Didn't he publish "The Art of Computer Programming" in 1968, when he was still at Caltech (according to the preface to the first edition, which was written from Pasadena, California) , just before he arrived at Stanford?
Over thirty years later after finishing the third volume, he's almost finished with its successor. That's way too long, pretty inexecusable, and bordering on the laughable.
Uh, he's done a lot more during that time. Published some other quite useful books (Concrete Mathematics, for example), a lot of papers, a lot of original results. I see papers by Knuth show up in math journals regularly.
The greatest computer scientist in the world created, in the intervening years from third volume to retirement, the...TeX.
Yes, among other things. Does everything Knuth does have to be revolutionary? For what it's worth, TeX is an amazing type-setting system. Perhaps you don't know how bad math type-setting had become by the time Knuth was motivated to write TeX. Take a look at Marcus's Number Fields, for example. Amazon will let you view some of the pages. It's a great book, but horribly type set. Maybe you don't care about those things. Some of us do.
By contrast, consider a 27 page Ph.D. thesis written by a guy named John Forbes Nash back in 1950 at Princeton University. With no TeX in those days, the double-spaced typewritten thesis has hand-written mathematical formulae and Greek symbols scribbled among and in between the lines. That thesis would win Nash the Nobel Prize in economics in 1994. If I recall correctly, you can see an actual-sized reproduction of the entire thesis, complete with hand-written scribbles, in the book The Essential John Nash . (Somehow, the hand-written stuff makes you feel as if Nash is sitting in the room with you, and -- corny as it sounds -- closer to his genius, as if you peeked inside his diary or something. )
What the hell does this have to do with anything? Yes, Nash did great work without TeX. Good for him. (By the way, ask somebody older than yourself what it was like preparing a mathematics dissertation before the advent of TeX. Go ahead, I'll wait.)
Really, though, are you trying to imply that Knuth hasn't done a substantial of significant research? Are you that ignorant? Kunth's work comprises much more than TAOCP and TeX.
Card readers are like guns or software. They can be used by bad people in bad ways, but that doesn't make them bad.
Ehhhh, what??? Yes I agree with the card reader and software part of the story. But can someone please explain how guns can ever be used in good ways.
Well, hunting, if you're into that sort of thing. (As a vegetarian, I'm not.) What about shooting sports? I own a rifle that only has been (and only will be) fired at paper targets. It's fun & relaxing.
If a person kills a bunch of people and keeps evidence of the murders in their house, and if there is just cause to suspect him of the murders, a search warrant is issued and that information is used against him.
That's not a good analogy. Instead, suppose that all people are required to have video cameras recording the inside their house at all times, and in the event of an alleged illegal activity, those tapes would be used against them.
You can't have an automated challenge/response system, because that defeats the point.
That's not true. There is an approach where you show a "proof of computational effort"; that is, your computer spends 10 or so seconds computing the response to a challenge. Here's a paper on the subject.
In case you didn't already know this, you can easily check if there is: run netstat -a -n -p|less and check for any suspicious ports or processes. Better still, run pstree -p|less and check for any suspicious processes, whether they're connected to the network or not.
Of course, this assumes that netstat and pstree haven't been replaced with compromised versions.
See, this is one of the things that I hate about the gun-rights crowd: it sabotages itself with this kind of crap.
I'm a liberal Democrat. Hell, I'm probably on the left wing of what most people consider liberal Democrats. I support abortion rights, gay rights, gay marriage, Head Start, massive health care reform, stricter environmental regulations, getting "Under God" out of the Pledge, etc.
I'm also an NRA and JPFO member.
I fully agree. Whenever I go into a gun store or read a gun magazine, the pro-gun propaganda always seems to be infused with racism, homophobia, ultra-right-wing religious extremism, etc. That alienates me, even though I am a 2nd amendment defender. I think that many people who could be sympathetic to the gun-rights cause are lost due to this "gun rights = right-wing-extremism" perception.
I sent an HTML email to my yahoo account and the words were changed as described. However, when I forwarded the changed email back to my work address, the changes disappeared and I had the original email back, "eval" and all.
No, it isn't. In Hebrew, there is a distinct word for murder. Some translations have rendered the phrase "Thou shalt not kill", but this is both linguistically and theologically inaccurate.
But that's besides the point. If some killing by man is OK by God, then I definitely don't want to be associated with this god, and thus I am against the "under God" item in the pledge.
Look, I agree with you about the pledge. But don't try to spread misinformation about something you clearly haven't studied and don't understand. If you want to debate the Bible, pick up a good translation and study it. My personal recommendation is The New Jerusalem Bible, which is both considered to be both accurately and elegantly translated (Tolkien was one of the translators, by the way) and has excellent notes.
We have the death penalty in America. God said: Thou shalt not kill.
No, that's not right. A more accurate translation is: "Thou shalt not commit murder." If you're going to debate theological matters, please familiarize yourself with the Bible itself, not some naive out-of-context soundbites.
One thing that I can never figure out, is given the violent reaction to unique CPU IDs why nobody ever complains about the unique hostid built into every Sun box.
A lot of high-end EDA software depends upon the hostid to handle license management. I'm not sure how FlexLM works on x86 Linux boxes, but if it depends on the MAC address as a unique identifier then it's got a very weak link in its chain...
Well, for what it's worth, the hostid on Suns is easy to spoof (at least as of 2.6; I dunno if the newer ones have changed it.) The hostid is stored as a string somewhere in the kernel memory space, and most apps (including the versions of flexlm I've used) use this value, rather than making a call to the hardware. There is software on the web that allows one to modify the stored hostid. I think that the PROM that holds the hostid can be rewritten as well, but I haven't tried this.
As for the loop invariants, pre- and postconditions, &c -- if one can't determine those at a glance, one has no chance of maintaining others' code (read: surviving) in the Real World.
Unfortunately, many (most?) programmers don't seem to understand invariants, preconditions, and postconditions. And yet they go on working.
For those that don't know the name, here are a few others you might want to check out: Turing, Minsky, Church, Shannon, Chomsky. Of course, these are just the "theory" guys and I am sure others will add to that list.
This is only true in the very specific case where there are no digits to the right of the digit your using to round. 2.59 is certainly closer to 3 than it is to 2, but by your reasoning, 2 should be the result of the rounding operation.
No, 2.59 is rounded up. You have to look beyond the first truncated space when rounding correctly. Rounding on a computer is typically done in binary, but since.5 has an exact binary expansion, this sample program should demonstrate correct IEEE round-to-nearest:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <math.h>
int main()
{printf("%f\n%f\n%f\n",rint(2.5),rint( 2.59),rint(3.5));
return 0;
}
Compiled with gcc on Solaris, I get the following output:
2.000000
3.000000
4.000000
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest - Cactus Ed Abbey
Uhh, that was Diderot that said that. If I recall correctly, when Ed Abbey was the editor of the student literary journal at the University of New Mexico, he printed that quote (attributed to Louisa May Alcott), getting himself fired and the journal abolished.
Math and Science teachers are the first laid off every year
when there's a budget cut (to the point that it's almost
impossible to get tenure because you're constantly shuffled
to the bottom of the pile with each transfer).
Could you give a reference for this claim? I strongly suspect that you've created this "fact" in order to support your argument. When I worked as a substitute teacher about 4 years ago, the school districts in California were desperate for math and science teachers. You could walk in fresh out of college, no credential, and they'd hire you and arrange for an emergency credential.
Should I have to understand how tires are made before being allowed to refine the airbag system?
Should I have to build my own engine before being qualified to style the interior?
Of course not. You should, however, understand the principles of internal combustion before attempting to design or maintain an engine.
No and No. A CS education should be likewise. Reinventing the wheel is a waste of resources almost all of the time.
No, a CS degree should teach one about Computer Science; that is, the study of algorithms and data structures, both in theory and in applications such as operating systems, databases, numerical computing, etc. If you simply want to learn how to write code without any understanding of what you are doing, check out one of those vocational schools that advertises on daytime television.
People who want to muck about at the low level should be majoring in computer engineering instead of the more general CS.
No, Computer Engineering is a different field, entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
Over thirty years later after finishing the third volume, he's almost finished with its successor. That's way too long, pretty inexecusable, and bordering on the laughable.
Uh, he's done a lot more during that time. Published some other quite useful books (Concrete Mathematics, for example), a lot of papers, a lot of original results. I see papers by Knuth show up in math journals regularly.
The greatest computer scientist in the world created, in the intervening years from third volume to retirement, the ...TeX.
Yes, among other things. Does everything Knuth does have to be revolutionary? For what it's worth, TeX is an amazing type-setting system. Perhaps you don't know how bad math type-setting had become by the time Knuth was motivated to write TeX. Take a look at Marcus's Number Fields, for example. Amazon will let you view some of the pages. It's a great book, but horribly type set. Maybe you don't care about those things. Some of us do.
By contrast, consider a 27 page Ph.D. thesis written by a guy named John Forbes Nash back in 1950 at Princeton University. With no TeX in those days, the double-spaced typewritten thesis has hand-written mathematical formulae and Greek symbols scribbled among and in between the lines. That thesis would win Nash the Nobel Prize in economics in 1994. If I recall correctly, you can see an actual-sized reproduction of the entire thesis, complete with hand-written scribbles, in the book The Essential John Nash . (Somehow, the hand-written stuff makes you feel as if Nash is sitting in the room with you, and -- corny as it sounds -- closer to his genius, as if you peeked inside his diary or something. )
What the hell does this have to do with anything? Yes, Nash did great work without TeX. Good for him. (By the way, ask somebody older than yourself what it was like preparing a mathematics dissertation before the advent of TeX. Go ahead, I'll wait.)
Really, though, are you trying to imply that Knuth hasn't done a substantial of significant research? Are you that ignorant? Kunth's work comprises much more than TAOCP and TeX.
No, the quote is correct. See the original manuscript:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd04xx/EWD498. PDF
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1075317/p osts
(Scroll down to post 47.) The original link was at:
http://members.aol.com/registered/private/freep/ke rryfonda.jpg
though it's gone now. "Registered" admits elsewhere on the board to creating the photo.
Ehhhh, what??? Yes I agree with the card reader and software part of the story. But can someone please explain how guns can ever be used in good ways.
Well, hunting, if you're into that sort of thing. (As a vegetarian, I'm not.) What about shooting sports? I own a rifle that only has been (and only will be) fired at paper targets. It's fun & relaxing.
Geez, you people sure do take your games seriously. What was the conversion like? Did you have to be baptized again?
Quakers don't practice baptism.
That's entirely false.
That's not a good analogy. Instead, suppose that all people are required to have video cameras recording the inside their house at all times, and in the event of an alleged illegal activity, those tapes would be used against them.
That's not true. There is an approach where you show a "proof of computational effort"; that is, your computer spends 10 or so seconds computing the response to a challenge. Here's a paper on the subject.
I don't mean to sound flameish, but that seems like an injustice.
Not only that, but Bill Gates is listed there while Wirth and Hoare (among others) are not.
Of course, this assumes that netstat and pstree haven't been replaced with compromised versions.
I'm a liberal Democrat. Hell, I'm probably on the left wing of what most people consider liberal Democrats. I support abortion rights, gay rights, gay marriage, Head Start, massive health care reform, stricter environmental regulations, getting "Under God" out of the Pledge, etc.
I'm also an NRA and JPFO member.
I fully agree. Whenever I go into a gun store or read a gun magazine, the pro-gun propaganda always seems to be infused with racism, homophobia, ultra-right-wing religious extremism, etc. That alienates me, even though I am a 2nd amendment defender. I think that many people who could be sympathetic to the gun-rights cause are lost due to this "gun rights = right-wing-extremism" perception.
I sent an HTML email to my yahoo account and the words were changed as described. However, when I forwarded the changed email back to my work address, the changes disappeared and I had the original email back, "eval" and all.
No, it isn't. In Hebrew, there is a distinct word for murder. Some translations have rendered the phrase "Thou shalt not kill", but this is both linguistically and theologically inaccurate.
But that's besides the point. If some killing by man is OK by God, then I definitely don't want to be associated with this god, and thus I am against the "under God" item in the pledge.
Look, I agree with you about the pledge. But don't try to spread misinformation about something you clearly haven't studied and don't understand. If you want to debate the Bible, pick up a good translation and study it. My personal recommendation is The New Jerusalem Bible, which is both considered to be both accurately and elegantly translated (Tolkien was one of the translators, by the way) and has excellent notes.
No, that's not right. A more accurate translation is: "Thou shalt not commit murder." If you're going to debate theological matters, please familiarize yourself with the Bible itself, not some naive out-of-context soundbites.
A lot of high-end EDA software depends upon the hostid to handle license management. I'm not sure how FlexLM works on x86 Linux boxes, but if it depends on the MAC address as a unique identifier then it's got a very weak link in its chain...
Well, for what it's worth, the hostid on Suns is easy to spoof (at least as of 2.6; I dunno if the newer ones have changed it.) The hostid is stored as a string somewhere in the kernel memory space, and most apps (including the versions of flexlm I've used) use this value, rather than making a call to the hardware. There is software on the web that allows one to modify the stored hostid. I think that the PROM that holds the hostid can be rewritten as well, but I haven't tried this.
Unfortunately, many (most?) programmers don't seem to understand invariants, preconditions, and postconditions. And yet they go on working.
One more name for the list: Edsger Dijkstra.
My father, being a frugal mathematician, photocopied the checks he received from Knuth, and then promptly cashed them.
truncated space
Errr, truncated digit.
This is only true in the very specific case where there are no digits to the right of the digit your using to round. 2.59 is certainly closer to 3 than it is to 2, but by your reasoning, 2 should be the result of the rounding operation.
.5 has an exact binary expansion, this sample program should demonstrate correct IEEE round-to-nearest:
No, 2.59 is rounded up. You have to look beyond the first truncated space when rounding correctly. Rounding on a computer is typically done in binary, but since
#include <stdio.h>
#include <math.h>
int main()
{printf("%f\n%f\n%f\n",rint(2.5),rint( 2.59),rint(3.5));
return 0;
}
Compiled with gcc on Solaris, I get the following output:
2.000000
3.000000
4.000000
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest - Cactus Ed Abbey
Uhh, that was Diderot that said that. If I recall correctly, when Ed Abbey was the editor of the student literary journal at the University of New Mexico, he printed that quote (attributed to Louisa May Alcott), getting himself fired and the journal abolished.
Math and Science teachers are the first laid off every year when there's a budget cut (to the point that it's almost impossible to get tenure because you're constantly shuffled to the bottom of the pile with each transfer).
Could you give a reference for this claim? I strongly suspect that you've created this "fact" in order to support your argument. When I worked as a substitute teacher about 4 years ago, the school districts in California were desperate for math and science teachers. You could walk in fresh out of college, no credential, and they'd hire you and arrange for an emergency credential.
I work for Honda. Excuse me, but:
Should I have to understand how tires are made before being allowed to refine the airbag system?
Should I have to build my own engine before being qualified to style the interior?
Of course not. You should, however, understand the principles of internal combustion before attempting to design or maintain an engine.
No and No. A CS education should be likewise. Reinventing the wheel is a waste of resources almost all of the time.
No, a CS degree should teach one about Computer Science; that is, the study of algorithms and data structures, both in theory and in applications such as operating systems, databases, numerical computing, etc. If you simply want to learn how to write code without any understanding of what you are doing, check out one of those vocational schools that advertises on daytime television.
People who want to muck about at the low level should be majoring in computer engineering instead of the more general CS.
No, Computer Engineering is a different field, entirely.