Leaderboard

I was diagnosed with Asperger's last year and it explains a whole lot of strange things going back to childhood. One is that I tend to be very wordy. I cannot comprehend how folks can say anything useful in ten words or less. For most of my life, I just avoided saying much because I'd get so much crap for it. But since being diagnosed, I've come to embrace it. Yes, there will always be people who get annoyed. I envy them for their ability to be brief. A common complaint I've heard over the years is something including the words "over-analyzing" or "over-thinking" things. Asperger's is said to be a form of autism, and one thing that characterizes the autistic brain is we tend to be dealing with 10x or more stimuli coming into our brain at any given moment that most other folks. Here's an analogy: In baseball, you can be standing at the plate, and for most people at bat, they just see the pitcher, the wind-up, and then a ball coming at them. They can focus in and just see the ball. And they have to make a decision when the ball is about 1/4 of the way towards them whether to swing at it or not. I see the ball, the pitcher, the second baseman slapping his glove, the short-stop stepping sideways, the left and right fielders getting ready, the 3rd-baseman, the 3rd-base coach signaling the guy on 2nd base, the birds flying at the lights, some people in the stands jumping around and waving, and I hear all of the noises behind me and coming from the dugouts. Sometimes it's a wonder I can even swing the bat before the ball is in the catcher's mitt. I loved basball as a kid; I played left field, and I could stop anything coming at me. But I could never hit the ball worth a darn, so the coach would only put me in on the 7th inning. When I hear those words, "over-analysing" and "over-thinking", it reminds me that most people have brains that allow them to just focus on the pitcher and the ball, without all of that other crap distracting them. For THEM, they'd have to think long and hard to be present to even a fraction of the "noise" that floods into my head every waking moment of my life. For THEM, it WOULD take a LOT of analysis and thought! For me, it's just what's there when I look at ANYTHING. It's like ... human beings have a "squelch" control in our brains that's set to only allow the strongest and most intense signals come through to our brains. But people on the autism spectrum have that squelch control turned down so we get a lot more noise along with the signals we're looking for. And we have to process all of that crap in real-time just to stay focused on whatever it is we're trying to deal with. People on the so-called "lower-functioning" end of the spectrum have it turned WAY down, to the point where they can't talk or control their muscles well due to the constant overload of signals coming into their brain. At least, that's one of the latest theories. It seems to capture some of the dynamics involved, anyway. It's a big plus in the software field because it helps me be a great architect -- I naturally see things from a birds-eye view, and often with far more breadth, depth, and detail than most other folks. Of course, they all think I'm off my rocker and say things like, "Earth to Schwartz ... come on back to the meeting!" I cannot tell you how many problems I've seen over the years that nobody wanted to talk about that later on came back to cause major problems. It's both a gift and a curse. It's just how my brain works.

OT: thanks to this syndrome, we have such people as, for example Newton Einstein Bill Gates Where would we be today without this syndrome?

Just thought I'd mention it: Embarcadero Germany has always been very helpful when any issues arose with some strange (if not to say illegal in Germany) policies from Embarcadero. They also helped converting Named User licenses to Network Named User licenses, which is possible as long as you have got maintenance and solves the activation count issue once and for all, because you then host your licenses on premises and don't need Embarcadero's servers any more.

Some News.. I chivvied Grey Matter along as I had not heard anything other than an acknowledgement, and informed them (as an aside) that I had been in contact with legal departments both governmental and private and had been advised that my first course of action should be to try and resolve it with the supplier (i.e. them). (Both of these statements are true, but not necessarily connected!!) I have to say that they were verging on excellent and said that they would sort it and get my registration count bumped up (but to wait a few days). I just tried and voila, re-registered and back in. I suppose that there is a lesson in this (apart from NEVER change the name of your computer) in that buying directly from Embarcadero gives you no protection or clout. As an individual you are just a name on a list and fair game for a maintenance scam. The supplying agent has far more influence. I don't know about the US, but in the UK, the seller is accountable for anything sold that is not 'of merchantable quality' and I would be entitled to redress, irrespective of whether they were just a third party. They are still liable (as is AMEX who I bought it through). The redress could have been in the form of a full refund, and probably would have been (I feel) if all else had failed. If I had gone down that road, I would have immediately bought Delphi again but now with an extra 12 months maintenance. Alternatively, Grey Matter could have simply given me a new licence (claiming back from Embarcadero I supose) and yea, 12 months maintenance again. In all of this painful experience, Embarcadero get 'nil point' and Grey Matter a good 8 (they would have got 10 if they had acted without the 'by the way' mention of legal action) Quite how Embarcadero think this will benefit them I can't fathom. It pisses off every independent developer, gives them (Embarcadero) a god awful name and can only result in them falling further and further back in the good product category. If this was introduced by someone in middle management who thought it was a good idea they should be sacked. If it was brought in by someone at a more senior level, they should resign. I don't know how much it was bumped up as I am too wary to try.

@gkobler v1.0.0.3: Yes, now it works.

Fast search for Delphi hwid https://theroadtodelphi.com/2010/12/02/generating-a-unique-hardware-id-using-delphi-and-the-wmi/

Every time I see your name, I look forward to a long post. I honestly mean it as a compliment.

Since 1999, I've been hired numerous times because I'm an "expert" with DELPHI -- not merely with Pascal. I have never been asked about either FPC nor Lazarus for use in any sort of production capacity. They have language features that Delphi only dreams about, and they can be fun to play with. Even an educational institution I worked at for nearly 5 years kept their Delphi license current and the project head refused to even consider FPC or Lazarus. Lately I've been shifting my focus over to TMS WebCore because I believe the future lies in web apps for generalized cross-platform needs, rather than a hodge-podge of separate platforms that are all evolving so fast that keeping track of them all in parallel with moving the common platform forward is an expensive exercise in chasing one's tail just to stay current. TMS has also added the ability to encapsulate WebCore (or any web-based) apps to run as native apps using their Miletus technology. Is this a panacea for all of the humonguous apps historically built with Delphi that have been around for more than a decade? Hardly. But the last three jobs I've had all implemented a ton of stuff in core parts of their systems that could be moved without too much trouble into service-based instances running inside their own network. One was slowly moving in that direction for newer things, but I saw a ton of resistance elsewhere. An earlier one was migrated from one DB to another. I know we could have done it in-house in about 4 months, but upper Management insisted they thought it would be better to outsource it. I have no idea what it cost, but probably over $500k, and it ran over by 50% before they pulled the plug and the other dev on our team finished it up in a few weeks. The whole thing could have been reimplemented in far less time as a REST-based service, but everybody thought that was just way too risky and that the performance would be really bad. They were just guessing, of course. The bottom-line is ... Management sticks with what they know. From what I've seen in most apps I've supported, there's a ton of stuff that can be easily factored-out and moved into REST-based services. There's also a lot of UI redesign that can be done to simplify different use-cases. What happens with these big desktop apps is they start out simple, then get warts added on top of warts until you have this huge, complex mess that's got all sorts of right-click options on virtually everything to deal with common needs that cannot be provided without severe change to the UI. Moving these horribly mutated ginormous desktop apps over to web apps without significant redesign is silly. But it's all that companies seem to think is warranted. Either that or it's like: "well, if we're going to rebuild it, there's no way in hell we'll use Delphi! We'd only consider C#/.NET in that case." I have personally never seen a single one of such redesigns ever completed on-time or within budget. So I'm not doing Delphi work any more, because pretty much the only jobs I get hired for are maintaining ancient legacy Delphi apps where the company generally refuses to allow us "experts" to do any sort of refactoring. (I have always suspected that's because they usually have no automated test suites.) I honestly don't even know why they bother to hire Delphi "experts" because they never wanted to hear anything I suggested. My job was to simply fix bugs reported by customers and add the occasional feature that a customer pestered them to add -- and often paid for. All that to say, I don't think this has anything to do with "Pascal" at all. They know "Delphi", not "pascal". But if they were to switch, they'd rather switch to JavaScript, Python, Rust, and Go. Even C# is fading away.

They route license increase to Sales and Renewals, and of course, Sales will try to sell you a subscription, but AFAIK you don't have to purchase it and they will bump your license count. Still, this is confusing practice and sometimes you need to be persistent.

OT: BPL hell. I build monolithic applications. copy the exe anywhere and run it. Never even considered using dll or bpl "technology". All I ever see is drawbacks to this kind of software development.

If a FOSS project does not get the expected attraction, despite decades of public existence, despite capable language (Object Pascal), then they have some strange (or not professional-grade) priorities. They are not attractive for new/more compiler developers.