It must be the time of the year. Famous people dying left and right. Or maybe it is happening all the time, and I've only just noticed.
Last Thursday, Colonel Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator, was captured in Sirte, and killed shortly afterwards. Apparently, NATO shot a convoy and injured Gaddafi, who was then captured and killed by the NTC.
But Gaddafi wasn't the only person to die in the recent times. No, I'm not talking about Steve Jobs. I'm talking about Dennis Ritchie, co-founder of UNIX, inventor of C, defender of the faith. OK, I made up the last one. But the other two are true. C, one of the most popular computer programming languages there is, owes its existence to this man, who also co-created UNIX, the upon which Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X are modelled. UNIX is one of the most influential operating system that has ever been created. C became the basic of C++, Java, C#, Python, ... and the list goes on. Not VB, though; that was based on BASIC, which preceded C. Dennis Ritchie changed the world of computing altogether. But the news of his death won't receive nearly as much media attention as Steve Jobs'. I'll admit, I have never heard of him before, either. Sad.
On a more personal note, I am looking forward to the Birmingham Financial Forum tomorrow. I hope I will find it at least somewhat useful. I hope the food will be good!
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