Posts by Marco van de Voort

Re: Plus ca change - lentement

The illusion that GTK3 will be a worthy successor to GTK2 has been abandoned long ago, as soon as externally reported bugs were no longer resolved.

That depends really on which country you are from.

In some countries education believes in using industry languages for education, while some other countries choose languages based on educational purposes. In some countries it depends on the school/college.

Both cases have their arguments for and against (including that industry languages training most benefit big business that can use cheap graduates with minimal training and might have changed anyway when students graduate/after that initial job, and counter argument that the educational purposes argument in practice often degrades to teachers not having to less frequently update/rewrite their courseware than actual educational benefit )

Re: Linux "Desktop"

And, more importantly old software for that API still largely works

If some old app crucial to you is suddenly out of favour, you are stuck with getting it to compile on supported distributions yourself, mess with VMs and other layers, which all require their own attention/time and also get more difficult with time.

There is no binary backwards compatibility at all for Linux.

Re: Too Scary, Too Complicated

There are more issues, like e.g. anything that defies the procedural regime (e.g. home made exceptions, advanced forms of nested functions (e.g. with displays)) etc etc is hard.

Own debug code generation (and an own debugger to interpret them): hard.

The problem is that if you chose the transpiler way, it forever will remain bound to transpiler (read target language) limitations.

Re: Indeed C is everywhere just deep down

Free Basic can generate assembler on x86 and generates C for gcc for the rest.

Free Pascal writes ELF .o directly, but still uses LD on popular *nix targets.

On more static targets like Windows and go32v2/dos it has complete stack (assembler/archiver linker, resource compiler and, finally, in the development version, a debugger).

Re: Humor has its funny side.

It is more a reference to looking at something from all angles, which in Dutch is "looking from all sides".

I'd go for "aspects"

Your driver shortage numbers oversimplify and miss several aspects:

First, and for all, cabotage has ended, and UK bound lorries from the EU often go home empty, requiring UK rides to substitute. The goods picked up by those were not counted in those 20000 EU drivers. Only the ones with some form of residency were counted.

Moreover longer customs eat up driver-hours and thus also require relatively more drivers. Lorries are also less filled because taking goods from multiple sources complicates passing customs, again leading to more lorries being used and thus drivers.

Moreover, the UK driver populace is relatively old, and during this almost two year period, some naturally retired, and some simply called it a day because of all the troubles, while less than the replacement were trained for various reasons. Some also might also have found other work during covid related hiatus and left the industry.

And of course not all drivers are equal, drivers for very long lorries or lorries with hazardous materials usually needing special training and licenses.

So basically it is brexit, covid and an already pre-existing demographic among drivers suddenly happening as a perfect storm. The speed of it all probably surprises even some of the ardent remainers, who expected Brexit impact not instant, but to be a slow trainwreck over 10+ years.

Well, as long as your company doesn't have Eur 5000 annual revenue: (from the license text:)

"Once your company's total revenue reaches US $5,000, or your team expands to more than 5 developers, you can move up to an unrestricted commercial license with Professional edition."

which is kind of well, always. (it doesn't say only the revenue of Delphi program counts)

Re: WW2 quarter of British Tank crew casualties were when popping out to make a brew

Though I assume the British Tank crews had a better reason not to go outside than the average office working at home.

copyright assignments

The problem with the copyright assignments is that it just shifts the weak point that goes rogue from the heir to Canonical.

E.g. if Canonical would go bust and parts would be snapped up by someone seeking to exploit the portfolio anyway they can.

This is an quite old discussion, since afaik GNU managed projects like gcc and gdb also require copyright assignment.

services

Ad services are services, which wouldn't be covered in a deal. UK sovereignty fully applies here.

And even if it would, it would cover moving EU citizens data to UK datacenters, and nothing about 3rd party state citizens(Brits) elsewhere.

Re: Brexit?

What will the UK do after Brexit wrt aviation?

- make meals even less palatable with chlorinated chicken.

Re: I've never understood what people have against braces (or semicolons)

Well, braces are shifted letters. Non shifted characters are easier. Like euh, begin...end, but some people wanted to save some keystrokes ;)

Re: And in the next release ...

There have been discussions about 6502, but it is even more register starved than the Z80. And none of them are 16-bit capable, not even by combining 8-bit registers (iow needing zero page indirect indexing to process a pointer). The codegenerator doesn't model this atm.

Re: And there is of course also lazarus/freepascal

Thank you

Branching and merging worked from the start. Tagging was replaced by branching even.

SVN doesn't internally administrate as finely divided though, which lessens merge performance in more extreme cases. But that is something different. In cases both sides have changes in the same lines it sometimes borks.

(but a good 3rd party three-way diff tool as Beyond compare can even resolve many of those)

Re: the question is why Delphi failed to sweep up more of the Windows development market

Personally I think the time for 3rd party tools vendors was simply over and from the late nineties on, the market belonged to the big IT vendors that predatory priced development tools because they wanted to promote their "platform".

Another ten years later, open source would also start a significant dent.

Borland maybe should have aligned themselves with a Big One in that period.

Some of that is what I thought. "Easy Visa" is an easy to implement solution to clear some last hurdles, and also attract the students before they become "World Class Scientist" (the bit where you educate an hundred to find one nugget)

To cherry pick world class staff, primarily you need to give potential staff good salaries and somewhat secure prospects. World Class staff coming for multi year tenures don't mind visa that much, since they can be handled by the uni (or research institutions) bureau for that. And those know which points to pressure for the real good ones.

Easy visa is the methods to drag in reams of (usually /paying/) hopefuls into your education system to bolster the base, to partially fund it, and with hopefully some cream rising to the top eventually.

Well, indeed Apple has shown many signs that it takes users of software not serious, and focusses chiefly on media consumption. Primarily from its own services.

So the blame is on the Apple users still trying while the writing has been on the wall for a decade, while Apple is laughing all the way to the bank.