As originally scheduled, the ICS 10A final exam will be given on Thursday, December 11, from 8:00 to 10:00 a.m. in our regular classroom, SE II 1304.
The exam will cover the entire course. It will emphasize topics from lecture and from the assignments. Below is a list of the major topics from the course. While we can't guarantee that every single fact on the exam will be listed below, we have made the list as comprehensive as possible and no major topic area is omitted. The form of the exam will be very similar to the form of the midterm and sample midterm, though the final will be a little longer (since you have 120 minutes instead of 80).
We will supply a copy of the Deus X instruction set with the final exam, as we did with the midterm. In addition, you may bring with you one page (8.5 by 11 inches, both sides) of notes, on which you may place any information you think will help you on the exam. You may also bring a conventional calculator (no PDAs or cellphones), but be careful to read the questions carefully; some of them, for example, may require spreadsheet formulas rather than numeric calculations.

1. Fundamental concepts


• Hardware, software, data, algorithm, program


• Source code (human-prepared, e.g., HTML) vs. interpreted code (e.g., rendered web page) or object (executable, machine language) code


• Caching


2. Forms of information


• Models, abstraction, and abstraction hierarchies (levels of abstraction)


• Hierarchical (tree) organization


• Communications system: source, encoder, channel (noise), decoder, destination


• Natural (human) language; why computers can't understand it


• Human perception: visual, auditory, kinesthetic


• Quantitative information vs subjective information or opinion


• Representing information in computers


• Bits and bytes; ASCII; numbers as ASCII, binary numbers, BCD; size and scale (KB, MB, GB, ...)


• Digitizing pictures (and other real-world information)


• Sampling, quantization, color; resolution and bit depth


• JPEG and GIF formats


• Graphics software


• Bitmap ("paint") vs. vector ("draw," "illustrate") software


• Spreadsheets: cell references, formulas, roundoff error


• Measuring information; bandwidth


• Compression and redundancy


• Lossless vs. lossy; syntactic vs. semantic


• Delta encoding, run-length encoding, LZW, GIF, JPEG


• Probability: a measure of information


• Basic definition (0-1); lack of history


• (number of outcomes you're interested in) / (total number of possible outcomes)


• P(not A) = 1 - P(A)


• Expected value--sum of: (probability of each outcome) * (value of that outcome)


• Presenting information effectively


• Rules of good typography (handout)


• Effective presentation graphics (Tufte); chart types (bar, pie, line)


3. The Internet


• Services: World-Wide Web, Email, file transfer/ftp, telnet (remote login), chat/IM


• Client machines, server machines, network backbone; what contributes to delays


• Decentralized design; packet switching vs. circuit switching


• The Web


• Web browsers, HTML, URLs, domain names, WYSIWYG web editors


• Web index and search services; full Boolean searches (and, or, not)


4. Computer characteristics and organization (including the Deus X)


• Memory, registers, instruction format


• Sequential execution of instructions (fetch, decode, execute)


• Storage hierarchy (registers, RAM, secondary storage, e.g., disks); capacity vs. access time of various media; direct or random access storage (e.g., disks or CDs) vs. sequential access (e.g., tapes)


• Operating systems: managing computational resources


• process control (multitasking/timesharing), security/authentication (what you know/have/are), memory management (virtual memory)


• User interface: GUI vs. command-line


• Configuration and components of modern desktop computers


• Machine-level vs. high-level programming languages: Going from a problem description to an executable program, how much is done automatically?


• Human-computer interaction, user interfaces (ease of learning vs. ease of use)


• Pattern recognition and less-than-perfect matching


5. Social and legal impact of computing


• Changes in the skills and knowledge that are important


• Computer crime [we didn't cover this topic this quarter; it won't be tested]


6. Maxims


• People time is more expensive than computer time


• Electronic components are faster, cheaper, and more reliable than mechanical ones

Friday, December 5, 2003 -- 4:50 PM