Posts Tagged ‘Computer Science’

Observations

  • Random number generators (RNGs) try to simulate real-world randomness.
  • It is impossible for a computer to truly “generate” something random.
  • Flipping a coin ten times and getting a mixture of heads and tails looks more random than getting all heads or all tails.

Question

  • Does an RNG base its generated numbers off of previously-generated numbers to make the results look more random to the human eye?

Imagine you’re standing in your dusty garage. It’s completely empty aside from you and ten cardboard boxes lined up in a row on the concrete floor in front of you. In each of these boxes are your personal documents, organized in chronological order. The boxes are closed, so how do you know what is in each box?

You look closer at the sides of the boxes and notice that each one is numbered: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and so on. “Okay,” you think aloud, “but where is the TPS report I’m supposed to have? Lumberg needs it by this afternoon.”

When someone first starts programming, the whole concept of “interpreted” languages and “compiled” languages might seem a bit confusing. Luckily, you have someone super smart like me to explain them to you in a manner that even your great grandpa could understand — even if he’s dead!

All decent programming languages are either compiled or interpreted. What language you’re programming in determines whether you need to download an interpreter or a compiler to run the programs you create. There are a few differences between the two types of languages.

Ethernet's Binary Exponential Backoff Algorithm

Posted: 14th December 2009 by Andrew Brown in Tutorials
Tags: ,

The Binary Exponential Backoff algorithm is a method of avoiding congestion on an Ethernet network. The algorithm is evaluated by all participants in a collision.

  1. At first, all computers in the collision continue transmitting a 48-byte “Jam Packet.” This packet ensures that everyone involved in the collision are aware that there has been a problem, which otherwise might not be the case.