
Knuth is no longer mailing out checks for $2.56  - michael_dorfman
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news.html#financial
======
markessien
I 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.

~~~
axod
The 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.

~~~
wheels
\- Banking is often free in the US, just like in Europe. Credit card usage is
more prevalent in the US. All of the things that I typically do with bank
transfers in Europe (with the odd exception of monthly rent which was a check
and my salary which was a bank transfer) I did in the US with a credit card.

\- 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.

~~~
markessien
What about the fee that the credit card charges? And don't you have to them go
to the offices to pay the rent then?

~~~
wheels
Credit card charges are much higher in Europe. Because of the ubiquity of
credit cards in the US, it drives prices down; incidentally, that's why bank
transfers are expensive in the US and cheap in Europe.

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>

~~~
markessien
I don't know man - it just seems wrong that I should be paying a fee to
Mastercard or Visa everytime I pay my rent, no matter how small. Bank
transfers in Europe are free, as they should be.

~~~
wheels
A few things:

\- 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.

~~~
markessien
Hmm, I didn't know that some banks actually charged money for transfer.
Germany does make it incredibly tough and complicated to wade through all the
neccessary laws and paperwork to get a business started. I guess that's why
most people prefer to just be employees.

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.

------
JesseAldridge
_"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
Seriously, what dunce would cash one of those?

~~~
jgrahamc
I 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
</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
WTF 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?

~~~
nailer
Yes, you missed something. And you're rude.

Read my post again.

If it still doesn't make sense, realize that most people are not computer
scientists, mathematicians, and physicists.

~~~
Hexstream
So in short you think someone should build a great GUI on top of TeX. Why not?

~~~
nailer
Someone should have done that many years ago, when TeX had a chance of
succeeding as a mainstream typesetting language, along with allowing people to
use their not-bitmapped, TTF (and later OTF) fonts without conversion tools.

I think now it's a little too late.

------
ced
_It 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.

~~~
DarkShikari
This 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.

------
michael_dorfman
According to the Bank of San Serriffe website (<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
Darn 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
Yeah. Crazy as it sounds, it's actually safer now to use a credit card than a
check.

~~~
aneesh
That'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.

------
andr
There go my funding plans...

------
akkartik
For someone so concerned about layout I've always wondered why Knuth's recent
news never have a date attached.

~~~
jsomers
If 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.

------
Herring
> _"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
I 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
Favorite: _"From now on it will be kudos, not escudos"_

------
technoguyrob
"Account balances as of 31 October 2008:"

But it's the 30th today....

~~~
jcl
Knuth likes to play with alternate number bases. He really means 25 December.

------
vaksel
why doesn't he just paypal the money?

~~~
kqr2
He 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
well then why not send people an autographed copy of the book? People would
appreciate that even more

~~~
donw
Like 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.

------
damienkatz
Why not money orders?

------
mattmaroon
There's this thing called PayPal, check into it.

~~~
igorhvr
Sure. Go ahead. Check into it -> <http://paypalsucks.com/forums/>

~~~
mattmaroon
There'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.

