[OT] Computer news from Kassel

[Wilhelm Sanke]

1. People around Kassel - and elsewhere - today celebrate the 100th 
birthday of Konrad Zuse, the inventor of the first programmable computer.

Some extracts from Wikipedia:

"Konrad Zuse ( 22 June 1910) was a German engineer and computer pioneer.

His greatest achievem was the world's first functional 
program-controlled Turing-complete computer, the Z3, in 1941 (the 
program was stored on a punched tape).

Zuse also designed the first high-level programming language, 
Plankalkül, first published in 1948."

Zuse developed his computer living in a small town near Kassel. His 
Z3-Computer is one of the exhibits in the "Technikmuseum" of Kassel.


2. The University of Kassel this semester added another position of a 
"Junior Professor" in "Computational Sciences" to the faculty of its 
IT-Department.

The first holder of this position got his doctorate at the University of 
Edinburgh. His special field in research and teaching is "The structure 
of programming - trouble-shooting and avoidance".

It is as yet unknown whether during his stay in Edinburgh the new 
professor had come into contact with Revolution or the Revolution team, 
but considering the topic of his work this seems to be highly probable. 
Apparently he had taken a look at the Revolution bug database with its 
enormous lags in fixing even fatal bugs,  e.g. Report #8275 "Groups: 
Bugs and features ("last group" broken)?" of  Sept 16, 2009, which 
astonishingly is still listed as "unconfirmed" although it contains a 
recipe to crash Revolution with only 4 lines of script.

Although this report is now almost one year old, apparently nobody from 
Revolution so far has bothered to take a look at this bug report. It 
might be a wise move from the side of the Revolution team to enlist the 
support and cooperation of our new professor.--

Best regards,

Wilhelm Sanke