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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.
unless of course, your Albert Einstein, Galileo, Marie Curie, Niels Bohr, Ernst Ruska, or any number of other important members of the scientific community throughout the centuries. many of these people did not provide 'breakthroughs until well into there 30's, and most of them continued to provide useful advances in science well into there later years.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Makes me wonder why anyone would assume everyone on ./ knows who he is, what he's done, or why we should care what he has to announce...
Seriously? To draw a comparison, it's like being a geneticist and not knowing who Gregor Mendel is. Or a physicist/mathematician and drawing a blank when Sir Isaac Newton's name comes up. You could be a philosopher who has never heard of Aristotle or Plato. Or a FLOSS developer who has never heard of Richard Stallman. A game developer who has never heard of John Carmack. I could go on, but I'm not sure I could find a good stopping point and I'm fighting the impulse to just be insulting. Your ignorance is appalling. Please just smash your computer with a sledgehammer and go for a long walk on a short pier.
Not that surprising. Being capable of sustaining epic levels of cognitive dissonance would be needed to be able to work for Monsanto and sleep at night.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Yes it has, actually.
You just aren't equipped to recognize that fact.
I learned how to program outside of academia, and have read Knuth. Independent study should still involve some modicum of actual study.
It's pathetic that you think nobody else can think for themselves or come up with their own ideas and breakthroughs.
Do you honestly think that you can come up with the kind of breakthroughs that have been done in CS over the past 60 years without reading some of the literature?
Sure, if you write some simple scripts or basic applications, you don't need to know much about algorithms, but once you start messing about with algorithms and datastructures, it pays to at least have heard of Knuth.