Slashdot Mirror
Knuth Plans 'Earthshaking Announcement' Wednesday
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Donald Knuth is planning to make an 'earthshaking announcement' on Wednesday, at TeX's 32nd Anniversary Celebration, on the final day of the TUG 2010 Conference. Unfortunately, nobody seems to know what it is. So far speculation ranges from proving P!=NP, to a new volume of The Art of Computer Programming, to his retirement. Maybe Duke Nukem Forever has been ported to MMIX?" Let the speculation begin.
Who is Knuth?
...that we will know tomorrow :)
Would be shocking, but as smart as Knuth is I doubt that's the kind of thing he'd be discovering at this point in his career. Breakthrough proofs tend to be completed by kids in their early to mid 20's, it's when the brain is still plastic enough for truly out of the box thinking but where enough knowledge has been gathered to actually work on the hard problems.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
He's discovered Wu Tang and Shaolin are one and the same.
Probably that Duke Nukem Forever won't be running any dedicated servers...
I thought Knuth was already retired... as in, I think he explicitly retired so that he would have time to finish the books!
Probably meant to link here.
Step #2: Solve for N:
So P!=NP,
therefore P!/P=N,
thus the Ps cancel and we are left with N=!.
Step #3: ???
Step #4: Profit!
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
TeX has been adopted by W3 as the new HTML 6 standard.
So it probably TeX related. I don't see Knuth going off topic so much. Of course, the TeX engine is earth in that community, so who knows?
TeX 3.15 will get released. Subsequently, the universe will collapse.
It's probably something about a clever algorithm for continuously updating the layout of a TeX like document in WYSIWG style. LyX is a nice tool, but it would be very cool to have a crisp realtime document layout algorithm. One you have the capability to do that with TeX source code, then I can imagine we'll see much richer non-MS-Word editing environments.... hopefully written in pure javascript so I can have a real document editor on the iMaxi or ChromeOldS
P! divided by P will not cancel out the P's. It would be actually give (P-1)!.
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
TeX will be finalized and no more changes will be made to it.
I mean sure, it's nice to have a proof and all, but P < NP is a fairly widely accepted notion that is already believed to be true even in absence of a full proof, so if a proof were to be forthcoming it would provide greatly desired closure to the open problem, make the discoverer of the proof rich and famous, but would not be likely to really change anything.
Far more significant, IMO, would be the revelation and proof that P=NP.
That said, my money's on the announcement being a new volume of TAoCP.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Will he announce of a replacement for TeX ? Some language that would actually make sense and won't generate completely obscure error message ?
Don't get me wrong, I love LaTeX (I know LaTeX is not TeX) and I am using it everyday. But everyday, I hope there will be a better tool (and no word is not an option, and no graphical wrapper around LaTeX are not really helpful as well).
... Knuth migrated to Word 2010.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
or something big and dramatic. It wouldn't be anything as simple as retirement.
I bet he has finally broken down and finally got a real email address :P
A little birdie told me....He's going to replace Larry King!
He has a deal with the mysterious British agency known as the Laundry. He doesn't publish the fourth volume and they don't render him metabolically inactive. Don't any of you pay attention to what Charlie Stross has to say?
That he is a computer simulation fooling all of us for over 50 years...
a play on words...the "Earthshaking" part?...for someone so precise it seems unlikely that the choice of words is coincidental...
TeX version 4.0 .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potrzebie
That's it! You've figured it out! He's discovered a graboid in his basement!
drink a beer, relax, and wait until tomorrow for the announcement. Which is sure to be disappointing now.
I predict he announces that computer programming is best practiced as a semi-automated assembly-line-style set of interchangeable tasks rather than an "art". He'll say that programming as an "art" is anachronistic. inefficient, and impractical, and that the conventional approach and the people who promote it have been holding back progress in software creation because a faster, cheaper, more modern, dumbed-down approach doesn't appeal to them professionally or aesthetically.
And then he'll announce his new software construction method that can be done by ordinary people with a short period of training for 1/5th what computer programmers make. It works great, but it's boring and repetitive and never creative. It delivers software in a predictable amount of time with a predictable budget and reasonable (also predictable) quality. And the development costs less than half of conventional approaches.
That's my prediction.
What exactly was the nature of the fraud? What did they do that made him have to stop sending real checks?
If the boobs didn't do it, a mathematical proof won't either. :P
I get the sense that this is a tongue-in-cheek announcement? It's 2010, so maybe it'll be the MMX machine?
Let's see. Wednesday: July 7, 2010 = 7-7-7DA. 20th anniversary of TeX. Hmm. I can't figure it out, but I'd put my money on an elegant technical curiosity which doubles as elaborate pun and extended joke, kind of like MMIX.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
He's obviously figured out an algorithm to predict earthquakes, and he's determined that one will happen during or just after his presentation! And, of course, he'll announce it.
You need to think more literally!
Knuth doesn't stand out amongst his peers in his field as much as those examples you've mentioned. Peers such as Turing, Shannon, Dijkstra, Boole, Babbage, von Neumann, Hopper... (etc.) are all more important
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_scientists
(disclaimer: i knew who Knuth was but i'm just not bothered by those that don't when there are so many prominent computer scientists)
42. [99] Complete The_Art_of_Computer_Programming.
Clearly he's become a super villain and invented an earthquake machine as part of some evil plot.
Albert Einstein was born 14 March 1879. In 1905 he published his famous four papers. The equations of general relativity were published in October 1915.
My name is Donald Knuth. And if you study with my 8 week program, you will learn a system of self defense that I developed over two seasons of fighting in the octagon! Its called Don Kwan Do!
Obviously he's developed a doomsday device, which he will use to hold the world for ransom (and presumably use to make sure ACTA doesn't get through).
So far as I know, Knuth has done essentially zero work related to the P/NP question; a lot of algorithmics and tons of fantastic work in combinatorics, but I can't think of a single significant result he's contributed to complexity theory. While it's not impossible that he could have some sort of 'outsider breakthrough', it seems almost infinitesimally unlikely given the mathematical context and techniques that have had to be developed for similar complexity problems. My money would be on either a formal open-sourcing of the TeX codebase or the development of a full HTML5 rendering engine for TeX along the lines of the system that mathoverflow.net uses.
He proves P != NP.
Due to limitations with TeX can't be bothered to fit it into the margins
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
"Amazing" Randi helped him find out.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
It's all done with mirrors!
Your link to MMIX doesn't work...it doesn't have an http:// prefix, so it just sends you to a slashdot path.
You know, just in case that might be important. I know, it's too much to ask for editors to read articles OR click links...but hey...
That's kind of presumptuous don't you think?
Especially when P=NP :-)
I bet I'm not alone on this one. Some jackass writes a O(n^3) solution to a O(log n) problem and when I question it, the guy quotes Knuth.
... also, I can kill you with my brain.
Looks like most people have missed the connection - the announcement is at the TUG in San Francisco.
Maybe he has discovered an algorithm to predict earthquakes. The next big one to hit in SF at 5:32 Wednesday.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
And my entire world along with it! ARRRRRG!!
That God exists and he's Rule 110.
No, that won't happen until Zeno moves.
A new edition of TAoCP will be announced, with all code snippets rewritten in JavaScript.
He was on the team that worked on Doom. And all the other id games. There's also Mike Abrash. That dude's a frickin' genius. But, back to Carmack, if game engine designers ever appointed a patron saint, it would be him. Works on space projects now. Very cool.
Nope, he'll announce that he's Locutus of Borg, that he's infected our global Internet with an assimilation virus that activates NOW, and that resistance is futile!
One's fascicles really start to hurt after one has been holding a fake smile for too long. Fascicles invariably melt and stain your shirt before you can eat them. In a limestone cave, it is impossible to remember the difference between a fascicle and that other thing, which either descends from the ceiling or ascends from the floor, or vice versa. In the springtime, people are sometimes killed by giant falling fascicles when they walk too close to the side of the barn. Woe unto all of us if the Fascicles come to power after this election. I have spent what my wife believes is an unhealthy amount of time looking at sites on the Internet that are dedicated to the fetish of getting kicked in the fascicles.
I'm sorry, but I cannot take the word "fascicle" seriously. Perhaps if I had ever heard it used anywhere else and in any other context, I could, but I haven't, and I can't.
If it's to be really earthshaking: COBOL isn't that bad...
They're most likely Indians and they thought it was how you spell "Kenneth".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
http://www.codethinked.com/image.axd?picture=WindowsLiveWriter/TheProgrammerDressCode_10D17/knuth_don_2f874343-5a7b-4b33-823a-b18a84849447.jpg
Now compare him with everyone else - they've all got face hair: ...),
Alan Kay (oop),
Bjarne Stroustrup (c++),
Brian Kernighan (unix, c), Dennis Ritchie (c),
Ken Thompson (unix),
John McCarthy (lisp),
Richard Stallman (gnu),
Steve Wozniak (apple),
Larry Wall (perl),
Alan Cox (linux kernel),
James Gosling (java),
Grady Booch (uml),
"Maddog" Jon Hall (linux intl),
Manuel Blum (cryptography),
Robin Milner (ml),
Philip Wadler (haskell, xquery),
Jaron Lanier (virtual reality),
Niklaus Wirth (Euler, Algol W, Pascal, Modula, Modula-2, Oberon),
C.A.R. Hoare (quicksort),
Robert Tarjan (splay trees),
Dan Bricklin (visicalc),
Phil Katz (pkzip),
Jon Postel (rfc),
Larry Ellson (oracle).
http://www.codethinked.com/post/2007/12/06/The-Programmer-Dress-Code.aspx Edsger Dijkstra (come on
A game developer who has never heard of John Carmack.
I didn't hear of Carmack until I'd been working in game development for a couple of years - and even then I heard about him in a /. discussion. There's more to games than FPSes. IMO Sid Meier would be a better example in the field of game development.
Perhaps he's gay?
Peers such as Turing, Shannon, Dijkstra, Boole, Babbage, von Neumann, Hopper... (etc.) are all more important
Well yeah, if those are his peers, he does stand out from the rest of that Wikipedia list. And he definitely belongs on that short list, obviously after Turing and Church - and after Euler, Shannon, Boole, etc - around the same level of recognition as Dijkstra, I would say.
sic transit gloria mundi
And then he'll announce his new software construction method that can be done by ordinary people with a short period of training for 1/5th what computer programmers make. It works great, but it's boring and repetitive and never creative.
Great! This means we'll be able to write a beautiful piece of software that automates the new software construction method!
(...which is obviously the point of the parent. Are people not even the comments any more, just skimming the first few sentences?)
I lost my sig.
the first CS student that claims he read The Art of Computer Programming Vol. 1-3 and isn't lying.
I really think I've had my fill of Frankie MacDonald and his California earthquake predictions on YouTube.
..what is it?
to say about this subject.
Mmm, Claud Shannon was an electrical eng to my knowledge and he was the one to lay down the foundation of Information theory (to my knowledge) is that concidered computer science?? IMHO computer science is built on top of that (like medecical science is built on top of biology)
There's a conference for TeX? That's an earth shattering thought on its own!
My blog: http://www.redcode.nl
Hopper?!?!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Hey guess what, the announcement is at the TeX's 32nd Anniversary Celebration.
You know the Tex User Group thing.
So hands up who thinks it's likely to be related to Tex ?
So to mix my Math I suggest that .5
P(Announcement(P!=NP)) ~ 0
P(Announcement(P==NP)) ~ 0
P(Announcement(Related to TeX)) >
Have we enough Ps NPs and Not reallys Ps going on here ?
http://davesboat.blogspot.com/
...that he saved 15% on his auto insurance by switching to a well-known company -- so simple, even a LaTeX user could do it.
And, after staying at a nationally-known hotel chain, he will be taking over for Larry King on CNN despite having no television-hosting skills.
He's really a she, but nobody would have taken a woman seriously in Computer science in the 60s.
I know what it is!
Knuth has found a way out of the Matrix that we all live in.
(I think it's a program that is so complex that reality breaks down...leaving a crack in the universe that we can crawl through.... or, maybe I've been watching too much Dr Who...)
The lower serif on the letter 'r' will be reduced by 2 %, despite him once saying "These fonts will never change again".
Time of the announcement around the world
Knuth has already expressed interest in unicode. I think he will announce that Tex/Latex will fully rely on unicode and will completely leave out all the old mess of \alpha and so on that used to make tex code difficult to read. Some tool will help translating from old tex to new tex.
Here it is
earthshaking announcement
It's Knuth, so I am bolting everything down. If the guy says that the earth will be shaking, I am taking it literally.
You can't handle the truth.
Would that be TeXML?
and it appears to be very very fast!
:-(
This is probably a wrong guess, because it is not Tex related
It's Claude, you insensitive claud.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
If you want a priority list, it should be Euler, Boole, Turing, Church, Babbage, Von Neumann, Dijkstra + Knuth + Hopper
Earthshaking? This is obviously a plot by Dr. Earthquake. Knuth must be prevented from giving this announcement. Sounds like just the kind of thing the Department of Homeland Security would be all over.
Hasn't Knuth an award out for everybody who found a bug in TeX? Somebody must have found one :-)
Or the nazi who's never heard of Adolf Hitler.
"Tom Cruise is right. Unix backwards is Xinu"
that he got it wrong?
> I know he's the authority on algorithms but I doubt he can change one of the most fundamental constant in mathematics.
Maybe he'll switch to using tau? (tau == 2 pi and cuts lots of twos out of equations).
There are many things that could be done in compsci that would be great, but when someone mentions an upcoming "earthshaking" announcement in the field, the first thing that springs to mind for me is true, hard AI. We all know it's coming; someone just needs to figure out the last few pieces. I fancy Knuth's chances more than most.
"My job is to compare the AI literature with what came out of the electrical engineering community, and other disciplines; each community has had a slightly different way of approaching the problems." -- Knuth
Then again, he might be announcing his new luddite cult ;)
... about the correct pronunciation of his name.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
He found a buffer overflow and is going to get out of the matrix.
...you're doing it wrong.
Let me guess - you don't use library functions either? Write every program from scratch?
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Guys, he finally found a way to actually shake the earth. He is going to initiate a series of small earthquakes to release all the strain energy in the San Andrea's fault in a controlled way and actually tap it to provide renewable carbon free energy for the next 100 years.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Reading that page in context, he's delivering a talk entitled "An Earthshaking Announcement". That doesn't necessarily mean he's making an earthshaking announcement.
In all seriousness, given that it's being presented at a TeX conference, I highly doubt it's something so fundamental as P vs. NP. Since we're all flailing wildly at possible answers, I'm going to put my money on an average-case polynomial solution to an NP-complete problem. These already exist, but the average case is very fragile and rarely survives reduction to another NP-complete problem. Perhaps he's found one for one of the more popular and useful NP-complete problems.
Who's running the pool?
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
It's probably not going to be a good day, since slashdot has already posted 13 kdawson stories in a row.
I'm voting for TeX version 4.0, and MetaFont version 3.0.
I can think of nothing more that would get TeX folks in a lather.
If he generates enough excitement over what it might be, and then announces that it was nothing, that might be kind of shaking.
...his proof of the Turing-Lovecraft theorem: "Phase Conjugate Grammars for Extradimensional Summoning"
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
Knuth has downloaded and installed the latest Ubuntu and saw it was good.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
This slashdot article simply references a bullet point on a convention agenda. How did it make its way to slashdot if it wasn't hyped in some other fashion? For all I know is that the "Earth Shaking" announcement could be an open bar reception for the attendees.
around the same level of recognition as Dijkstra, I would say.
Bah. Knuth wrote volumes of books full of algorithms. I can't think of a single algorithm that Dijkstra ever came up with.
Badass Resumes
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
He's calculated the mass of a Higgs/Boson particle. Shortly thereafter our planet is compressed to the size of a pea in a failed experiment.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Obligatory: I want the Knuth - but I can't handle the Knuth!
But how funny IS Knuth? Would he pull a stunt like an announcement about ... Earthquakes?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Claud, Claude, Cloud... What's next, the Final Fantasy VII flamewar among people who prefer Aeris, Aerith, and Alice?
On May 14, he gave a talk entitled "All Questions Answered" for the Case Western Alumni Association. Does anyone here think he really answered all the questions? In other words, isn't it possible you folks are taking this a bit too literally?
The Bank of San Seriffe is going to start issuing its own currency.
Knuth doesn't stand out amongst his peers in his field as much as those examples you've mentioned.
True, however Knuth is more relevant to the points being made here, because of his publications & teaching making him harder to not have heard of.
Yes. It will use S-expressions.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I love my Kindle, but the crappy typesetting is sorta sad...
TAOCP is being rewritten to use Java.
Peers such as Turing, Shannon, Dijkstra, Boole, Babbage, von Neumann, Hopper... (etc.) are all more important
Knuth does stand out from those you mentioned. What have any of them done lately?
(For the clueless - the others are all dead. For the pedantic and/or humorless - yes, I know they're all dead.)
Redundancy is good And also good.
Duh - a Bug in LaTex found and he's paying someone $10.
I can't think of a single algorithm that Dijkstra ever came up with.
I can. what was it now? Oh, damn, you know when you have it on the tip of your tongue... what was Dijkstra's Algorithm called? oh, you'll just have to Google it yourself.
Obviously, miracle happens.
And there's even other ways the problem is not as well defined as we think: There could exist a different model than the turing machine with non-deterministic output which could model NP problems (let's call the new problem space NP') and that may be in P. If the nature of this machine is such that the normal translation requirement needed to be in NP doesn't work on it (or becomes NP itself), we might have P!=NP, but P=NP'. This would allow us to solve some NP problems in P yet still have P!=NP.
I just think the entire space of algorithms is not filled out enough to make universal predictions. So if we prove P!=NP, we might still be able to solve the problems in P. In which case it's our framework that must be thrown out, not the search for P-time procedures.
This is to say, NP tells us more about the current state-of-the-art for automated processing than it does about the actual nature of the universe. While this may turn out to be false, a proof of P!=NP is not necessarily a signal to give up looking for P solutions to NP problems.
"I think this, more than anything else, is what causes peoples brains to go stale."
I have suspicions that brains "go stale" [cells are lost] because so many grow so infatuated with their own ideas that they tend to impose them on their conception of reality. Axons among these channels get reinforced, while those leading to other connections atrophy. When this happens, many brain cells are lost as they simply aren't being used and nutrition and ultimately, energy, always in short supply in the body because it is costly and risky to create, goes to where it is used. These people then loose the flexibility to think creatively. Brain cells, like muscle cells need exercise.
You do not exercise all of them, if your only significant ideas can be printed on a bumper sticker or a quick political slogan. To exercise them all, you need to be more "open-minded". Being wrong and then being able to learn from your mistakes, helps build new axonal pathways. Many fail to learn from their mistakes and become "conservatives" and "reactionaries", able to only respond reflexively.
Ignoring reality again and again even as it slaps you in the face: the hallmark of a true conservative
Knuth has reduced all of Wolfram's work to five lines of TeX
Sums up the whole thread. This is also the main argument against constructivist teaching, on which, for example, the failing modern Spanish education system is built upon.
To do list for Windows
I think a *swoosh* sound would be appropriate here :).
To do list for Windows
He tells everyone in the audience to jump at the same time - earth shaken.
Either that Don Knuth is the cover for a group of Bourbaki-like American computer scientists or that he's given up religion.
That is all.
only reason I know anything about him is when I ran across the "Shannon number" estimate of the size of the game tree for chess.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
He will publish an e-mail address where people can reach him.
He's going to announce that, contrary to long-held conventional wisdom, you CAN do that in horizontal mode!
Pope and the Catholic church has no problem with evolution
The Catholic Church ostensibly accepts the process of evolution, just to throw doubt on its mechanisms. They consider the challenge of creationism to be a "lively" scientific debate. They take the position that, whatever science finds, the Church will be comfortable with the result saying 'But God willed it' (they have learned their lesson...):
But it is important to note that, according to the Catholic understanding of divine causality, true contingency in the created order is not incompatible with a purposeful divine providence. Divine causality and created causality radically differ in kind and not only in degree. Thus, even the outcome of a truly contingent natural process can nonetheless fall within God’s providential plan for creation. (Communion and Stewardship: Human Persons Created in the Image of God, plenary sessions held in Rome 2000-2002, published July 2004. Cardinal Ratzinger, then head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, has endorsed this text coming out of The International Theological Commission which was charged with dealing with this 'non-problem')
No problem? If you are naive, you might be comfortable with that, until they turn this around and tell you that there is no true contingency since God willed it, that therefore the soul does not arise out of a material process without God's intervention, and then come back with Adam and the original sin, as they steadfastly insist, and the created soul, and the limitations of the materialistic scientific outlook. With that, they are satisfied that they have justified their moral mission in this sinful world and finally put science in its damn place.
Evolution has been the Catholic Church's main concern ever since the issue surfaced with the publication of Darwin's 'The Origin of Species', and they are not nearly close to be out of trouble yet. They are in the very same hot tub than the other Adamic religions regarding evolution, despite their ostensible affectation to have no problem with it.
According to my source all that time has has been really working on Duke Nukem Forever (for MIX machine)!
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
fyi, http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1814327 He'll admit his error in designing the CS classic Btree algorithm. The error was uncovered by the author of 'Varnish' caching software. Dietrich
I had the absolute joy of secretarial support for about a year and a half. My productivity more than tripled because of her.
Really, if you can afford it, hire a secretary. Whatever the cost, you will more than make up for it by getting a lot more work done.
If you are even remotely interested in the people behind the solving of the Theorem, you should watch this documentary about Andrew Wiles.
That's *WHOOSH* you insensitive clod!
Knuth doesn't stand out amongst his peers in his field as much as those examples you've mentioned. Peers such as Turing, Shannon, Dijkstra, Boole, Babbage, von Neumann, Hopper... (etc.) are all more important
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_scientists
(disclaimer: i knew who Knuth was but i'm just not bothered by those that don't when there are so many prominent computer scientists)
Based on books and other papers I read, written by those people.
Knuth - LOL! Oh, my stomach, it hurts! Can't breath! Mu-u-u-ust stop laughing!
Turing - Booooring, boring, boring, booooring!
Djikstra - Slightly amusing, until he starts rambling, he always starts rambling.
Boole - Zzzzzzzzzzzz
Babbage - I admit, I've never read anything by Babbage
von Neumann - Zzzzzzzzzz
Hopper - Snicker, heh, heh, heh...
Hopper is both brilliant AND funny. That's like hot chocolate WITH cream.
Knuth is both brillant AND funny as hell. Thats like hote chocolate WITH cinnamon AND cream.
They are also very good at explaining complicated stuff simple, but not simplistic. As is Djikstra.
The other ones, meh!
He has reproduced the Mona Lisa using an algorithm written in 7 lines of FORTRAN for CUDA.
All those books and papers? Comedy! Literate programming? C'mon, who'd take *that* seriously. TeX? Wrote it as a joke on his professor.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I was walking down a short pier.
My head was down, I was counting the slits between each plank on the pier.
I discovered something:
When you're out of slits, you're out of pier.
No brain, no pain.
Obviously the evil genius has snapped, and he'll be unveiling his new Doomsday Device. If ECMA does not make TeX the one and only standard for text storage and processing by tomorrow noon PST, he'll unleash an earthquake that will level the West Coast. Earth-shaking indeed!
The title of a presentation at a TeX conference.
What that would be? Well, it must be TeX related, of course.
It's an announcement.
But when the title "an earth shattering announcement" is used, it is probably a bit of humor, and meant as the exact opposite.
I suppose we shall see, when the proceedings are published, eh?
I'd never heard that one before, but I remember the ad tag line on which your punch line is based, and send a little gusto your way.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
(posting this from the Sir Francis Drake Hotel)
a successor to TeX which he has been working on for some time
scratch tex78 and tex82
so making up for assumptions which don't fit the internet age
jokes about measuring and math in TeX .4pt == .3999pt
maxdimen too small, 1sp too large
tunnel vision caused by computers of the day
subset of XML uses Unicode automatic everything
all directions and all dimensions
hypertext
text audio video sensors GPScoords accelerometers haptics
midi input to score and back to music
no macros --- menu driven like Word but enhanced
spoken command and gestures
\i \TeX (wrapped on a sphere)
spoken name accompanied by (optional) ringing bell
not programmed directly
1289 bugs in TeX
571 bugs in metafont
Project Marianne
www.projectmarianne.com
Project Biturgical
written in Scheme using all buzzwords
pricing - monthly subscription on cloud
first year one month free
pricing based on internet speed
will change everyday
life is too short to reread anything
will benefit world's economy, user's can sell documents
network of certified consultants
online help
- for dummies
- for wizards
- personalized on-line
symbolic equations
graphics
maps
satellite photos
\i\TeX hyper document
math mode like mathml --- must evaluate
avatars
hyperbolic geometry
videoconferencing
world-class photo retouching
character, face, speech recignition
cognition
output format:
- lasercutters
- embroidering machines
- 3D printers
- plasma cutters
interactive cookbook
life as hypertext document
released next month
pending patent applications
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
The earth should be shattered by now. Any news about the announcement?
Disappointing. I feel manipulated, but at least by someone with obvious high intellect.
How about Dijkstra's Algorithm?
What's the news?
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
According to the schedule on Knuth's site the earth was shattered a few hours ago.
Anyone know what was announced?
As far as I can tell, the earth shattering news is there's going to be an XML-based TeX successor. Underwhelming, eh?
Grace Murray Hopper invented the compiler.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
It's Thursday. Wednesday passed.
According to a participant "Oh, guess he's done. Knuth apparently decided to use TUG 2010 to troll everyone."
"Where's the kaboom. There was supposed to be an earth shattering kaboom".
Do you think you're smart, or do you think everybody else is stupid?
The question isn't "who?". Given that she invented the worst programming language ever, the question is "why?".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That's what I get for copying and pasting the link wrong. My initial search included all the crap Google usually appends to their search (&hl=en and so forth) so I chopped it off after the keywords themselves.
Here's the correct link: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=DE+Knuth
I must be new here.
To do list for Windows
You are not expected to know this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm
Ok, now that one just about made my day! =)
It would be like a Nazi who didn't know that Henry Ford admired Adolf Hitler.
http://river-valley.tv/an-earthshaking-announcement/ Uploaded with permission from Don Knuth.