Posts by MarcoV

Type-safe C-killer Delphi hits 30, but a replacement has risen

Re: A colleague of mine uses Delphi/Lazarus

That is a common fallacy. Deep knowledge of libraries is actually usually more limiting than language knowledge.

Re: A colleague of mine uses Delphi/Lazarus

So... How many are intimately familiar with QT design Studio?

The problem is that small programming, specially for windows is a dying art all around. The alternatives superficially might have more buzz, but if they are not already available in the team, the value of it is debatable

RIP: Software design pioneer and Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth

Re: Semicolon Wars

Actually Modula-2 did that already. But it also changed the block structure in other (and IMHO better) ways to fix dangling else

Have you ever suspected your colleague doesn't hope this email finds you well?*

The best coworker is somewhat capable in his supposed field and even a bit beyond here and there.

.... because there is already enough dead wood.

Open source licenses need to leave the 1980s and evolve to deal with AI

Article shorts the discussion and only guards AI corporate industries.

It totally bypasses the question if Open source authors WANT to be AI fodder.

UK becomes Unicorn Kingdom, where AI fairy dust earns King's ransom

10 million

And oh joy, if you could only fundamentally change the economy by spending the princely one-off sum of 10 million, while also being relatively late in the game.

Microsoft suggests businesses buy fewer PCs. No, really

Re: Didn't Oracle come up with a similar idea

And the result will also be the same. After lacklustre uptake, Microsoft and/or the customers cans it in 4-5 years, all longterm green investment in the bin

BOFH: We send a user to visit Kelvin – Keeper of the Batteries

Love the description of Kelvin

We had a facilities guy just like that. Now I finally guessed what was in that awful freshly ground coffee.

Nostalgic for VB? BASIC is anything but dead

Re: Basic isn't the problem

If gambas (also) had an pure Windows option, like e.g. the already mentioned Lazarus does, it might already be exactly that.

I still encounter a lot of old delphi (D4..D7) and VB6 with HMI programmers.

Enter Tinker: Asus pulls out RISC-V board it hopes trumps Raspberry PI

Re: Wrong

The architecture definition of Risc V is open. The CPU design itself not necessarily.

RMS probably will want a complete open design, but that will probably preclude the faster RISCV's.

Re: Wrong

Indeed, and riscv and its possibly lower license fees matter for producers, but for endusers that only factors if the price is really lower (and on small orders it probably won't matter)

Who writes Linux and open source software?

gitHUB

Well, the real opensourcy's of course never submitted to Microsoft's Github EULA, and are elsewhere.:-)

Debian dev to the rescue after proposal to remove Itanium from Linux kernel

GCC

I assume that the team most happy to see Itanic go would be GCC, not the kernel :-) Itanium required a lot of work in the compiler.

Prepare to be shocked: Employees hate this One Weird Clause

Too broad: You can't work in IT for 2 years.

A well meaning employer that wanted to avoid defection to the nearest competitor. But the clause was worded so broadly it could be interpreted as "you can't work in IT for 2 years after you leave".

They of course said it was not meant so broad, and I countered as "why do you don't exactly write down what you mean then". And so it happened, narrowed down to competitors in the exact same sub field of a sub field of IT.

I'm absolutely convinced there was no malicious intent, but you never know what is going to happen, and who they sell their business to at some point.

Sweating the assets: Techies hold onto PCs, phones for longer than ever

Re: Same

Techies also buy more expensive gear, and can do upgrades themselves. The cheapest SKUs are often yesteryear (or several) old.

Labyrinth of 371 legacy systems hindered hospital's IT meltdown recovery

solution

Rebrand the interwoven legacy systems as micro services?

GCC 13 to support Modula-2: Follow-up to Pascal lives on in FOSS form

Re: Opaque Types

I did a lot of work in Topspeed (1.17 and later 3.1x), and I came from Turbo Pascal in that time. The compiler was very nice and had lots of nice embedded features (like custom calling conventions).

Compared to Pascal, the thing I liked most was the import/export system and the improved block structure (still my favourite block system). Things that I didn't liked were the string support (too laborious) and the case sensitivity.

I also disliked the function name at the end, but that might also be because the IDEs back then didn't really assist refactoring. In general it felt more evolutionary than revolutionary, but of course TP already had some M2 stuff merged back relative to standard (70s) pascal

After useful compiler life for Topspeed ended Imigratied back to 32-bit Delphi and Free Pascal.

America's nuclear fusion 'breakthrough' is super-hot ... yet far from practical

Re: Nuclear fusion reactors are very common. They're called 'stars'.

Deuterium is dangerous, iirc it influences the folding of proteins into alpha helixes and beta sheets, but IIRC since all hydrogen atoms are constantly exchanged, you need to have a really high percentage of deuterium in your body for ill effects. It was a bit of a organic chemistry coffee table joke, perfect murder where a wife fed the husband cabbage cooked in heavy water. (other practicalities aside). (Organic chemistry labs use deuterium for NMR purposes)

Re: Nuclear fusion reactors are very common. They're called 'stars'.

I only know the basic principles of fusion, but this is a lab experiment and the in/out numbers are there to prove that fusion happened. For a sustainable process the lasers might only be required to ignite (but you could keep it self sustaining after firing), the fuel might be a bigger problem than the 3MW of the lasers.

Since you need to refine the fuel too. IIRC deuterium is rare (ppb in water) and tritium is nearly absent in nature.

Britain has likely missed the boat for having a semiconductor industry

Re: Bah

It is more "waves the rules" nowadays.

Musk: Twitter will have 1 billion monthly users inside 18 months

Re: writers vs readers

But will followers pay $$$ to have a checkmark next to their name? Doubt it.

writers vs readers

Some strange disconnect in this article (well, another one)

The subscription options are for the mostly for the writing side of thigns that use twitter as some publishing channel. The cited stats are for the mostly readers. Assuming the readers will sign up for subscription is somewhat far fetched.

Qualcomm predicts 2024 is the year Windows on Arm goes large

Re: Microsoft still make an ARM build of Windows?

Afaik they offered it for RPI4 (64-bit) when it came out. One of our devels used that for the arm64 windows port.

So are they finally going to introduce a platform that will be supported 4 years + ?

Because that is primarily what Windows is about, legacy and long term. Being able to deploy it and support it for a period that makes sense in the non virtual world, which means 10 years minimum

Brexit dividend? 'Newly independent' UK will be world's 'data hub', claims digital minister

Re: It's the brexiter anti-growth coalition at it again

Can't detect if it was meant sarcastically or not.

Rust is eating into our systems, and it's a good thing

Re: ALGOL, PASCAL, MODULA 2, ADA

Pascal still lives in Delphi and Free Pascal.

Modula2 is fairly dead (while there is a GNU M2, it isn't the most active). It was used quite a bit in the mid nineties in medical and other.

Wirthian influences are heavily felt in Java (listed in the credits of the VM IIRC), and of course C# is a hybrid of Java with Delphi directly.

Don't say Pentium or Celeron anymore, it's just Processor now, says Intel

Re: Who talks like this?

You'd be surprised. One of the webshops here in the NL that sells to mom and pop doesn't even mention the exact model of the processor in the overview , even if you click details twice. It just says i5 or i7, but it might as well be the 2013 model.

Scary future....

There's no place like GNOME: Project hits 25, going on 43

Re: Plus ca change - lentement

No experience with that yet. We are only now migrating to GTK3, but I see users defecting to deliver their apps with QT all the time.

Most of the apps made with our tool are quite densely packed with controls, and GTK never did that particularly well, but it seems to be deteriorating as the version goes up.