> Vulcan hopes it will attract mobile computer-users willing to > pay for wirelessly transmitted movie trailers and other content
Is there no point at which shame kicks in? Who where these people raised by? While I do realize that some people will pay $10 for a movie they don't intend to see just to see an anticipated trailer preceding it, $1500 for trailers seems just a tad over the top. Like there is nothing else well-heeled geeks could do with a wireless computer except watch trailers--TRAILERS, mind you, not movies. Because we certainly couldn't bring ourselves to invite global piracy and the resulting collapse of society by offering actual movies online.
> There is always the balancing game > between elegance and price though.
Not neccessarily, it's just that many (most?) hackers simply don't value or care about aesthetics. They only value functionality, and once the project is functional, it's finished. It's quite easy to find an old CD player on a dump, gut it and mount the mobo and PS in the empty shell. There, it already looks much more elegant. Next, add a simple IR receiver (e.g. IRMAN) and find some software that interfaces to the IR driver. That's the trickier bit, there's a scarcity of nice looking software that can be driven interely via IR. That's the second aspect of aesthetical indifference--not only is there a beige PC in the living room, but it's driven via a keyboard and shell or Perl scripts. MythTV and Freevo are working precisely in this direction to provide a hands-off appliance experience, so those are definite options. Once it's all said and done you haven't really spent any more, yet you have a much more visually and ergonomically pleasing result.
> Delphi IS 800 pound gorilla in all the places where > decisions on tools are taken not exclusively by suits
Well, this eliminates the Fortune 500 and any other high-profile companies that industry publications (e.g. eWeek or InfoWorld) watch and target, which leads to a vicious cycle of tighter and tighter embrace of Microsoft tools. You can still sneak in Delphi in various ways into these environments, albeit not as an officially approved too. For example, in this VB (and at times reluctantly VC++) shop I often use Delphi for non-deliverable tools and utilities to save time, and project managers look the other way because they figure that nobody will have to maintain this throw-away code anyway.
Why reluctantly VC++? Well, once in a while you hit VB's limits, such as not being able to create non-ActiveX DLLs or implement certain COM interfaces (such as those containing method names with underscores), and while management doesn't always fully buy these limitations and thinks you're just making them up to be difficult (how could VB have these limitations--after all, EVERYONE is using it?!) they don't have a technical basis to deny your request and cave.
If Delphi were the 800 pound gorilla of development tools, fine, the more companies open their products, the better. But as things are, the last thing Delphi needs is major component vendors throwing in the towel. It's sad because Delphi offers one of the few sane and productive alternatives to Microsoft's painful tools and frameworks (.NET shows promise but isn't there yet in terms of maturity and widespread use).
> alas, imacs have no pci slots. and the rooms do not have phone lines.
In that case wireless might still be your best option. Find some USB wireless adapters, preferably some with an optional external antenna, and try playing around with positioning until you hopefully get a signal. If you can't reach all the way to the router room, you could position an intermediary wireless bridge in some closer room in-between. One advantage of having separate access point and router (rather than the popular all-in-one devices at the moment) is that the optimal positions for the two devices rarely coincide. An AP should reside somewhere centrally in the house, or in the attic, with a single run of cable to the router. Of course, 802.11b often does have problems reaching all rooms anyway. That's one of the main reasons I went with the Proxim Symphony HRF setup instead--only 1.6 Mbps, but the reach is incredible: my AP is in the basement, half buried underground in a brick house, and my notebook still gets 100% link quality at the edge of the property down by the creek, some 100 feet through earth, brick and framework. I believe their cards have a much higher power output than the 802.11b standard (this is only for the older HRF 1.6 Mbps standard though, I don't know how the new HomeRF 10 Mbps stuff holds up). They also have a USB adapter, and they do mention Mac support for their PC Card adapter, so maybe you can get drivers for the USB adapter. It's something work checking out anyway.
> Why am I limited to two devices as > bridges but as many as I want as nodes?
I wasn't aware of any such limitation (which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist), but it sounds kind of fishy. OTOH, those bridges are way overpriced anyway, I'm going to set up Linux boxes as bridges instead running LRP. Boxes might be exagerated; I have stacks of old 486 boards sitting around that operate fanlessly, I'm going to add a small fanless PS and boot the board off a 4MB CF card, so it's all nice and solid state, mounted in some sort of flat project enclosure (or an old VCR/CD/DVD player case).
Are there no HomePNA 2.0 Mac drivers for PCI cards? Are you on 9 or X? It would be handy if you could get drivers, because in that case you could get away without any bridges at all--just plug the iMacs into the phone outlets and use a machine by your router as the bridge.
> newer HomePNA hardware is faster (steady 10Mbps) and works well
I'll second that. Throughput of HomePNA 2.0 is identical to 10baseT. Plus you can pick up the cards so bloody cheap, a lot of places sell the Diamond and 3Com cards for under $10. Plus, for quick'n-dirty hookups, it's particularly nice that you can simply daisy chain a bunch of computers together using cheap phone cable without needing a hub.
When every power supply has HomePlug built in with just another wire going to the motherboard, I will revisit it. Until then, it's just too damn expensive and bulky.
For articles that you scan from the printed world and store as scanned images, I would recommend something like PaperPort Deluxe. In addition to offering nice folder-based scanned image management and editing, it also allows annotating these scans via virtual sticky notes, text boxes, free-form drawing and highlighting, etc. All these annotations are stored in a separate layer but can be permanently "burned" into the underlying raster image at any time. In addition it also offers background full-text indexing (after OCR-ing on the fly) and searching. It's quite space efficient with scans, especially when scanning at 300 dpi lineart (which is most useful for archiving printed articles, since they can be printed again at decent quality), with the average magazine article page taking up only about 30-40KB as a compressed TIFF image.
Anyway, while it also lets you manage Word, Excel, PDF etc. files and web pages (and view them within its interface), unfortunately it won't let you annotate those. That would indeed be a very nice extra feature, maybe it should be suggested to ScanSoft. But still, scans of printed articles do make up a very substantial subset of research articles (my wife also does research and has to deal with this same issue), so PaperPort's features are still very useful. Plus it's a very inexpensive product, often included for free with $40 scanners.
Well, the RDB-based fs is a lower-level technology towards adding extensive meta-data to files and is not a complete EDM system in and of itself. But Microsoft has also entered the document management industry itself with their SharePoint stuff (http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint). While they're not a major player (yet?), it definitely seems to be a market they're interested in.
> but it seems to me (and it's early, so bear with me) that it's easier for > me to remember one piece of meta-data (i.e. the path to the file) than several
Well, if retrieval were the sole objective of document management systems, you would probably be right, it might not be worth the effort. However, tagging files (or more generically, "documents") with extended meta-data that's not part of the file itself is a very powerful and useful feature way above and beyond the mere purpose of finding that file again. You enable new kinds of functionality by persisting various kinds of information with a file. This is maybe less useful in a home environment, but in an enterprise setting it can be invaluable, enabling things such as workflow and all kinds of other complex processing of files. Of course, most useful (enterprise) document management systems offer more features than just meta-data, such as version control (checking in and out), access control, automatic indexing and rendering to various portable formats (PDF, TIFF etc.), sophisticated backup (e.g. to optical storage banks) and replication between sites, and so on.
I've spent the last two plus years working with FileNET, one of the top EDM (electronic document management) systems at the moment, and its scope is quite huge. They have a massive (COM) API to write custom apps around the system, and that's mostly what we do in my department. Document processing robots, gateways between various libraries (a library is one complete FileNET installation, and we have dozens for all the various departments), and all sorts of other bizzare and arcane apps. Since TVA is a government agency AND operates nuclear plants, it has very stringent formalized requirements for document handling and storage (e.g. what kind of optical storage, how long to persist documents and in what format, etc.) A sophisticated document management system is a must to manage the millions of documents and AutoCAD drawings involved in a lossless and auditable fashion. A mere filesystem based approach runs out of steam pretty quickly once you're dealing with 15,000 users and millions of files.
As others have already mentioned, unless the article had it all wrong, it seems that you're going about this the hard way. Why not create an encrypting FS driver along the lines of Scramdisk or DriveCrypt that always stores the disk data in encrypted form and only decrypts it upon reading? The token would then simply provide the key, and when it's not present, you simply can't decrypt the data, without requiring a lengthy de/encryption process each time you leave and return? In addition, you could make the driver smart enough to let you encrypt only certain directories, plus you could still keep the cache encryption functionality as it is now.
But the chances of that happening in the US are about the same as adopting the metric system anytime soon. Using 24-hour time (not "military" time as some call it in the US--the day doesn't have 2400 hours, plus skipping the delimiter tends to imply that the minutes are base 10) is simple, intuitive and unambiguous. It also makes calculating time differentials easier. Using 12-hour time leads to nothing but confusion and is counter-intuitive anyway: you go 9am, 10am, 11am, and then suddenly to 12pm. From a purely mathematical point of view it's messing up continuity.
> Oh, and if you (or anyone else) does go looking to buy a TiVo
Actually, I'm considering selling mine and getting two ReplaysTVs instead. The LAN streaming between the units sold me on them. Plus, I never use TiVo's main claim to fame anyway, the thumbs and suggested viewing. I'm very particular about what I want to watch.
It's a compromise thing. There are joys in the here and now, but it's also a long-term investment into not dying a lone bastard. I've seen too many wretched souls awaiting the end of their days in some retirement home/death asylum without anyone ever coming to see them, and the thought of that terrifies me personally.
> She didn't know what it was, and thought it was just a toy. > About a month later we went out and bought a second one, with lifetime service.
It's funny how wifes are that way. My wife now curses anytime she has to watch TV without TiVo (like downstairs or away from home), and yet I had to twist her arm to get it. But that doesn't change the fact that there are spending thresholds beyond which it doesn't matter how nice the product is, you simply won't spend that much. Granted, the TiVo has come down in price now ($200 for the 40 hour units), but now it's a matter of spending more on the lifetime service than the device itself, which triggers new objections.
TiVo have had years to come up with interesting new features, and this is it? They've done NOTHING remotely interesting since the original product. You can't even officially expand storage, even though that could be a huge cash cow for them. I want to buy a second unit for the entertainment room and be able to watch shows recorded on the living room unit, and vice versa, but I can't. Owning two units simply doesn't add any interesting capabilities at all. Replay offers these kinds of features, plus their monthly fee is only $10, so with two units I'd save $6 a month. I'm seriously considering selling my Series 1 SA and getting two Replay units.
> I'm glad for anything that would keep Tivo afloat.
These kinds of statements are getting so old that they start to irritate and anger. TiVo apologists are like Mac fanatics: they extoll the virtues of one closed and compulsively controlling vendor over others just because the look of their products gives them warm fuzzy feelings. TiVo is much more interested in cozying up to the entertainment industry than in pleasing its customers, and if you are willing to accept that because it will "help them survive," you're beyond help. TiVo's brown-nosing hasn't stopped Hollywood in any shape or form from slamming PVRs at every opportunity and trying every which way to influence politicians to stop this "menace." Sleeping with the enemy doesn't help you survive, it just helps them gain insight into how to beat you.
> FWIW, if you had bought the lifetime service, you would have already saved over $100 in monthly fees
Whey I bought my Series 1 SA, they were going for $399. Given the hard time I had convincing the wife that we really needed this, there's no way I would have gotten away with spending another $200 on top of that. And if you claim $600 for yet another TVA appendage is nothing, you're either not married or not in my (and most people's here) social bracket, so we have little to discuss either way.
> What I meant was that Borland's products don't define the language. > Borland just provides one implementation.
Not true in the case of Delphi. Delphi is not an implementation of some standard Object Pascal. In fact, there is no standard OP--Delphi IS standard OP. That's also why they gave up on the moniker Object Pascal. The language itself is now officially called Delphi. And yes, the VCL drove the implementation of language features.
> But the pascal language, while a good choice for beginners, sux in comparison to C.
Let's not start on that. Pascal is especially great for production code because it precludes some tricky hacks that "expert" C/C++ programmers used to like (such as assignment in logical expressions), and tends to make code overall more readable. It also avoids the header/implementation file mess and often results in half the number of source code files, which I personally find organizationally neater. It's not as expressive as C++, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Borland definitely has had some bouts of identity crisis. And now again they seem to be acquiring companies that aren't strictly related to language tools, so I don't know what's going to happen with Borland long-term.
Slashdot Mirror
> It finds data that people went out of their way to make accessable from the host computer
Oh, but still "nothing to configure," right? Bah!
> That's gotta be a mistake.
Well, on the 5.8" screen the 6 looked like a 4, so they got fooled. Squinty strangely didn't help.
> Vulcan hopes it will attract mobile computer-users willing to
> pay for wirelessly transmitted movie trailers and other content
Is there no point at which shame kicks in? Who where these people raised by? While I do realize that some people will pay $10 for a movie they don't intend to see just to see an anticipated trailer preceding it, $1500 for trailers seems just a tad over the top. Like there is nothing else well-heeled geeks could do with a wireless computer except watch trailers--TRAILERS, mind you, not movies. Because we certainly couldn't bring ourselves to invite global piracy and the resulting collapse of society by offering actual movies online.
> There is always the balancing game
> between elegance and price though.
Not neccessarily, it's just that many (most?) hackers simply don't value or care about aesthetics. They only value functionality, and once the project is functional, it's finished. It's quite easy to find an old CD player on a dump, gut it and mount the mobo and PS in the empty shell. There, it already looks much more elegant. Next, add a simple IR receiver (e.g. IRMAN) and find some software that interfaces to the IR driver. That's the trickier bit, there's a scarcity of nice looking software that can be driven interely via IR. That's the second aspect of aesthetical indifference--not only is there a beige PC in the living room, but it's driven via a keyboard and shell or Perl scripts. MythTV and Freevo are working precisely in this direction to provide a hands-off appliance experience, so those are definite options. Once it's all said and done you haven't really spent any more, yet you have a much more visually and ergonomically pleasing result.
The ADS Cadet ISA card can be picked up for really cheap and it has Linux support. Only problem is scaring up ISA slots.
> Delphi IS 800 pound gorilla in all the places where
> decisions on tools are taken not exclusively by suits
Well, this eliminates the Fortune 500 and any other high-profile companies that industry publications (e.g. eWeek or InfoWorld) watch and target, which leads to a vicious cycle of tighter and tighter embrace of Microsoft tools. You can still sneak in Delphi in various ways into these environments, albeit not as an officially approved too. For example, in this VB (and at times reluctantly VC++) shop I often use Delphi for non-deliverable tools and utilities to save time, and project managers look the other way because they figure that nobody will have to maintain this throw-away code anyway.
Why reluctantly VC++? Well, once in a while you hit VB's limits, such as not being able to create non-ActiveX DLLs or implement certain COM interfaces (such as those containing method names with underscores), and while management doesn't always fully buy these limitations and thinks you're just making them up to be difficult (how could VB have these limitations--after all, EVERYONE is using it?!) they don't have a technical basis to deny your request and cave.
If Delphi were the 800 pound gorilla of development tools, fine, the more companies open their products, the better. But as things are, the last thing Delphi needs is major component vendors throwing in the towel. It's sad because Delphi offers one of the few sane and productive alternatives to Microsoft's painful tools and frameworks (.NET shows promise but isn't there yet in terms of maturity and widespread use).
> alas, imacs have no pci slots. and the rooms do not have phone lines.
In that case wireless might still be your best option. Find some USB wireless adapters, preferably some with an optional external antenna, and try playing around with positioning until you hopefully get a signal. If you can't reach all the way to the router room, you could position an intermediary wireless bridge in some closer room in-between. One advantage of having separate access point and router (rather than the popular all-in-one devices at the moment) is that the optimal positions for the two devices rarely coincide. An AP should reside somewhere centrally in the house, or in the attic, with a single run of cable to the router. Of course, 802.11b often does have problems reaching all rooms anyway. That's one of the main reasons I went with the Proxim Symphony HRF setup instead--only 1.6 Mbps, but the reach is incredible: my AP is in the basement, half buried underground in a brick house, and my notebook still gets 100% link quality at the edge of the property down by the creek, some 100 feet through earth, brick and framework. I believe their cards have a much higher power output than the 802.11b standard (this is only for the older HRF 1.6 Mbps standard though, I don't know how the new HomeRF 10 Mbps stuff holds up). They also have a USB adapter, and they do mention Mac support for their PC Card adapter, so maybe you can get drivers for the USB adapter. It's something work checking out anyway.
> Why am I limited to two devices as
> bridges but as many as I want as nodes?
I wasn't aware of any such limitation (which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist), but it sounds kind of fishy. OTOH, those bridges are way overpriced anyway, I'm going to set up Linux boxes as bridges instead running LRP. Boxes might be exagerated; I have stacks of old 486 boards sitting around that operate fanlessly, I'm going to add a small fanless PS and boot the board off a 4MB CF card, so it's all nice and solid state, mounted in some sort of flat project enclosure (or an old VCR/CD/DVD player case).
Are there no HomePNA 2.0 Mac drivers for PCI cards? Are you on 9 or X? It would be handy if you could get drivers, because in that case you could get away without any bridges at all--just plug the iMacs into the phone outlets and use a machine by your router as the bridge.
> sounds a lot like 10b2 but faster.
Plus you don't need terminators, and the cable is a lot thinner and more flexible.
> newer HomePNA hardware is faster (steady 10Mbps) and works well
I'll second that. Throughput of HomePNA 2.0 is identical to 10baseT. Plus you can pick up the cards so bloody cheap, a lot of places sell the Diamond and 3Com cards for under $10. Plus, for quick'n-dirty hookups, it's particularly nice that you can simply daisy chain a bunch of computers together using cheap phone cable without needing a hub.
When every power supply has HomePlug built in with just another wire going to the motherboard, I will revisit it. Until then, it's just too damn expensive and bulky.
For articles that you scan from the printed world and store as scanned images, I would recommend something like PaperPort Deluxe. In addition to offering nice folder-based scanned image management and editing, it also allows annotating these scans via virtual sticky notes, text boxes, free-form drawing and highlighting, etc. All these annotations are stored in a separate layer but can be permanently "burned" into the underlying raster image at any time. In addition it also offers background full-text indexing (after OCR-ing on the fly) and searching. It's quite space efficient with scans, especially when scanning at 300 dpi lineart (which is most useful for archiving printed articles, since they can be printed again at decent quality), with the average magazine article page taking up only about 30-40KB as a compressed TIFF image.
Anyway, while it also lets you manage Word, Excel, PDF etc. files and web pages (and view them within its interface), unfortunately it won't let you annotate those. That would indeed be a very nice extra feature, maybe it should be suggested to ScanSoft. But still, scans of printed articles do make up a very substantial subset of research articles (my wife also does research and has to deal with this same issue), so PaperPort's features are still very useful. Plus it's a very inexpensive product, often included for free with $40 scanners.
Does not work with manual override. Sorry guys!
Well, the RDB-based fs is a lower-level technology towards adding extensive meta-data to files and is not a complete EDM system in and of itself. But Microsoft has also entered the document management industry itself with their SharePoint stuff (http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint). While they're not a major player (yet?), it definitely seems to be a market they're interested in.
> but it seems to me (and it's early, so bear with me) that it's easier for
> me to remember one piece of meta-data (i.e. the path to the file) than several
Well, if retrieval were the sole objective of document management systems, you would probably be right, it might not be worth the effort. However, tagging files (or more generically, "documents") with extended meta-data that's not part of the file itself is a very powerful and useful feature way above and beyond the mere purpose of finding that file again. You enable new kinds of functionality by persisting various kinds of information with a file. This is maybe less useful in a home environment, but in an enterprise setting it can be invaluable, enabling things such as workflow and all kinds of other complex processing of files. Of course, most useful (enterprise) document management systems offer more features than just meta-data, such as version control (checking in and out), access control, automatic indexing and rendering to various portable formats (PDF, TIFF etc.), sophisticated backup (e.g. to optical storage banks) and replication between sites, and so on.
I've spent the last two plus years working with FileNET, one of the top EDM (electronic document management) systems at the moment, and its scope is quite huge. They have a massive (COM) API to write custom apps around the system, and that's mostly what we do in my department. Document processing robots, gateways between various libraries (a library is one complete FileNET installation, and we have dozens for all the various departments), and all sorts of other bizzare and arcane apps. Since TVA is a government agency AND operates nuclear plants, it has very stringent formalized requirements for document handling and storage (e.g. what kind of optical storage, how long to persist documents and in what format, etc.) A sophisticated document management system is a must to manage the millions of documents and AutoCAD drawings involved in a lossless and auditable fashion. A mere filesystem based approach runs out of steam pretty quickly once you're dealing with 15,000 users and millions of files.
not everyone knows your friend Guido that can "guarantee" that sort of resale value. Most of us would be SELLING it for $500.
As others have already mentioned, unless the article had it all wrong, it seems that you're going about this the hard way. Why not create an encrypting FS driver along the lines of Scramdisk or DriveCrypt that always stores the disk data in encrypted form and only decrypts it upon reading? The token would then simply provide the key, and when it's not present, you simply can't decrypt the data, without requiring a lengthy de/encryption process each time you leave and return? In addition, you could make the driver smart enough to let you encrypt only certain directories, plus you could still keep the cache encryption functionality as it is now.
But the chances of that happening in the US are about the same as adopting the metric system anytime soon. Using 24-hour time (not "military" time as some call it in the US--the day doesn't have 2400 hours, plus skipping the delimiter tends to imply that the minutes are base 10) is simple, intuitive and unambiguous. It also makes calculating time differentials easier. Using 12-hour time leads to nothing but confusion and is counter-intuitive anyway: you go 9am, 10am, 11am, and then suddenly to 12pm. From a purely mathematical point of view it's messing up continuity.
> of Scandinavian descent are into the idea that the Vikings were
> the first Europeans to reach North America. Even if true [...]
Even if true?! Don't let the facts obscure your view of the world, my friend.
> Oh, and if you (or anyone else) does go looking to buy a TiVo
Actually, I'm considering selling mine and getting two ReplaysTVs instead. The LAN streaming between the units sold me on them. Plus, I never use TiVo's main claim to fame anyway, the thumbs and suggested viewing. I'm very particular about what I want to watch.
> but why would a man ever do it?
It's a compromise thing. There are joys in the here and now, but it's also a long-term investment into not dying a lone bastard. I've seen too many wretched souls awaiting the end of their days in some retirement home/death asylum without anyone ever coming to see them, and the thought of that terrifies me personally.
> She didn't know what it was, and thought it was just a toy.
> About a month later we went out and bought a second one, with lifetime service.
It's funny how wifes are that way. My wife now curses anytime she has to watch TV without TiVo (like downstairs or away from home), and yet I had to twist her arm to get it. But that doesn't change the fact that there are spending thresholds beyond which it doesn't matter how nice the product is, you simply won't spend that much. Granted, the TiVo has come down in price now ($200 for the 40 hour units), but now it's a matter of spending more on the lifetime service than the device itself, which triggers new objections.
TiVo have had years to come up with interesting new features, and this is it? They've done NOTHING remotely interesting since the original product. You can't even officially expand storage, even though that could be a huge cash cow for them. I want to buy a second unit for the entertainment room and be able to watch shows recorded on the living room unit, and vice versa, but I can't. Owning two units simply doesn't add any interesting capabilities at all. Replay offers these kinds of features, plus their monthly fee is only $10, so with two units I'd save $6 a month. I'm seriously considering selling my Series 1 SA and getting two Replay units.
> I'm glad for anything that would keep Tivo afloat.
These kinds of statements are getting so old that they start to irritate and anger. TiVo apologists are like Mac fanatics: they extoll the virtues of one closed and compulsively controlling vendor over others just because the look of their products gives them warm fuzzy feelings. TiVo is much more interested in cozying up to the entertainment industry than in pleasing its customers, and if you are willing to accept that because it will "help them survive," you're beyond help. TiVo's brown-nosing hasn't stopped Hollywood in any shape or form from slamming PVRs at every opportunity and trying every which way to influence politicians to stop this "menace." Sleeping with the enemy doesn't help you survive, it just helps them gain insight into how to beat you.
> FWIW, if you had bought the lifetime service, you would have already saved over $100 in monthly fees
Whey I bought my Series 1 SA, they were going for $399. Given the hard time I had convincing the wife that we really needed this, there's no way I would have gotten away with spending another $200 on top of that. And if you claim $600 for yet another TVA appendage is nothing, you're either not married or not in my (and most people's here) social bracket, so we have little to discuss either way.
> What I meant was that Borland's products don't define the language.
> Borland just provides one implementation.
Not true in the case of Delphi. Delphi is not an implementation of some standard Object Pascal. In fact, there is no standard OP--Delphi IS standard OP. That's also why they gave up on the moniker Object Pascal. The language itself is now officially called Delphi. And yes, the VCL drove the implementation of language features.
> But the pascal language, while a good choice for beginners, sux in comparison to C.
Let's not start on that. Pascal is especially great for production code because it precludes some tricky hacks that "expert" C/C++ programmers used to like (such as assignment in logical expressions), and tends to make code overall more readable. It also avoids the header/implementation file mess and often results in half the number of source code files, which I personally find organizationally neater. It's not as expressive as C++, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Borland definitely has had some bouts of identity crisis. And now again they seem to be acquiring companies that aren't strictly related to language tools, so I don't know what's going to happen with Borland long-term.