The Dilbert principle states: If you are *bad* at your current job, you will be promted to a PHB job so you can't do any harm.
The Peter principle states: If you are *good* at your job you will be promoted to do a different job. Repeat until you reach a job that you're not good at. Stop. This is more or less the oposite of the Dilbert principle.
The Dilbert principle is intended to be funny (but as was noted, there is nothing funny about how popular Dilbert is). The Peter principal is based on observation.
Though the GOF Design Patterns book is relatively comprehensive, it was never intended to be an exhaustive list of all the patterns in existence, just a tour of some of the best ones. (see the Preface)
Is it the right thing to to do base the contest on how many *GOF* patterns can be found?
> you can buy a good toaster; not all of them are crap
Point taken, but under a completely free market, crap does sometimes drive out or marginalise good stuff, simply because it appears cheaper. Which is why there are regulations & laws about truth in advertising, pollution during manufacturing, minimum standards of durabilty, minimum wages, etc.
Check out the interview with Bruce Sterling at http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/10/08/114721 7. I think this is what he's getting at when he talks about making the hidden costs visible: One consequence of this is that the producer's and consumer's goals are more closely aligned. The interesting problem is to do this effectively without compromising the free market with too much government intervention. I don't think it's likely to happen in the US though, your business lobby groups have to much power over the Government. It's not in the interests of highest profits to make those costs visible, or to have citizens that care that thier Nikes are made in 3rd world sweatshops.
For an example of how to do it right (someone please correct me if this is an urban legend!), there is a law in Germany that any packaging that a company ships, they must be prepared to accept back and recycle. Beautifully elegant, no?
> A free market may suck, but the alternatives are much worse
I won't disagree. As someone else observed, the democratic system is the worst system ever. Except for all the others.
> if you have a choice between 10 different brands or product X, there is competiton between the different brands to make the "best" product.
Perhaps you are defining "best" to be "whatever people buy the most of", but I don't buy that definition.
There is competition among producers be the best producer, ie. to sell the most product or to make the most profit, not to make the highest quality, innovative product. As in any evolutionary scenario, the actors act in *their own* best interest, no-one elses.
To make the best product is one way for a producer to get ahead, but is is often a difficult way. Alternatives are good marketing, cheap product, good *looking* product, sweatshop labour, cheap but polluting manufacturing methods, dumbing down the consumers, products that wear out quickly and of course, vendor lock-in. Market dominance by one company is only one possible problem. Sadly, increased competition encourages manufacturers to cut corners in order to compete.
Which is why you can get 10 different brands of toaster, all of them cheap crap. Which is why, last time I was in the US, I could get 20 kinds of salad dressing, and all the ones that I tried tasted sickly-sweet.
> they don't make em like they used to
And this is in spite of lots of competition. Because producers, even under competition, act in thier own best interests, not yours.
This is all because the freest of free markets benefits the producers not the consumers. This should be obvious, as the producers will then act in thier own interests, not anyone else's. Yet so many people think that letting producers do what they want benefits the US consumer most.
I need only mention a certain large software firm that acts in it's own best interests to wrap the argument up. A firm that dominates the market has no incentive to innovate or use new or open standards.
W2K/NT5: don't assume doubling will continue
on
Gartner Slams Linux
·
· Score: 3
Disclaimer: I'm not a Microsoft advocate, I'm just an old timer who has been here before.
Why is Linux gaining market share? Much of it has to do with NT4.0 being 4 or 5 years old now. However NT5/W2K will almost certainly ship in the next 6 months.
I hate to say it, but I've seen this before. Before NT 3 shipped, Novel & co were taking the oportunity to erode MS's market share. Where are they today?
My opinion is that W2K will ship, and while it wil be OK, it will probably continue the quality slide started in NT3 -> NT4 caused by being large, complex and closed. The adoption of W2K may be slowed until service packs come out if the problems are bad.
The Linux vs. Win2K market share fight is the interesting one, not his Linux vs. Nt4 thing. Right now Linux has a head start (it's out of Beta), but don't automatically assume that your doubling will continue through next year and the next. MS will change the ground rules.
>Louis XVI was a genuinely nice guy who was not totally unamenable to reforms towards a more constitutional monarchy. But the rabble cut his head off anyway
It's not exactly an uncommon phenomenum. Gorbachev introduced Perestroika, and was ousted for his trouble. Give 'em a hand, and they'll take the whole arm (head?)
> human cloning... will remain fiction for a long time, not due to ethical or technical reasons, but because it's not useful
D you honestly think that Americans do things because they are *useful*? (I've visited America, and they are all weirdos there) I vote for human cloning happening real soon now.
> Hrmmm. Once Japan decides on a standard for DVD-R, the technology will perpetuate
What's that got to do with it? DVD is suplanting CDrom because it's bigger and faster. You think that won't happen again? Oh wait, it's already happening (http://slashdot.org/articles/99/07/30/1612205.sht ml)
> but I don't think it's constructive to introduce the global overpopulation problem >into this issue, at least not on the basis that it was presented
Ok, how about this basis: Why place a high value on the life of a (severly disabled) human, when there are several thousand million of them already, and only a few thousand tigers or gorillas left?
>Although I think algorithms are invented, not discovered.
Really? A dumb mechanistic genetic algorithm program can find them.
>I should say, the first caveman who invented a method for producing fire.
I suspect that they started of by by *using* fire, taken from brush-fires and lightnigh strikes, and keeping it alive for long periods of time. Though the later inventions of fire drils & flint spark-makers do count.
I don't think that a sudden emergence of food wars is likely. However, I think the currect trend of wars being driven by access to scarce resources (scarce relative to populatin size that is) will escalate. In other words, it's happening already. These wars are bloody (Ruanda for e.g.), but I don't understand what you mean by "one-sided". Conflicts within the third world are usually long and messy.
The first commercial device that produces clean, safe power by low-temperature nuclear reactions goes on the market.... Pons and Fleischmann receive the Nobel Prize for Physics.
Sorry, but that's just wishful thinking. It would be nice, but I'm 99% sure that Pons and Fleischmann's cold fusion is pure BS. There is no way that it sould be predicted as something that is going to happen
>While for most purposes I agree that the Celsius system is superior, for weather the Fahrenheit system still seems better.
Word up: That's only because you're used to it.
> It allows people to say things such as "the weather is in the 90s today" and people know what you mean.
Really? I'm people (but not American) and I don't have a clue what you mean.
>but the greater precision of the Fahrenheit units makes smaller changes easier to understand.
This is more than offset by the fact that the zero point and scale are arbitrary. In Celcius, 0 = freezing, 100 = boiling. What could be simpler? If you want precision, use a decimal point.
1) Speed of compilation during development to make the programmer's (code-compile-debug) loop as tight as possible. Speed/size of the exe (within reason) is not an issue with these builds.
2) Then there is the release build. On this build, speed/size of the final executable is all. Speed of compilation (within reason) is not an issue.
One suggested tactic is to optimise both simulataneusly is to have 2 compilers - for dev and for release. But most vendors just use compiler switches to change from Debug to Release builds.
Borland has typically been very good in both compiler speed departments.
Thier promo material tends to emphasise the quick debug builds, but that is because Delphi has for a long time competed against MS's Visual Basic, which being an interpreted language has a compile time of zero - you can stop at a breakpoint, change the code and carry on running . IMHO this is one of the few nice features of VB. Would I want to see it in Delphi or C? No way.
> I really believe that it would be possible to modify VCL to wrap around GNOME or KDE controls. > Thus you could use the "C++ Builder for Linux" with either widget set
As someone else noted, The Delphi/CB VCL may be written in OP, but it is really just a wrapper for the windows API, which relies heavily on sending messages all over the place.
A VCL that runs under a completely different OS and UI toolkit, and tries to maintain compatible public interfaces with the Win32 VCL may be possible, but will likely be as ugly as heck & generally be the Wrong Thing (tm).
I love VCL, it makes Win32 bearable because it does the right thing to it.
I'm all in favour of a similar library for Unix (less learing curve for me & my cohorts) - but why must it be identical?
Why should a KDE/Gnome VCL do Win32's right thing? Ok, I mean aside from that pesky source compatibility trip.
> I guess I can agree that the IDE has suffered > from creeping featurism along with most of > its competitors. Still, it works well enough.
Hm, I'm not so sure of that. The Delphi IDE has in delphi 4 been the buggiest part of the whole system. Even after the third patch it's not quite right.
This is s good indicator of achitecture problems in the current release.
Sheesh. so many people post here a "Inprise is M$'s bitch now" rubbish because they don't even know the basic facts of the matter they are discussing. To find out about the patent infringement matter that lead (amongst other things) to the last Inprise/MS deal, check out http://www.inprise.com/about/press/1999/inprise_ms .html "Microsoft also paid Inprise $100 million for the rights to use Inprise-patented technology in Microsoft products and to settle a number of long-standing patent and technology licensing issues. "
I believe from old threads on threads on nntp:forums.borland.com/borland.public.delphi.non- technical that Borland held some basic and embarrassing software patents (spits over left shoulder at the mention of the concept) . Go to the patent database at http://164.195.100.11/netahtml/search-bool.html and enter and enter query Inprise in Assignee Name OR Borland in Assignee Name to find out more.
Or just consider this bit of an old post that I dug up on Deja:
> Well, there was one key phrase in the news release (which probably >explains why the MS site is silent on this deal) and that is "to settle >outstanding patent and licensing issues". A little spelunking in the patent >listings reveals some interesting stuff. It seems that Borland has a patent >on fly-over hints, and RAD two-way tools (was assigned to Borland just >yesterday it looks like) among other things.
>One thing that really struck me >is that several years ago, Borland got a patent on a property-method-event >programming environment for "context-free" components IN STANDARD C++. This >sounds very much like COOL. And then of course there are all the spreadsheet >patents that Borland holds, which almost read like a functional spec for >Excel.
Why do you think MS gave Borland wads of dough? Because they had to much cash and wanted to spead the wealth!?!? I repeat, MS's options in this matter were 1) Pay up, cover up, and save face with licensing agreements and handshakes 2) 2) Go to court, get bad publicity and pay up anyway.
Did Borland sell out or lose out? I think not! They had to promise to support the next generation of MS's windows technologies. Like they weren't going to do so anyway just to keep a competitive advantage. What, was MS actually scared that Borland would pull out of the Windows market and sell only UNIX dev tools instead?!?
> MS' goal is not just to dominate the OS market, but to dominate the mainstream software market, > which they are able to dominate more easily by being in control of the OS market
Agreed, I tried to say that, sorry if it didn't come across. Embrace and extend all the way.
> While a closed-source "Delphi for Linux" (or whatever) would be less of a boon than an open-source one, > think about all the products being opened up these day
> open the source out of sheer embarrassment of being the last closed-source software vendor left
One can but hope. Maybe we'll end up with the VCL being open-source (Source shipw with Delphi already), with Borland coordinating the fixes and extensions. Looks like they are heading in this direction already - see http://www.borland.com/techvoyage/jediinitiative.h tml
> Prediction: In a year MS buys the rest of Inprise
I very much doubt it. This may be wishfull thinking, but I'd like to see this as a scenario of Borland using MS's own money against them.
Borland's goals are not MS's goals. MS's goals, as far as I can see, are to dominate the OS market, and thereby extend that into domination of all other software markets. Borland's goal, IMHO is to gain share in the the development tools market. In this they compete with MS, against MSVC, VB, etc. In as much as Borland tools make windows apps which sell windows OS licences, they are partners with MS.
I do not think that MS put Borland up to this. I think thier customers did. The way I read it, MS paid over a lot of money to avoid a long and costly patent infrigement suit. They have little control over Borland.
Much as I like Delphi and use it daily, I am still nervously questioning the possible results of closed-source development environments on Linux.
Yeah, me too - submitted it yesterday but not a peep. IMHO it's interesting to me as I am a paid Win/Delphi programmer interested Linux. I'd say that a lot of Slashdotters are in similar positions.
Iteresting points here are: 1) Borland R&D is moving from R to D of a full toolset for Linux (Java, CBuilder, Delphi) 2) An new product development & hiring that starts soon after a big cash infusion cannot be a coincidence. This is most likely financed with Microsoft's money. 3) If I write an open source, free, GPL'd program, what use is that if you can't compile it without a closed-source, paid-for, proprietary compiler? 4) Even though Delphi rocks (and is IMHO, and the HO of the rest of the programmers here, a *great* language), what market penetration is it likely to get in the presence of good, stable, free C++ compilers. 5) How much commonality between Win/Delphi and Linux delphi can there be? Same IDE - yes. Same language - yes. Same non-visual classes - yes. Same Visual component library - I think not. Porting Delphi apps from Win to Linux won't be a no-brainer.
Slashdot Mirror
The Dilbert principle states: If you are *bad* at your current job, you will be promted to a PHB job so you can't do any harm.
The Peter principle states: If you are *good* at your job you will be promoted to do a different job. Repeat until you reach a job that you're not good at. Stop. This is more or less the oposite of the Dilbert principle.
The Dilbert principle is intended to be funny (but as was noted, there is nothing funny about how popular Dilbert is). The Peter principal is based on observation.
Though the GOF Design Patterns book is relatively comprehensive, it was never intended to be an exhaustive list of all the patterns in existence, just a tour of some of the best ones. (see the Preface)
Is it the right thing to to do base the contest on how many *GOF* patterns can be found?
> you can buy a good toaster; not all of them are crap
1 7. I think this is what he's getting at when he talks about making the hidden costs visible: One consequence of this is that the producer's and consumer's goals are more closely aligned. The interesting problem is to do this effectively without compromising the free market with too much government intervention. I don't think it's likely to happen in the US though, your business lobby groups have to much power over the Government. It's not in the interests of highest profits to make those costs visible, or to have citizens that care that thier Nikes are made in 3rd world sweatshops.
Point taken, but under a completely free market, crap does sometimes drive out or marginalise good stuff, simply because it appears cheaper. Which is why there are regulations & laws about truth in advertising, pollution during manufacturing, minimum standards of durabilty, minimum wages, etc.
Check out the interview with Bruce Sterling at http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/10/08/11472
For an example of how to do it right (someone please correct me if this is an urban legend!), there is a law in Germany that any packaging that a company ships, they must be prepared to accept back and recycle. Beautifully elegant, no?
> A free market may suck, but the alternatives are much worse
I won't disagree. As someone else observed, the democratic system is the worst system ever. Except for all the others.
> if you have a choice between 10 different brands or product X, there is competiton between the different brands to make the "best" product.
Perhaps you are defining "best" to be "whatever people buy the most of", but I don't buy that definition.
There is competition among producers be the best producer, ie. to sell the most product or to make the most profit, not to make the highest quality, innovative product. As in any evolutionary scenario, the actors act in *their own* best interest, no-one elses.
To make the best product is one way for a producer to get ahead, but is is often a difficult way. Alternatives are good marketing, cheap product, good *looking* product, sweatshop labour, cheap but polluting manufacturing methods, dumbing down the consumers, products that wear out quickly and of course, vendor lock-in. Market dominance by one company is only one possible problem. Sadly, increased competition encourages manufacturers to cut corners in order to compete.
Which is why you can get 10 different brands of toaster, all of them cheap crap. Which is why, last time I was in the US, I could get 20 kinds of salad dressing, and all the ones that I tried tasted sickly-sweet.
> they don't make em like they used to
And this is in spite of lots of competition. Because producers, even under competition, act in thier own best interests, not yours.
This is all because the freest of free markets benefits the producers not the consumers. This should be obvious, as the producers will then act in thier own interests, not anyone else's. Yet so many people think that letting producers do what they want benefits the US consumer most.
I need only mention a certain large software firm that acts in it's own best interests to wrap the argument up. A firm that dominates the market has no incentive to innovate or use new or open standards.
Disclaimer: I'm not a Microsoft advocate, I'm just an old timer who has been here before.
Why is Linux gaining market share? Much of it has to do with NT4.0 being 4 or 5 years old now. However NT5/W2K will almost certainly ship in the next 6 months.
I hate to say it, but I've seen this before. Before NT 3 shipped, Novel & co were taking the oportunity to erode MS's market share. Where are they today?
My opinion is that W2K will ship, and while it wil be OK, it will probably continue the quality slide started in NT3 -> NT4 caused by being large, complex and closed. The adoption of W2K may be slowed until service packs come out if the problems are bad.
The Linux vs. Win2K market share fight is the interesting one, not his Linux vs. Nt4 thing. Right now Linux has a head start (it's out of Beta), but don't automatically assume that your doubling will continue through next year and the next. MS will change the ground rules.
> Oh? It's already happened eh?
Ug. point taken. However, CD will eventually go the way of all obsolete media, as will DVD. Why should they be any different to all other media?
>Louis XVI was a genuinely nice guy who was not totally unamenable to reforms towards a more constitutional monarchy. But the rabble cut his head off anyway
It's not exactly an uncommon phenomenum. Gorbachev introduced Perestroika, and was ousted for his trouble. Give 'em a hand, and they'll take the whole arm (head?)
> human cloning ... will remain fiction for a long time, not due to ethical or technical reasons, but because it's not useful
D you honestly think that Americans do things because they are *useful*? (I've visited America, and they are all weirdos there) I vote for human cloning happening real soon now.
> Hrmmm. Once Japan decides on a standard for DVD-R, the technology will perpetuate
t ml)
What's that got to do with it? DVD is suplanting CDrom because it's bigger and faster. You think that won't happen again? Oh wait, it's already happening (http://slashdot.org/articles/99/07/30/1612205.sh
> but I don't think it's constructive to introduce the global overpopulation problem
>into this issue, at least not on the basis that it was presented
Ok, how about this basis: Why place a high value on the life of a (severly disabled) human, when there are several thousand million of them already, and only a few thousand tigers or gorillas left?
> Well, alright, I cut corners...
Fair enough
>Although I think algorithms are invented, not discovered.
Really? A dumb mechanistic genetic algorithm program can find them.
>I should say, the first caveman who invented a method for producing fire.
I suspect that they started of by by *using* fire, taken from brush-fires and lightnigh strikes, and keeping it alive for long periods of time. Though the later inventions of fire drils & flint spark-makers do count.
I don't think that a sudden emergence of food wars is likely. However, I think the currect trend of wars being driven by access to scarce resources (scarce relative to populatin size that is) will escalate. In other words, it's happening already.
These wars are bloody (Ruanda for e.g.), but I don't understand what you mean by "one-sided". Conflicts within the third world are usually long and messy.
The first commercial device that produces clean, safe power by low-temperature nuclear reactions goes on the market. ... Pons and Fleischmann receive the Nobel Prize for Physics.
Sorry, but that's just wishful thinking. It would be nice, but I'm 99% sure that Pons and Fleischmann's cold fusion is pure BS. There is no way that it sould be predicted as something that is going to happen
>While for most purposes I agree that the Celsius system is superior, for weather the Fahrenheit system still seems better.
Word up: That's only because you're used to it.
> It allows people to say things such as "the weather is in the 90s today" and people know what you mean.
Really? I'm people (but not American) and I don't have a clue what you mean.
>but the greater precision of the Fahrenheit units makes smaller changes easier to understand.
This is more than offset by the fact that the zero point and scale are arbitrary. In Celcius, 0 = freezing, 100 = boiling. What could be simpler? If you want precision, use a decimal point.
> That first caveman who invented fire
Fire occurs naturally, so it can be discovered but not invented. Much like genes and algorythms.
Nah. "Australia".
The album was called, um, Radio KAOS? Radio waves?
1) Speed of compilation during development to make the programmer's (code-compile-debug) loop as tight as possible. Speed/size of the exe (within reason) is not an issue with these builds.
2) Then there is the release build. On this build, speed/size of the final executable is all. Speed of compilation (within reason) is not an issue.
One suggested tactic is to optimise both simulataneusly is to have 2 compilers - for dev and for release. But most vendors just use compiler switches to change from Debug to Release builds.
Borland has typically been very good in both compiler speed departments.
Thier promo material tends to emphasise the quick debug builds, but that is because Delphi has for a long time competed against MS's Visual Basic, which being an interpreted language has a compile time of zero - you can stop at a breakpoint, change the code and carry on running .
IMHO this is one of the few nice features of VB. Would I want to see it in Delphi or C? No way.
> I really believe that it would be possible to modify VCL to wrap around GNOME or KDE controls.
> Thus you could use the "C++ Builder for Linux" with either widget set
As someone else noted, The Delphi/CB VCL may be written in OP, but it is really just a wrapper for the windows API, which relies heavily on sending messages all over the place.
A VCL that runs under a completely different OS and UI toolkit, and tries to maintain compatible public interfaces with the Win32 VCL may be possible, but will likely be as ugly as heck & generally be the Wrong Thing (tm).
I love VCL, it makes Win32 bearable because it does the right thing to it.
I'm all in favour of a similar library for Unix (less learing curve for me & my cohorts) - but why must it be identical?
Why should a KDE/Gnome VCL do Win32's right thing? Ok, I mean aside from that pesky source compatibility trip.
What particular variety of idiotic ideology-driven propaganda are you refering to by misnomer of "the actual facts"?
Evolution doesn't happen - Oh yeah? You don't believe in antibiotic-resistant bacteria then? Doesn't matter, they believe in you.
Why don't you try some real facts. Try looking for books by Daniel Dennet or Richard Dawkins.
> I guess I can agree that the IDE has suffered
> from creeping featurism along with most of
> its competitors. Still, it works well enough.
Hm, I'm not so sure of that. The Delphi IDE has in delphi 4 been the buggiest part of the whole system. Even after the third patch it's not quite right.
This is s good indicator of achitecture problems in the current release.
Sheesh. so many people post here a "Inprise is M$'s bitch now" rubbish because they don't even know the basic facts of the matter they are discussing. To find out about the patent infringement matter that lead (amongst other things) to the last Inprise/MS deal, check out http://www.inprise.com/about/press/1999/inprise_ms .html
- technical that Borland held some basic and embarrassing software patents (spits over left shoulder at the mention of the concept) . Go to the patent database at http://164.195.100.11/netahtml/search-bool.html and enter and enter query Inprise in Assignee Name OR Borland in Assignee Name to find out more.
h tml
"Microsoft also paid Inprise $100 million for the rights to use Inprise-patented technology in Microsoft products and to settle a number of long-standing patent and technology licensing issues. "
I believe from old threads on threads on nntp:forums.borland.com/borland.public.delphi.non
Or just consider this bit of an old post that I dug up on Deja:
> Well, there was one key phrase in the news release (which probably
>explains why the MS site is silent on this deal) and that is "to settle
>outstanding patent and licensing issues". A little spelunking in the patent
>listings reveals some interesting stuff. It seems that Borland has a patent
>on fly-over hints, and RAD two-way tools (was assigned to Borland just
>yesterday it looks like) among other things.
>One thing that really struck me
>is that several years ago, Borland got a patent on a property-method-event
>programming environment for "context-free" components IN STANDARD C++. This
>sounds very much like COOL. And then of course there are all the spreadsheet
>patents that Borland holds, which almost read like a functional spec for
>Excel.
Why do you think MS gave Borland wads of dough? Because they had to much cash and wanted to spead the wealth!?!? I repeat, MS's options in this matter were
1) Pay up, cover up, and save face with licensing agreements and handshakes
2) 2) Go to court, get bad publicity and pay up anyway.
Did Borland sell out or lose out? I think not! They had to promise to support the next generation of MS's windows technologies. Like they weren't going to do so anyway just to keep a competitive advantage. What, was MS actually scared that Borland would pull out of the Windows market and sell only UNIX dev tools instead?!?
> MS' goal is not just to dominate the OS market, but to dominate the mainstream software market,
> which they are able to dominate more easily by being in control of the OS market
Agreed, I tried to say that, sorry if it didn't come across. Embrace and extend all the way.
> While a closed-source "Delphi for Linux" (or whatever) would be less of a boon than an open-source one,
> think about all the products being opened up these day
> open the source out of sheer embarrassment of being the last closed-source software vendor left
One can but hope. Maybe we'll end up with the VCL being open-source (Source shipw with Delphi already), with Borland coordinating the fixes and extensions. Looks like they are heading in this direction already - see http://www.borland.com/techvoyage/jediinitiative.
> Prediction: In a year MS buys the rest of Inprise
I very much doubt it. This may be wishfull thinking, but I'd like to see this as a scenario of Borland using MS's own money against them.
Borland's goals are not MS's goals. MS's goals, as far as I can see, are to dominate the OS market, and thereby extend that into domination of all other software markets. Borland's goal, IMHO is to gain share in the the development tools market. In this they compete with MS, against MSVC, VB, etc. In as much as Borland tools make windows apps which sell windows OS licences, they are partners with MS.
I do not think that MS put Borland up to this. I think thier customers did. The way I read it, MS paid over a lot of money to avoid a long and costly patent infrigement suit. They have little control over Borland.
Much as I like Delphi and use it daily, I am still nervously questioning the possible results of closed-source development environments on Linux.
Yeah, me too - submitted it yesterday but not a peep. IMHO it's interesting to me as I am a paid Win/Delphi programmer interested Linux. I'd say that a lot of Slashdotters are in similar positions.
Iteresting points here are:
1) Borland R&D is moving from R to D of a full toolset for Linux (Java, CBuilder, Delphi)
2) An new product development & hiring that starts soon after a big cash infusion cannot be a coincidence. This is most likely financed with Microsoft's money.
3) If I write an open source, free, GPL'd program, what use is that if you can't compile it without a closed-source, paid-for, proprietary compiler?
4) Even though Delphi rocks (and is IMHO, and the HO of the rest of the programmers here, a *great* language), what market penetration is it likely to get in the presence of good, stable, free C++ compilers.
5) How much commonality between Win/Delphi and Linux delphi can there be? Same IDE - yes. Same language - yes. Same non-visual classes - yes. Same Visual component library - I think not. Porting Delphi apps from Win to Linux won't be a no-brainer.