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Domain: wizzy.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to wizzy.com.

Comments · 9

  1. I was there, and blogged by andyr · · Score: 1 · on Hawking Searching For Africa's Einsteins

    I was there, it was great, I blogged about it.. I was very pleased to meet and listen to Michael Griffin - head of NASA. One doesn't often have all these important people milling around for two days - they are usually at the other end of a red carpet for 5 minutes.

  2. Re:IBM's been doing this for-ever, dude. by mstahl · · Score: 0, Redundant · on IBM Saves $250M Running Linux On Mainframes

    But I did learn about optimizing instruction fetches by scattering the compiled code around the circumference of a magnetic drum so that the drum would have rotated around beneath the read head in time for the next instruction.

    Mel? Is that you?

  3. Re:Well? by gardyloo · · Score: 2, Funny · on Market Research Company Secretly Installs Spyware

    Personally,
    I think we should all write in this style.
    A real Story-of-Mel style.

    Hawt.

    Seriously. The world
    might not be made better for it.
    But *I* might be made better for it.

    When Congress writes anti-spam/anti-spyware laws
    in this style, and the FBI enforces them,
    with judges reading sentences in
    i-am-bic pentameter,
    humanity will be restored
    (whatever THAT means).

    [Now, watch slashdot's formatter totally f this up]

  4. Re:Ignore everything else you've read here. by Dun+Malg · · Score: 1 · on Crash Course in Game Programming?
    I would agree completely. Blackjack was the first game I ever wrote. I did it on the TI-82 graphing calculator during my HS Chemistry class. It sucked, but I was learned the basics about programming and how difficult it really can be. Especially putting in the cheat codes so my lab partner would always be at a statistical disadvantage. :)

    You know, I think blackjack must be the most common "first game" there is. The first game I ever wrote was a text-based blackjack in BASIC on some weird NCSS mainframe (accessed using a 15" dot-matrix print-terminal via 300baud acoustic coupler). My father's first game was blackjack written in binary "toggled in" via switches on the front of his home-built Heathkit(?) Z80(?) machine. Even the piece of software at issue in the saga of Mel, a Real Programmer was a blackjack program. Makes sense, though. The game really does lend itself to computer implementation with its simple hard rules for the dealer/AI.

  5. Re:Engineering within limits brings great results by gardyloo · · Score: 5, Informative · on Where's My 10 Ghz PC?

    Ah, yes.
    It seems that we need to review
    The Story of Mel.

    I'll post it here from several places,
    So that the good people of /.
    (and the other people of /.)
    Don't wipe out a single server (yeah, right!)

    http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html
    http://www.wizzy.com/andyr/Mel.html
    http://www.science.uva.nl/~mes/jargon/t/thestoryof mel.html
    http://www.outpost9.com/reference/jargon/jargon_49 .html

    and, of course, many other places.

  6. Re:Who cares? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on Functional Languages Under .NET/CLR

    Haha you weenie.. Real programmers will use C#, C++ and C.. May I laugh in your face? You're considering C for real programmers? You obviously have never heard about The Story Of Mel... C.. pff

  7. Programming languages for parallel machines by andyr · · Score: 1 · on Ask Chuck Moore About 25X, Forth And So On
    How do you rate occam as a programming language for multiprocessor machines ?

    Cheers, Andy! PS. My Transputer stuff ..

  8. Re:What is Forth by andyr · · Score: 1 · on Ask Chuck Moore About 25X, Forth And So On
    > I recall a company creating a transputer
    That was Inmos - a British Microelectronics company. It was a regular CPU - not FPGAs. However, it did have a stack architecture. It was a parallel processing machine - 32 bit, integer, floating point, and onboard microscheduler to allow fast (20usec) context switches. To properly implement parallelism between processors, it is also necessary to do parallel processing on a single CPU. This is because it is always more important to keep other processors busy than to get on with your own jobs. The Transputer had a CPU, onboard 4K RAM, and four high-speed communication links to its brethren, each with their own DMA engines. You can find out more from RAM's transputer page. I have my own transputer stuff too.

    Cheers, Andy!

  9. Cobalt Qube servers by andyr · · Score: 1 · on Hong Kong LinuxWorld 2000
    Folks, We run the cobalt (MIPS CPU) servers from http://www.vservers.com

    % uname -a
    Linux xxxx 2.0.34 #1 Thu Feb 25 21:04:19 PST 1999 mips unknown

    /proc/cpuinfo says 250 BogoMIPS

    I am disappointed in the speed of these boxes - they are half the speed of my 400Mhz Pentium.

    vserver % time sum up-1.1.9.iso
    126.31user 19.81system 2:41.37elapsed

    shakazulu % time sum up-1.1.9.iso
    76.89user 3.94system 1:26.68elapsed

    I expect better from a RISC machine that hopes to challenge intel.

    Cheers, Andy!

    --
    wizzy