M.S. in CS or Information Science with B.S. in IT
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computer-science
What is the difference between Computer Science and Information Science?
I have heard these two terms thrown around by people with the same friends. As much as I've heard, computer science is the more mathematically rigorous and its graduates tend to write more code. What distinguishes an Information Science student from a Computer Science student? What different career paths are available to each? ...
What is “2's Complement”?
I'm in a computer systems course and have been struggling, in part, with Two's Complement. I want to understand it but everything I read hasn't brought the picture together for me. I've read the wikipeida article and various other articles including my text book. Hence, I wanted to start this community wiki post to define what Two's Com...
Code Golf: Shortest Turing-complete interpreter.
I've just tried to create the smallest possible language interpreter. Would you like to join and try? Rules of the game: You should specify a programming language you're interpreting. If it's a language you invented, it should come with a list of commands in the comments. Your code should start with example program and data assigned t...
what's it called when you have a data structure that looks like an org chart?
This is me showing that I didn't get a CS degree. What I'm wondering is what the heck you call this: every node has a id (unique) and a parentId the node at the top of the tree has no parentId a parent node can have 0...n child nodes, or maybe it's more correct to say that a parent node id can appear in 0..n nodes Seems simple right...
Difference between a Computer Scientist and Computer programmer
What is the difference between a Computer Scientist and a Computer Programmer? What is the difference in the actual work they do in industry?(not in academia) Can you provide some real world examples too? ...
What is the most underrated or little known but useful algorithm?
I'm looking for the one algorithm or data structure which is so unknown yet useful that you think it's a horrible oversight by the computer science or programming community. If only we could all learn this one thing, a lot of good would be done to many future programs. The best one I can come up with is interpolation search, which only...
Should I go to school and get my degree in computer science?
I'll try and keep this short and simple. I've always enjoyed programming and I've been doing it since high school. Right after I graduated from high school (2002), I opted to skip college because I was offered a software engineer position. I quit after a couple of years later to team up on various startup companies. However, most of ...
Looking for ideas on a computer science course project.
Hey. I'm taking a course titled Principles of Programming Languages, and I need to decide on a project to do this summer. Here is a short version of what the project needs to accomplish: "The nature of the project is language processing. Writing a Scheme/Lisp processor is a project of this type. A compiler for a language like C or Pasca...
What open course lecture(s) should I attend?
I am a sophomore CS student and I want to spent my summer with e-learning. There are a lot of open course lectures around but I don't know where to start or how to proceed. Edit: Thanks for advices but my real problem is i cant choose which particular lecture should i attend.I mean there are a lot and some are about AI some others about...
Hardware Cache Formulas (Parameter)
The image below was scanned (poorly) from Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective. (I apologize to the publisher). This appears on page 489. I'm having a terribly difficult time understanding some of these calculations. At the current moment, what is troubling me is the calculation for M, which is supposed to be the number of uni...
How do you normalize a finite state machine?
How do you find the minimal Deterministic FSM? Is there a way to normalize non-deterministic FSMs? Is there a linear time bound algorithm to find the minimal FSM for a given machine? Is there a way to see if two FSMs are equivalent? This is not a homework question. I was watching this lecture series and just got curious. ...
What exactly is the halting problem?
Whenever people ask about the halting problem as it pertains to programming, people respond with "If you just add one loop, you've got the halting program and therefore you can't automate task" Makes sense. If your program has an infinite loop, then when your program is running, you have no way of knowing whether the program is still cr...
What is the role of stack in a microprocessor?
What is the role of stack in a microprocessor? ...
How can I get research experience outside the college setting?
I graduated 4 years ago from a small college with a good computer science program, and I am interested in going back to grad school. My numbers (GPA & GRE) are good, but those don't matter nearly as much as I wish they did! CS grad programs understandably value research and recommendations in an application above all else, and I have n...
Which universities have comp sc. lectures online?
Which universities have comp. science lectures online? I'm referring to free, general viewing of courses. ...
Combinatorics : Grouping Characters Challenges
I was working on some grouping problems at my work. There are quite a few questions, please bear with me. I find them quite interesting. If anyone here is also interested in combinatorics, please help me out. Ok so we have a bunch of characters , here i have taken a i d s. What are the ways we can group the elements ? Let us say we ha...
How are float and doubles represented in C++ (gcc)?
How are floating points represented and interpreted by a compiler. I am trying to understand that so I can easily interpret what byte array would mean for floats and doubles. Thanks ...
Is finding the equivalence of two functions undecidable?
Is it impossible to know if two functions are equivalent? For example, a compiler writer wants to determine if two functions that the developer has written perform the same operation, what methods can he use to figure that one out? Or can what can we do to find out that two TMs are identical? Is there a way to normalize the machines? E...
Computer Science and Psychology
First off, my apologies for asking this fairly off-topic question. But in my experience, there are a lot of highly intelligent people on SO so I figured I might give it a shot. Please don't be too triggerhappy with the 'close'-button :-) Besides, I think there's some chance that this may be of general interest. I'm a Computer Science ma...