I've seen several postings on several forums, websites and discussions.
DelphiHaters is a blog about Delphi's dark side. Delphi is a "great language" that, as of writing this article, has fallen from grace.
DelphiHaters exploits the fact that anyone who criticized Delphi gets called a troll, and many personal insults (sometimes cancelled and sometimes not) and shunned for the rest of your life. Once that happens, you lose your Delphi job, you lose your Delphi contacts, you eventually lose all your Delphi revenues. (if you don't believe this, see what happened to Simon Kissel, Frank De Groot and others) Thus, the people who write this blog (along with guests, friends and opinions) are intentionally anonymous.
If there is nobody to insult, the author (or "your reviewer") goes and focuses on issues at hand without personal, racial, ethnic and religious insults and slurs getting into the way of discussion.
Topics of discussion are:
- Why are there so few Delphi Jobs? The real reasons are cheating, deceitful and lying Delphi developers who do nothing every day, and other issues that explores the fact that "Delphi does not make any business sense".
- When is Delphi x64 coming? Since this blog posted more than two years ago, it is just a promise while the current company (Embarcadero) and third-party vendors continues to collect money by subscription. This blog explores the morality and ethics behind this (along with the usual 30-50% discount before the next great version).
- The dark side of Delphi. Of course, it makes perfect sense to download Delphi and Delphi-related products from RapidShare, BitTorrent - until you get caught. This blog explores the facts and community behind it.
- The inconvenient truths about Delphi. If Delphi is truly a great language, almost every website would use it (instead of PHP), we would be learning DelphiScript instead of JavaScript, the pascal-like syntax would be everywhere. Delphi would be cross-platform, today, Embarcadero would be as great as Adobe, Mozilla Foundation or ... If there are millions of Delphi developers, where are the books, and revenue to support them?
- Delphi's third-party community and the concepts of trolling. Why not call your boss a troll, or the HR (Human Resource) person a troll? They care more about your work (or lack of it) than anyone else.
- Quality Assurance. QA department who acts like a bastard towards Delphi developers. This blog explores reasons why products built with Dephi are so poor or maybe Delphi developers refuse to do hard work, like component development, GUI and Windows low-levels. You can always leech it so why bother learn? The infamous unofficial pirate community is killing these skilled people who do the hard work and these people move on to other languages.
- The Money. You can get very rich learning about Delphi and the Pascal language... or perhaps not. There is lot of unpaid work looking for some (foolish) person to do it (for no reward). Or you can use another language, such as Objective-C, PHP or Ruby and realize that most of it is free or at much lower-cost and quality is higher... This translates into jobs, revenues and business continuity. That's why you see so many jobs for Visual C++, C# and so on.
- Life after Delphi. Many Delphi developers have left the Delphi community, sometimes, never to return again. A time was a time and the party is over. The time of exit is and manner is up-to that person - either honorably or dishonorably. Just don't feed the trolls or you will forever be banished from the Delphi community.
- Misery. Misery loves party. Your reviewer blogs about hardships and costs issues faced by employers and employees. Can't find that dream Delphi job anymore? Your reviewer wonder why? Why not take a big business loan to buy Delphi and make a profit - or try doing it?
- Fair feathered friends. This blog explores the concept of friends who will eventually betray you, cheat you, lie to you, and do all manner of things against you (in the future). This blog explores the darker side of this fact. Just don't tell Mr. Chad's wife about it[1] or many people who lost lot of money because partnerships went sour[2] ... all in the name of Delphi.
- The File-Sharing Madness... This blog explores the file-sharing gone viral... Just make sure you don't share your source codes or they will be forever on the Internet. The same goes with XXX Delphi developer pictures. Your reviewer couldn't believe the other-jobs some Delphi developers have.
- The other side of success. If Delphi is success, why is it not Dr. Bob Corporation or LMD AG hiring hundreds of Delphi developers? If using Delphi is highly successful, there should be more rags to riches companies that built solid products, superior by design... or maybe not. Why are the people who do Delphi evangelism in one's and two's? Did you see the last Java conference[3] attended by more than 2,500 developers? Guess how many attended the future of Delphi in Paris? Only 100 developers.[4]
We welcome your comments and criticisms. We hope you enjoyed your stay, and hope this educating blog educates you about the "other Delphi" you never learned in College or University. If you can make an honest living out of it and pay the bills - good for you. but if you run into continual hardships and misery... it is time to move on.
[1] http://www.kudzuworld.com/Help/index.en.aspx
[2] https://forums.embarcadero.com/thread.jspa?threadID=47747
[3] http://jz10.java.no/
[4] http://www.tmssoftware.com/site/blog.asp?post=179
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Perhaps an end soon.
This blog will perhaps, come to an end soon...
The reason is simple...
I don't think writing anymore about Delphi's problems will solve basic problems, like cost of Delphi, whether or not there is a 64-bit version of Delphi, or whether the active Delphi-warez community take notice of this.
In fact, it's quite opposite
I thank the readers for reading my articles. Unless there's a need to write something, I'll stay low and ignore it.
Have a nice Christmas and nice holiday. I wish everyone well, even to my adversaries and Delphi lovers. If there was a last word, it would probably in the way how this blog started.
The reason is simple...
I don't think writing anymore about Delphi's problems will solve basic problems, like cost of Delphi, whether or not there is a 64-bit version of Delphi, or whether the active Delphi-warez community take notice of this.
In fact, it's quite opposite
- I think with Delphi 64-bits, the price will be so high, that nobody can afford it, or that the price of licensing Delphi VCL stuff -- like -- DevExpress.VCL will keep increasing... Both of them are currently subscriptions, so it gets expensive to buy the same over and over again to keep the license.
- Moved all my source code base to C++. Who cares about fast Delphi compile times when Visual C++ with Core i7 compiles in approximately the same speed? Who cares about DevEx.VCL when you can get CodeJock renewals at much less price...
- The Delphi-warez community will probably be happy that they can continue their shameful acts without someone spying on them from time-to-time.
I thank the readers for reading my articles. Unless there's a need to write something, I'll stay low and ignore it.
Have a nice Christmas and nice holiday. I wish everyone well, even to my adversaries and Delphi lovers. If there was a last word, it would probably in the way how this blog started.
Critic's Guide to Delphi Exorcist - Part 4 - Volunteerism & Delphi
Volunteering for DelphiThe Delphi Spirit
Phillip Morris Peter Morris, a Delphi developer wrote on his former website -
They give, you take.
When you ask, they give nothing in return.
Which is what the Delphi community is about:
You give - you make the free VCLs, commercial software (then pirated and downloaded many times)
You give - you give your time to post thousands and thousands of posts on the newsgroup in unpaid work
You become a field tester and gradually graduate to field tester SysOp (or TeamB'er)
They take...
You ask for something in return:
You'll probably get no money from the newsgroup dustbins (e.g., href) who sell Google Ads
You'll probably get no financial help if you get into trouble,
You'll probably get no money at all.
Which is what the Delphi spirit is about.
They give, you take.
When you ask, they give nothing in return.
Which is what the Delphi community is about:
You give - you make the free VCLs, commercial software (then pirated and downloaded many times)
You give - you give your time to post thousands and thousands of posts on the newsgroup in unpaid work
You become a field tester and gradually graduate to field tester SysOp (or TeamB'er)
They take...
You ask for something in return:
You'll probably get no money from the newsgroup dustbins (e.g., href) who sell Google Ads
You'll probably get no financial help if you get into trouble,
You'll probably get no money at all.
Which is what the Delphi spirit is about.
Critic's Guide to Delphi Exorcist - Part 3 - Delphi Jobs & Jobless Recovery
Implications of Joblessness, Subscriptions and Skills
Does Delphi justify it's high costs?
Your reviewer looked at Dice.com, Monster, JobBankUSA and was interesting to see some nice trends:
The usual favorite was to put "Delphi, Paradox, Interbase", and then get a free copy of Delphi (the employers won't blink buying it for you) and then Interbase (ditto) and almost every 3rd party component to get the job done... Then spend the whole day chatting away on your ICQ List, MSN List, browse the web and do very little works.
The reality catches up very quickly with these people. Your reviewer remembers hiring plenty of these kind of people.
Language
Most Delphi developers bitch and moan about the last version of Delphi being Delphi 7 (some say Delphi 6 before on-line activation was used, or Delphi 5 when the last good compiler was there). Some say Delphi 2007 (the last good version before the Unicode update), some say Delphi 2009 (because that was the last good version before the nefarious copy-protection caused lot of problem with Delphi).
With the job market being so bad, few or very few employers can catch-up and use the latest version of Delphi. The problem with Delphi (in relation to jobs) are:
1) Cost of Delphi + Third-party.
This is what kills Delphi dead in the water. The people who advocate Delphi are the vendor themselves on the newsgroups. You can usually Google them up, and they charge a pretty penny for their product.
1a) Of what Quality?The quality of the products built with Delphi so poor that the vendors just decided to move on. That means, even with small costs - domain and cheap web-hosting (US$9.95, US$4.95...), some vendors just decided their domains should expire and no-longer pay for the web-hosting.
The former two Delphi Magazines, DelphiMagazine (UK) redirects to a Thumb-Drive buy-now site, DelphiMagazine (USA) redirects to a cyber-squatter site.
The remaining people who are there, developed in during the Delphi 3-7 time when CompuServe, AOL and BBS's ruled the day. When the Internet came, a new and ugly force came out - nasty customer feedback.
CompuServe had this whack-a-mole policy where you can delete nasty feedback and ban that person from the whole CompuServe network. There were a couple of vocal "Delphi Haters" who voiced their opinions and eventually got removed from the former GO:BORL forums. Then came the USENET, where (as of today), Borland still puts hosts a newsgroup server linked to web-based NNTP. They stopped anonymous-posting when Simon Kissel (of Cross-Kylix fame) spammed the former Borland newsgroups and permanently ejected from the CodeGear, Embarcadero newsgroups.
1b) Plagiarism and Fraud.
Why bother work so hard to write your own codes when you can steal it and re-brand it as your own?
With people using Delphi doing this, you can imagine why:
It's faster to make money from the sweat of other people, lie about everything and get away with it. Many Delphi developers get away with it because many of them are overseas. Their customers would be from Japan, Germany or Brazil and then they have no legal recourse to get their money back, short of disputing it with MasterCard or Visa.
That's why you see some vendors offering direct money transfer to pay money to them. Good luck if you can get your money back. Then, there is PHP with mostly free, C# with mostly free, Python, Ruby with almost free everything you can take and use. Ditto with Java. For example, Mr. Jolyon Smith uses NetBeans instead. Go figure...
A fool and his money is one big (third) party...
2) Desktop app only, but no Linux, Mac, Web or Andriod or iPad or iPhone apps.The biggest market now is portable apps. The other reason for this is because it is easy to develop and fast to make money because either the Telco (your telephone company such as AT-and-T or Verizon) or iTunes or Google collects money on the developer's behalf.
For example, to activate the product, you would send an SMS (US$5.00) to a certain number and then receive a confirmation code to enter into the small mobile app. Some vendors, like Kaspersky Anti-virus sends the confirmation code to enter to your PC's Kaspersky Security application.
Mac and Linux apps are good money, it seems. Certain vendors make Mac-only applications and earn lots of money. For instance, OmniGroup makes excellent products for Mac OSX.
iTunes, iPhone and iOS is the latest hottest territory for developers. Where's Embarcadero? not here...
3) Software Piracy. This is already affecting many Delphi 3rd party developers.
Ask Mr. Ray N. whether DevExpress would support "Diamond Docking", better looking Ribbon compatibility (as in better looking Ribbon aesthetics and Ribbon UI) or when a Report Writer for VCL would be ready, the answer is that they don't have the money to do it. (or rather - they cannot afford to hire more Delphi developers)
This leads to higher prices or building SAAS products (e.g., TestRails) because there is no piracy or leaks when the customer does not pay-up. Have you seen any SAAS product built with Delphi? Me neither.
Good times are over. DelphiHater's predictions in a jobless recovery and jobless economy
Your reviewer sees many friends who are dying to find a job. Maybe it's time to say this to them:
1) Move on. Delphi won't pay your bills anymore. The reasons are simple. For employers, the costs don't make any sense. The development costs are so expensive, all the profits get eaten-up by the vendors and there's no money left.
If there was money left, it's all gone. Take a look at how many jobs PHP, VB.NET, C# are available. Maybe you'll learn something like learning a new skill towards financial freedom.
But wait - there's more. There's this need to buy, buy and buy third-party components and then realize that most of it is of better quality or requires no payment in C#, PHP, Perl, Java and even in OSX / iOS (iPhone/iPad).
2) Consider flipping burgers in Mc Donalds or working as a store assistant in Wallmart. For some people, that's considered a deep insult, but to be honest, in this kind of economy, maybe these people can see beyond fooling around during office-hours monitoring the newsgroups (like an unpaid employee) or doing work for free for others, or doing work for nothing.
Basic lessons -- like coming early to work, leaving on-time, taking responsibility for a job, doing a good job well done comes with flipping burgers. The saying goes -- the higher the wages before being laid-off and pride, the deeper the fall...
3) Consider going to work as a junior C# or C++ developer. Face the honest facts and realize that all the time you were lied, cheated and there is nothing honest with Delphi. The whole thing is a big house of credit-card debts, one bill after another not paid, nothing worth it. Amazingly, many Delphi developers shun re-learning everything all over again, telling the same nonsense over and over again -- like too hard to learn a new language, too difficult. But what the fact is that these Delphi developers don't want to learn anything except want a big paycheck (that no longer exists).
4) Some female Delphi developers on the newsgroups have become domestic servants or au-pair or cleaner or janitor. It's a damn shame that someone leaves the country (e.g., Philippines, Indonesia) and work as a domestic servant in a richer country (e.g., UK or Ireland or Italy). Your reviewer was surprised to know there was so many Delphi developers who gave up their job and went overseas. Don't be surprised the nanny who takes care of your kids was once a Delphi developer :)
There are always die-hard Delphi software developers. You can read the current article "Lost a Delphi Envagelist" if you feel confident.
Does Delphi justify it's high costs?
Your reviewer looked at Dice.com, Monster, JobBankUSA and was interesting to see some nice trends:
- Some Delphi jobs refer to using Delphi Hotel Management System (Hospitality and working at hotels)
- Some Delphi jobs refer to going to the Delphi, the GM subsidiary.
- Some Delphi jobs refer to porting Delphi application to C# (hint: Visual Studio)
- Some Delphi jobs are there from suspiciously looking Indian Outsourcing companies (hint: ABC "Infotech" LLC, some name with "InfoTech", some name whose website states "Outsourcing to India?", some name whose Website states "Chinese Developers wanted")
- Some Delphi jobs requires you speak Hindi or Chinese as a second language.
- Some Delphi jobs, the person who you are asked to call, sounds like a thick burly voice or thick accent you cannot make out if it is actually English or a mix of Hindi-English.
The usual favorite was to put "Delphi, Paradox, Interbase", and then get a free copy of Delphi (the employers won't blink buying it for you) and then Interbase (ditto) and almost every 3rd party component to get the job done... Then spend the whole day chatting away on your ICQ List, MSN List, browse the web and do very little works.
The reality catches up very quickly with these people. Your reviewer remembers hiring plenty of these kind of people.
Language
Most Delphi developers bitch and moan about the last version of Delphi being Delphi 7 (some say Delphi 6 before on-line activation was used, or Delphi 5 when the last good compiler was there). Some say Delphi 2007 (the last good version before the Unicode update), some say Delphi 2009 (because that was the last good version before the nefarious copy-protection caused lot of problem with Delphi).
With the job market being so bad, few or very few employers can catch-up and use the latest version of Delphi. The problem with Delphi (in relation to jobs) are:
1) Cost of Delphi + Third-party.
This is what kills Delphi dead in the water. The people who advocate Delphi are the vendor themselves on the newsgroups. You can usually Google them up, and they charge a pretty penny for their product.
1a) Of what Quality?The quality of the products built with Delphi so poor that the vendors just decided to move on. That means, even with small costs - domain and cheap web-hosting (US$9.95, US$4.95...), some vendors just decided their domains should expire and no-longer pay for the web-hosting.
The former two Delphi Magazines, DelphiMagazine (UK) redirects to a Thumb-Drive buy-now site, DelphiMagazine (USA) redirects to a cyber-squatter site.
The remaining people who are there, developed in during the Delphi 3-7 time when CompuServe, AOL and BBS's ruled the day. When the Internet came, a new and ugly force came out - nasty customer feedback.
CompuServe had this whack-a-mole policy where you can delete nasty feedback and ban that person from the whole CompuServe network. There were a couple of vocal "Delphi Haters" who voiced their opinions and eventually got removed from the former GO:BORL forums. Then came the USENET, where (as of today), Borland still puts hosts a newsgroup server linked to web-based NNTP. They stopped anonymous-posting when Simon Kissel (of Cross-Kylix fame) spammed the former Borland newsgroups and permanently ejected from the CodeGear, Embarcadero newsgroups.
1b) Plagiarism and Fraud.
Why bother work so hard to write your own codes when you can steal it and re-brand it as your own?
- The library EZPDF Library is a rip-off from QuickPDF Library,
- The former UDC corporation sold rip-off versions of Julian's WpTools,
- The CNPack "borrowed" some code from Andy J's famous IDE extensions (and then Andy Closed-sourced them to prevent updates from his own extensions going to CNPack),
- SoftLab Dephi Decompiler for Delphi and C++ Builder is a rip-off of EMS Source Rescuer,
- DA Generator includes a copy of Delphi 7 DCC Compiler (check the delphi directory in the program)
- Grid Plus Plus runs into an interesting licensing problem: It is illegal to use DevExpress, WpTools, TMS, TeeChart (et al) in design-mode in binary form. Their (meaning: WpTools, TMS, DevExpress, TeeChart) EULA prohibits it. The vendor must also be legally-blind since they used to call it "Delphi++" and then got a nice letter from Embarcadero's lawyers.
- I reviewed DxSock many months ago and gave it a negative review. Other people say the same:
The complete opposite of what is written on their website.
With people using Delphi doing this, you can imagine why:
It's faster to make money from the sweat of other people, lie about everything and get away with it. Many Delphi developers get away with it because many of them are overseas. Their customers would be from Japan, Germany or Brazil and then they have no legal recourse to get their money back, short of disputing it with MasterCard or Visa.
That's why you see some vendors offering direct money transfer to pay money to them. Good luck if you can get your money back. Then, there is PHP with mostly free, C# with mostly free, Python, Ruby with almost free everything you can take and use. Ditto with Java. For example, Mr. Jolyon Smith uses NetBeans instead. Go figure...
A fool and his money is one big (third) party...
2) Desktop app only, but no Linux, Mac, Web or Andriod or iPad or iPhone apps.The biggest market now is portable apps. The other reason for this is because it is easy to develop and fast to make money because either the Telco (your telephone company such as AT-and-T or Verizon) or iTunes or Google collects money on the developer's behalf.
For example, to activate the product, you would send an SMS (US$5.00) to a certain number and then receive a confirmation code to enter into the small mobile app. Some vendors, like Kaspersky Anti-virus sends the confirmation code to enter to your PC's Kaspersky Security application.
Mac and Linux apps are good money, it seems. Certain vendors make Mac-only applications and earn lots of money. For instance, OmniGroup makes excellent products for Mac OSX.
iTunes, iPhone and iOS is the latest hottest territory for developers. Where's Embarcadero? not here...
3) Software Piracy. This is already affecting many Delphi 3rd party developers.
Ask Mr. Ray N. whether DevExpress would support "Diamond Docking", better looking Ribbon compatibility (as in better looking Ribbon aesthetics and Ribbon UI) or when a Report Writer for VCL would be ready, the answer is that they don't have the money to do it. (or rather - they cannot afford to hire more Delphi developers)
This leads to higher prices or building SAAS products (e.g., TestRails) because there is no piracy or leaks when the customer does not pay-up. Have you seen any SAAS product built with Delphi? Me neither.
Good times are over. DelphiHater's predictions in a jobless recovery and jobless economy
Your reviewer sees many friends who are dying to find a job. Maybe it's time to say this to them:
1) Move on. Delphi won't pay your bills anymore. The reasons are simple. For employers, the costs don't make any sense. The development costs are so expensive, all the profits get eaten-up by the vendors and there's no money left.
If there was money left, it's all gone. Take a look at how many jobs PHP, VB.NET, C# are available. Maybe you'll learn something like learning a new skill towards financial freedom.
But wait - there's more. There's this need to buy, buy and buy third-party components and then realize that most of it is of better quality or requires no payment in C#, PHP, Perl, Java and even in OSX / iOS (iPhone/iPad).
2) Consider flipping burgers in Mc Donalds or working as a store assistant in Wallmart. For some people, that's considered a deep insult, but to be honest, in this kind of economy, maybe these people can see beyond fooling around during office-hours monitoring the newsgroups (like an unpaid employee) or doing work for free for others, or doing work for nothing.
Basic lessons -- like coming early to work, leaving on-time, taking responsibility for a job, doing a good job well done comes with flipping burgers. The saying goes -- the higher the wages before being laid-off and pride, the deeper the fall...
3) Consider going to work as a junior C# or C++ developer. Face the honest facts and realize that all the time you were lied, cheated and there is nothing honest with Delphi. The whole thing is a big house of credit-card debts, one bill after another not paid, nothing worth it. Amazingly, many Delphi developers shun re-learning everything all over again, telling the same nonsense over and over again -- like too hard to learn a new language, too difficult. But what the fact is that these Delphi developers don't want to learn anything except want a big paycheck (that no longer exists).
4) Some female Delphi developers on the newsgroups have become domestic servants or au-pair or cleaner or janitor. It's a damn shame that someone leaves the country (e.g., Philippines, Indonesia) and work as a domestic servant in a richer country (e.g., UK or Ireland or Italy). Your reviewer was surprised to know there was so many Delphi developers who gave up their job and went overseas. Don't be surprised the nanny who takes care of your kids was once a Delphi developer :)
There are always die-hard Delphi software developers. You can read the current article "Lost a Delphi Envagelist" if you feel confident.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Critic's Guide to Delphi, Exorcist Edition Part 2
No young blood
The lack of young Delphi meant older developers are not teaching their skill to younger Delphi developers (because of poor job prospects and massive software piracy).
Few more years later, Delphi developers will grow so old they could retire or maybe RIP... Some of the third-party software developers are retired (e.g., David Baldwin from http://www.pbear.com/) or passed away...
Every year, Mr. David I. would do his annual round the world tour. What's wrong with the world tour?
Reference: http://blogs.embarcadero.com/davidi/2010/08/30/40114/
Embarcadero's NewsgroupsWhen you connect to the Embarcadero's web-based newsgroup forum from FireFox, you always get the below error message. Maybe they use DataSnap or cannot seem to bother about security.
The Delphi Media Kit
If you paid Euros 4,000 you would expect to get a media kit. Atlas, it is sold separately...
If you paid Euros 4,000 you would expect to get a media kit. Atlas, it is sold separately...
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Critic's guide to Delphi, Exorcist Edition, part 1
Your reviewer promised to review Delphi 2009, but so much time have passed and ended-up reviewing Delphi XE edition.
Delphi XE stands for "Delphi Extreme Edition" or "XE" but it sounds more like "Delphi Exorcist Edition".
This version of Delphi is for the Delphi faithful. There is no other reason to buy it (unless you happen to be aTroll Tool vendor). This version of Delphi is simply an attempt for Embarcadero to satisfy people who brought an over-priced yearly SA subscription and expect a new upgrade during the 12-months of their subscription. The people who brought last year's Delphi edition without SA (waiting years for bug-fixes) get screwed and all the complaints start to look like insult-sword-fighting Monkey Island style.
Since Embarcadero choose to call it "XE", your reviewer found the closest matching word to be "Exorcist" so hence, "Exorcist Edition" would be in appropriate humor.
17-page Embarcadero Review
The biggest problem with the people at Embarcadero is they seem to have this bad habit of not writing down anything meaningful. Reading Ander Olsson's blog (Hacker's Corner), you would expect it to be filled with technical articles, tips, advice, excellent how-to-do things in Delphi... Instead, it is filled with job-postings, chatter and non-existent page 2.
The same goes with David Intersimone's website. It was only until a year ago your reviewer recommended putting a Wiki that the documentation wiki was written.
The only decent documentation you'd ever get about Delphi are from outsiders, like Mr. Marco Cantu, Dr. Bob, the former Delphi Magazine (UK), InfoCann Delphi Magazine (USA), blog postings and the huge Google Newsgroup archive.
There is so much misleading information on Embacardero's website that SD times managed to write a totally misleading article on next year's (or maybe 2012) version of Delphi.
There are no books written for Delphi 2011 (I could only count on Mr. Marco Cantu's Delphi 2010 handbook), just blog postings, bits and pieces of information here and there.
64-bit Delphi. When?
The development of the Delphi 64-bit edition must be very slow. Those waiting would have moved over to Visual C++/64-bits, GCC or FreePascal/64...
1) There is only just twitter feeds, and some chatter about it. The people at Embarcadero must have been so lazy or just didn't care about getting the news about Delphi/64 - there have been essentially no blog postings, no documentation primers, almost nothing about Delphi/64.
2) The people who are waiting for Delphi/64 would have conveniently moved their source-code base over to QT or WxWidget or NET or XCode.
Even the person who wrote the Delphi Distiller (a pirate application to circumvent Delphi's weak copy protection), Dr Alvin started to use QT and stopped using Delphi.
Delphi Pricing
Satirical picture showing a bearded person (guess who?), two other people in Embarcadero-black attire milking the Delphi cash-cow.
If there was anything to say about pricing, it is Embarcadero releasing a new version of Delphi every year to appease those who brought the Software Assurance. If they didn’t release a new version every year, Embarcadero would be SA-dammed by their customers.
Since this Software Assurance idea came out, it seems to be an annual affair to milk the Delphi faithful of their hard-earned money by assuring them upgrades every year. The better term for this is temple-tax or tithe since older versions of Delphi is often depicted as a temple. In order to get updates to the Delphi VCL, updates to the compiler, you had no choice but to either buy a new license or upgrade.
The price for a new version of Delphi has increased to either Euros 800 or US$800 (more like US$950 after including taxes) depending on where you live (excluding S&H and local taxes). Pricing for the most expensive edition of Delphi is around Euros 4,000. One fact has become certain – between Taxes and Death, you have to pay for Delphi and Delphi-related upgrades.
For hobbyists, the cost of Delphi and annual upgrade deters the hobbyists.
The ability to buy Delphi Professional at 10% from list price with heavy restrictions makes no sense.
The current pricing structure of annual upgrades, SA and the like, destroys the Delphi developer base.
Return on Investment: Mostly underwater.
The irony of an obese man diving underwater is not lost considering the inability to sell a copy of Delphi to dispose of assets and continual depreciation results in every copy having US$0.00 resale value. The people who buy used copies of Delphi (other than from official sources) do not get their orders honored or have future problems with Embarcadero.
For the uninformed, the way how business owners buy Delphi is by taking a cash/credit or loan. For example, some business owners take huge loans (e.g., US$50,000 loan) to start a business. Since the resale price of Delphi is US$0.00, and if the owners (and employees) within the loan-period cannot generate enough revenue to repay the initial business loan, the loan goes “underwater”.
The price of Delphi (and salary/wages to software developers) itself discourages jobs and new hiring. I would really urge Mr. David Intersimone to take the real Underwater challenge – take a big loan (preferably request for US$500,000), hire all the exert Delphi developers and develop a new product… then find yourself gnashing, swearing at every Delphi bug there is out there, missing features, bad or non-existent IntraWeb features, missing 64-bit, missing OSX support, bad documentation (and so on). Make sure all of them are properly licensed and use all-Delphi applications. Avoid Java or Visual C++ written products (like Atlissian Confluence, Eclipse, etc.) and do it for a couple of years… It would be really fun to insult and mock the customers (like the current making fun of people on newsgroups) when products doesn’t perform as expected, the inability to make a fully “built-using-Dephi” website. There are also the joys of having the bank take away everything when the business fails and falling behind payments.
Maybe Embarcadero people wearing black means sobering-up to the reality that Embarcadero need to stop selecting “good” reviews and start listening to their customers.
DelphiHater’s Roadmap is more accurate
Mr. Michael Rezlog and the hidden project manager (whose identity is hidden or not posted on the newsgroup) must be reading my blog.
Few months ago, I posted about Delphi Ultimatum (http://delphihaters.blogspot.com/2009/11/delphi-ultimatum.html) and how those suggestions were taken seriously.
Delphi XE has:
a) working memory leak checker and profiler. (Automated QA is now included)
b) build manager. (Final Builder, crippled is now included)
c) parts of GExperts and probably CNPack is now part of Delphi.
d) IPWorks (after looking at so many complaints with Indy)
e) Database driver source-code is available.
Reusing Last Year’s Promotion Materials
Your reviewer had amusing time looking at Delphi promotion material. It looks like they have been re-used from last year. You can notice all the items marked "Delphi 2010", "Delphi 2009", as it that needs to be considered.
Blackfish – More love needed
The bitter taste of former Borland, DevCo and CodeGear follies must have come one full cycle now. The latest database offering BlackFish (why not call it Jellyfish instead?) must have felt the brunt of the typical build-deploy-dump cycle that almost every Delphi developer encountered.
The first casualty is the venerable DBF and Paradox format. Borland could have fixed all the bugs in the Borland Database Engine, but decided to depreciate it instead. That left people who used DBF and Paradox that bad taste in their mouth and jump to Sybase Advantage Server. Then the same went for ADO, renamed DBGO, then left there almost untouched for almost 14 years (1997-2011) with no new features added while the original ADO layer (using 2.1) was upgraded to 2.9.
If Embarcadero wants forgiveness, it would have continued to maintain it, and make BlackFish more attractive to both developers and end-users.
Personally, your reviewer won’t use Blackfish. If I was to use something, I would want to use something that’s easy to use like Apache CouchDB, MongoDB or if the customer is a Microsoft-shop, MSSQL.
End of part 1. Part 2 will come with more technical details.
Delphi XE stands for "Delphi Extreme Edition" or "XE" but it sounds more like "Delphi Exorcist Edition".
This version of Delphi is for the Delphi faithful. There is no other reason to buy it (unless you happen to be a
Since Embarcadero choose to call it "XE", your reviewer found the closest matching word to be "Exorcist" so hence, "Exorcist Edition" would be in appropriate humor.
17-page Embarcadero Review
The biggest problem with the people at Embarcadero is they seem to have this bad habit of not writing down anything meaningful. Reading Ander Olsson's blog (Hacker's Corner), you would expect it to be filled with technical articles, tips, advice, excellent how-to-do things in Delphi... Instead, it is filled with job-postings, chatter and non-existent page 2.
The same goes with David Intersimone's website. It was only until a year ago your reviewer recommended putting a Wiki that the documentation wiki was written.
The only decent documentation you'd ever get about Delphi are from outsiders, like Mr. Marco Cantu, Dr. Bob, the former Delphi Magazine (UK), InfoCann Delphi Magazine (USA), blog postings and the huge Google Newsgroup archive.
There is so much misleading information on Embacardero's website that SD times managed to write a totally misleading article on next year's (or maybe 2012) version of Delphi.
There are no books written for Delphi 2011 (I could only count on Mr. Marco Cantu's Delphi 2010 handbook), just blog postings, bits and pieces of information here and there.
64-bit Delphi. When?
The development of the Delphi 64-bit edition must be very slow. Those waiting would have moved over to Visual C++/64-bits, GCC or FreePascal/64...
1) There is only just twitter feeds, and some chatter about it. The people at Embarcadero must have been so lazy or just didn't care about getting the news about Delphi/64 - there have been essentially no blog postings, no documentation primers, almost nothing about Delphi/64.
2) The people who are waiting for Delphi/64 would have conveniently moved their source-code base over to QT or WxWidget or NET or XCode.
Even the person who wrote the Delphi Distiller (a pirate application to circumvent Delphi's weak copy protection), Dr Alvin started to use QT and stopped using Delphi.
Delphi Pricing
If there was anything to say about pricing, it is Embarcadero releasing a new version of Delphi every year to appease those who brought the Software Assurance. If they didn’t release a new version every year, Embarcadero would be SA-dammed by their customers.
Since this Software Assurance idea came out, it seems to be an annual affair to milk the Delphi faithful of their hard-earned money by assuring them upgrades every year. The better term for this is temple-tax or tithe since older versions of Delphi is often depicted as a temple. In order to get updates to the Delphi VCL, updates to the compiler, you had no choice but to either buy a new license or upgrade.
The price for a new version of Delphi has increased to either Euros 800 or US$800 (more like US$950 after including taxes) depending on where you live (excluding S&H and local taxes). Pricing for the most expensive edition of Delphi is around Euros 4,000. One fact has become certain – between Taxes and Death, you have to pay for Delphi and Delphi-related upgrades.
For hobbyists, the cost of Delphi and annual upgrade deters the hobbyists.
The ability to buy Delphi Professional at 10% from list price with heavy restrictions makes no sense.
The current pricing structure of annual upgrades, SA and the like, destroys the Delphi developer base.
Return on Investment: Mostly underwater.
The irony of an obese man diving underwater is not lost considering the inability to sell a copy of Delphi to dispose of assets and continual depreciation results in every copy having US$0.00 resale value. The people who buy used copies of Delphi (other than from official sources) do not get their orders honored or have future problems with Embarcadero.
For the uninformed, the way how business owners buy Delphi is by taking a cash/credit or loan. For example, some business owners take huge loans (e.g., US$50,000 loan) to start a business. Since the resale price of Delphi is US$0.00, and if the owners (and employees) within the loan-period cannot generate enough revenue to repay the initial business loan, the loan goes “underwater”.
The price of Delphi (and salary/wages to software developers) itself discourages jobs and new hiring. I would really urge Mr. David Intersimone to take the real Underwater challenge – take a big loan (preferably request for US$500,000), hire all the exert Delphi developers and develop a new product… then find yourself gnashing, swearing at every Delphi bug there is out there, missing features, bad or non-existent IntraWeb features, missing 64-bit, missing OSX support, bad documentation (and so on). Make sure all of them are properly licensed and use all-Delphi applications. Avoid Java or Visual C++ written products (like Atlissian Confluence, Eclipse, etc.) and do it for a couple of years… It would be really fun to insult and mock the customers (like the current making fun of people on newsgroups) when products doesn’t perform as expected, the inability to make a fully “built-using-Dephi” website. There are also the joys of having the bank take away everything when the business fails and falling behind payments.
Maybe Embarcadero people wearing black means sobering-up to the reality that Embarcadero need to stop selecting “good” reviews and start listening to their customers.
DelphiHater’s Roadmap is more accurate
Mr. Michael Rezlog and the hidden project manager (whose identity is hidden or not posted on the newsgroup) must be reading my blog.
Few months ago, I posted about Delphi Ultimatum (http://delphihaters.blogspot.com/2009/11/delphi-ultimatum.html) and how those suggestions were taken seriously.
Delphi XE has:
a) working memory leak checker and profiler. (Automated QA is now included)
b) build manager. (Final Builder, crippled is now included)
c) parts of GExperts and probably CNPack is now part of Delphi.
d) IPWorks (after looking at so many complaints with Indy)
e) Database driver source-code is available.
Reusing Last Year’s Promotion Materials
Your reviewer had amusing time looking at Delphi promotion material. It looks like they have been re-used from last year. You can notice all the items marked "Delphi 2010", "Delphi 2009", as it that needs to be considered.
Blackfish – More love needed
The bitter taste of former Borland, DevCo and CodeGear follies must have come one full cycle now. The latest database offering BlackFish (why not call it Jellyfish instead?) must have felt the brunt of the typical build-deploy-dump cycle that almost every Delphi developer encountered.
The first casualty is the venerable DBF and Paradox format. Borland could have fixed all the bugs in the Borland Database Engine, but decided to depreciate it instead. That left people who used DBF and Paradox that bad taste in their mouth and jump to Sybase Advantage Server. Then the same went for ADO, renamed DBGO, then left there almost untouched for almost 14 years (1997-2011) with no new features added while the original ADO layer (using 2.1) was upgraded to 2.9.
If Embarcadero wants forgiveness, it would have continued to maintain it, and make BlackFish more attractive to both developers and end-users.
Personally, your reviewer won’t use Blackfish. If I was to use something, I would want to use something that’s easy to use like Apache CouchDB, MongoDB or if the customer is a Microsoft-shop, MSSQL.
End of part 1. Part 2 will come with more technical details.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Pirates of the Delhi-burn
Pawnage #1 - updated
One useless FastReport owner, responsible for the massive software piracy of FastReport version 4, is Mr. Vicente B. Leonel who uploaded his version of FastReports to a warez site.
The proof, because there needs to be proof -
The way how the FastReports installer watermark the files is the header and footer of the file contains a ______ watermark. This is always removed by the users.
However, one careless individual posted his *.log file of the install. It contains this entry:
C:\Documents and Settings\Vincente B. Leonel\My Documents\Fast Reports\ ____
All you need to do is google Mr. Vincente and realize he is a FastReports user.
Special thanks to the moderators of a certain forum for removing this information :)
Just hint for the vendor to remove his access to the Fast Report private customer access area.
:)
Humor - Free Delphi Employment
Your reviewer was very amused at some incidents recently.
This happened behind the scene on one of those forums...
1) Get one of those software pirates and...
2) Promise him a job, get him to work for 3 weeks, and get source-code from that person
3) On the 4th week (approx 1 month) just walk away and don't contact him again.
4) The software pirate, being pissed-off, bitches and moans about he never got paid.
5) Think about karma, that he uses all stolen goods and then complains about not being paid.
This happened behind the scene on one of those forums...
1) Get one of those software pirates and...
2) Promise him a job, get him to work for 3 weeks, and get source-code from that person
3) On the 4th week (approx 1 month) just walk away and don't contact him again.
4) The software pirate, being pissed-off, bitches and moans about he never got paid.
5) Think about karma, that he uses all stolen goods and then complains about not being paid.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Secret of Delphi Island
(Satire)
Your reviewer was doing some looking up some of the biographies (or bio for short) of people on those not-so-legal forums.
Your reviewer found three Delphi sites where their owners went to work dressed as a pirate, took photos of themselves in the office as a pirate, and believe-it-or-not, posted it on their flickr or linked to their blog.
Then, they went and do their business of uploading file upon file on those not-so legal forums.
What does that remind you of?
Either it's talk like a pirate day (website), dress like a pirate day, or this whole Delphi thing is starting to feel like you're in "Secret ofMonkey Delphi Island"
There's person called Largo which sounds uncannily similar to Embarcadero whose objective seems to milk Delphi developers of their hard earned money
There's even TeamB circus where, with answering many newsgroup questions, you can become one of them, too.
The game even sells GamePlayer's magazine, which sounds eerily similar to the Delphi Magazine.
There's even a troll who operates a troll-booth. Feels like the third-party vendors who need payment before providing the products.
There are plenty of "Men of Low Moral Fiber" in the Delphi community.
There is also chance to form a development team.
Like real-life Delphi developers, they expect you to pay lots and lots of money to do almost nothing and relax and enjoy while you do all the work...
Monkey Island has a fighting system called "Insult sword-fighting". This sounds eerily similar to the long-winded insult postings in the Embarcadero newsgroups.
Maybe someone was playing real-world "Monkey Island" and testing their insult sword-fighting skills on the Embarcardero forums?
There is also opportunity to buy used Boats. That sounds like buying copies of Delphi. The price sounds right - around 4,000 pieces of Gold or approx 4,000 Euros.
I wonder how much are the commissions Mr. Stan. made for selling one boat... err... one copy of Delphi?
Mr. Herman Toothrot would find it very comforting there is a dentist in the Embarcadero newsgroups...
Where about the Help Files for the game Monkey Island? There are none - You have to figure it all out yourself. Does that sound similar to real-life Delphi development?
The game-play in the "Secret of Monkey Island" feels like real-life Delphi software development. This blog posting is a humorous and satirical look on Delphi software development.
Your reviewer was doing some looking up some of the biographies (or bio for short) of people on those not-so-legal forums.
What does that remind you of?
Either it's talk like a pirate day (website), dress like a pirate day, or this whole Delphi thing is starting to feel like you're in "Secret of
There's person called Largo which sounds uncannily similar to Embarcadero whose objective seems to milk Delphi developers of their hard earned moneyThere's even TeamB circus where, with answering many newsgroup questions, you can become one of them, too.
The game reflects real-life Delphi development. The game has people who sell documentation (a much needed asset in the Delphi community)
The game even sells GamePlayer's magazine, which sounds eerily similar to the Delphi Magazine.
There's even a troll who operates a troll-booth. Feels like the third-party vendors who need payment before providing the products.
There are plenty of "Men of Low Moral Fiber" in the Delphi community.
There is also chance to form a development team.
Like real-life Delphi developers, they expect you to pay lots and lots of money to do almost nothing and relax and enjoy while you do all the work...
Monkey Island has a fighting system called "Insult sword-fighting". This sounds eerily similar to the long-winded insult postings in the Embarcadero newsgroups.
Maybe someone was playing real-world "Monkey Island" and testing their insult sword-fighting skills on the Embarcardero forums?
There is also opportunity to buy used Boats. That sounds like buying copies of Delphi. The price sounds right - around 4,000 pieces of Gold or approx 4,000 Euros.
I wonder how much are the commissions Mr. Stan. made for selling one boat... err... one copy of Delphi?
Mr. Herman Toothrot would find it very comforting there is a dentist in the Embarcadero newsgroups...
Where about the Help Files for the game Monkey Island? There are none - You have to figure it all out yourself. Does that sound similar to real-life Delphi development?
The game-play in the "Secret of Monkey Island" feels like real-life Delphi software development. This blog posting is a humorous and satirical look on Delphi software development.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Humour: Delphi "Love"
Your reviewer was looking at several Delphi not-so-legal sites and really amused at them. I won't give any names, but it gives some ideas what to look for.
The first three are in Arabic and Persian language, from Egypt, Saudi and Iran respectively. It was really hard for your reviewer to browse the site, except using Google Translate (Arabic to English, Persian to English). The next three in Czech, Romanian and Spanish. Everyone probably knows the Czech site very well. There are two Russian site that are dedicated for this (Russian to English).
If you browse around these sites... You'll get 101 links to RapidShare, HotFiles and so on to download these things not-so-legally.
I love you... until you have no job and no money
Every now and then, these URLs to Rapidshare will go bad or stale. Why does this happen? The owners of TMS, DevExpress and Components4Developers are busy sending emails requesting those sites to delete illegal uploads to those sites.
The next obvious thing happens - these Delphi lovers re-upload the files to those file-sharing sites again and again and again and again and again ....
Here are some interesting suggestions for the Component vendors:
1) Some of the harder-to-reach URLs require some reputation, like 50 thanks, 100 thanks. Upload some other component to that site and protect it... and within 8 hours, you will get more than 100 thanks and be able to view these hard-to-reach URLs.
2) Buy the MaxMind GeoIP or IP location site and protect your downloads using it. If your user specify he is from America but the download IP from Russia, shut down the account.
3) Automate the routine. Use the same build utility (e.g., either Final Builder or AutomatedQA) to automate sending emails to these file-sharing sites to remove these links.
4) Consider better background checks of your customers.
The people who really love Delphi, do things such as spreading the "Component Love", spreading "free copies of Delphi", spreading all the serial numbers, cracks and so on...
They are going to cause Delphi sales to drop, Delphi-component sales to drop... When component vendors sees little or no sales, month after month, they will start to stop development and probably close shop.
Look at DevExpress. Their WinForms and WebForms NET components are 10 or 20 times more advanced than the Delphi components. Look at other Delphi component vendors. If they cannot sustain the business, they will close down and put their components on SourceForge.
It affects other Delphi developers indirectly. These Delphi developers are waiting for the next raise, better pay... they probably are sweating and working really hard to make things work... or out of job and out of money.
Thank You
Your reviewer says "thank you" to Delphi lovers for causing Delphi job losses, business failure, loss of revenue and causing Delphi developers to remain jobless.
Keep up the Delphi Lover cheers and warmth!
:)
The first three are in Arabic and Persian language, from Egypt, Saudi and Iran respectively. It was really hard for your reviewer to browse the site, except using Google Translate (Arabic to English, Persian to English). The next three in Czech, Romanian and Spanish. Everyone probably knows the Czech site very well. There are two Russian site that are dedicated for this (Russian to English).
If you browse around these sites... You'll get 101 links to RapidShare, HotFiles and so on to download these things not-so-legally.
I love you... until you have no job and no money
Every now and then, these URLs to Rapidshare will go bad or stale. Why does this happen? The owners of TMS, DevExpress and Components4Developers are busy sending emails requesting those sites to delete illegal uploads to those sites.
The next obvious thing happens - these Delphi lovers re-upload the files to those file-sharing sites again and again and again and again and again ....
Here are some interesting suggestions for the Component vendors:
1) Some of the harder-to-reach URLs require some reputation, like 50 thanks, 100 thanks. Upload some other component to that site and protect it... and within 8 hours, you will get more than 100 thanks and be able to view these hard-to-reach URLs.
2) Buy the MaxMind GeoIP or IP location site and protect your downloads using it. If your user specify he is from America but the download IP from Russia, shut down the account.
3) Automate the routine. Use the same build utility (e.g., either Final Builder or AutomatedQA) to automate sending emails to these file-sharing sites to remove these links.
4) Consider better background checks of your customers.
The people who really love Delphi, do things such as spreading the "Component Love", spreading "free copies of Delphi", spreading all the serial numbers, cracks and so on...
They are going to cause Delphi sales to drop, Delphi-component sales to drop... When component vendors sees little or no sales, month after month, they will start to stop development and probably close shop.
Look at DevExpress. Their WinForms and WebForms NET components are 10 or 20 times more advanced than the Delphi components. Look at other Delphi component vendors. If they cannot sustain the business, they will close down and put their components on SourceForge.
It affects other Delphi developers indirectly. These Delphi developers are waiting for the next raise, better pay... they probably are sweating and working really hard to make things work... or out of job and out of money.
Thank You
Your reviewer says "thank you" to Delphi lovers for causing Delphi job losses, business failure, loss of revenue and causing Delphi developers to remain jobless.
Keep up the Delphi Lover cheers and warmth!
:)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)