WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]

Liambp's comments

Liambp | 2 years ago | on: BBC Micro

The BBC micro was a ridiculously good hobbyist / tinkering machine ever created. It had a bunch of easy to use interfaces both digital and analog. It had great upgrade potential with interfaces for sideways roms and even a second processor. It also had a extremely fast Basic interpreter. The only thing that really limited it was the 64k memory limit due to the 16 bit addressing of the 6502 processor.

Liambp | 2 years ago | on: Tokyo has 20 times as much WiFi as it needs

Prepay is generally a better deal in UK and Ireland and often includes unlimited internet for about €20. Here is an example from Vodafone (not the cheapest by any means): https://n.vodafone.ie/shop/pay-as-you-go-plans.html €25 per month gets you unlimited data in Ireland and up to 30Gb in other EU countries including Germany.

I have always thought it a bit odd that users with a monthly contract often pay more than "pay as you go pre-pay" but I think that is because it is mainly business and older people who opt for a monthly contract.

Liambp | 2 years ago | on: Tokyo has 20 times as much WiFi as it needs

"when my mobile net has run out"? Are Japanese mobile networks stuck in the 2010s? In Europe unlimited (or at as near as makes no difference) data has become so ubiquitous that public wifi is more or less redundant.

Liambp | 3 years ago | on: 1Hz CPU made in Minecraft running Minecraft at 0.1fps [video]

Can someone explain to a clueless person (me) how a 1Hz CPU manages to achieve even 0.1fps frame rates. That is only ten clock cycles per frame. I don't know what the IPC of Chungus 2 is but that doesn't seem a lot of cycles to calculate each new frame.

Thinking about this another way. Real world CPUs have clock speeds at least 1 billion times faster than this and they only run Minecraft a few 1000 times faster than is claimed here. How do these numbers add up?

Liambp | 4 years ago | on: How Intelligent Are Cats? (2004)

Can anyone give me a TLDR of this? I think it is saying that "Just cause cats don't act like humans doesn't mean they aren't smart" but its very long and doesn't have a decent summary so I am not sure.

Liambp | 4 years ago | on: Matrix Multiplication

This annoys me because it is the opposite of the way I do matrix multiplication myself. I work from left to right taking the rows of the left hand matrix, transposing them then scalar producting them with each column of the left hand matrix in turn. This animation starts with he columns of the left hand matrix and it feels like it is "working backwards" by going from right to left.

Liambp | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: What was it like to use BBS?

I can bring you back a little further than BBS system. I was in University n Europe in the 1980s and thanks to IBM European Universities got free access to a European academic research network (EARN). We soon discovered that you could use various gateways to get stuff off the much more developed US academic / defense research network called internet called ARPANET. The most reliable way of communicating was to use specially constructed emails and the servers would send files back in ASCII encoded pieces also by email that you had to reconstruct to get the original files. It always amused me that the biggest server around was hosted by "White Sands Missile Base" and I downloaded a lot of stuff from there.

It is worth noting that back in those days you couldn't just type an email as [email protected]. You needed to tell the mail server what path it needed to take to get to the recipient. We developed quite ingenuous ways of bouncing emails around various connected networks in order to get them to our intended destinations.

page 1