This package should be useful for UNIX users who want technical information. UNIX Power Tools consists of tips, tricks, concepts and freeware. Covers add-on utilities and how to take advantage of clever features in the most popular UNIX utilities. A CD-ROM is included.
We present a method for load balancing parallel sorting on heterogeneous networks of workstations and clusters. Load balancing is achieved by exploiting information about the available throughput of the processors. First, the problem is partitioned into subproblems such that the times taken by the processors to solve the subproblems are balanced. Determining the partition involves solving a nonlinear system for finding the subproblem sizes. Second, the data are sorted by each process and are merged by choosing a processor topology which minimizes the critical path.
Though support for learning computing in schools is growing, many children still begin learning to program without formal support in open-ended programming environments. While researchers have evaluated the final code of these types of projects, we know little about how users’ behaviors and usage of support tools relate to understanding. We ran a study where participants had open-ended programming time with access to one of two support tools: suggestions or tutorials. Participants then completed four tasks which required understanding of the suggestion or tutorial content. We did not find an effect of suggestions compared to tutorials on knowledge application, but we did find that many participants who performed better tended to explore more of the interface, code behaviors, and support tools. Our results suggest that future tools for encouraging learning during open-ended programming should likely focus on supporting users who tend to explore less on their own.