How similar is this to the sipeed NanoKVM? (RISC-V based, software source https://github.com/sipeed/NanoKVM ) From the outside it looks very very alike.
I think everything coming out now is (essentially) coming down to the same core chips -- an HDMI-to-USB capture device + WCH's various UART-to-HID products being hubbed together. Just pick your SoC and software to run the show on top.
There's also the class of devices that includes PiKVM, where it's HDMI-to-MIPI for the video capture, and everything else is standard Raspberry Pi capabilities (Ethernet, WiFi, USB host and device, GPIO for motherboard power/reset/LED).
I remember when Java was exciting. There were several attempts at open source Java OSes like JOS (https://jos.sourceforge.net/). A Java applet runtime for the PalmPilot. My thesis on dynamic aliasing protection was based on a dynamic Java-esque runtime. But... Java got a reputation for being heavyweight.
And yes, as others have said, instead we got the modern web, with (for example) web based word processors requiring orders of magnitude more compute power than a desktop of the early Java era.
Web applets were a terrible experience all round. Downloaded JAR files usually just worked, though. The GUI looked odd because it wasn't using normal operating system controls, but in terms of performance it was no slower than any native program except for in the most extreme cases.
Java on the web was pretty terrible from beginning to end, but The Java Web could've worked.
Now that we have the web, we're moving back to the Javaverse in the form of apps (which, on Android, are actually Java(-like)). Every big website has one of those "for the full experience, download our app" banners. Other sites use WASM to bring back the Java applet days, now without third party plugin full of security holes. Google Docs renders to a virtual canvas in the browser in the same way an applet would've back in 2003, except it would've been able to open files directly from the file system.
And lo and behold, the new system is also a terrible experience.
> Google Docs renders to a virtual canvas in the browser in the same way an applet would've back in 2003, except it would've been able to open files directly from the file system.
I'd have said the situation back then was a bit better than that - a Java applet wouldn't have been able to access your filesystem by default, for instance.
Part of the benefit of Sun's Java was that the bytecode itself could be statically verified to only have good behaviour and the plugin would then sandbox what it could access at runtime. The plugin itself would obviously have had bugs - like all software - but it's not obvious to me that was intrinsically worse than having all that code as part of the browser (as we do now).
I'd contrast it with ActiveX and (I think), which was very free about what its applets could do (basically just Windows executable code, I think). Flash I'm less clear on the limitations of.
We have moved on in other ways, of course - browsers are architected to isolate processes more, including use of things like seccomp.
To be fair, Java Swing was my first GUI programming experience, and is still the best I had. For Desktop, fast iteration, no budget, and works anywhere, it's basically Swing or Electron.
but in terms of performance it was no slower than any native program except for in the most extreme cases.
Java applications were really slow, and certainly much slower than native programs, until HotSpot became the default in J2SE 1.3. It's distance history now, but I remember a lot of excitement about Java in 1996 (compile once) and then disappointment of how slow it was.
(After some iterations HotSpot became a really good JIT compiler.)
I remember trying to play Java applet games before broadband Internet was widely deployed - I soon gave up on waiting for the applet to download and played some other game, but it was great once broadband Internet became available (or I was using a computer at a big institution with fast Internet).
Love digging around projects like JOS. I had never heard of it before, and there really doesn't seem like much else online about it beyond the info that can be found from that link. There's always something melancholy about retroactively watching the activity of a project like JOS have such a swarm of activity and then just quietly and unceremoniously dying off.
Does it play the single player mode cutscenes though? My PC was underpowered when I was playing Red Alert. Full screen, full motion video still seemed pretty amazing back then. "Hitler is.. out of ze way"
If you have the original CDs, then yes, you can import all the cutscene media files (FMV, music etc.) during the install phase and it will play them just like the original, but they aren't included in the download for obvious reasons.
How prevalent is ladder logic for new industrial systems?
Over two decades ago I was programming a Foxboro PLC in their SALL language, which was compiled down to C. Variables and control structures! And you could hack the C if you wanted your state transitions to go faster.
I work for a subsidiary of a large industrial equipment manufacturing company, ladder logic is ubiquitous. At least across our partners and the plants we operate within. It's usually written by former electricians called "controls engineers", not software engineers, because it mimics relay diagrams. Controls engineers tend to live completely within the software ecosystem. I've known few who were comfortable with even "structured text" routines. One of the major advantages my company has is that they hire software engineers to produce custom featured HMIs for customers, and train on ladder logic.
In my opinion Ladder logic is easiest to troubleshoot, as cause and effect can be easily followed, especially when being connected online and seeing the signaling. Unless events are too quick. Then no language has the advantage. Then data trace is helpful.
Structured Text is superior when it comes to calculations, bit manipulation and code flow (loops, conditionals etc). Sequences diagrams are advantageous for abstracting sequences. Function Block Diagrams are good for connecting abstractions. They all have their place imo, except Instruction List, which I can’t think of having a single advantage.
It's sadly bread and butter, if you order a typical PLC program made-to-measure you'll get ladders. Anyway custom languages are certainly not the way to go, IEC 61131-3 languages are virtually always used, LD being most popular and SFC also gets its share.
Do you really think you're the first person to think of this?
If you actually need a certain medication, and you absolutely must take it by putting it in your lunch, then I suppose you can feel free to explain that in a courtroom, but you should be reminded that perjury is a vey bad legal strategy and judges don't like to play games.
DIY (instead of the cloud) is the answer. If you're pushing terabytes+ from day 1 on a shoestring, you're going to want your own CDN. If you can manage a queueing system and the occasional wait, run your own (or rented physical) hardware for transcoding at as high a utilisation as you can.
Build vs buy pushes you to "build" early on when your margins are slim and your volume is huge.
Yes, you are being too paranoid. Once booted into Openwrt the router will only be running Openwrt code. I guess there's the tiny possibility of a backdoored bootloader but that would have to be a pretty sophisticated backdoor!
When I looked at buying an EV last year, BYD was a serious option. In the end I decided on a second hand Nissan Leaf. In New Zealand, we're right hand drive and have no local auto makers. We import lots of second hand cars from Japan as a result. Like most New Zealanders, I've never owned a new car. Cheap Chinese EVs are somewhat cost competitive with second hand Japanese EVs which is crazy. Still not going to buy one. I'm happy that geopolitical tensions aren't going to stop spare parts being available.
I have similar sentiment in the UK but the leaf has the wrong fast-charge port! Everything is CCS apart from the nissan leaf and a few other older things. Give it another year or two and finding a chademo fast charger is going to be fairly challenging compared to CCS (where 100+ KW ones are becoming more and more prevalent now)
