Posts by Frogfather

Techie made a biblical boo-boo when trying to spread the word

Regomised?

I'm guessing the Regomiser has some kind of manual override. Otherwise it "randomly" assigning Gabriel to this story smacks of divine intervention.

RIP: Software design pioneer and Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth

Re: Turbo Pascal

Yup, and all on a single 5.5" floppy disk!

Datacenter fire suppression system wasn't tested for years, then BOOM

Something similar

Something very like this happened when I worked at Scottish TV in Glasgow in the 90s except that the dump was caused by a techie working on the system crossing some contacts with his scope probe. The gas release is achieved by a small explosive device so yes, it would go Booooom!

IT outage at Scotland's Heriot-Watt University enters second week

In older times

I was at HW in the early 80s before cyberattacks were a thing. However, the Burroughs B6900 rose to the challenge by being down for most of first year. Maybe a valve burned out or something.

Comparing the descendants of Mandrake and Mandriva Linux

Brings back memories

I was a user of Mandrake/Mandriva for many years - the decision was kind of forced as I used Borland Kylix - an ill fated attempt to port Delphi to Linux - which was certified to run only on Mandrake 8.2 and RedHat ... er 7.something.

If I remember correctly there was some tie in with a publishing company so the distro came in a box with some installation disks and a large book. Mandrake 8.2 was on 3 cds, Mandriva 10 was on 6. I found them a couple of months ago during a clear out.

I stuck with it until Mandriva until there was a major hiatus and they sacked most of their devs (I think that's when Mageia became a thing) at which point I switched to Fedora. I'm not sure Shuttleworth was entirely to blame - most distros are free these days - but he probably hastened an inevitable decline.

Delphi RAD tool (remember that?) gets support for Linux desktop apps – again

Re: Kylix in use here

If you want a backup copy and are anywhere near Scotland mine runs MandrakeLinux 10 (i think) on a P4. Free for the taking away. I still have the big poster with all the classes listed on it too!

A former Kylix user writes

I still have a P4 with a working copy of Kylix 3 cluttering up my flat. It was in continuous use from 2003 til 2012 and despite being adapted for Linux by nailing Delphi 5 to a wineserver it actually worked pretty well. Now coding in Java I occasionally yearn for the days of no dependencies whatsoever and near instantaneous compile time. However as most of the other posts here note, the only likely market for Embarcadero's products these days given their high price, is maintaining legacy code. My last employer's core product was in Delphi though they were actively trying to transition to C# and Angular. I wonder how many genuinely new projects are written in Delphi. My guess would be not very many. Meanwhile I really should get rid of that old P4...

Blighty’s beloved Big Ben bell ends, may break Brexit bargain

Another breakdown

It was also stopped for a year around 1975 when a brake failed on the striking train causing the mechanism to disintegrate fairly violently.

Live or let dial - phones ain’t what they used to be

If the numbers were clockwise

The dial would have to turn counter clockwise which is not only counter intuitive but according to some is associated with the devil. Maybe they *did* know what they were doing back then...

The Sons of Khan and the Pascal Spring

Sadly

Nice though I'm sure Embarcadero's stuff is, my understanding is that the IDE will only run on windoze even if the executables will run in all sorts of places. So I'm still faithfully sticking to 10 year old Borland Kylix. And if anyone's about to suggest Lazarus: don't, just... don't...

You mean...

there are languages where you don't need to do that?!