I'm on the DNC list (since day 1) and it worked nearly perfectly for several years, but now I'm starting to get more callers. I think people are starting to catch onto the fact that their chances of getting any sort of punushment is almost zero. After this many years, only a few dozen telemarketers have been fined. Most businesses don't seem to care because they know they aren't big enough to catch the attention of the FTC.
I don't see how I've dug myself a hole at all. In fact, it seems like you are just covering for yourself. You initially said:
What I DO NOT want is a phone service that gives me a friggin "select from the following options" load of BS when I lift up the receiver! I have enough of that crap when phoning help desks.
Well, I informed you that you didn't have to listen to that same stuff you do at work. You simply disable the option. But then you came back and said
Which bit of "I don't want" means "I don't realise they're optional"??
So, you appear to claim that you realized you could disable the feature, but you still complained about it anyway in your initial post, so the most logical conclusion to be drawn was that you were upset NOT because you would have to deal with it (if you used the service) but merely because it existed. I can't find a better way to reconcile those 2 statements with each other.
As for the firefox example, how would it be irritating if you disable it? Oh no!!!! You'd have to go into the options and configure the app the way you like it, as if 99.9% of people who are picky enough to care don't already do that anyway. Oh, the horror!!!!!
PS. Sorry I don't keep up on all of your preferred slang. I thought it might mean something else, but apparently I was wrong. You have shamed me. I shall now kill myself to spare my family the dishonor I have brought upon them.
Wait, so your complaint is that you don't care whether or not you ever have to use or experience a feature, you simply don't want the feature to exist in any form whatsoever? So like, for example, if you didn't like javascript, then even though Firefox lets you disable javascript completely, you wouldn't want to use Firefox because of that? Wow.
P.S. If your are going to be a jackass and keep referring to me as a Muppet (which doesn't seem to make any sense), then can you at least give me the dignity of being a particular Muppet? I like playing drums, so how about Animal? And for you, how about Oscar?
I'm a Vonage user. Yes, they do partially do this, but in a MUCH more limited way.
1) There is no option that I know of to screen the calls via voicemail. 2) They don't have any useful way of blocking callers (you can block anonymous, but thats it) 3) The system isn't configurable to forward/simulring individual numbers differently. I find this to be a problem. I have my home (vonage) number simulring my cell phone. Problem is, when I'm trying to call my wife at home, the phone at home ring once, then the simulring to my cell phone kicks in, but since I'm initiating a call, it goes straight to voicemail, which counts as answering the call, so the home phone stops ringing and I get my own voicemail. 4) Theres no way to transfer a call from one phone to another. 5) I think Vonage charges a fee per voicemail to do the transcription.
Unfortunately, though, when you call out from your home number, it would transmit your home number instead of your google voice number.
One solution is to block the number, which is not what I'd usually want. I want people to know I was calling them, but I'd want the caller ID to display the number they should call me back on.
The other solution is to use a computer to setup the call (in which case google will call you and then connect you), or call into google voice, then enter the number it should forward it to (for when you don't have a computer handy), but that would be annoying to do that every time you try to make a call
I was under the impression that the reason for the E-911 problems was not because there was no ANI data (or incorrect data), but because the ANI data alone wasn't sufficient to identify the caller's location. In order for that to work, they need to be able to export the address from their account information and have it imported into the E-911 system.
Even if you don't have access to that extra info, you still have the ANI info (which is more like a unique key), which you can then use to identify future calls from the same caller.
Don't forget that your walkie talkie needs one hell of a range. And of course, you need to be comfortable with letting any random person listen in on your voicemail.
Google Voice eliminates some of the annoyances of its predecessor. You can, if you wish, turn off that âoepress 1, press 2â option, so when the phone rings, you can just pick it up and start talking.
yet you didn't seem to know it said that. And as that article indicated that this feature existed (in mandatory form, as suggested by that quote) on the old GrandCentral service, then you wouldn't have needed to be "clairevoyant" to know...you'd just need to be familiar with the old service. You DO, however, have to be a jackass to reply the way you did.
Really? I didn't know that steam powered cassette based answerphones would let you listen in on a voicemail to your home line even though you were in the office. Like they always say...you learn something new every day.
What I DO NOT want is a phone service that gives me a friggin "select from the following options" load of BS when I lift up the receiver
Good news. If you had RTFA you would have read the part where it says this is optional.
Since Caller ID has become virtually useless for identifying anyone other than friends and family (it is regularly blocked or spoofed), it would be nice if Google Voice gave you the option to view the ANI info (which is what is used internally by the phone systems for billing and E-911, and is generally considered unspoofable). I've been waiting for someone to do so for a long time.
Xbox Live subscription and points cards do not require any activation. In fact, the only identifier visible on the packaging is the UPC code. There are no serial numbers on the package. The only serial numbers is on the card, behind a tear off panel.
1) My memory of Halo 2 is much fuzzier than my memory of Halo 1, but I thought the Halo 2 story line touched on that somewhat, about why the covenant brought the battle to earth. Maybe not.
2) I thought the covenant did believe it was a weapon. I thought it was in Halo 2, with the prophets being the one leading the covenant to believe they are embarking on a journey. But again, my memory is fuzzy on that. It's been about 3 years since I played Halo 1, and even longer since Halo 2.
3) Actually, I believe you do succeed in rescuing the captain. It's later in the story that he gets absorbed by the flood and you kill him
Re:How can you trust this article?
on
Review: Halo Wars
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· Score: 1
Wow, so you mean Bungie were some huge visionaries that realized there was this huge untapped market on the console that nobody had ever thought to attempt to grab onto before? Everyone before them was completely oblivious to the opportunity that existed?
No, the reason it is "despite" and not "because" is that implementing a FPS on a console control scheme is just outright difficult, and nobody had yet figured out the ideal way of handling it. Others had tried, but there were very few successes. Bungie stumbled on the correct combination of controls and gameplay mechanics that made it work well on a console.
It also helped that Halo had a huge fan following because of some of the revolutionary graphics they had been teasing for years on the PC, and that followed them over when they switched to be console only (at least initially). However, that wouldn't have helped them had their implementation been as good as it was. A fan following + crap game = no fan following (just ask Romero).
Now there are others, but Halo enjoys the benefit of being the first to get it as right as they did.
It is perfectly natural to want a story to be there. Why are books the sacred realm of stories? What is so special about a book that they should have a story, but not a video game? Some people don't enjoy reading (I generally don't), so we'd like to experience stories differently (interactively). It's not a necessity for every game, but it helps.
PS. I'm not the person you replied to but: I didn't like HL much but I loved Portal.
Wow, I can't believe someone found the Halo story hard to follow. I haven't played the original Halo in almost 3 years, but I'll give your challenge a shot from memory:
1) Humans are at war with covenant (bad guys)
2) Story starts with Pillar of Autumn (a big colony ship) being pursued by covenant. The ship comes out of hyperspace in an unknown location, and covenant are still in pursuit. There is a large ring shaped artificial planet nearby.
3) Covenant manage to board the ship, and you (Master Chief) are asked to take Cortana (the ship's AI) to protect it from capture. You are to flee from to ring planet.
4) Once on the planet, you regroup with everyone else that escaped.
5) You learn your captain was captured by the covanant, so you rescue him and several other shipmates.
6) While captive, the captain learned that the covenant believe Halo is not just a planet, but a super weapon. He also learned the covenant are attempting to gain control of Halo so they can use it.
7) You try to find out where the control room is
8) You head for the control room so that YOU can get control of the weapon first.
9) On the way there, you run into the flood, which is a sort of parasitic creatures race. They were apparently in containment on Halo and accidentally released by the covenant in their attempt to get control of Halo.
10) You run into Guilty Spark, who is a service bot responsible for caring for the installation (ie: Halo). When he learns you are there to activate Halo, and he wants to help you because he needs to stop the flood, and activating Halo will do that (he can't activate it on his own because of security protocol).
11) He leads you to recover the activation index...the key you will need to activate Halo.
12) You then proceed to the control room to activate it. However, as you activate it, Cortana discovers that Halo is not a weapon, but a device to purge the galaxy (or maybe just some large portion of it) of life.
13) You try to abort, but Guilty Spark tries to stop you by sending Halos defensive system against you. You succeed anyway.
14) You now decide that leaving the Halo intact is too dangerous (in case someone else activates it) so you are going to destroy it. You head back to the crashed Pillar of Autumn to have it self destruct (taking Halo with it).
15) You then escape in a small ship before Halo explodes.
That's just from memory. Might have missed a few points, but that covers the basics. Nothing very complex or confusing there. If you want to argue that the story is lame or otherwise not compelling, that's fine (your choice). But to say it's difficult to figure out what's going on....well, if that's the case, I suggest "Hello Kitty Island Adventure" is probably a better match for your intellect.
I would think sitting in the handicapped seat and plugging into the mic jack would make it EASIER for them to identify where you were sitting, not harder.
I read the rockband.com forums, and at one point a Harmonix employee suggested (but wouldn't commit by giving specific details) that there will be some sort of interaction with the other games. Whether that means you will be able to import RB1/2 songs into this game, export Beatles songs to RB2, or something completely different, it isn't clear.
No, I'm actually going by what I hear from the majority of players I've interacted with (both newbies and longtime players) and that's the general attitude now. Cover songs are really looked down upon.
I know of one case were people are content with the cover version (and in fact prefer it). Rush's "Working Man" was originally released as a cover, but a new version was released as an "original". However, the original wasn't actually the original. Apparently (and we can only guess, since there is no official explanation), the original master recordings weren't available or of the proper quality to release the song, so they found a different version that the band had recorded years later. They used that version for the "original" version. However, some people prefer the cover version because it is a closer match to the version on the album.
Of course, maybe if they had no other choice, they'd take what they can get, but from the impression I have, not a lot of people would be happy about it.
In some cases, that's true, but most of the time I don't think it is. I mean look at Rock Band 2. When it was released, they said it would come with 80+ songs, and then there would be a download code so that you could download another 20 once they got them ready. Everyone was excited. Then Harmonix released the 20 songs for download and they all turned out to be indie songs. Tons of people bitched and complained, and many won't even go and download those 20 songs even though they are free.
The problem there is that fans have gotten a taste of the real thing, and many won't tolerate it anymore. It would be kind of like saying that game design has gotten really expensive these days, and that developers should just keep costs down and go back to 2.5D engines for their FPS games. Most gamers won't tolerate either option anymore.
They've already got more than enough music to be released. They only release 3 to 8 songs a week from 2 or 3 artist (or sometimes an entire album instead). There's no way the company can keep up with everything. There are tons of artists out there that don't even have a single song in Rock Band, and it's not because of negotiation failures. There are just too many artist to cover without flooding the market.
So if Warner wants to pull their catalog from the list of available options, it will only make it that much easier for Harmonix to catch up with other artists from some other labels. I have a feeling Rock Band won't be lacking for anything, but Warner will have to answer to their artists about why they aren't seeing the advantages that other artists are enjoying.
Well, they ARE "competing" now, yet net neutrality is gradually becoming an even more important issue despite that. There are a few problems with competition. For one, there isn't truly competition in a lot of areas. In many cities, franchise agreement restrict other competitors from coming in. Even if there are competitors, you might find that the competition works backward from how you hope. When one company starts charging extra for certain services, that gives them a financial advantage, and others may have to adopt the same policies just to stay competitive.
But the whole reason this topic came up was because the compiler in question generated code that required the hardware to be configured in a certain way. Yet the reason it had to be configured that way was because the instructions generated for code on the right side of a short-circuit test required it, even though the code on the left side dictated that no such requirement should exist. If the short circuit evaluation were properly adhered to, then no such requirement on system configuration would be in place.
Thus we are clearly talking about 2 completely different results. It is not equivalent code. There is a side effect of doing it differently, and that's the basis that some of us have been arguing from.
There is no question that the underlying hardware can do things in whatever way it wants as long as the result is the same. Look at modern CPUs that do predictive branching. They will guess at what the outcome of a branch will be even before the result is known, and they will then execute the code on the predicted branch before the result is known. When the result is finally known, if it turns out the hardware guessed wrong, then the code from the predicted branch is flushed from the pipeline without ever being committed. The end result is exactly the same as if the prediction had not taken place. That's an equivalent result. It is transparent (other than some performance implications, but performance isn't dictated by the C spec).
No need to count. Anytime you are assigning to a string, you know exactly what you are assigning. If you are assigning a constant, the compiler can count the characters. If you are assigning another string, you just copy its length counter. If you are appending, you just add one string's counter to the other's counter. If you are reading into the string as a buffer, then the read function is going to tell you the exact number of characters it read in. Even if you are copying from another string that is terminated and thus has no counter, all you have to do is copy until you get to the terminator (which you have to do anyway), then subtract the address/offset of the terminator from the start address/offset.
Yes, it is still a tiny bit of extra work (an assignment, and possibly an addition and/or subtraction), but that's negligible for almost 100% of things.
Actually, IIRC that is only true of the AnsiString type. I'm pretty sure that if you declare a ShortString (which was simply called a String in Delphi 1, and had to be explicitly declared as a ShortString in Delphi 2 and up) there is no terminating character.
However, I'm not sure that anyone has actually bothered to use a ShortString in years (and for all I know, it may not even be in the language anymore), so I'm just nitpicking.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm on the DNC list (since day 1) and it worked nearly perfectly for several years, but now I'm starting to get more callers. I think people are starting to catch onto the fact that their chances of getting any sort of punushment is almost zero. After this many years, only a few dozen telemarketers have been fined. Most businesses don't seem to care because they know they aren't big enough to catch the attention of the FTC.
I don't see how I've dug myself a hole at all. In fact, it seems like you are just covering for yourself. You initially said:
Well, I informed you that you didn't have to listen to that same stuff you do at work. You simply disable the option. But then you came back and said
So, you appear to claim that you realized you could disable the feature, but you still complained about it anyway in your initial post, so the most logical conclusion to be drawn was that you were upset NOT because you would have to deal with it (if you used the service) but merely because it existed. I can't find a better way to reconcile those 2 statements with each other.
As for the firefox example, how would it be irritating if you disable it? Oh no!!!! You'd have to go into the options and configure the app the way you like it, as if 99.9% of people who are picky enough to care don't already do that anyway. Oh, the horror!!!!!
PS. Sorry I don't keep up on all of your preferred slang. I thought it might mean something else, but apparently I was wrong. You have shamed me. I shall now kill myself to spare my family the dishonor I have brought upon them.
Wait, so your complaint is that you don't care whether or not you ever have to use or experience a feature, you simply don't want the feature to exist in any form whatsoever? So like, for example, if you didn't like javascript, then even though Firefox lets you disable javascript completely, you wouldn't want to use Firefox because of that? Wow.
P.S. If your are going to be a jackass and keep referring to me as a Muppet (which doesn't seem to make any sense), then can you at least give me the dignity of being a particular Muppet? I like playing drums, so how about Animal? And for you, how about Oscar?
I'm a Vonage user. Yes, they do partially do this, but in a MUCH more limited way.
1) There is no option that I know of to screen the calls via voicemail.
2) They don't have any useful way of blocking callers (you can block anonymous, but thats it)
3) The system isn't configurable to forward/simulring individual numbers differently. I find this to be a problem. I have my home (vonage) number simulring my cell phone. Problem is, when I'm trying to call my wife at home, the phone at home ring once, then the simulring to my cell phone kicks in, but since I'm initiating a call, it goes straight to voicemail, which counts as answering the call, so the home phone stops ringing and I get my own voicemail.
4) Theres no way to transfer a call from one phone to another.
5) I think Vonage charges a fee per voicemail to do the transcription.
That's just for starters.
Unfortunately, though, when you call out from your home number, it would transmit your home number instead of your google voice number.
One solution is to block the number, which is not what I'd usually want. I want people to know I was calling them, but I'd want the caller ID to display the number they should call me back on.
The other solution is to use a computer to setup the call (in which case google will call you and then connect you), or call into google voice, then enter the number it should forward it to (for when you don't have a computer handy), but that would be annoying to do that every time you try to make a call
I was under the impression that the reason for the E-911 problems was not because there was no ANI data (or incorrect data), but because the ANI data alone wasn't sufficient to identify the caller's location. In order for that to work, they need to be able to export the address from their account information and have it imported into the E-911 system.
Even if you don't have access to that extra info, you still have the ANI info (which is more like a unique key), which you can then use to identify future calls from the same caller.
If I'm wrong, someone please correct me.
Don't forget that your walkie talkie needs one hell of a range. And of course, you need to be comfortable with letting any random person listen in on your voicemail.
Well, then explain how the article said
yet you didn't seem to know it said that. And as that article indicated that this feature existed (in mandatory form, as suggested by that quote) on the old GrandCentral service, then you wouldn't have needed to be "clairevoyant" to know...you'd just need to be familiar with the old service. You DO, however, have to be a jackass to reply the way you did.
Really? I didn't know that steam powered cassette based answerphones would let you listen in on a voicemail to your home line even though you were in the office. Like they always say...you learn something new every day.
Good news. If you had RTFA you would have read the part where it says this is optional.
Since Caller ID has become virtually useless for identifying anyone other than friends and family (it is regularly blocked or spoofed), it would be nice if Google Voice gave you the option to view the ANI info (which is what is used internally by the phone systems for billing and E-911, and is generally considered unspoofable). I've been waiting for someone to do so for a long time.
Xbox Live subscription and points cards do not require any activation. In fact, the only identifier visible on the packaging is the UPC code. There are no serial numbers on the package. The only serial numbers is on the card, behind a tear off panel.
1) My memory of Halo 2 is much fuzzier than my memory of Halo 1, but I thought the Halo 2 story line touched on that somewhat, about why the covenant brought the battle to earth. Maybe not.
2) I thought the covenant did believe it was a weapon. I thought it was in Halo 2, with the prophets being the one leading the covenant to believe they are embarking on a journey. But again, my memory is fuzzy on that. It's been about 3 years since I played Halo 1, and even longer since Halo 2.
3) Actually, I believe you do succeed in rescuing the captain. It's later in the story that he gets absorbed by the flood and you kill him
Wow, so you mean Bungie were some huge visionaries that realized there was this huge untapped market on the console that nobody had ever thought to attempt to grab onto before? Everyone before them was completely oblivious to the opportunity that existed?
No, the reason it is "despite" and not "because" is that implementing a FPS on a console control scheme is just outright difficult, and nobody had yet figured out the ideal way of handling it. Others had tried, but there were very few successes. Bungie stumbled on the correct combination of controls and gameplay mechanics that made it work well on a console.
It also helped that Halo had a huge fan following because of some of the revolutionary graphics they had been teasing for years on the PC, and that followed them over when they switched to be console only (at least initially). However, that wouldn't have helped them had their implementation been as good as it was. A fan following + crap game = no fan following (just ask Romero).
Now there are others, but Halo enjoys the benefit of being the first to get it as right as they did.
It is perfectly natural to want a story to be there. Why are books the sacred realm of stories? What is so special about a book that they should have a story, but not a video game? Some people don't enjoy reading (I generally don't), so we'd like to experience stories differently (interactively). It's not a necessity for every game, but it helps.
PS. I'm not the person you replied to but: I didn't like HL much but I loved Portal.
Wow, I can't believe someone found the Halo story hard to follow. I haven't played the original Halo in almost 3 years, but I'll give your challenge a shot from memory:
1) Humans are at war with covenant (bad guys)
2) Story starts with Pillar of Autumn (a big colony ship) being pursued by covenant. The ship comes out of hyperspace in an unknown location, and covenant are still in pursuit. There is a large ring shaped artificial planet nearby.
3) Covenant manage to board the ship, and you (Master Chief) are asked to take Cortana (the ship's AI) to protect it from capture. You are to flee from to ring planet.
4) Once on the planet, you regroup with everyone else that escaped.
5) You learn your captain was captured by the covanant, so you rescue him and several other shipmates.
6) While captive, the captain learned that the covenant believe Halo is not just a planet, but a super weapon. He also learned the covenant are attempting to gain control of Halo so they can use it.
7) You try to find out where the control room is
8) You head for the control room so that YOU can get control of the weapon first.
9) On the way there, you run into the flood, which is a sort of parasitic creatures race. They were apparently in containment on Halo and accidentally released by the covenant in their attempt to get control of Halo.
10) You run into Guilty Spark, who is a service bot responsible for caring for the installation (ie: Halo). When he learns you are there to activate Halo, and he wants to help you because he needs to stop the flood, and activating Halo will do that (he can't activate it on his own because of security protocol).
11) He leads you to recover the activation index...the key you will need to activate Halo.
12) You then proceed to the control room to activate it. However, as you activate it, Cortana discovers that Halo is not a weapon, but a device to purge the galaxy (or maybe just some large portion of it) of life.
13) You try to abort, but Guilty Spark tries to stop you by sending Halos defensive system against you. You succeed anyway.
14) You now decide that leaving the Halo intact is too dangerous (in case someone else activates it) so you are going to destroy it. You head back to the crashed Pillar of Autumn to have it self destruct (taking Halo with it).
15) You then escape in a small ship before Halo explodes.
That's just from memory. Might have missed a few points, but that covers the basics. Nothing very complex or confusing there. If you want to argue that the story is lame or otherwise not compelling, that's fine (your choice). But to say it's difficult to figure out what's going on....well, if that's the case, I suggest "Hello Kitty Island Adventure" is probably a better match for your intellect.
I would think sitting in the handicapped seat and plugging into the mic jack would make it EASIER for them to identify where you were sitting, not harder.
I read the rockband.com forums, and at one point a Harmonix employee suggested (but wouldn't commit by giving specific details) that there will be some sort of interaction with the other games. Whether that means you will be able to import RB1/2 songs into this game, export Beatles songs to RB2, or something completely different, it isn't clear.
No, I'm actually going by what I hear from the majority of players I've interacted with (both newbies and longtime players) and that's the general attitude now. Cover songs are really looked down upon.
I know of one case were people are content with the cover version (and in fact prefer it). Rush's "Working Man" was originally released as a cover, but a new version was released as an "original". However, the original wasn't actually the original. Apparently (and we can only guess, since there is no official explanation), the original master recordings weren't available or of the proper quality to release the song, so they found a different version that the band had recorded years later. They used that version for the "original" version. However, some people prefer the cover version because it is a closer match to the version on the album.
Of course, maybe if they had no other choice, they'd take what they can get, but from the impression I have, not a lot of people would be happy about it.
In some cases, that's true, but most of the time I don't think it is. I mean look at Rock Band 2. When it was released, they said it would come with 80+ songs, and then there would be a download code so that you could download another 20 once they got them ready. Everyone was excited. Then Harmonix released the 20 songs for download and they all turned out to be indie songs. Tons of people bitched and complained, and many won't even go and download those 20 songs even though they are free.
The problem there is that fans have gotten a taste of the real thing, and many won't tolerate it anymore. It would be kind of like saying that game design has gotten really expensive these days, and that developers should just keep costs down and go back to 2.5D engines for their FPS games. Most gamers won't tolerate either option anymore.
They've already got more than enough music to be released. They only release 3 to 8 songs a week from 2 or 3 artist (or sometimes an entire album instead). There's no way the company can keep up with everything. There are tons of artists out there that don't even have a single song in Rock Band, and it's not because of negotiation failures. There are just too many artist to cover without flooding the market.
So if Warner wants to pull their catalog from the list of available options, it will only make it that much easier for Harmonix to catch up with other artists from some other labels. I have a feeling Rock Band won't be lacking for anything, but Warner will have to answer to their artists about why they aren't seeing the advantages that other artists are enjoying.
Well, they ARE "competing" now, yet net neutrality is gradually becoming an even more important issue despite that. There are a few problems with competition. For one, there isn't truly competition in a lot of areas. In many cities, franchise agreement restrict other competitors from coming in. Even if there are competitors, you might find that the competition works backward from how you hope. When one company starts charging extra for certain services, that gives them a financial advantage, and others may have to adopt the same policies just to stay competitive.
But the whole reason this topic came up was because the compiler in question generated code that required the hardware to be configured in a certain way. Yet the reason it had to be configured that way was because the instructions generated for code on the right side of a short-circuit test required it, even though the code on the left side dictated that no such requirement should exist. If the short circuit evaluation were properly adhered to, then no such requirement on system configuration would be in place.
Thus we are clearly talking about 2 completely different results. It is not equivalent code. There is a side effect of doing it differently, and that's the basis that some of us have been arguing from.
There is no question that the underlying hardware can do things in whatever way it wants as long as the result is the same. Look at modern CPUs that do predictive branching. They will guess at what the outcome of a branch will be even before the result is known, and they will then execute the code on the predicted branch before the result is known. When the result is finally known, if it turns out the hardware guessed wrong, then the code from the predicted branch is flushed from the pipeline without ever being committed. The end result is exactly the same as if the prediction had not taken place. That's an equivalent result. It is transparent (other than some performance implications, but performance isn't dictated by the C spec).
No need to count. Anytime you are assigning to a string, you know exactly what you are assigning. If you are assigning a constant, the compiler can count the characters. If you are assigning another string, you just copy its length counter. If you are appending, you just add one string's counter to the other's counter. If you are reading into the string as a buffer, then the read function is going to tell you the exact number of characters it read in. Even if you are copying from another string that is terminated and thus has no counter, all you have to do is copy until you get to the terminator (which you have to do anyway), then subtract the address/offset of the terminator from the start address/offset.
Yes, it is still a tiny bit of extra work (an assignment, and possibly an addition and/or subtraction), but that's negligible for almost 100% of things.
Actually, IIRC that is only true of the AnsiString type. I'm pretty sure that if you declare a ShortString (which was simply called a String in Delphi 1, and had to be explicitly declared as a ShortString in Delphi 2 and up) there is no terminating character.
However, I'm not sure that anyone has actually bothered to use a ShortString in years (and for all I know, it may not even be in the language anymore), so I'm just nitpicking.