Posts by Marco van de Voort 220 posts • joined 17 Jun 2008
Well, as long as your company doesn't have Eur 5000 annual revenue: (from the license text:)
"Once your company's total revenue reaches US $5,000, or your team expands to more than 5 developers, you can move up to an unrestricted commercial license with Professional edition."
which is kind of well, always. (it doesn't say only the revenue of Delphi program counts)
The problem with the copyright assignments is that it just shifts the weak point that goes rogue from the heir to Canonical.
E.g. if Canonical would go bust and parts would be snapped up by someone seeking to exploit the portfolio anyway they can.
This is an quite old discussion, since afaik GNU managed projects like gcc and gdb also require copyright assignment.
When I started working, more experienced colleagues always warned to never guess gender, and always let people enter their gender, because slight mistakes already lead to highly offended customers/users/whatever.
This was before the whole non-binary movement, and as a result, by 2005 that already changed to "let people enter how they want to be addressed", since that was what most gender fields were used for anyway.
So given that a small mistake will cause an enormous backlash, what can you actually use it for? Statistics maybe, but in most cases those will be anonymized, so you won't have the name. So that leaves dodgy webcrawling to send spam.
Risc V might be fashionable and the "open" community's darling, but there is only one decent source for production level silicon exists , SiFive.
MIPS is relatively cheaper, and more regular and used in great variety, used in the past in many routers, game computers, settopboxes and even microcontrollers using it exist (e.g. PIC32).
I'd at least expect the various ARM license fugitives to be divided over the two.
There have been discussions about 6502, but it is even more register starved than the Z80. And none of them are 16-bit capable, not even by combining 8-bit registers (iow needing zero page indirect indexing to process a pointer). The codegenerator doesn't model this atm.
svn commit like it's the year 2000: Apache celebrates 20 years of Subversion
Branching and merging worked from the start. Tagging was replaced by branching even.
SVN doesn't internally administrate as finely divided though, which lessens merge performance in more extreme cases. But that is something different. In cases both sides have changes in the same lines it sometimes borks.
(but a good 3rd party three-way diff tool as Beyond compare can even resolve many of those)
Personally I think the time for 3rd party tools vendors was simply over and from the late nineties on, the market belonged to the big IT vendors that predatory priced development tools because they wanted to promote their "platform".
Another ten years later, open source would also start a significant dent.
Borland maybe should have aligned themselves with a Big One in that period.
I did need to get a new ATM card due to the magnets of an NMR apparatus. There was tray for keys and wallets near the door that I forgot in my hurry.
Usually it was fine, but occasionally (specially after servicing) a light imbalance could generate a card wiping field (and it was said to rip the keys from your trousers, but I never witnessed that).
p.s., hydrochloric acid on your ATM card is also not very good for it. Just light acid on the hand and touched the magnetic strip of card at one end, but the card was finito, the strip got some green tinges at the end where the acid touched and refused to work a few days later . All in the nineties when the ATMs only had a magnetic script of course.
Some of that is what I thought. "Easy Visa" is an easy to implement solution to clear some last hurdles, and also attract the students before they become "World Class Scientist" (the bit where you educate an hundred to find one nugget)
To cherry pick world class staff, primarily you need to give potential staff good salaries and somewhat secure prospects. World Class staff coming for multi year tenures don't mind visa that much, since they can be handled by the uni (or research institutions) bureau for that. And those know which points to pressure for the real good ones.
Easy visa is the methods to drag in reams of (usually /paying/) hopefuls into your education system to bolster the base, to partially fund it, and with hopefully some cream rising to the top eventually.
Well, indeed Apple has shown many signs that it takes users of software not serious, and focusses chiefly on media consumption. Primarily from its own services.
So the blame is on the Apple users still trying while the writing has been on the wall for a decade, while Apple is laughing all the way to the bank.
Indeed how long, and how about versioning? The problem with .NET is always that there is no single version default available on all targets. (and if win7 is pushing up daisies, it will probably be replaced by old corporate LTS versions of Windows 10)
If you need to deliver something simple like a tool to configure a piece of hardware then you are stuck with a runtime versioning mess with anything but the win32/64 subsystem.
I've been on an major (Chello) ISP helpdesk for two years, doing 2nd and 3rd line (senior) work. Basically all the customers wanted was an engineer to come and sort things out, and they all had already checked everything (they thought). NOT!
We already had expert systems for self help, and they were next to useless. (unless you liked in kicking in open doors). Customers simply couldn't specify the problem beyond "Internet doesn't work" (*)
(*) test one: does mail work? Yes, hmm, then "some internet works" :-)
In the late nineties, our computerclub had freebsd systems, multiusers systems off a shared NFS with the hardware also doubling as terminals.
To make emergency login to the physical console possible without logging of the locally logged on user, they simply defined extra getty's on up to 20 terminals (F1..F10 and iirc ctrl-shift-F1..F10). The ctrl-shift-Fx combos (and the extra terminals on them) were a bit a secret.
I was porting a full screen app, and experimenting with consoles in raw mode, and found a whole bunch of syscons ioctls. These included font manipulation. I also found out that if you execute a program with "exec xxx" on one of the hidden consoles, that the terminal stdinput handle remained valid for syscons ioctlrs and that the syscons didn't change the settings on a per console/getty basis.
I used that for two programs:
- one that created a lookup table for 2 x 26 characters (upper/lower) that shuffled the values. Then I set font and keyboard controller according to this table. So you would press the "E" key, and the "E" glyph was shown, but some other ascii code (like "v") was actually generated to the terminal.
- I took the VGA font and did some bit twiddling (shift upper and lower rowes) to make them a bit cursive or mirrored. Then I started animating the font. (so slanted to the right, normal slanted to the level, normal etc).
The program hooked sigusr2 which could be used (from a remotely logged in session) to turn these features on and off. Fun times, though in the end I didn't trick my main targets as badly since they had seen me develop it. We used it with a lot of fun next year on the new batch of students though.
Intel coined AVX512, and thus has to invest silicon surface that largely goes unused in the first generations to get a critical mass. IOW it is seeding it to get people to use it.
AMD doesn't, so only upgrades the vector unit when it actually becomes commonly used, and spends the surface one whatever is needed now (either making cheaper or other features)
Keep in mind that there is barely enduser -512 silicon out there atm, and worse the standard is hopelessly fragmented in substandards.
Some Xeon servers had some older substandard, but clock down when heavily used, or implement a 512 instruction using two 256 pipes (as AMD does for AVX2 currently in ryzen 2x00)
I don't remind version details any more, but the last one could be made to run quite long using LD_PRELOAD tricks (adding a runner script that set them). People kept them running way past 2010, and pretty much only the mobile wave made them reconsider.
I never really used it. I didn't need the commercial finishing touch for my internal use/server apps, and Free Pascal/Lazarus was more comfortable, and more importantly progressing and supported.
I still use Delphi though on Windows for my core applications, mostly because of more convenient debugging.
Small apps, utils and cmdline work (including a sizable part of the testing) all work with FPC/Lazarus.
Afaik the former serverside Linux option was based on the so called nextgen modification of the original dialect that is used on the mobile platform offerings. As it originates in the Mac world, it borrows heavily from Objective C and misses many original language features.
The original Kylix WAS a full dialect version, but I can't seem to find what this thing uses.
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