Knuth is no longer mailing out checks for $2.56
www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu
www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu
The last time I received a cheque from the U.S in germany, it was one of the most annoying payment methods I've ever used. First of all, there was this massive fee, then they froze the cash for 6 weeks while the check was verified. This was back in 2002 or so when I was pretty poor, and I had just done a contract job for a guy for a few thousand US$. 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.
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.
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.
- I've had more problems with my land-line in Germany than I ever did in the US. And I've heard enough stories about BT to believe that it's all peaches and cream on the island.
- Those little chips in the European cards aren't used in most cases (at least the German ones), and in fact the most recent ones being issued here don't have them anymore. You certainly don't need anything but the magnetic strip for ATM or credit card transactions.
I always either payed my rent in the US by mail or by putting a check in a drop-box that we had at the building where I lived. (Note that I haven't lived in the US since 2002, so things may have progressed since then.)
<minirant> This is the problem with most US-Europe comparisons -- and honestly, something that Europeans are especially bad at. They tend to look at the US with a set of assumptions and bemoan that the US is backward without realizing that the some of the things being used as a basis for the comparison are out of whack. That's not to say that there aren't huge problems in the US, but they're rarely as simple as portrayed in the European media. </minirant>
On the other hand bank transfers do have fees associated, and I'm not even sure how I'd go about initiating one. That does make transferring funds between individuals a pain. Cash and check are standard but each has its drawbacks.
PayPal sorta, kinda, addresses these difficulties but they claim their own pound of flesh on the transactions. I suspect it's a great startup opportunity but it's a regulatory minefield, and the entrenched behemoths are very efficient at maintaining the status quo.
- Bank transfers aren't universally free in Germany. Mine cost about 30 cents.
- Rent was one of the few things that I mentioned wasn't paid with credit cards.
- "As they should be" is problematic. I for instance, find the whole process of founding a GmbH insanely complicated (even with the new reforms), but hey, they're different countries. I could make a long list of things about each country of things that work better in the other, but it wouldn't be the most useful means of comparison.
In england, it's WAY easier, and most things can be done online. The UK generally has a much less formal feel about most things compared to Germany.
Umm, that's a problem with your "advanced" bank....
Checks usually "clear" in a day or two, but most banks have antiquated standards for how long they keep the funds on hold. My current bank keeps checks in my account uncleared for eight (8) business days (except for the first $100), and this policy means I never deposit checks -- instead I go to the bank it was drawn on and cash it. Bank tellers, whom you would think would be used to large stacks of cash, still seem to get flustered when you present a single-digit-thousands check and ask for cash. Dunno why.
Anyway, the biggest problem with the checking system is that banks have six months to bounce a check, which means that checks you've forgotten about for months can suddenly make your bank balance go negative. Fun. The second biggest problem is that there's no real security in the system at all.., people jealously guard their debit card PINs, but will happily write a check which is effectively a license to take money, of any amount, out of the account it's drawn on. All someone has to do is use the routing and account numbers on the bottom of the check for electronic ACH.
Basically, checks are a bad idea today, and you should probably avoid using them when possible.
They're still used there, google chop stamp taiwan and you'll get a bunch of results.
And yes, chops can be forged, and when I was there, there were many criminal cases involving forged or stolen chops.
/facepalm
I remember, at the time, thinking that Knuth might be offended if I didn't. I guess I was just young...
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.
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?
Read my post again.
If it still doesn't make sense, realize that most people are not computer scientists, mathematicians, and physicists.
I think now it's a little too late.
But, ok, I read your post again:
You: "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."
Wikipedia: "Many THOUSANDS of books have been published using TeX, INCLUDING books published by Addison-Wesley, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, Oxford University Press and Springer..."
And here: found in 30 seconds of time spent in Google, are some excerpts of descriptions of what a few other people use Tex for (http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/:
"This is a set of maps that I made for the frontispiece of a bound volume of my mother's journals that she wrote during a sailing trip in the Greek islands..."
"It's a poster I made for presenting at a linguistics conference. I was wary about trying to do something like this with LaTeX at my level, but I was astonished at how easy it turned out to be..."
"As an experiment, I typeset the second chapter of the book of Esther from the Hebrew Bible. "
This is an example of how well TeX can be adapted to all different languages, even typesetting from right to left
"I'm attaching two files that use the CJK package to typeset Chinese. "
"A piece of Tibetan text which describes the Story of a Brahman and his family."
"Another fine typesetting example showing how well TeX can produce beautiful books. It is created with the ConTeXt package."
"Inclusion of these submissions in the TeX showcase might be helpful for biologists to venture into learning LaTeX, once they understand what they can do with this wonderful software. I made these figures for an article that was published in The PracTeX Journal."
"This Master's Thesis has no math at all. This is my Master's Thesis for sociology..."
"...from The Book of Tea by Okakura Kazuko"
"Here are a few pages of 352 from a chess book...Typesetting was done by PDFLaTeX..."
"The book is Exiles from a Future Time by Alan M. Wald, University of North Carolina Press. The design is by Richard Eckersley, whose achievements in book design have earned him the designation of Royal Designer for Industry by the Royal Society of Arts..."
"This is a document that introduces Early Music to all audiences..."
"A Music example submitted by Norbert Preining. This is from the Andante KV 315, W.A. Mozart, transcription from D. Taupin..."
"An example of a catalog entry automatically created from a vendor's database. You can find it among around 800 siblings at www.erco.com"
"From a critical edition of Saranadeva's Durghatavrtti, in Sanskrit..."
"These two pages are taken from the Greek edition of Giambattista Bodoni's Manuale Typographico (published by Agra, in 2003), a landmark in the history of typography..."
"A page from the book Mikael by Theophan�s Ioannou, published in Greece by Indiktos (May 2003)."
"A page from the journal Inscriptiones graecae..."
"A text in Judeo-spanish, from The Judeo-Spanish Ballad Chapbooks of Yacob Abaraham Yon..."
Now let me ask once again, what did I miss? I'm interested in you citing people who have failed to publish their book(s) because of TeX' failings...or was it "bugs"?
To prove my post nonsense, you'd have to have come up with some supporting arguments against it, which your post did not.
You're still rude. The caps are unnecessary. If your argument was strong enough, you wouldn't need either.
Sure, there are people who use TeX. I didn't say they weren't any.
Crapflooding Hacker News to prove some people use TeX doesn't prove that most people can use TeX.
If you still don't get it:
* Submit your school work in TeX
* Submit your resume in TeX.
* Visit a magazine publisher and ask what they use for layout
* Write a book. Submit it in TeX. Some places may still accept it. They are by far the minority.
When you're done, check out http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, particularly the 'In Comments' section.
If Ubuntu never fixes goal #1, and particularly if it never fixed things stopping that goal, I wouldn't consider it a success.
TeX never achieved it's stated goal of allowing anyone to create typeset documents, and I don't consider it a success.
You may now return to digg and stop invading HN.
<sacredcow>
* I know dozens of people who made resumés in TeX.
* A huge number of technical journal publishers (in some fields, the majority) use TeX
* Write a math or very technical science book. Submit it in anything other than TeX. Some places may still accept it. They are by far the minority.
---
Your posts are pointless nonsense.
I know many people who use OpenBSD. I could list them too.
That doesn't mean that OpenBSD allows anyone to compute securely. OpenBSD has a high barrier to entry, requiring a lot of technical skill and prerequisite knowledge.
Which is fine, as OpenBSD never stated that was their intention.
TeX, on the other hand, intended to allow anyone to easily create typeset documents. But it's difficult to use, and hence only rarely used for modern typesetting.
For example, I would be flabbergasted if any of your 24+ friends who have TeX resumes didn't have those resumes refused by most companies or recruiters.
Don't take it personally.
If corporate documents are mostly created with Microsoft products, it is certainly not about the ease with which those products can be used to create structured documents (hint: it's nearly impossible to use them for that), but rather about market-share network effects, highly effective monopolistic tactics on Microsoft's part, and (a wrong) general perception about the relative merits of different methods.
I'll agree with you that TeX (or even LaTeX or ConTeXT) is no walk in the park, but to suggest that it has a particularly high barrier to entry, especially compared to the knowledge required to, e.g., write out a high-level mathematical formula longhand and have any clue what it's saying, is so overblown it becomes absurd.
The market for document preparation systems is brutal, and TeX has never had effective evangelism or much real attempt to make it "newbie-friendly". But so what? The world is a big place, with plenty of space for different approaches. I use (La)TeX for math, InDesign for political science papers, and Text Edit for reading letters sent to me in .doc format by my uncle. All of them work well for these purposes; again, so what?
Also, PDF resumes, whether created with TeX or anything else, are accepted nearly universally in many fields.
If that's your idea of a failure, what's your idea of a success?
And I'm interested where you got the "reasonable amount of effort thing" from. The TeXbook says nothing of the sort, for example: "TeX, a new typesetting system intended for the creation of beautiful books---and especially for books that contain a lot of mathematics."
Note the emphasis on the "beautiful" and "mathematics" rather than ease of use.
Sure. But most people who write documents don't use TeX. That might be because TeX seems to prefer using its own custom font system which doesn't work with any of their fonts, and lacks and modern GUI. TeX should have, and could have, been Word, with an emphasis on structure.
The projects goals came from its Wikipedia page, which admittedly isn't referenced.
Perhaps this misunderstanding of the goals for TeX is what makes your posts sound trollish. Most people who write documents don't need anything but the simplest of typesetting. The web is a collection of millions of documents, but it is built off about six fonts (of which only three get much use), using a very limited character set.
Most people who need good typesetting for technical documents use TeX, particularly if they want to typeset mathematical notation. Wikipedia requires minimal typesetting for the majority of its content, but the maths is set using TeX.
Why no TeX viewer? The goal for TeX was to typeset printed documents, books. PDFs work fine online, you could easily send someone a resume on paper or in a PDF, typeset using TeX.
Why no bundled TeX GUI? TeX didn't set out to be a text editor, it just handles typesetting for people who don't own printing presses. If it had tried to be a text editor, it would probably have been much less successful, and would be probably be forgotten by now.
Writing a WYSIWYG text editor is a very different challenge to writing a typesetting program. For example, TeX will try and lay out a paragraph so that there is no trailing single word on the last line. (And will produce warning messages if it can't find a way to make it look good.) To do that, you need to have access for the whole paragraph of text. However, in a WYSIWYG editor, as soon as the type hits the page, you want it to stay there. You don't want it moving about as you add text to the end of a paragraph, because it will feel like unpredictable, leading to a poor user experience.
Typesetting formulae graphically has similar problems, but they are even worse. The few GUIs for TeX that do exist are largely unremarkable, but notably they are GUIs which use TeX, it isn't a goal for TeX itself to provide one.
TeX's goal is beautifully typeset books, a goal it achieves.
(Specifically the typesetting of The Art of Computer Programming series of books, though obviously it is used in a much wider context.)
Is that true? It's weird to hear Knuth complain about such a down-to-earth problem.
Come to think of it, this also describes my approach to algorithms. ;) Darn you, Knuth! I used to be contented with bubble sort!
dude...
But it's the 30th today....
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.
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.