Fraud Threat Halts Knuth's Hexadecimal-Dollar Checks

Barence writes "You may be aware of Donald Knuth, the creator of TeX and author of The Art of Computer Programming, who used to post checks to anyone who spotted an error in one of his books — one hexadecimal dollar, or $2.56. No one cashed them though. This blogger has two of them proudly on his wall, but the sad news is that modern day bank fraud has put a stop to Knuth's much-loved way of keeping his books free of errors." (Here's Knuth's own post about the sad change.)

Comments

Re:Forgive me

[Kjella]

Think of a dollar as "100" cents. 0x100 cents = 256 (decimal) cents.

It's still wrong though, "cent" is the same "cent" as in "centimeter" or "percent" and means 1/100. The unit is the dollar, so 0x1 dollar = one dollar. Msybe a hex kilogram can mean 0x1000 grams, but in this case it makes no sense. Not that this is of any consequence whatsoever, since it's an arbritrarily chosen value anyway...