It is odd to think that one of the most important people in the history of computers just died and most people don’t know who he is. I would like to think people would link to know about Dennis Ritchie. A good place to start is here: Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com.

To be honest, it wasn’t just Steve Jobs that stood on his shoulders. Everyone did, and everyone continues to. AIX, Linux, Sun Solaris, the Android OS and Mac OSX all derive from the work he did. When you combine iOS and other UNIX based OSs, you can say that most digital devices in the world are based on the work Ritchie did. Not to mention all the other things that the WiReD article points out. When it comes to digital technology, it really is Dennis Ritchie’s world.

Another thing I would  like to point out is the work he did on this book:

I would argue that this is the best technical book ever written. It is like The Elements of Style of technical books. It is is concise, clear and comprehensive. It even has something I think is really innovative: a chapter zero. This was brilliant in two ways: one, it allowed new developers to get started writing useful code without having to know too much about the language (a great incentive to keep learning) and two, it made alot of sense to start at chapter zero, because the language itself starts counting at zero for some things (e.g. arrays). I still have my copy of it, and for simple algorithms, I will pull it out to use as an example, since the code is so well written.

So not only did Dennis Ritchie pioneer (with others) the UNIX operating system and the C programming language, but he cowrote the best technical book ever written. More importantly, all of the work that came after his was influenced by him.

That is why you will see so many technical people lamenting his death. He truly was a titan.

According to this, China labour costs push jobs back to US – FT.com, the U.S. is seeing companies relocate or place manufacturing jobs there rather than offshore locations like China. The reason is twofold (see the quote I put in bold):

Rising Chinese labour costs are changing the economics of global manufacturing and could contribute to the creation of 3m jobs in the US by 2020, according to a study being released on Friday.

The Boston Consulting Group analysis says the new jobs will be generated by a “re-shoring” of manufacturing activity lost to China over the past decade.

“Re-shoring is part of a broad trend that will emerge as … production gradually swings back to the US,” Hal Sirkin, a senior partner at the consultancy, told the Financial Times.

The Boston Consulting Group estimates that the trend could cut the US’s merchandise trade deficit with the rest of the world, excluding oil, from $360bn in 2010 to about $260bn by the end of the decade. The shift would also reduce its soaring deficit with China, which reached $273bn in 2010 and has triggered an intense political controversy over China’s exchange rate policies.

“While Chinese labour costs are rising, US competitiveness has been improving,” says Mei Xu, the Chinese-born co-owner of Chesapeake Bay Candle, which makes candles and other home fragrance products. “We can invest in automation to make our candles in a factory near Baltimore for a similar cost to doing the same job in China.”

Let’s see if this trend picks up strength.