Saturday, January 2, 2010

Hotel California moment: Delphi Haven

Your reviewer was amused over DelphiHaven's Small thought post.

Why does the off-topic newsgroup still exist?

It's also called borland.spank.the.trolls.really.hard, borland.character.assassination
and borland.unforgiven

borland.spank.the.trolls.really.hard newsgroup
Let me explain this one. Suppose there's a troll on the newsgroup, who criticizes about Delphi, so what happens, TeamB redirects post to off-topic newsgroup for further newsgroup spanking. There, since there are no moderation rules, you can see all manner of insults, racial slurs, personal attacks, the true colors of Delphi developers.

borland.character.assassination newsgroup
Many years ago, when Frank de Groot complained about Delphi, his posts were redirected to borland.off-topic and there he complained being called Troll, insulted, and lost all his business..., to add insult to injury, now everyone can Google Frank the troll de Groot. Did TeamB ever cancelled those messages? nope, it stays on there, and archived on Google Newsgroups, and other newsgroup archives. If there was one way lose all business, this would be the perfect way to lose all Delphi business.

Same thing what happened to Simon Kissel (person who did Cross-Kylix) and got insulted by TeamB, and you can still read it. It's amazing any insults to former Borland staff and TeamB gets canceled, while insults to Simon Kissel do not get canceled.

borland.character.unforgiven newsgroup
Since Google Newsgroups (formerly Deja), HREF (formerly Tarmaraka) and others pick-up Borland's newsgroup feed, you get those notable troll reminders, such as reminding Frank de Groot, Simon Kissel (et al) they are not welcome anymore.

If there was change at Embarcadero (formerly DevCo, CodeGear) it would be to drop that newsgroup, get rid of those blow-hards, (Let's not even talk about Delphi.Jobs newsgroups...).

Even at Embarcardero's competitors - Quest Corp, Sybase, I never seen such nonsense at their community sites.

DelphiHater never post at Borland, DevCo, CodeGear, Embarcadero's newsgroup any more. DelphiHater uses Google search. Since most questions are already answered, there is little to look for...

Maybe some kind words for DelphiHaven, the newsgroups are like Hotel California, the Delphi developers seems friendly, nice, but deep down, they are just prisoners to the Dominatrix Delphi, and you can check out anytime you want... but you can never leave.

Maybe when DelphiHaven's developer realizes Delphi can't feed him or his family, or maybe get him that job promotion he so badly wanted (jobs? what jobs?), or respect his blog wanted, it could be haven, or it could be hell...

:)

2 comments:

Chris said...

Ah, Simon Kissel... Have you noticed how Embarcadero's strategy since taking over Delphi is rather closer to his 'alternative roadmap' than the real 'roadmap' of the time (2006)? As in, drop Delphi.NET, make the VCL Unicode, revive cross platform (http://delphiroadmap.untergrund.net/)? For sure, the decision to postpone 64 bit wasn't anticipated by Kissel, but then this postponent seems for the sake of getting cross platform out the door, a postponent that may need not have been necessary had Embarcadero taken over Delphi as soon as CodeGear had been spun out from Borland. (The CodeGear interregnum involved such fripperies as Delphi.NET being persisted with, JBuilder being pointlessly revived, and 3rdRail and an alpha quality Delphi for PHP being introduced...)

'or respect his blog wanted'

Well, 'haven' partly had the implication for myself of the blog being a 'haven' from other (non-programming) stuff,
which is why I've generally avoided blogging about internal Delphi politics. Mind you, it's the odd post that hints of such a thing that gets the hits...

Delphi Haters said...

Hi Chris,
you're welcome.