Slashdot Mirror
Stop the Math Press's Presses — Knuth Announces iTex
After Donald Knuth's anticipated "earthshaking announcement," it's safe to say that the world is still here. yowlanku writes "Christoper Adams tweeted live from TUG 2010 Conference that 'Donald Knuth's TeX successor will be named iTeX.' " Knuth "also stated that this successor of TeX will have features like 3-D printing, animation, stereographic sound."
I hear it's already been rejected from the App store.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
What?
No Twitter integration?
We were all hoping he'd announce proof that P = NP....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Name it after some other deliberately mispronounced form of fetish-wear. I'd happily write papers in buttplug (pronounced bootploog).
Come to think of it, I'm only familiar with the hardware side of 3D printing.
What is the state of the art in terms of 3D printing software and/or definition languages? Is there anything approaching a standard yet, that can take account of issues like number and type of available materials (conductive metal, plastic, etc.), material properties (tensile strength etc.), degrees of freedom (angles that can be accessed), resolution/step size, and other issues like that in a reasonable way?
I doubt it really, but I guess my question is more "how far are we from achieving it? What work's been done so far?"
Film at 11.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
He said earthshaking, not Earth-destroying. Sad to see that he is going to waste more time on typesetting, though.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Wait for build 1729.
here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1702818&cid=32752126
It was an hilarious presentation in the spirit of his first publication... http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/01/the-enduring-art-of-computer-programming.html (scroll down to Potrzebie)
to repeat (w/o the geocoord)
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.
I'm trying to figure out what stereographic sound is. I think it's sound, but the graphic makes me thing maybe it's graphics. Or is this a joke? I'm really confused.
AAPL
2^3 * 31 * 647
your one and only chance today to claim "1st iPost" but nooooo, you had to do something else instead...
Never saw Slashdot article with less substance... And that says a lot.
And who is this news source?
http://opencm3.net, http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/
Knuth "also stated that this successor of TeX will have features like 3-D printing, animation, stereographic sound."
In other words, it will become a bloated mess.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Whoosh!
You mean Apphole?
Animations? So with a buildup like that we get... a blink tag?
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
OT comments on religion or politics are, ex ipso, trolls.
Yet, I don't believe that neither animation nor stereographic sound will come out well in print. Exactly, what's the objective here? Is it to replace media formats which support sound, video and 3D graphics?
Ever hear of a Kindle?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
It amazes me how many people take this seriously.
It reads just like the Kernighan & Ritchie C "admission" or RFC 1149.
Jeez folks. It's a JOKE.
I wonder if this would surprise him: at 4AM Pacific today, I searched for "knuth announcement".
Google told me that was the 27th most common search over the preceding hour.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
What do you expect them to typeset the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with?
... Apple sues Knuth for infringing trademarks over the use of the "i" in iTex?
Techshop is a shared-equipment workspace in Menlo Park CA, with a few other branches (they're opening in San Francisco this summer.) I was there welding a couple of weeks ago, and ran into a friend of mine who was doing a project in the laser cutter room, and the people working on the other laser cutter were Knuth and his wife. (I refrained from walking over and saying "Hi, I'm Joe Fanboi, I used your books 30 years ago!".) Techshop has laser cutters, embroidering machines, 3D printers, and plasma cutters, and here's Knuth's latest project supporting them. I wonder if he's got any plans for controlling CNC milling machines and routers?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Whoosh!
Look, I don't mind if iTex replaces Flash, but don't take Whoosh away from me! I'm rather fond of it.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I know, WTF indeed. This iTEX is even going to have TrueType fonts! And he rewrote it in Java. Knuth has really gone soft in his old age.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
As I posted moments ago on my own site, Google is now exceeding M$/IBM/GE/GM/Standard Oil/The East India Co at their worst.
Apple remains Apple. Comparing the two is like calling atheism a religion ... a category error.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
Wow, your earthshattering announcement sure was earthshattering! You're going to name your next project iTex! Wow! I mean, holy shit, wow!
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
26 users.
I don't do that stuff anymore.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
The social sciences, arts, humanities, etc have no need as they do not do massive equations.
Um... when was the last time the arts did ANY equations, let alone "massive" ones.
Computer users who have come up using GUIs are wanting WYSIWYG programs like Word.
The GUI word processor (with WYSIWYG rendering) has been around for about 20 years in the home market, and 30 or more in the professional market.
TeX might be smaller than Word, but if you compare the number of people who use "Styles" such as "Heading 1" etc in MSWord versus TeX users, I imagine the numbers will be roughly comparable.
please move along
God spoke to me.
It still depends on what department you are in though. I wrote up my homework in LaTeX for all of my classes since I learned it freshman year. In both departments (I was a math/CS double major), professors took me more seriously than other students specifically because of handing in homework written up in LaTeX. It was easier for them to grade and they recognized it and were thankful for it. So in engineering it might be getting smaller, but from a student's perspective, it is not getting any smaller in either math or computer science. Most of the grad students I know learned LaTeX early on in their master's program because it was just something necessary to know, if they had not already learned it as an undergrad.
we all know that earthshattering is caused by women dressing immodestly. An Iranian cleric told me this so I know that it is true. The lack of any earth shattering during knuths presentation suggestion he did not yell "show us your tuts!" to throngs of swooning coeds.
"TeX is a small market" doesn't make sense. TeX, LaTeX and other derivatives are free, people use them as they see fit. Engineers do not need to write a lot of equations; heck, I have physics teachers who use word because they are too old to learn latex, and they haven't really had something complicated to write (experimental physics).
See this link for a good presentation of what TeX can actually do http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex . For arts and stuff.
Furthermore, consider that there are scientists who have to write equations as fast as normal text, because their normal text IS equations --- see this article for instance http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.0044 .
TeX is also a systematic system of writing. That means stuff like sympy (http://code.google.com/p/sympy/), maxima (http://maxima.sourceforge.net/), GiNaC (http://www.ginac.de/) and others can be used to make complicated symbolic computations and then output them automatically in a TeX file. Do you realize what this means in terms of productivity?
Anyway, my point is not to turn you into a TeX enthuziast. But, if you hear someone say that TeX is getting used more and more, don't act like we're just a couple of old farts talking about our half forgotten youth, because it really makes you look bad.
new sig
...by a new version, called Hitex.
even though it's called iTex, i isn't useful as a version numbering scheme... \sqrt{2} maybe?
I hope this is real, because this would be very bad for a joke.
stereographic is a real word - disney used it to describe the sound on Fantasia - it means that you can visualise the position of the object based on the stereophonic effect. Quite an interesting use of words because it highlights the primacy of vision over the other senses in terms of how we perceive the world.
The social sciences, arts, humanities, etc have no need as they do not do massive equations.
Um... when was the last time the arts did ANY equations, let alone "massive" ones.
Take Cinematography and get back to me on that.
Latex is still used in the academic world, but mostly by stick-in-the-mud professors that don't want to learn anything new.
When I read that sentence I seriously thought you were trolling. I'm a physicist, and everyone I know is using Latex.
OK, so what is "stereographic sound"?
I wonder if this would surprise him: at 4AM Pacific today, I searched for "knuth announcement".
Not likely. A lot of computer scientists have strange hours.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The engineering (EE and Mech) and CS research group who I do IT for use TeX (specifically LaTeX) extensively. There are several groups where the professor basically tells their grad students "you are expected to learn and use LaTeX if you are part of this lab". We do have some people using Word + MathType, but they are certainly a large minority. I used to do IT for the CS department at the same University. LaTeX was the most important package to have installed on all the grad student machines, I don't think a single one used Word.
Sure, I have yet to meet a humanities student that uses or even knows what TeX is, but it is certainly alive and well in science and engineering. You could say the same thing about Matlab.
http://river-valley.tv/an-earthshaking-announcement/ posted with permission from Knuth.
Download the announcement at http://river-valley.tv/conferences/tug-2010