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Knuth is no longer mailing out checks for $2.56
- michael_dorfman 18y agoAccording to the Bank of San Serriffe website (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/boss.html http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/boss.html) I should be getting one of those "Certificates of Deposit to the Bank of San Serriffe" sometime (for 0x$1.20)-- I'll post a scan when it arrives.
- mechanical_fish 18y agoDarn it! I was able to ignore this problem until Knuth brought it to my conscious attention! Come to think of it, this also describes my approach to algorithms. ;) Darn you, Knuth! I used to be contented with bubble sort!
- KirinDave 18y agoYeah. Crazy as it sounds, it's actually safer now to use a credit card than a check.
- LogicHoleFlaw 18y agoI will second this. I write software that accepts both credit cards and EFT (Electronic fund transfer) transactions. Credit cards are much harder to spoof than EFT account data. A voided check has all of the data you need to initiate an EFT transaction.
- aneesh 18y agoThat's not crazy. It has always been very safe to use a credit card, because if some fraudster uses your credit card to pay for something, you're not liable. With cash, checks or a debit card, your money is already gone. With a credit card, the credit card company's money is on the line, not yours.
- Herring 18y ago> "It turns out that only 9 of the first 275 checks that I've sent out since the beginning of 2006 have actually been cashed. The others have apparently been cached." dude...
- michael_dorfman 18y agoI certainly wouldn't cash mine, but I wonder about Thorsten Dahlheimer, who appears to have racked up $2635.52-- now that's worthy of some major props.
- bandris 18y agoFavorite: "From now on it will be kudos, not escudos"
- JesseAldridge 18y ago"It turns out that only 9 of the first 275 checks that I've sent out since the beginning of 2006 have actually been cashed. The others have apparently been cached." /facepalm
- river_styx 18y agoSeriously, what dunce would cash one of those?
- jgrahamc 18y agoI cashed the check Knuth sent me years ago. I remember, at the time, thinking that Knuth might be offended if I didn't. I guess I was just young...
- nailer 18y ago</sacrewcow> The non-monetary value of the cheques is, to me, minimal. I'm well aware of the Knuth's work and the confidence required to post a logarithmic reward for bugs. But the concept of 'bug' has been artificially limited. The primary goal of TeX is "to allow anybody to produce high-quality books using a reasonable amount of effort". It is clearly buggy, as it certainly has failed at that goal. The problem is that engineers are to focused on algorithms to care about usability or even realize that this is a problem. It is a problem, and it prevented TeX from achieving it's stated goal. The same attitude in other projects would ensure their failure too.
- logjam 18y agoWTF are you talking about? From wikipedia: "In several technical fields, in particular computer science, mathematics and physics, TeX has become a de facto standard. Many thousands of books have been published using TeX, including books published by Addison-Wesley, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, Oxford University Press and Springer. Numerous journals in these fields are produced using TeX or LaTeX, allowing authors to submit their raw manuscript written in TeX." In my field, Tex (used with macro packages) is the standard. We format book chapters and papers for publication using these macros. We communicate with other scientists using the product of these tools. We could easily produce journals and/or books ourselves using these tools, and many people do. They are excellent for that purpose. They are free. They work. They work better than anything else I know. Am I missing something?
- andr 18y agoThere go my funding plans...
- akkartik 18y agoFor someone so concerned about layout I've always wondered why Knuth's recent news never have a date attached.
- jsomers 18y agoIf you attach dates on a page like this, you risk looking flaky whenever there's a big gap between posts. Leaving his entries dateless might mitigate the pressure to update regularly. That's just a guess, though.
- technoguyrob 18y ago"Account balances as of 31 October 2008:" But it's the 30th today....
- jcl 18y agoKnuth likes to play with alternate number bases. He really means 25 December.
- vaksel 18y agowhy doesn't he just paypal the money?
- kqr2 18y agoHe could if people were really interested in the money. People, however, are more interested in keeping his check and autograph as a collector's item and/or bragging rights.
- vaksel 18y agowell then why not send people an autographed copy of the book? People would appreciate that even more
- jcl 18y agoThe books cost a lot more than the "hexadecimal dollars" he has been handing out.
- donw 18y agoLike hell they would. It's hard to explain, but if I had the choice between a $100 textbook with Knuth's signature, or a $2.56 check for finding a bug, I'd take the cheque. It's such a unique way to thank people, unlike an author-signed book.
- ced 18y agoIt is absolutely idiotic to have 64-bit pointers when I compile a program that uses less than 4 gigabytes of RAM. When such pointer values appear inside a struct, they not only waste half the memory, they effectively throw away half of the cache. Is that true? It's weird to hear Knuth complain about such a down-to-earth problem.
- LogicHoleFlaw 18y agoThis is a common complaint by games developers too. Blowing half your cache on unused bytes in pointers is really annoying.
- DarkShikari 18y agoThis is actually a serious problem when using complex data structures that consist primarily of pointers between memory locations (example: linked lists or trees): this is the one case where 64-bit can actually be significantly slower than 32-bit. Imagine a doubly linked list that contains "int" values: on 32-bit each node would be 96 bits, on 64-bit each node would be 160 bits.
- markessien 18y agoI really don't get how America can be so advanced in so many things, but still use cheques. Why don't you have a bank transfer system? When I was in Texas last year, we went to a bank and they had these pneumatic tubes that suck in your cheques! Like a gas station. I felt like I had time travelled to some alternate reality. The last time I received a cheque from the U.S in germany, it was one of the most annoying payment methods I've ever used. First of all, there was this massive fee, then they froze the cash for 6 weeks while the check was verified. This was back in 2002 or so when I was pretty poor, and I had just done a contract job for a guy for a few thousand US$. So I had all this money on my account, but I could not withdraw it because of the freeze. It was like putting some roast turkey in a sealed glass box in the middle of a famine.
- iigs 18y agoWhen I was in Texas last year, we went to a bank and they had these pneumatic tubes that suck in your cheques! Like a gas station. I felt like I had time travelled to some alternate reality. I've lived in the US my whole life, and using those things feels like I've stepped into an alternate reality, as well. They really feel like something from a 1950s sci-fi space comic. I don't believe I've used one in five years, at least. The problems with checks are the same as the problems with credit cards -- the system is secure enough that the bank system is happier to buy down the losses/inefficiencies than to build an infrastructure secure and flexible enough to remove them. Since customers don't want to pay anything -- be it money or convenience -- to get additional security, the banks are on their own to improve things. I think Bruce Schneier had some articles on this a long time ago.
- axod 18y agoThe other amazing thing is that you pay for cheques in the US, and you pay a 'convenience fee' for doing online transfers. I would hate living in a country where banking for individuals is not free. In the UK I don't think many shops will accept cheques any more... The US is great at marketing itself to "seem" advanced, but when you look at banking, or internet access, or mobile phones, or even land lines (They never work)... ;) It also amazes me how credit cards don't seem to have progressed in the US. Here in the UK/europe probably, we enjoy chip+pin security on cards, but afaik in the US it's still just a magnetic stripe easy to clone.
- mattmaroon 18y agoThere's this thing called PayPal, check into it.
- igorhvr 18y agoSure. Go ahead. Check into it -> http://paypalsucks.com/forums/ http://paypalsucks.com/forums/
- mattmaroon 18y agoThere's a forum bashing every popular company. That doesn't mean anything. What does mean something is that millions of people do have PayPal accounts and it's a trivial and inexpensive way to transfer small amounts of money.
- damienkatz 18y agoWhy not money orders?