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🔗 Wikipedia chooses Lua as its new template/macro language
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- "Wikipedia chooses Lua as its new template/macro language " | 2012-01-31 | 25 Upvotes 1 Comments
🔗 Mumps (Programming Language)
MUMPS ("Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System"), or M, is an imperative, high-level programming language with an integrated transaction processing key–value database. It was originally developed at Massachusetts General Hospital for managing patient medical records and hospital laboratory information systems.
MUMPS technology has since expanded as the predominant database for health information systems and electronic health records in the United States. MUMPS-based information systems, such as Epic Systems', provide health information services for over 78% of patients across the U.S.
A unique feature of the MUMPS technology is its integrated database language, allowing direct, high-speed read-write access to permanent disk storage.
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- "Mumps (Programming Language)" | 2025-06-13 | 103 Upvotes 71 Comments
🔗 Wikipedia: Database Download
Wikipedia offers free copies of all available content to interested users. These databases can be used for mirroring, personal use, informal backups, offline use or database queries (such as for Wikipedia:Maintenance). All text content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License (CC-BY-SA), and most is additionally licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Images and other files are available under different terms, as detailed on their description pages. For our advice about complying with these licenses, see Wikipedia:Copyrights.
Some of the many ways to read Wikipedia while offline:
- Kiwix: (§ Kiwix) – index of images (2024)
- XOWA: (§ XOWA) – index of images (2015)
- WikiTaxi: § WikiTaxi (for Windows)
- aarddict: § Aard Dictionary / Aard 2
- BzReader: § BzReader and MzReader (for Windows)
- WikiFilter: § WikiFilter
- Wikipedia on rockbox: § Wikiviewer for Rockbox
- Selected Wikipedia articles as a printed document: Help:Printing
Some of them are mobile applications – see "List of Wikipedia mobile applications".
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- "Wikipedia: Database Download" | 2025-04-27 | 203 Upvotes 99 Comments
🔗 Area code 710
Area code 710 is a special area code, reserved to the federal government of the United States in 1983. As of December 2006, it had only one working number, 710-NCS-GETS (710-627-4387), which requires a special access code to use.
See Government Emergency Telecommunications Service for more information on this service.
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- "Area code 710" | 2017-06-10 | 356 Upvotes 81 Comments
🔗 Minitel
Minitel, officially known as TELETEL, was an interactive videotex online service accessible through telephone lines. It was the world's first and most successful mass-market online service prior to the World Wide Web. It was developed in Cesson-Sévigné, Brittany, by government-owned France Télécom.
The service was initially launched on an experimental basis in July 1980 in Saint-Malo and extended to other regions in late 1980. It was commercially introduced throughout France in 1982 by the Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones (PTT), since 1991, divided into France Télécom and La Poste. From its inception, users were able to make online purchases, book train tickets, access business information services, search the telephone directory, maintain a mailbox, and utilize chat functionalities similar to those now supported by the World Wide Web.
In February 2009, France Télécom reported that the Minitel network still maintained 10 million monthly connections. The service was discontinued by France Télécom on 30 June 2012.
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- "Minitel" | 2026-09-30 | 24 Upvotes 2 Comments
🔗 Palmer Notation
Palmer notation (sometimes called the "Military System" and named for 19th-century American dentist Dr. Corydon Palmer from Warren, Ohio) is a dental notation (tooth numbering system). Despite the adoption of the FDI World Dental Federation notation (ISO 3950) in most of the world and by the World Health Organization, the Palmer notation continued to be the overwhelmingly preferred method used by orthodontists, dental students and practitioners in the United Kingdom as of 1998.
The notation was originally termed the Zsigmondy system after Hungarian dentist Adolf Zsigmondy, who developed the idea in 1861 using a Zsigmondy cross to record quadrants of tooth positions. Adult teeth were numbered 1 to 8, and the child primary dentition (also called deciduous, milk or baby teeth) were depicted with a quadrant grid using Roman numerals I, II, III, IV, V to number the teeth from the midline. Palmer changed this to A, B, C, D, E, which made it less confusing and less prone to errors in interpretation.
The Palmer notation consists of a symbol (⏌⎿ ⏋⎾) designating in which quadrant the tooth is found and a number indicating the position from the midline. Adult teeth are numbered 1 to 8, with deciduous (baby) teeth indicated by a letter A to E. Hence the left and right maxillary central incisor would have the same number, "1", but the right one would have the symbol "⏌" underneath it, while the left one would have "⎿".
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- "Palmer Notation" | 2022-04-07 | 22 Upvotes 4 Comments
🔗 Whistled language
Whistled languages use whistling to emulate speech and facilitate communication. A whistled language is a system of whistled communication which allows fluent whistlers to transmit and comprehend a potentially unlimited number of messages over long distances. Whistled languages are different in this respect from the restricted codes sometimes used by herders or animal trainers to transmit simple messages or instructions. Generally, whistled languages emulate the tones or vowel formants of a natural spoken language, as well as aspects of its intonation and prosody, so that trained listeners who speak that language can understand the encoded message.
Whistled language is rare compared to spoken language, but it is found in cultures around the world. It is especially common in tone languages where the whistled tones transmit the tones of the syllables (tone melodies of the words). This might be because in tone languages the tone melody carries more of the functional load of communication while non-tonal phonology carries proportionally less. The genesis of a whistled language has never been recorded in either case and has not yet received much productive study.
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- "Whistled language" | 2017-12-30 | 37 Upvotes 8 Comments
🔗 Why is P3P not used more?
The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) is an obsolete protocol allowing websites to declare their intended use of information they collect about web browser users. Designed to give users more control of their personal information when browsing, P3P was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and officially recommended on April 16, 2002. Development ceased shortly thereafter and there have been very few implementations of P3P. Microsoft Internet Explorer and Edge were the only major browsers to support P3P. Microsoft has ended support from Windows 10 onwards. Microsoft Internet Explorer and Edge on Windows 10 will no longer support P3P. The president of TRUSTe has stated that P3P has not been implemented widely due to the difficulty and lack of value.
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- "Why is P3P not used more?" | 2010-12-24 | 18 Upvotes 16 Comments
🔗 May Day
May Day is a public holiday in some regions, usually celebrated on 1 May or the first Monday of May. It is an ancient festival marking the first day of summer, and a current traditional spring holiday in many European cultures. Dances, singing, and cake are usually part of the festivities.
In 1889, May Day was chosen as the date for International Workers' Day by the socialists and communists of the Second International, as well as anarchists, labor activists, and leftists in general around the world, to commemorate the Haymarket affair in Chicago and the struggle for an eight-hour working day. International Workers' Day is also called "May Day", but it is a different celebration from the traditional May Day.
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- "May Day" | 2022-05-01 | 57 Upvotes 8 Comments
🔗 Alcohol Powder
Alcohol powder or powdered alcohol or dry alcohol is a product generally made using micro-encapsulation. When reconstituted with water, alcohol (specifically ethanol) in powder form becomes an alcoholic drink. In March 2015 four product labels for specific powdered alcohol products were approved by the United States Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) which opened the doors for legal product sales. However, as of 4 January 2016, the product is not yet available for sale and legalization remains controversial due to public-health and other concerns. Researchers have expressed concern that, should the product go into production, increases in alcohol misuse, abuse, and associated physical harm to its consumers could occur above what has been historically associated with liquid alcohol alone.
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- "Alcohol Powder" | 2021-06-18 | 21 Upvotes 3 Comments