Probably the study only counts the parts of Europe that are EU members, so your 727 million is a little overestimated. In the EU, there are roughly 450 million people.
Nonetheless, since this is still by 30% higher, it is no valid comparison with the US numbers.
Actually it seems that the wayback machine contains wrong contents also. For my site (www.wastl.net) it reports for the year 2000 the start page of MS IIS. However, the site has been running under Linux since it exists and I have always had full control over DNS...
Makes me think even more. Actually this is kind of forgery.
Commenting the code may be unimportant for many pieces of code, but there are many algorithms that you simply won't understand if they are written in C/C++/Java without comments in the code.
Sure, if you pack it in a module and say what it does, this should be sufficient, but unfortunately there is no code that is bug-free (except perhaps TeX:-) ), so it is always necessary to fix bugs. You cannot fix a bug if you don't understand how the algorithm works.
Probably you ran into the symlink problem that 2.4.12 should fix.:-)
Sebastian
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 1
I'm sorry, I must've missed the long queues of Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists lining up for their chance to be a suicide bomber.
You probably missed that part of history where the US was in war with Japan, then.
I must've missed the crowds of people cheering in New Delhi and Peking as opposed to the crowds cheering on the West Bank.
When the news of the plane crash arrived in the Middle East, it was already evening there. However, the pictures showing the cheering crowd were taken in full daylight. So, guess what...
Question: how many peaceful democratic countries with Islam as the dominant religion can you name?
I can at least name several that are not involved in terrorism, and those are also the BIGGEST islamic countries: Indonesia, Turkey, Egypt.
First, I want to say that I am truly shocked by today's events, even although I am not living in the US, but in Germany.
The US chooses its allies, aids the countries which stand for the same causes and beliefs that are harmonious with ours, and that's final.
...but I cannot accept this statement. The US has supported several dictatorships (Iraq, some Latin American countries, Indonesia) in the past. If it aids the strategic considerations, all beliefs are thrown away.
Obviously you are not involved in the administration of real mail servers. It's only a few seconds to you as the end user. But it's a lot of traffic for the ISPs which have to pay per MB.
You might want to have a look into a museum (Really, no joke).
I don't know whether you have the time and money for the trip, but a very good recommendation (worldwide) is the German Museum of Technologies in Munich (Deutsches Museum). They have a very extensive coverage of computer sciences beginning with simple mechanical caluclators like the ones of Leibniz and Pascal over the (working!) Zuse Z3 (a 1945 computer) up to the modern developments of today's microprocessors (but not operating systems or software).
Very interesting is to take a guide and have it all explained to you. There is also a book available at the museum store, which can possibly be ordered online and in English (Publications (German)).
Possibly there is also a museum about history of sciences somewhere in the U.S., but if you plan a trip to Europe anyway, the German Museum of Technologies is definately worth the time for you.
For anyone interested: A good introduction about the history of numbers and algorithms can be found in a paper by F. Bauer (I think he has also invented the B+-tree):
Those of you familiar with German can also have a look at a short overview of Adam Ries' "Rechnen auff der Linihen" from 1518, which describes how to calculate the multiplication on the Abacus and is considered as the first mathematical book for the common people:
Rechnen auff der Linihen
After "Rechnen auff der Linihen", he wrote "Rechnen auff der Linihen und der Federn" which also is considered as the introduction of the Arabic numbers to Central Europe.
The Arabic numbers had been introduced to Europe in 1202 by Leonardo Fibonacci (who also found the famous "fibonacci numbers", now a standard algorithm for describing recursion).
And last but not least, also an article in English:
Adam Ries.
The Europeans at this time (13th century) were still counting with Roman numbers and thus were merely capable to multiply.
There is a very famous letter from a merchant to a mathematician in Germany were he asks where he should send his son for studying so that he can learn proper mathematics. The reply from the mathematician was that if he were just to learn how to add and substract, it would be sufficient to stay in Germany. But if he wanted to learn how to multiply it would be necessary to go to Florence (in Italy, has a very old university).
The problem for mathematics in Europe were the Roman numbers. They didn't allow a purely syntactical calculation like the arabian numbers we use now (try to add II and CIIX by writing them in a table like we learn now in school!).
Arabian numbers were first introduced in Europe with Adam Ries in the 16th century (I think).
This may be true when using the application for just delivering content from a database or something similar that doesn't require to process data over several connections.
On the other hand, complex web applications need a sophisticated session management and the program should not be called anew on every connection. True, PHP provides some session management, but Java Servlets tend to be much faster in such cases.
If the application has to serve dynamic content to a browser, I would recommend to use Java Servlets. This may appear to be a slow solution on first look (Java is 10-20 times slower than C in most cases), but there are some considerable advantages to this approach:
Java Servlets run over sessions: With standard CGIs, the program is called again and again on every connect and you thus have to deal with data exchange via slow means (i.e. files on the hard disk etc). Even when using FastCGI, you will have independent processes (but I am not familiar enough with FastCGI). With Java Servlets on the other hand, you have a shared data space, each connection is handled from a pool of threads and has access to the same data. Processes need not be started again, it's just calling a method when a connection is made.
Scalability. With Java Servlets you can easily have a cluster of Apache webservers and Java Servlet engines without changing the code
Rapid Application Development. Java Servlets are usually much faster to implement than equivalents in C or Perl. You have session management, threads, and many API functions built-in
There is also a way to achieve this in C: Write an Apache module. This will almost certainly provide the maximum speed. However, the development effort will also be considerably higher.
Computer Science is not just "coding". There is also a lot of real research in the field, think e.g. about database indexing, operating systems, compilers, programming languages. All of these have their foundations in proper research. Otherwise you would still program in machine code, operating systems would not be able to run several processes, large amounts of data could not be processed.
And indeed, for a scientist, the code is not the thing that is important, its the idea! Imagine a very simple thing, the quicksort algorithm. I can implement it in many different programming languages, but the thing is still the same. (BTW, my personal favorite for this is Haskell, which is really beautiful code:
It can have a big effect. The German gouvernment already has a position against software patents (with a sudden change of opinion...), so there are now the two largest countries (in terms of population) in the EU against software patents. True, decisions are only made with 100% majority, but it is at least an important step.
Please try to get some real facts before posting such stupid things:
Konrad Zuse built the first computer, in Germany. Even today's computers are still based on a model developed by von Neumann ("von Neumann architecture"). Leibniz is one of the founders of computational theory (in the 18th century!) and development of mathematical logics was mainly in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. Diesel developed automobiles, Gutenberg developed printing...
The term "German Engineered" probably has its roots in the 1950s to 1970s because Germany had a very weak currency compared to the dollar but good engineers nonetheless, so German products were of high quality and cheap (now they are probably still of high quality but not cheap).
And BTW, the "superior" American engineers after WWII were in large parts German engineers that the US took WITHOUT checking whether they were Nazi or not.
But, I agree with you that this "German Engineered" thing is really stupid for a Linux Distribution, especially as I think that SuSE is not very good when it comes to "engineering" (ever looked at their startup scripts and at the rc.config=win.ini file?).
In Sweden, posession of guns is inhibited as in almost all other European countries.
You are probably talking about Switzerland where it is part of the military service to have the guns at home. The Swiss army is organized as a kind of militia because it is the best way to defend a mountain region like that (they also have a group that is mounted on bikes!).
Anyway, as far as I know, they only get the ammunition for their guns in case of a crisis and posessing guns is inhibited in general.
Perhaps increased restriction doesn't result in a lower crime rate, but the number of murders DOES decrease.
EU-Europe has about 450 million citizens and such shootings happen at most once every 10 years (I'm just not saying "never" because there is always the chance).:-)
There is a reason why it is such a big news: it would be avoidable if weapons weren't available so easily.
But I agree with you that crossing the street and being killed is much more probable than being killed in a shooting (at least in so-called civilized countries).
Sebastian
Re:Liberty in the US vs. liberty in Germany
on
Nazis on Napster
·
· Score: 1
Communist propaganda isn't allowed if it tries to destroy Democracy. The German Communist Party has been forbidden in the 1960s because of that.
It was Communism that was the main anti-democratic concern between 1950 and 1990. Now it is the ultra right-winged parties since they have gained popularity espacially in Eastern Germany and with young unemployed people.
It is the very peculiar history of Germany that "forces" us to have a close view at anything related to the Third Reich. For example, it is forbidden to deny that millions of Jews (and other people) were murdered in concentration camps (this is also known as the "Auschwitz-Lie")
But on the other hand Europe is a lot more liberal in other parts, so I think it is not appropriate for US Americans to critisize these laws as long as there is death penalty and such stupid things.
Yes, I know, I was just nervous with my mouse but didn't want to bother you with the same post again.
I would like to suggest to the Slashdot team a method to change one's own post at least to the extent of formatting (I realize that this could be abused if the content is changed, but formatting it would be reasonable).
I think the best way to store your documents in some sort of XML application, either using one of the predefined applications or designing one that fits your needs yourself.
<P>
The advantages are obvious:
<UL>
<LI>XML is plain text and can be read by anyone even without knowledge of XML</LI>
<LI>XML is structure-carrying data; the data itself is carrying the information on how it is structured;
<LI>XML is standardized; there are numerous applications that can use the data, e.g. search engines or query languages, transformations, editors
<LI>XML documents can be easily transformed to any other document type using XSLT. This includes HTML and PDF
</UL>
To say that it would not matter because it would
need those elements, that may well come from the cultural context, doesn't make sense. Many language don't have loop, conditions or function calls. </I>
Then, however, these languages aren't turing complete.
<P>
The problem is not function calls and the posts that emphasized logic and mathematics were quite right in my opinion.<BR>
A programming language has to be designed to match certain restricted grammars for lexical and syntactical analysis to ensure an acceptable performance of compilers and interpreters. Usually you use a regular grammar for lexical analysis (to recognize the tokens) and a context-free grammar for the syntactical analysis (a regular grammar would be better but you couldn't express a block structure with that). <BR>
Additionally, the grammars are often restricted so that you only need a certain lookahead to determine the next parsing step. (a typical example are LL(1) parsers: left-to-right, leftmost derivation, one symbol lookahead).<BR>
These are the main things that influence the structures of programming languages. Most languages (imperative, logic, functional) languages follow this principle.
<P>
Additionally, there is certainly some influence from the real machines that only provide sequential information processing (even if this influence becomes minmal in logical or functional programming).
<P>
<I>My intuition would be that the history of programming languages would have been quite different if programming would have emerged
from another cultural block than the english one.</I>
<P>
In history, programming languages didn't resemble the English language very much, they were very close to the way the machine worked. This was just to avoid complex compilers. When theoretical computerscience provided the base for modern high-level programming languages, it didn't have much to do with English, but with automaton theory and logics.
<P>
BTW, there have been languages that were not designed by English-speaking people: PASCAL is perhaps the most prominent one (developed at the ETH Zürich), also very popular is PROLOG (developed in France).
<P>
Sebastian
Slashdot Mirror
Probably the study only counts the parts of Europe that are EU members, so your 727 million is a little overestimated. In the EU, there are roughly 450 million people.
Nonetheless, since this is still by 30% higher, it is no valid comparison with the US numbers.
Sebastian
Actually it seems that the wayback machine contains wrong contents also. For my site (www.wastl.net) it reports for the year 2000 the start page of MS IIS. However, the site has been running under Linux since it exists and I have always had full control over DNS...
Makes me think even more. Actually this is kind of forgery.
Sebastian
Commenting the code may be unimportant for many pieces of code, but there are many algorithms that you simply won't understand if they are written in C/C++/Java without comments in the code.
Sure, if you pack it in a module and say what it does, this should be sufficient, but unfortunately there is no code that is bug-free (except perhaps TeX:-) ), so it is always necessary to fix bugs. You cannot fix a bug if you don't understand how the algorithm works.
Sebastian
Probably you ran into the symlink problem that 2.4.12 should fix.:-)
Sebastian
I'm sorry, I must've missed the long queues of Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists lining up for their chance to be a suicide bomber.
You probably missed that part of history where the US was in war with Japan, then.
I must've missed the crowds of people cheering in New Delhi and Peking as opposed to the crowds cheering on the West Bank.
When the news of the plane crash arrived in the Middle East, it was already evening there. However, the pictures showing the cheering crowd were taken in full daylight. So, guess what
Question: how many peaceful democratic countries with Islam as the dominant religion can you name?
I can at least name several that are not involved in terrorism, and those are also the BIGGEST islamic countries: Indonesia, Turkey, Egypt.
Sebastian
The US chooses its allies, aids the countries which stand for the same causes and beliefs that are harmonious with ours, and that's final.
Sebastian
The difference is that the US considers itself as a democracy and as world's saviour in moral issues.
Sebastian
Obviously you are not involved in the administration of real mail servers. It's only a few seconds to you as the end user. But it's a lot of traffic for the ISPs which have to pay per MB.
Sebastian
I don't know whether you have the time and money for the trip, but a very good recommendation (worldwide) is the German Museum of Technologies in Munich (Deutsches Museum). They have a very extensive coverage of computer sciences beginning with simple mechanical caluclators like the ones of Leibniz and Pascal over the (working!) Zuse Z3 (a 1945 computer) up to the modern developments of today's microprocessors (but not operating systems or software).
Very interesting is to take a guide and have it all explained to you. There is also a book available at the museum store, which can possibly be ordered online and in English (Publications (German)).
Possibly there is also a museum about history of sciences somewhere in the U.S., but if you plan a trip to Europe anyway, the German Museum of Technologies is definately worth the time for you.
Sebastian
According to the homepage, it's the Alladdin Free Software License, which is not considered Open Source if you follow the OS definition.
Essentially, they want to get paid if someone makes money with their software.
Sebastian
http://www.charlesworth.com/isr/issues/isr231/1379 _18/
Those of you familiar with German can also have a look at a short overview of Adam Ries' "Rechnen auff der Linihen" from 1518, which describes how to calculate the multiplication on the Abacus and is considered as the first mathematical book for the common people: Rechnen auff der Linihen
After "Rechnen auff der Linihen", he wrote "Rechnen auff der Linihen und der Federn" which also is considered as the introduction of the Arabic numbers to Central Europe.
(see Adam Ries - German)
The Arabic numbers had been introduced to Europe in 1202 by Leonardo Fibonacci (who also found the famous "fibonacci numbers", now a standard algorithm for describing recursion).
And last but not least, also an article in English: Adam Ries.
Sebastian
The Europeans at this time (13th century) were still counting with Roman numbers and thus were merely capable to multiply.
There is a very famous letter from a merchant to a mathematician in Germany were he asks where he should send his son for studying so that he can learn proper mathematics. The reply from the mathematician was that if he were just to learn how to add and substract, it would be sufficient to stay in Germany. But if he wanted to learn how to multiply it would be necessary to go to Florence (in Italy, has a very old university).
The problem for mathematics in Europe were the Roman numbers. They didn't allow a purely syntactical calculation like the arabian numbers we use now (try to add II and CIIX by writing them in a table like we learn now in school!).
Arabian numbers were first introduced in Europe with Adam Ries in the 16th century (I think).
Sebastian
This may be true when using the application for just delivering content from a database or something similar that doesn't require to process data over several connections.
On the other hand, complex web applications need a sophisticated session management and the program should not be called anew on every connection. True, PHP provides some session management, but Java Servlets tend to be much faster in such cases.
Sebastian
If the application has to serve dynamic content to a browser, I would recommend to use Java Servlets. This may appear to be a slow solution on first look (Java is 10-20 times slower than C in most cases), but there are some considerable advantages to this approach:
There is also a way to achieve this in C: Write an Apache module. This will almost certainly provide the maximum speed. However, the development effort will also be considerably higher.
Sebastian
Sorry, some of the code got removed in the post...
Computer Science is not just "coding". There is also a lot of real research in the field, think e.g. about database indexing, operating systems, compilers, programming languages. All of these have their foundations in proper research. Otherwise you would still program in machine code, operating systems would not be able to run several processes, large amounts of data could not be processed.
:: [a] -> [a]
And indeed, for a scientist, the code is not the thing that is important, its the idea! Imagine a very simple thing, the quicksort algorithm. I can implement it in many different programming languages, but the thing is still the same. (BTW, my personal favorite for this is Haskell, which is really beautiful code:
quicksort
quicksort [] = []
quicksort (x:xs) = quicksort [y | y =x]
).
Sebastian
It can have a big effect. The German gouvernment already has a position against software patents (with a sudden change of opinion...), so there are now the two largest countries (in terms of population) in the EU against software patents. True, decisions are only made with 100% majority, but it is at least an important step.
Sebastian
Please try to get some real facts before posting such stupid things:
Konrad Zuse built the first computer, in Germany. Even today's computers are still based on a model developed by von Neumann ("von Neumann architecture"). Leibniz is one of the founders of computational theory (in the 18th century!) and development of mathematical logics was mainly in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. Diesel developed automobiles, Gutenberg developed printing...
The term "German Engineered" probably has its roots in the 1950s to 1970s because Germany had a very weak currency compared to the dollar but good engineers nonetheless, so German products were of high quality and cheap (now they are probably still of high quality but not cheap).
And BTW, the "superior" American engineers after WWII were in large parts German engineers that the US took WITHOUT checking whether they were Nazi or not.
But, I agree with you that this "German Engineered" thing is really stupid for a Linux Distribution, especially as I think that SuSE is not very good when it comes to "engineering" (ever looked at their startup scripts and at the rc.config=win.ini file?).
Sebastian
Looks like they put down their DNS servers, the domain doesn't resolve and both of them can't be pinged:
# whois aspalliance.com
[...]
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.ORCSWEB.COM 166.82.35.3
NS2.ORCSWEB.COM 166.82.36.253
# ping 166.82.35.3
PING 166.82.35.3 (166.82.35.3) from 141.84.xxx.xxx : 56(84) bytes of data.
--- 166.82.35.3 ping statistics ---
6 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss
Sebastian
In Sweden, posession of guns is inhibited as in almost all other European countries.
You are probably talking about Switzerland where it is part of the military service to have the guns at home. The Swiss army is organized as a kind of militia because it is the best way to defend a mountain region like that (they also have a group that is mounted on bikes!).
Anyway, as far as I know, they only get the ammunition for their guns in case of a crisis and posessing guns is inhibited in general.
Perhaps increased restriction doesn't result in a lower crime rate, but the number of murders DOES decrease.
Sebastian
EU-Europe has about 450 million citizens and such shootings happen at most once every 10 years (I'm just not saying "never" because there is always the chance).:-)
There is a reason why it is such a big news: it would be avoidable if weapons weren't available so easily.
But I agree with you that crossing the street and being killed is much more probable than being killed in a shooting (at least in so-called civilized countries).
Sebastian
Communist propaganda isn't allowed if it tries to destroy Democracy. The German Communist Party has been forbidden in the 1960s because of that.
It was Communism that was the main anti-democratic concern between 1950 and 1990. Now it is the ultra right-winged parties since they have gained popularity espacially in Eastern Germany and with young unemployed people.
It is the very peculiar history of Germany that "forces" us to have a close view at anything related to the Third Reich. For example, it is forbidden to deny that millions of Jews (and other people) were murdered in concentration camps (this is also known as the "Auschwitz-Lie")
But on the other hand Europe is a lot more liberal in other parts, so I think it is not appropriate for US Americans to critisize these laws as long as there is death penalty and such stupid things.
SebastianYes, I know, I was just nervous with my mouse but didn't want to bother you with the same post again.
I would like to suggest to the Slashdot team a method to change one's own post at least to the extent of formatting (I realize that this could be abused if the content is changed, but formatting it would be reasonable).
SebastianI think the best way to store your documents in some sort of XML application, either using one of the predefined applications or designing one that fits your needs yourself.
<P>
The advantages are obvious:
<UL>
<LI>XML is plain text and can be read by anyone even without knowledge of XML</LI>
<LI>XML is structure-carrying data; the data itself is carrying the information on how it is structured;
<LI>XML is standardized; there are numerous applications that can use the data, e.g. search engines or query languages, transformations, editors
<LI>XML documents can be easily transformed to any other document type using XSLT. This includes HTML and PDF
</UL>
Sebastian
To say that it would not matter because it would
need those elements, that may well come from the cultural context, doesn't make sense. Many language don't have loop, conditions or function calls. </I>
Then, however, these languages aren't turing complete.
<P>
The problem is not function calls and the posts that emphasized logic and mathematics were quite right in my opinion.<BR>
A programming language has to be designed to match certain restricted grammars for lexical and syntactical analysis to ensure an acceptable performance of compilers and interpreters. Usually you use a regular grammar for lexical analysis (to recognize the tokens) and a context-free grammar for the syntactical analysis (a regular grammar would be better but you couldn't express a block structure with that). <BR>
Additionally, the grammars are often restricted so that you only need a certain lookahead to determine the next parsing step. (a typical example are LL(1) parsers: left-to-right, leftmost derivation, one symbol lookahead).<BR>
These are the main things that influence the structures of programming languages. Most languages (imperative, logic, functional) languages follow this principle.
<P>
Additionally, there is certainly some influence from the real machines that only provide sequential information processing (even if this influence becomes minmal in logical or functional programming).
<P>
<I>My intuition would be that the history of programming languages would have been quite different if programming would have emerged
from another cultural block than the english one.</I>
<P>
In history, programming languages didn't resemble the English language very much, they were very close to the way the machine worked. This was just to avoid complex compilers. When theoretical computerscience provided the base for modern high-level programming languages, it didn't have much to do with English, but with automaton theory and logics.
<P>
BTW, there have been languages that were not designed by English-speaking people: PASCAL is perhaps the most prominent one (developed at the ETH Zürich), also very popular is PROLOG (developed in France).
<P>
Sebastian