For me the best version of Delphi was V2. The Win16 version was buggy when you really pushed it hard. But Delphi 2.... wow... Even when Delphi 5 was out, I'd use that on a build box and do all my coding with Delphi2. Which is a very nice testament to the backwards compatibility of the language.. yeah, I'm sure I was missing out on all sorts of nice Delphi5 specific features, but 2 was just that good. And even in that early of a version, it was still light years ahead of anything else.
Kylix wasn't bad, but they did screw the pooch on it. Making it x86 specific was okay in the Win32 world, but it was never going to cut it in the Linux world. If they had made a portable compiler or at least announced they were going to and released an x86 compiler first, I think they could have owned the corporate development space. Instead, they lost out to Java. But hey... JBuilder isn't all that bad.:)
I used Delphi in my first programming job out of College. Initially I chuckled over the fact that it was Pascal, but eventually grew to learn and love Object Pascal.
It wasn't so much the language that made it great, it was the way the IDE, Debugger and compiler all played so nicely together. And yes, a C++ version was available as well. It was all of the ease of Visual Basic (and let's be honest, more) but without the bullshit of being stuck with some horrible language and the pain of trying to manage runtime distribution. Delphi compiled all dependencies into your binary, if you so wished. No more dll hell, at least, as far as your Delphi applications went.
It also had the relatively unheard of concept (at least in the windows world, at that time) of direct database access. You didn't have to mess with ODBC. You could write your corporate app for in-house use, and just let them change parameters in configuration screen, use them to connect to a database yourself. No freakin ODBC control panel applet to mess with. Nirvana, I tell you.
The VCL was another nice Borland item. It was their Visual Component Library (I think) and it was basically a wrapper around the standard Win32 controls/forms. Worked very well, and even made it over to linux with Kylix.
Unfortunately, Borland subscribed to the commodore school of marketing. The best place to see Borland adverts was in Borland targeted publications. The choir was already converted, but they never figured that out. That combined with typical MSFT tactics (hire away their best developers, give away competing products for a song) reduced Borland to a shell of it's former self. Now they exist by pumping out JBuilder updates every 8 months and living off that revenue gravy train.
My belief that people on the right are in love with oil companies would easily be backed up by the fact that Bush ran an oil company and is best buddies with the Saudis.
I support an energy independent America where we can have minimal dealings with people in the Middle East who want to fly airplanes into buildings. Guess I'm just a wacky liberal, eh?
See, this is the problem with people on the right. You say something, and they take it to extremes.
The context in which I mentioned oil and nuclear energy was clearly for generating power. It had nothing to do with plastics, tires, fertilizer, deodorant, etc.
Could nuclear energy be used for those purposes? No. Clearly not. To even suggest I was talking about that is really dumb.
Well... this seems like a poor example to me. You really should be able to tell what's happening by the exception being thrown. If you see a (forgive me for the java examples) java.io.FileNotFound Exception, you can probably figure it out. And in your do_foo() methods, assuming they throw exceptions, you should build and pass back an exception which contains not only the name of the method in which the error happened, but the stack trace as well.
I think you're missing my point. Taking your foot off the brake to stop the vehicle is counterintuitive. This isn't like when ABS was introduced and people had to retrain themselves to keep pressure on the brakes during a skid rather than pump them.
I'm missing your point, you're not reading. What to do. Your foot is lightly on the brake, yeah? Just like it would be when you really parallel park. Unless you gun it in. Which you shouldn't.
To stop, you PRESS THE BRAKE. 'Kay?
If you take your foot off the brake, the entire operation stops, because it wants you watching and able to stop it if necessary.
The system is simple... you apply moderate brake pressure, and the system parks. Your foot pushes down, it stops. Your foot goes off the pedal, it stops.
Ah, that's intuitive -- exactly what my first response would be as well. I always take my foot off the brake when I want the car to stop.
Oh, you're one of those guys who parallel parks without the brakes. I've seen you. You're not good at it. The system is simple... you apply moderate brake pressure, and the system parks. Your foot pushes down, it stops. Your foot goes off the pedal it stops. Is it really that difficult to follow?
BTW, if this disengages the auto-park, how do you stop the vehicle from continuing to roll backwards? Hand brake? Seems flawed to me...
When you're parked, you hit the park button. Pretty 'effin simple.
In large swaths of the US, we don't have the population density that lots of European countries have.
I'm not exactly sure that these systems are all viable over here.
I formally invite you to join the residents of the NJ/NYC metro area for a week of commuting. Then you can tell me how viable you don't think they are.
Dude, rock on! AM Radio rules. It's so great to wait 15 minutes for a traffic update during rush hour. And when you finally get it, one of 2 things will happen.
1) You get the update for the traffic backup you're currently sitting in.
2) You get no update for the traffic backup you're currently sitting in because the damn newsroom is so slow that nobody's reported it yet, or because the traffic chopper can only cover so many highways in a 15 minute timespan.
This is old and tired tech from the late 90's. Why europe's cars are just now getting around to doing the same things as a discontinued old car stereo system I have no idea.
I'm sure you could get a european version of the same system in the 90's. I don't think you could get it installed OEM in the 90's here or there. That's what the article is about. OEM's are including these systems.
I've been thinking something similar myself, and I think I've said it before, but what the hell, I'll say it again...
What's happened to computer software? In the end days of the C64/128 era there was GEOS. You had a full GUI environment, full WYSIWYG word processing, bitmapped printing, everything. Dropdown menus, icons, mice, desk accessories... The graphics were somewhat crude (how do you like your menus? Grey. Great, you're in luck), but they did the job. And considering the hardware limitations (320x200 I think, 64K of memory, a 1.06mhz 6502 processor) they were really damn good.
Now I look at XP and Word. Sure, I've got lots and lots of icons. And pretty colors. But do I really need a P4 at 1.5ghz with 512MB of ram to make the thing run usefully? Where did all this extra bloat come from? Sure, multitasking is great, and I wouldn't give it up. But later versions of the mac could do cooperative multitasking, and do it sort of okayish, in much less memory. My ancient powerbook can run Word, IE(Ironic that the most useful apps on that are from Microsoft), and AIM in 48MB of ram!
I could go on, but I don't know what the point would be. I've got my theories, library bloat, etc... but in the end, we're stuck with what we have.
I agree with you there... I've never used any other UI (including OS9/OSX) that's nearly as good as the WPS was. Once you got past the installed color defaults, it was pretty powerful.
If only my car supported MP3 cds... I know some do, and they're becoming more common, but mine doesn't quite yet. So I'm stuck burning Mix CDs, as are most commuters.:(
Good point... but I'd dare say that's not the typical usage pattern. What I do, and what most of my friends do, is burn mix CDs. I'm not sure how you'd do that with Gnome, but I know with K3B I can just fire it up, select "Burn an Audio CD" and drop my mp3s in.
And compared to XCDRoast, K3B is light years ahead interfacewise.
I agree with you on a lot of points... but there are a few reasons I keep coming back to KDE after my brief flirtations with Gnome...
- K3B. The best burner program on any platform I've ever used. Bar none.
- amaroK. A fantastic little media player, and it does one of the things I've been dying for for years. It'll scan and watch my mp3 directories for new files and add them to my collection. I know Zinf does that, but Zinf is buggy beyond belief.
- Kopete. Personal preference, but I prefer it to gaim these days.
- Konqueror. For browsing files it's tons faster than Nautilus.
That said, the main 2 apps I use are NetBeans and JEdit... so the desktop behind them doesn't really matter all that much.
Parent post to mine said he was "disappointed that it didn't live up to its advance billing and bring more applications to the various mobile devices I've used over the years". I pointed out that many, if not the vast majority, of mobile applications/games are java powered.
I corrected the original posters misconception. I wasn't saying "Java rules, you drooling moron". I just said it's there, you're missing it. You came in with a feces comment. Bravo sir, Bravo!
Also, it doesn't make me install *two* copies of the JRE like Sun does (one for development and one for the system JVM). So all-in-all, I like the IBM verison better.
Is this a windows thing? On my linux install of Java, I have the JDK installed with only one copy of the JRE.
Similarly, I recall the other guy running for president, the incumbent, saying something along the lines of "Saddam is not a threat" then "Saddam is a threat". Or "We can't afford to invade Iraq" then "We can't afford not to invade Iraq". I also recall something about "weapons of mass destruction" then something about "liberating the people".
Is it necessary for people, in every single Microsoft article, to make a completely random reference to Microsoft Bob and expect to get skyrocketed up to "+5 Funny"?
I could you the same question and point towards your.sig, since Kerry has explained his stance on Iraq many times. You obviously aren't posting that.sig for attention tho...
Face it, Bob was a monumental failure. It was supposed to revolutionize the way people used computers. They even gave out sunglasses at stores. It was the first software package, that I can remember, where they had huge release parties and events. When you fail on that level, it's not something you'll easily leave behind, even 10 years later.
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Actually, I'll disagree slightly..
For me the best version of Delphi was V2. The Win16 version was buggy when you really pushed it hard. But Delphi 2.... wow... Even when Delphi 5 was out, I'd use that on a build box and do all my coding with Delphi2. Which is a very nice testament to the backwards compatibility of the language.. yeah, I'm sure I was missing out on all sorts of nice Delphi5 specific features, but 2 was just that good. And even in that early of a version, it was still light years ahead of anything else.
Kylix wasn't bad, but they did screw the pooch on it. Making it x86 specific was okay in the Win32 world, but it was never going to cut it in the Linux world. If they had made a portable compiler or at least announced they were going to and released an x86 compiler first, I think they could have owned the corporate development space. Instead, they lost out to Java. But hey... JBuilder isn't all that bad.
I used Delphi in my first programming job out of College. Initially I chuckled over the fact that it was Pascal, but eventually grew to learn and love Object Pascal.
It wasn't so much the language that made it great, it was the way the IDE, Debugger and compiler all played so nicely together. And yes, a C++ version was available as well. It was all of the ease of Visual Basic (and let's be honest, more) but without the bullshit of being stuck with some horrible language and the pain of trying to manage runtime distribution. Delphi compiled all dependencies into your binary, if you so wished. No more dll hell, at least, as far as your Delphi applications went.
It also had the relatively unheard of concept (at least in the windows world, at that time) of direct database access. You didn't have to mess with ODBC. You could write your corporate app for in-house use, and just let them change parameters in configuration screen, use them to connect to a database yourself. No freakin ODBC control panel applet to mess with. Nirvana, I tell you.
The VCL was another nice Borland item. It was their Visual Component Library (I think) and it was basically a wrapper around the standard Win32 controls/forms. Worked very well, and even made it over to linux with Kylix.
Unfortunately, Borland subscribed to the commodore school of marketing. The best place to see Borland adverts was in Borland targeted publications. The choir was already converted, but they never figured that out. That combined with typical MSFT tactics (hire away their best developers, give away competing products for a song) reduced Borland to a shell of it's former self. Now they exist by pumping out JBuilder updates every 8 months and living off that revenue gravy train.
My belief that people on the right are in love with oil companies would easily be backed up by the fact that Bush ran an oil company and is best buddies with the Saudis.
I support an energy independent America where we can have minimal dealings with people in the Middle East who want to fly airplanes into buildings. Guess I'm just a wacky liberal, eh?
See, this is the problem with people on the right. You say something, and they take it to extremes.
The context in which I mentioned oil and nuclear energy was clearly for generating power. It had nothing to do with plastics, tires, fertilizer, deodorant, etc.
Could nuclear energy be used for those purposes? No. Clearly not. To even suggest I was talking about that is really dumb.
Jeezus.
As another card carrying member of the left, I also want to add to this... I do NOT oppose nuclear energy.
I just think the "Right" is so in love with Oil, they like to blame us for not having more nuclear power.
Well... this seems like a poor example to me. You really should be able to tell what's happening by the exception being thrown. If you see a (forgive me for the java examples) java.io.FileNotFound Exception, you can probably figure it out. And in your do_foo() methods, assuming they throw exceptions, you should build and pass back an exception which contains not only the name of the method in which the error happened, but the stack trace as well.
Just my
I think you're missing my point. Taking your foot off the brake to stop the vehicle is counterintuitive. This isn't like when ABS was introduced and people had to retrain themselves to keep pressure on the brakes during a skid rather than pump them.
I'm missing your point, you're not reading. What to do. Your foot is lightly on the brake, yeah? Just like it would be when you really parallel park. Unless you gun it in. Which you shouldn't.
To stop, you PRESS THE BRAKE. 'Kay?
If you take your foot off the brake, the entire operation stops, because it wants you watching and able to stop it if necessary.
Easy enough to understand, really.
As posted below:
The system is simple... you apply moderate brake pressure, and the system parks. Your foot pushes down, it stops. Your foot goes off the pedal, it stops.
Ah, that's intuitive -- exactly what my first response would be as well. I always take my foot off the brake when I want the car to stop.
Oh, you're one of those guys who parallel parks without the brakes. I've seen you. You're not good at it. The system is simple... you apply moderate brake pressure, and the system parks. Your foot pushes down, it stops. Your foot goes off the pedal it stops. Is it really that difficult to follow?
BTW, if this disengages the auto-park, how do you stop the vehicle from continuing to roll backwards? Hand brake? Seems flawed to me...
When you're parked, you hit the park button. Pretty 'effin simple.
In large swaths of the US, we don't have the population density that lots of European countries have. I'm not exactly sure that these systems are all viable over here.
I formally invite you to join the residents of the NJ/NYC metro area for a week of commuting. Then you can tell me how viable you don't think they are.
Dude, rock on! AM Radio rules. It's so great to wait 15 minutes for a traffic update during rush hour. And when you finally get it, one of 2 things will happen.
1) You get the update for the traffic backup you're currently sitting in.
2) You get no update for the traffic backup you're currently sitting in because the damn newsroom is so slow that nobody's reported it yet, or because the traffic chopper can only cover so many highways in a 15 minute timespan.
Yeah, AM traffic updates rock dude!
No, and No. You must have your foot on the brake pedal at all times. As soon as you take it off, the auto parking procedure stops.
This is old and tired tech from the late 90's. Why europe's cars are just now getting around to doing the same things as a discontinued old car stereo system I have no idea.
I'm sure you could get a european version of the same system in the 90's. I don't think you could get it installed OEM in the 90's here or there. That's what the article is about. OEM's are including these systems.
I've been thinking something similar myself, and I think I've said it before, but what the hell, I'll say it again...
What's happened to computer software? In the end days of the C64/128 era there was GEOS. You had a full GUI environment, full WYSIWYG word processing, bitmapped printing, everything. Dropdown menus, icons, mice, desk accessories... The graphics were somewhat crude (how do you like your menus? Grey. Great, you're in luck), but they did the job. And considering the hardware limitations (320x200 I think, 64K of memory, a 1.06mhz 6502 processor) they were really damn good.
Now I look at XP and Word. Sure, I've got lots and lots of icons. And pretty colors. But do I really need a P4 at 1.5ghz with 512MB of ram to make the thing run usefully? Where did all this extra bloat come from? Sure, multitasking is great, and I wouldn't give it up. But later versions of the mac could do cooperative multitasking, and do it sort of okayish, in much less memory. My ancient powerbook can run Word, IE(Ironic that the most useful apps on that are from Microsoft), and AIM in 48MB of ram!
I could go on, but I don't know what the point would be. I've got my theories, library bloat, etc... but in the end, we're stuck with what we have.
I agree with you there... I've never used any other UI (including OS9/OSX) that's nearly as good as the WPS was. Once you got past the installed color defaults, it was pretty powerful.
Is there, for instance, any reason I'd want to use it on Linux?
Yes. You've used Rexx and have a lot of Rexx applications/megascripts written for your OS/2 or Amiga based systems and you want to migrate.
Come on, that wasn't so hard to figure out.
If only my car supported MP3 cds... I know some do, and they're becoming more common, but mine doesn't quite yet. So I'm stuck burning Mix CDs, as are most commuters.
Good point... but I'd dare say that's not the typical usage pattern. What I do, and what most of my friends do, is burn mix CDs. I'm not sure how you'd do that with Gnome, but I know with K3B I can just fire it up, select "Burn an Audio CD" and drop my mp3s in.
And compared to XCDRoast, K3B is light years ahead interfacewise.
I agree with you on a lot of points... but there are a few reasons I keep coming back to KDE after my brief flirtations with Gnome... - K3B. The best burner program on any platform I've ever used. Bar none. - amaroK. A fantastic little media player, and it does one of the things I've been dying for for years. It'll scan and watch my mp3 directories for new files and add them to my collection. I know Zinf does that, but Zinf is buggy beyond belief. - Kopete. Personal preference, but I prefer it to gaim these days. - Konqueror. For browsing files it's tons faster than Nautilus. That said, the main 2 apps I use are NetBeans and JEdit... so the desktop behind them doesn't really matter all that much.
It's called reading for context.
Parent post to mine said he was "disappointed that it didn't live up to its advance billing and bring more applications to the various mobile devices I've used over the years". I pointed out that many, if not the vast majority, of mobile applications/games are java powered.
I corrected the original posters misconception. I wasn't saying "Java rules, you drooling moron". I just said it's there, you're missing it. You came in with a feces comment. Bravo sir, Bravo!
Also, it doesn't make me install *two* copies of the JRE like Sun does (one for development and one for the system JVM). So all-in-all, I like the IBM verison better.
Is this a windows thing? On my linux install of Java, I have the JDK installed with only one copy of the JRE.
Are you aware that the vast majority of games you play on any phone (except Verizon phones) are written in Java?
Thought not.
Similarly, I recall the other guy running for president, the incumbent, saying something along the lines of "Saddam is not a threat" then "Saddam is a threat". Or "We can't afford to invade Iraq" then "We can't afford not to invade Iraq". I also recall something about "weapons of mass destruction" then something about "liberating the people".
Neither one of these guys is a straight shooter.
Is it necessary for people, in every single Microsoft article, to make a completely random reference to Microsoft Bob and expect to get skyrocketed up to "+5 Funny"?
.sig, since Kerry has explained his stance on Iraq many times. You obviously aren't posting that .sig for attention tho...
I could you the same question and point towards your
Face it, Bob was a monumental failure. It was supposed to revolutionize the way people used computers. They even gave out sunglasses at stores. It was the first software package, that I can remember, where they had huge release parties and events. When you fail on that level, it's not something you'll easily leave behind, even 10 years later.
I lost my faith when I heard they were making "Mannequin 2".
For me, it was "Weekend at Bernie's 2". You can only beat a dead corpse for so long.