urtie

Well, there was a neat feature that Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 had that got killed because the iPhone couldn't do it: you could call and send SMS through integration with a Bluetooth enabled phone. That functionality was then removed, and reintroduced a decade later with great fanfare, but only if you had an iPhone.

There are projects such as https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer-java and https://wasmtime.dev/ that extend this embeddability to Java, .net, C, C++, rust, Python, Ruby and Go. Wouldn't want to call those 'JS et al'.

Ofcourse, that ignores the fact that for many of these languages there are existing libraries and drivers to connect to databases that would not work with this embedded one, but still.

This reminds me of the Basicode system, which transmitted cross platform programs over the radio... and in the Netherlands, some of the programs could then be checked against the checksummed program listings on Teletext...

Well, for the Dutch market there's Luna: https://www.nedap-luna.com/. This has the advantage of being integrated fully into a formal care structure and of several years of research in how to best present information specifically for patients with cognitive issues.

Well, the costs for the 'in' and 'out' reader are really not the major issue for most companies, as you could conceivably set a particular perimeter that cordons of 'secure' from 'not secure' and would only have to configure anti-passback for that perimeter. The real trick (and therefore problem) is in making sure that people do not walk through doors together, that is, making sure that only a single person passes the perimeter for a single access request. Single-person passages are way more costly than the readers, and have the additional problem of not allowing all that many people to pass per hour. That means that you may even need multiple for a given people flow. And that's leaving aside the convenience issues.

From TFA: 'pretty substantial code base too. About 55,000 lines of ruby code'. Am I the only one to think that 55k LoC is not pretty substantial? That's the amount of code you can easily deal with as a single person, no team required. No wonder doing CI locally sounds tempting, as there's probably not all that much integration in the first place.

I've run something similar for 5 years, using https://www.smartevse.nl/ as the brains. The main advantages over commercial EVSE's in my case were that I could loadbalance charging the car with the electricity demands of the house, and that I could have the EVSE itself inside, so that there's no 240V current on any circuit from the breaker box indoors towards the car when there's no car present.

I do intend to add a second sometime, so that I can put the EVSE in my home automation UI as well; the version 2 of smartevse that I use does not have a network connection, but it can be connected to be controlled by a version 3 that does.

Or a library who's code now only exists on the wayback machine... and of the modified version that you actually use only a single copy exists on an old machine that one of the devs in the company never bothered to hand in for recycling...

Never mind that it's part of a decade old contract stipulating a quarter century support...

Greenfield is easy. :)

Over the past decade, decade-and-a-half, it seems to have become quite common in at least the Netherlands to install taps that provide cold, hot and boiling water in new kitchens. These days, the higher end taps also do chilled and carbonated water.

The origin story for the boiling water tap is powdered instant soup, which isn't quite instant without instant boiling water... :)

I remember how I 'earned' my autographed copy... by asking 'so, how do you suppose we add interactivity to VRML? Binding with Java Applets? JavaScript?'

The world these days does look quite a bit different than it did in the 1990's... and yet some things aren't.

The problem with space sensing interfaces is one of intentionality. The best example of how this is hard that I can think of is that of a passive IR sensor wired to trigger opening a door. If that door is parallel to a hallway, the door will probably be opened a lot by people that have no intention whatsoever of going through the door.

It is that particular problem that is well captured by buttons: by decreasing the actual sensing area you increase the intentionality of the measurement. Furthermore, requiring specific directional movement increases it further.

Another example: the capacitive sensing 'buttons' on my washing machines can be accidentally activated by touching with the side of the arm, which can occur for instance when I'm loading detergent. That accidental activation is harder to achieve and easier to detect before accidental activation for physical buttons that have some travel.

What I like most about this manual (and others from that same era) is that the manuals do not coddle you. They provide the details, up to the exact memory layout of your computer. And that in a manual for an educational language!

Just to get you an idea of how wrongheaded this entire thing was, I have a personal anecdote relating to this shitstorm.

Back in autumn 2013 I got a letter stating that I had received too much in child care benefits, with a request to pay it back. On the back of said letter was the text 'If you are still entitled to child care benefits and want to settle this amount against upcoming entitlements, you do not have to do anything'. Given as I was still entitled to benefits, I proceeded to not do anything. A few weeks later I got a reminder, once again stating that if I wanted to settle, I wouldn't have to do a thing. The reminder was followed by a final notice with opportunity to pay, once again with the exact same text on the back of the letter. So, obviously, I once again did nothing.

Then we got a 'Dwangbevel in naam des konings', i.e. a writ of execution in the name of the king. Red envelope. No added text. So I had to pay up. Now, as you may well guess, the tax service had already also started settling against the benefits that I was still entitled to! This prompted me to write a strongly worded letter, asking the tax service in no unclear language what I should have done differently, and requesting them to not dock me for that particular money twice. Literally the only reaction to that letter from the tax service was in silently restituting to me the double payment.

Now, I'm a reasonably well paid and well educated software developer, who just happens to hold two nationalities. I am perfectly sure that I would not even have had a reminder had I just had the Dutch nationality.

I could have paid in the first place and not settled against upcoming benefits; I was just lazy. However, imagine you're scraping by on minimum wage and are put in such a situation. There is no other way you could have acted than I did, but you also would not have been able to pay up to the writ of execution. And there would have been no recourse!

Add to that the fact that in many cases, the people hadn't even actually been paid too much, as I had, but merely been tagged as possibly fraudulent and put in to the system for reclaiming paid benefits, so the government could take a stance of being hard against benefits fraud while figuring out if any fraud had taken place in the first place.

I'll never forget the 'update' from 10.4 Tiger to 10.5 Leopard that completely dropped the previously perfectly working Bluetooth addressbook/SMS/taking phone calls integration with a slew of bluetooth capable feature phones of the time, because the iPhone that was released just before simply didn't have the required capabilities in its software.

I've not moved away as the Unix-underpinnings combined with a mass-market UI have only recently been replicated with WSL2, and having mass-market UI really helps with not having to bother with as much stuff as you generally had to when running Linux or other Unixen on the desktop, and I want to get stuff done dammit.

ELAN was specifically developed to be used in the systematic teaching of programming to students in secondary education. As such it had very much the same goals as BASIC, but given that it was developed a decade later, and with one of the authors of the Algol 68 report leading the development group, it was much richer.

Some information for those interested is still at http://www.cs.ru.nl/elan/ and there's an implementation for the language there as well.

An interesting tidbit is that ELAN was used for the EUMEL system by Jochen Liedtke, who took what he learned to develop the L3 and later L4 microkernels; see also https://6xq.net/eumel/

To put those density numbers in a bit more perspective: the entire country of the Netherlands has a population density of 521 persons per km². This is including the rural areas. While I wouldn't want to be without a car and happily own two, I can take public transit within walking distance from home, and I'm on the far outskirts of the country.

Move to a different country. Apply for citizenship. Renounce your original citizenship. Rules may apply...

Sounds very much like BASICODE[1] which was used to broadcast e.g. tax return software on national public radio in the Netherlands back in the 1980's

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE

It seems as though the Nedap Livestock management approach is a bit easier to apply, plus it does location within buildings[1]. Love the hololens integration as well[2].

[1] https://www.nedap-livestockmanagement.com/dairy-farming/solu... [2] https://www.nedap-livestockmanagement.com/dairy-farming/solu...