Heh, funny to see this still floating around. This is the first draft of a paper I wrote with a partner for the "breadth and history of computer science" (EECS 101) class at Northwestern University my freshman year. At the time I found myself having just finished submitting a handful of patches to the FFMpeg project the year before I entered college, just finished a major patch for QEMU that winter, and using tinycc in a dumb project for using distcc to quickly find compile errors in huge C projects. When my professor/advisor put up this assignment and asked us to chose a notable character in the field I of course jumped at the chance to get to know the man as well as I had gotten to know his work.
To be honest, I'm a tad ashamed at some of the grammar and spelling mistakes in that draft. As you can see from the citation style and LaTeX footer, it was suggested by my advisor that I submit a draft to one of the general ACM journals for publication, but I never got around to it, so I never fully proofed the paper either.
It's really funny. I built freearchive.org for archiving my del.icio.us bookmarks (tagged with fa:archive). I tagged your draft sometimes ago (http://www.delicious.com/adulau/fa:archive+qemu) just because it was a good summary of Fabrice works. But I was not really expecting the archive to be useful for someone else...
Fabrice is a rare genius of immense proportions. Although the summary mentions some of his former work on the FFT and computing Pi, it was written before his more recent record breaking feat:
As mentioned by someone in the "boot the Linux kernel in your browser" thread, don't read this if you are patting yourself on the back (meaning you should read it: all of it).
Fascinating; I had read very little about him before this, so thanks.
It's been suggested on the other thread that he works at Netgem: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netgem (sorry, the link is in French, but it's been deleted from Wikipedia EN). Wikipedia FR for Fabrice Bellard supports this claim.
A quick google for "fabrice bellard netgem" shows his email address at Netgem and a slew of C header/source files copyrighted Netgem and written by him, so he was definitely working there at some point.
X stresses a curriculum of breadth, rather than depth. Although the university
specializes in engineering, students are required to take classes in sports and
humanities. Students spend the first four years studying a wide undergraduate
curriculum before their year of military service and then spend the remaining year
exclusively studying their specific major.
<…>
The goal of the X curriculum is to develop critical thinking skills rather than
preparation for an engineering occupation.
We still have system similar to this. Too bad many students don't like it :( I often read and hear cries "we ain't gonna need this". Not going to need brains? And yes, critical thinking involves the knowledge of some trivia.
[+] [-] Locke1689|15 years ago|reply
To be honest, I'm a tad ashamed at some of the grammar and spelling mistakes in that draft. As you can see from the citation style and LaTeX footer, it was suggested by my advisor that I submit a draft to one of the general ACM journals for publication, but I never got around to it, so I never fully proofed the paper either.
[+] [-] adulau|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wbhart|15 years ago|reply
http://bellard.org/pi/pi2700e9/
The linux kernel in a browser blows my mind. This is surely an immense amount of work. How does a mere mortal find the time!
And don't forget his IOCC entry (in 2048 bytes) of a self compiling C compiler:
http://www0.us.ioccc.org/2001/bellard.hint
[+] [-] mcobrien|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyclif|15 years ago|reply
Fascinating; I had read very little about him before this, so thanks.
[+] [-] astrange|15 years ago|reply
Of course he did write it, but it's quite different now or even in 2004 than it was at the beginning.
[+] [-] Locke1689|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markokocic|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robertk|15 years ago|reply
http://deconstructinggenius.wordpress.com/2011/04/22/there-i...
[+] [-] nvictor|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nl|15 years ago|reply
I've done a bit of Googling and can't find anything.
[+] [-] pluies|15 years ago|reply
A quick google for "fabrice bellard netgem" shows his email address at Netgem and a slew of C header/source files copyrighted Netgem and written by him, so he was definitely working there at some point.
[+] [-] Tycho|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rimantas|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vixen99|15 years ago|reply