Qualcomm by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli has always had a good impression of these people.
Silicon Graphics by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
This company is a bit like Sun Microsystems, you can hear a note of awe in the voice of those who knew it at its peak. This was a bit before Ciro Santilli's awakening.
Those people created OpenGL for God's sake! Venerable.
Both of them and Sun kind of died in the same way, unable to move from the workstation to the personal computer fast enough, and just got killed by the scale of competitors who did, notably Nvidia for graphics cards.
Some/all Nintendo 64 games were developed on it, e.g. it is well known that this was the case for Super Mario 64.
Also they were a big UNIX vendor, which is another kudos to the company.
Video 1.
Silicon Graphics Promo (1987)
Source. Highlights that this was one of the first widely available options for professional engineers/designers to do real-time 3D rendering for their designs. Presumably before it, you had to do use scripting to CPU render and do any changes incrementally by modifying the script.
Vaporware by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
One of the saving graces of open source is that you ship shit, but you don't announce vaporwave.
John Bardeen by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
The Story of John Bardeen at the University of Illinois (2010)
Source.
Mary Adela Blagg (1858–1944) was a British astronomer known for her significant contributions to the study of asteroids and her work on lunar topography. She is best remembered for her meticulous measurement and mapping of the Moon's surface features. Blagg was a pioneer in her field, and she published numerous academic papers, contributed to the cataloging of asteroids, and was one of the early members of the British Astronomical Association (BAA).
Mary Rosse is best known as the wife of the British astronomer and engineer Sir William Parsons, the 3rd Earl of Rosse. She played a significant role in the development of the Leviathan of Parsonstown, a large telescope built by her husband in the 19th century. Mary Rosse was also known for her skills in drawing and illustration, which contributed to the documentation and dissemination of astronomical findings at the time.
Nicole Capitaine is a French mathematician known for her work in the field of statistics and probability. She has made significant contributions to various areas, including the development of statistical methods, stochastic processes, and quality control. Capitaine has also been involved in mathematical education and has published numerous papers and articles on her research topics.
Sara Ellison is likely a reference to an academic or professional in a specific field, potentially related to economics or finance, but without more context, it’s difficult to provide a detailed answer.
Thérèse Encrenaz does not appear to be widely recognized in popular culture, literature, or notable historical accounts, at least up until my last knowledge update in October 2023. It is possible that she could be a local figure, an academic, or a person of interest in a specific context that is not broadly documented or known internationally.
Virpi Niemelä is a name that could refer to different individuals, and without more context, it's hard to pinpoint exactly which Virpi Niemelä you are asking about. One notable person with that name is a Finnish scientist known for her work in the field of ecology and environmental research.
Juli Feigon is a mathematician known for her work in the field of mathematics, particularly in relation to algebraic geometry, combinatorics, and mathematical biology. She has made significant contributions to the understanding of various mathematical structures and their applications.
Marine Carpuat is a researcher and academic known for her work in the field of natural language processing (NLP) and machine translation. She is affiliated with various institutions and has contributed to advancements in the understanding and development of algorithms related to language technology. Carpuat's research typically focuses on improving the quality and efficiency of machine translation systems, as well as exploring the interplay between language processing and other related fields.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
    .
    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact