Quiz submission record for quiz3-2-1 at Wed Jul  7 00:15:28 2004:

Your Answer for Question 1:
I don't remember and, looking back, couldn't find anything about security holes in the reading, but the best I could think of would be programmers hiding viruses in programs that are disguised as some innocuous file type, then calling them as mips instructions.  Saving the code for a jump call to itself in a register as a 32 bit number, then loading it as code could crash a computer in an infinite loop.  Possible prevention technique could be to always have a "big brother" application watching the processes of all applications, prepared to shut them down if they crash (ie the operating system).  This sacrifices speed and memory.

Your Answer for Question 2:
I couldn't find subnormal anywhere in the reader, the index, or the glossery, so I have no idea what it means.  Perhaps it is related to the rounding incurred in floating point operations

Your Answer for Question 3:
Some older machines lacked guard digits in double precision floating point opperations, leading to rounding errors and incorrect results when calculating things like 1.0 - x

Your Answer for Question 4:
The obvious advantages are backwards compatibility and user confidence that your results will be predictable.  It can be useful, however, to break from these standards in order to increase speed, as was the case in the Cray systems.


Your unique submission ID is quiz3-2-1-cs61c-bg-1089184528-2921.