Who is this guy?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/13/dennis_ritchie/

NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/technology/dennis-ritchie-programming-trailblazer-dies-at-70.html

Were they smart because they had beards?

Jobs clearly owes his use of beard to Ritchie.

My Fortran professor also had a beard. The man was already almost 75, and it was 1988.

It would appear that some languages are more beard-driven than others:

http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/tamir/archive/2008/04/28/computer-languages-and-facial-hair-take-two.aspx

Professor Farnsworth is smart and he is beardless.

Boygabriel said:

Professor Farnsworth is smart and he is beardless.

but he is not real.

Don't be so narrow minded.

Al Gore used to have a beard

The Big Lebowski has one too

I wonder if Armchair Warrior has a beard.

Of course...all inventors are greedy. Edison was greedy. Salk was greedy. No one invents anything for the public good or for a new way of looking at or doing things. Maybe people have to stop worrying about what others are doing and worry more about themselves. And by the way....I own no Apple products. Android for me.

Greed is merely another way of stating "looking out for one's best interest".

It is a fundamental part of human nature.

...whether you have a beard or not.

der, Dennis M. Ritchie had a large obit in the NY Times, the day after he died (as listed above). His passing was posted almost immediately on Slashdot. His passing was noted, and mourned, by the people whose livelihood depended on the technologies that were spawned by his work at Bell Labs (most notably C programming language and UNIX).

Whether or not Jobs was greedy is another story.

Oops; der should read "dmr"

Yes, but it does shine a light on what we as a society respect and admire. The fact that this observation is redundant these days is sad for society in general and the jokes on this thread only emphasize it. Pathetic.

Droid here, but covet that damn Ipad2.

yes on the months that i don't go hangout. i sport a bread . well if you call it that. it's out of laziness than any style. but back in my school days i try to sport a goatee .

Cornel West has a beard too

Another bearded wizard falls:

John McCarthy, father of AI and Lisp

As a teen he taught himself higher math by studying textbooks from nearby CalTech. Upon acceptance there a year later as a *teenager* they let him skip the first two years of math coursework.

Did his Mathematics PHD at Princeton with John Nash. Went on to positions at Dartmouth (where he coined the term "Artifical Intelligence" in 1955) and then MIT.

There he invented the Lisp programming language -- which became central to AI work thereafter -- and helped found MIT's (DARPA-funded) Project MAC to explore and develop AI, operating systems and other thinking machines for more complex math calculations. While there he also proposed in 1961 the idea of computer timesharing, where blocks of computing time might be provided as a service like a utility. This became the de-facto standard for later VAX systems in academia and is exactly one of the things that Amazon sells today as part of its AWS cloud computing services, now used for everything from crunching utterly massive data sets to modeling complex particle physics and chemical compounds to converting reams of decades of old media into modern digital formats, you name it.

Then he left for Stanford in 1962 where he helped to establish the legendary Stanford AI Laboratory (SAIL, alumni of which went on to found many of the largest and most well-known Silicon Valley tech companies) and continued there all the way up through his retirement in 2000.

Put another way, Apple's new Siri and so much else in its operating systems owe so much to this guy, just as they do to Dennis Ritchie. Practically everything to the two of them combined.

But it'll be Steve Jobs' bio that flies off the shelves.

Oh well.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/24/creator-of-lisp-john-mccarthy-dead-at-84/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/24/father_lisp_ai_john_mccarthy_dies/

So, this is the guy I should blame for the VAX computer I struggled with in college? Damn Fortran 7.

May he RIP

Naw, just the concept of timesharing often used in VAX. Yeah, was on Unix and VAX systems myself.

As an interesting trivia note, he created Lisp just a year or two after Fortran was invented elsewhere.