a computer programming course that culminates with a 90-minute test. But students did better on questions about If-Then statements than they did on questions about arrays, according to the head of the program. Long-time Slashdot reader theodp explains: Students exhibited "strong performance on primitive types, Boolean expressions, and If statements; 44% of students earned 7-8 of these 8 points," says program head Trevor Packard. But students were challenged by "questions on Arrays, ArrayLists, and 2D Arrays; 17% of students earned 11-12 of these 12 points."

"The most challenging AP Computer Science A free-response question was #4, the 2D array number puzzle; 19% of students earned 8-9 of the 9 points possible."

You can see that question here. ("You will write the constructor and one method of the SumOrSameGame class... Array elements are initialized with random integers between 1 and 9, inclusive, each with an equal chance of being assigned to each element of puzzle...") Although to be fair, it was the last question on the test — appearing on page 16 — so maybe some students just didn't get to it.

theodp shares a sample Java solution and one in Excel VBA solution (which includes a visual presentation).

There's tests in 38 subjects — but CS and Statistics are the subjects where the highest number of students earned the test's lowest-possible score (1 out of 5). That end of the graph also includes notoriously difficult subjects like Latin, Japanese Language, and Physics.

There's also a table showing scores for the last 23 years, with fewer than 67% of students achieving a passing grade (3+) for the first 11 years. But in 2013 and 2017, more than 67% of students achieved that passsing grade, and the percentage has stayed above that line ever since (except for 2021), vascillating between 67% and 70.4%.

2018: 67.8%
2019: 69.6%
2020: 70.4%
2021: 65.1%
2022: 67.6%
2023: 68.0%
2024: 67.2%
2025: 67.0%

Submission + - Windows 11 = Windows 7 ? 1

J. L. Tympanum writes: It looks to me like Windows 7, 10 and 11 are all the same OS, just with a different-looking window manager slapped on top. Can someone with more knowledge of Windows internals verify this claim, or refute it?

Submission + - SPAM: 'Whale poop loop' keeps ocean and humans alive and well 1

alternative_right writes: Whales of all shapes and sizes play a significant role in the health of marine ecosystems. About 50% of the air humans breathe is produced by the ocean, thanks to phytoplankton and whale waste. The Whale Poop Loop is the foundation of the marine food web and the planet's lungs.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Engineers Weigh Up Returning to Ancient Roman Concrete Recipes

alternative_right writes: The ancient Romans might have taught us a thing or two about manufacturing sustainable concrete that lasts for thousands of years.

A new study has rigorously analyzed the raw materials and energy demands of their ancient recipe, revealing some useful ways to improve modern cement.

Link to Original Source

Comment Re:Answer question headlines with (Score 1) 196

I'd argue that while you might be gaining something here (time) you could also losing something and that is expertise.

If you aren't reading the documentation yourself, then you aren't absorbing things that could be valuable later (even though they might not be relevant to the particular task you are doing now) and are therefore "stupider" at least by that definition.

All the time I'm involved in conversations where it is useful to have information in my head to either
- immediately answer a question (and avoid a follow up meeting), or
- prevent time being wasted on some course of action that isn't viable, or
- to suggest a neat solution I am aware of
all because of some detail I have read that hasn't previously mattered.

Of course, perhaps you are reading the documentation first, then pointing the AI at the relevant bits so it can complete some task and then reviewing the output for sanity, in which case I think you probably aren't losing out.

In the real world though I am seeing more and more information coming my way where it is pretty obvious that the person presenting it hasn't actually done their homework and doesn't really understand what they are proposing or working with.

Comment Re:Understandable but in practice, not sustainable (Score 1) 72

It's a hard answer. By stating "You will categorically not be paid if you try to ransom us", you're cutting out the part of organised crime that does stuff for a profit. There will be no profit in attacking a hospital. They will not pay, and you'll take an awful lot of heat for no return (and potentially be liable for any deaths that occur if they eventually catch you, increasing the sentence that's meted out to you).

However, there is still the vulnerability to politically motivated attacks, so safety still isn't assured, it just demotivates regular organised crime that just wants to make lots of money.

Comment It's not about having backups. (Score 1) 72

Having backups, and having tested backups is pretty much what everyone has.
The critical thing that people are finding is the metric to follow with Ransomware attacks is the Recovery Time for the entire estate. Not one system, but potentially hundreds of interlinked systems that all fail catastrophically at once.
That can take weeks of forensics to work out what's happened (and needs to be done before you can make an effective recovery, otherwise you may find you're back at still being compromised and ransom attacked within minutes of being back online). Then it can take weeks or months to recover and sync all the systems affected.

All the while, your primary business (in hospitals, for example, keeping people alive) is in measures that most likely can't handle the load long term with paper based recording and tracking. They certainly will have difficulty managing planned appointments and making new ones, which is why many business continuity plans have a time scale by which a given system needs to be recovered, or else things go south quickly after that period.

Comment The cost of time to recovery from total failure? (Score 1) 125

I've read so many people saying "should have had backups", but nobody has considered the time to rebuild from catastrophic failure. Every system and server is down, full restore and recovery to a time before infection (and validation of that).
The company was a transport company with 500 trucks on the road. That's a lot of logistics in play that need to have continuity, each one with cost of probably tens of thousands a day, or more, with heavy non-complete penalties for failure.
Full catastrophic failure can take weeks, or months to perform. In this time, you've haemorrhaged customers, who have had to try and make alternate arrangements where they can (and will likely not be back), no ability to schedule new business, and bills that still need to be paid.

The cash flow can easily drive a low margin business like transport into failure just by the time to recover from a complete loss of function by malicious infection. All the backups may be there, they may even have off site, and have done everything by the book, just the operating company as an entity could easily lose more in the recovery time window than it was possible to financially recover from.

Submission + - SPAM: Can AI think—and should it? What it means to think, from Plato to ChatGPT

alternative_right writes: Plato, who taught in the fourth century BCE, argued that each person has an intuitive capacity to recognize the truth. He called this the highest form of understanding: "noesis." Noesis enables apprehension beyond reason, belief or sensory perception. It's one form of "knowing" something—but in Plato's view, it's also a property of the soul.

Lower down, but still above his "dividing line," is "dianoia," or reason, which relies on argumentation. Below the line, his lower forms of understanding are "pistis," or belief, and "eikasia," imagination.

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Comment Re:Poor couple. (Score 1) 81

The law is unconstitutional, as other similar laws have been found in the past. It hasn't been removed from the books only because nobody has been charged for it in a century, thus nobody has had a chance to challenge it on those grounds. The exception is for the military, which has the UMC which is allowed to have stricter restrictions on behavior.

Comment Re:More things wrong with the world. (Score 4, Informative) 81

YEah, none of this will happen. Let's assume they don't have a prenup (in which case the settlement of assets is dictated by that). The wife would get 50% of what was generated during their marriage at best. That may include the house, but its value would be subtracted from what she got in cash. Alimony... depends on a lot of circumstances, but it's more rare and generally a limited time. Plus we have no idea what the wife's income is, she may make as much or more.

Will he get a job again? Of course he will. Probably not as a CEO in the near term, but he'll absolutely get jobs where he isn't a visible presence for the company. And in a few years the CEO jobs will open again, because nobody is going to give a fuck a year from now.

As for going to jail- no. If the alimony (which is unlikely to exist) does exist and it is set high, he goes back to court to get it lowered. Because alimony is based on your income (with a few exceptions for example purposefully staying unemployed). Given that he was just publicly fired, his current income potential is very low, so any alimony would be matchingly low. There are formulas for these things.

So in other words, your just spouting misogynistic bullshit.

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