Re: [fpc-other] What does Embarcadero spend there time on
On 2013-03-08 13:07, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote: least care to post a summary and possibly a TinyURL? Or do your regular rants about netiquete only apply to other people? Where does that come from? 1) I posted to fpc-other, where anything goes 2) The message was short and to the point. Not to hog you precious hard drive space. The alternative would have been to attach a 1Mb file, which is not allowed. 3) The YouTube URL fits within the 70 char limit I set, which means I don't use TinyURL type services in such case (also what if that service goes down, then nobody knows what I posted). 4) The topic is very visual which cannot be explained in a text message. You must view the video to appreciated what I was trying to convey. If you can't view videos, don't make your problem mine. 5) I meant for it post to be humours, hence the use of a smiley face. No ranting here. Now please, get a life... Regards, - Graeme - -- fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/ ___ fpc-other maillist - fpc-other@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-other
Re: [fpc-other] What does Embarcadero spend there time on
On 2013-03-08 14:55, Jonas Maebe wrote: yourself in the role of moderator on other lists and deriding people (rather than contacting the moderators and asking them to do something I guess the moderators simply don't do the job they were assigned or volunteered for. Also, there as no specific person I targeted in fpc-devel. Almost all posts lately contain about 95% quoted text! How does a moderator fail to see this? flaming), it's normal that other people will become more easily annoyed by what you yourself do. I still fail to see how my original message in this thread was an issue? I choose the right mailing list, and didn't include MB's of attached data. It's not karma, just some people that are outright idiots. Regards, - Graeme - ___ fpc-other maillist - fpc-other@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-other
Re: [fpc-other] What does Embarcadero spend there time on
On 08 Mar 2013, at 16:14, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote: It's not karma, just some people that are outright idiots. That does it, you're back on moderation. Please grow up, finally. Jonas FPC mailing list admin ___ fpc-other maillist - fpc-other@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-other
Re: [fpc-other] What does Embarcadero spend there time on
I must say, Mark and Jonas, you have just exhibited a serious lack of judgement and discipline. I think the original post by Graeme had nothing wrong with it. Short, to the point, and including a short URL. From the ensuing exchange it is clear you two are carrying over an attitude from elsewhere and elsewhen that is not appropriate. In short, you have been unfair. I stopped following the other fpc and lazarus lists because I was tired of this type of bickering. I only kept fpc-other because it was largely free of it. Now Mark and Jonas have spoiled even this list. What a shame. On Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 10:17 AM, Jonas Maebe jonas.ma...@elis.ugent.bewrote: On 08 Mar 2013, at 16:14, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote: It's not karma, just some people that are outright idiots. That does it, you're back on moderation. Please grow up, finally. Jonas FPC mailing list admin __**_ fpc-other maillist - fpc-other@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/**mailman/listinfo/fpc-otherhttp://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-other ___ fpc-other maillist - fpc-other@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-other
Re: [fpc-other] What does Embarcadero spend there time on
On 08 Mar 2013, at 16:37, Doug Chamberlin wrote: I think the original post by Graeme had nothing wrong with it. Short, to the point, and including a short URL. I agree. The moderation setting was in reaction to (a.o.) his subsequent messages. I stopped following the other fpc and lazarus lists because I was tired of this type of bickering. Then you also didn't see what lead to this (third time in the mean time, every time followed by a promise to behave according to the civility expectations of our mailing lists -- no matter how idiotic, soft or whatever he may find them) moderation setting for Graeme. Jonas___ fpc-other maillist - fpc-other@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-other
Re: [fpc-other] What does Embarcadero spend there time on
Graeme Geldenhuys wrote: Also, there as no specific person I targeted in fpc-devel. Almost all posts lately contain about 95% quoted text! How does a moderator fail to see this? I really don't want to prolong this and perhaps upset more people than necessary, but has it occurred to you that that's how mailing lists work and that possibly your expectations are unreasonable? You've previously said that you found excessive quoting irritating (you might have put it a bit more strongly than that) because you viewed messages in a browser: I believe that a number of people suggested at the time that that was quite simply your own fault for using the wrong tool for the job. I agree that excessive quoting is to be avoided. However the reasons that quoting became part of the mailing list and (in particular) Usenet doctrines were (a) because certain brands of client software- in particular anything provided by Microsoft- were very poor as managing threading and (b) particularly in the early days messages were regularly lost or arrived out of sequence. In fact it's not at all uncommon even today to find that messages are lost from a thread because they fail a gateway's acceptance criteria: suspect headers, attachments in a context where they're not expected, and so on. In other words it's still important that discussion groups of various forms be self healing, and the conventional mechanism for that is by appropriate quoting including- and some people miss this out- a So-and-so wrote: line at the top of the body as well as possibly a View this message in context URL at the bottom. But I'm sure that nobody not born yesterday didn't know that :-) -- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues] ___ fpc-other maillist - fpc-other@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-other
[fpc-other] Goodbye, and thanks for the fishes
Hello, After too much thinking I'ved decided to leave here. I don't know if this is permanent or not, but I can't for now continue to be here. I'ved wrote about it here: http://idkn.wordpress.com/2013/03/08/goodbye-pascal/ Goodbye and thanks for the fishes Ido ___ fpc-other maillist - fpc-other@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-other
Re: [fpc-other] What does Embarcadero spend there time on
On Fri, March 8, 2013 17:04, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote: Graeme Geldenhuys wrote: Also, there as no specific person I targeted in fpc-devel. Almost all posts lately contain about 95% quoted text! How does a moderator fail to see this? I really don't want to prolong this and perhaps upset more people than necessary, but has it occurred to you that that's how mailing lists work and that possibly your expectations are unreasonable? . . Just to add another view (to show that it is not a fight among two clearly delineated camps): - I agree to Graeme that many people don't use quoting efficiently - either always or at least sometimes (e.g. because they forget). - It is important to stress that efficient quoting is subjective and depends on many factors including used tools, habits and preferences (some people prefer more context than others), etc. - Pointing out good practice may be useful and accepted by others even from just one of the many subscribed people if performed in gentle way allowing others to improve themselves (without attacking them). One should probably not expect everybody else to even know what netiquette is these days (unfortunately :-( ), i.e. providing some specific reference may be useful and increase efficiency of such a message (text on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiquette_%28technology%29 might suggest some improvement opportunities for Graeme too ;-) ). Trying to enforce the expected behaviour (e.g. by pointing it out twice within the same day) should be certainly left to moderators in my view (and if someone believes that the moderator does this job insufficiently, it is always possible to contact him directly to discuss such concerns). I fully agree to Jonas explaining how other people might feel and why such a response might have arrived. Jonas simply tried to clarify potential reasons behind a bit curt reaction from Mark and I don't see anything problematic in that e-mail from Jonas. (Being a non-native speaker, I just hope that the word curt just looked up in a dictionary matches my intention here - I mean something worse than not very nice but not reaching inappropriate). - I believe that the response of Graeme to comment from Jonas was clearly inappropriate (calling others idiots is always inappropriate in my view and never leads to any positive outcome) and an obvious reason for the moderation action (especially if this wasn't for the first time with Graeme). - I _personally_ dislike insufficient quoting at least as much as excessive quoting (and yes, I observe that sometimes in FPC lists too - I mean messages commenting something without providing any clue what the statement is about unless looking at the whole thread). Again, different people, different habits, different preferences. - I do not share the opinion of Mark that sending URLs should be considered inappropriate or that senders willing to share some link with others ought to spend time on creating different (shorter) URLs in cases like this (and from this point of view I don't see anything wrong on Graeme's original post). While I do not necessarily always use tools allowing me to access You Tube on all devices which I use for reading e-mails, I understand that the choice of devices (with all their advantages and disadvantages) is fully on my side. My preferred _e-mail_ client has allowed clicking on URLs in plain text e-mails (and launching these URLs in the WWW browser) since at least 14 years ago, i.e. Mark's assumption that this has to do with reading e-mails via WWW client is not necessarily correct. In any case, I believe that a response like: Sorry, I cannot access the video when reading e-mails, can you please tell me what it is about? might give better results and would not provide triggers for unnecessary escalation. BTW, my original reaction when reading Graeme's post was: OK, a link to some video in fpc-other, I'll see if I have time for watching it later but I can probably live happily without it too. ;-) For everybody who read up to this point - yes, I know that I'm a candidate for being moderated because I tend to express my thoughts in too much detail leading to very long e-mails (also mentioned as bad habit on the netiquette link above). If you believe that I'm a bigger idiot than Graeme, Mark and Jonas together because of this, I'm fine with that. ;-) Tomas ___ fpc-other maillist - fpc-other@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-other
Re: [fpc-other] Goodbye, and thanks for the fishes
ik wrote: Hello, After too much thinking I'ved decided to leave here. I don't know if this is permanent or not, but I can't for now continue to be here. I'ved wrote about it here: http://idkn.wordpress.com/2013/03/08/goodbye-pascal/ Goodbye and thanks for the fishes We're sorry to see you go. However looking at your comments, I'd say that I feel under much less pressure to defend my use of Pascal than I did 25 years or so ago: unlike the situation then just about everybody has agreed that structured languages are vastly superior to BASIC/COBOL/FORTRAN and once you strip away the syntactic differences they have, to a very large extent, converged. As somebody said a few days ago, if you don't want to use extensions to the underlying language- array constructors, class helpers and so on- you don't have to. And because the language is strongly-typed it's unusual for a coding error to match a recently-introduced construct by accident. But I suppose all this begs the question: if one decides not to use Object Pascal, what are the viable alternatives? -- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues] ___ fpc-other maillist - fpc-other@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-other
Re: [fpc-other] What does Embarcadero spend there time on
On 2013-03-08 16:04, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote: I really don't want to prolong this and perhaps upset more people than necessary, but has it occurred to you that that's how mailing lists work and that possibly your expectations are unreasonable? Unreasonable? Not at all. Maybe I just remember the days of Fidonet where more people adhered to netiquette. I guess it was contributed to the fact that messages had to travel via dial-up modems across the world [I was part of that process]. Millions of discussions happened every day, and simply quoting what was needed for context worked very well then. Why suddenly doesn't that work now? Also take in consideration people with disabilities using something like screen readers. Having to sit for 15 minutes listening to 96+ lines of quoted text, just to get to the final punchline... the reply of 2-3 lines. And then this process happening for every single message in the FPC Lazarus mailing lists!!! Simply stripping out quotes take a mere second. Regards, - Graeme - -- fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/ ___ fpc-other maillist - fpc-other@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-other
Re: [fpc-other] What does Embarcadero spend there time on
Tomas Hajny wrote: On Fri, March 8, 2013 17:04, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote: Graeme Geldenhuys wrote: Also, there as no specific person I targeted in fpc-devel. Almost all posts lately contain about 95% quoted text! How does a moderator fail to see this? I really don't want to prolong this and perhaps upset more people than necessary, but has it occurred to you that that's how mailing lists work and that possibly your expectations are unreasonable? . . Just to add another view (to show that it is not a fight among two clearly delineated camps): .. Points noted and generally agreed. - I do not share the opinion of Mark that sending URLs should be considered inappropriate or that senders willing to share some link with others ought to spend time on creating different (shorter) URLs in cases like this (and from this point of view I don't see anything wrong on Graeme's original post). I didn't say it was inappropriate, I said that providing a TinyURL alternative would have helped people who- for some reason or other- couldn't cut-and-paste the full one. This is particularly the case for YouTube, which typically demands a fairly recent browser/Flash combination which might not be present on somebody's primary work computer. In the current case, Google doesn't throw up a link to that video on trivial searches (and more credit to Graham for finding and sharing it as a result) but there's no way that I- for one- am going to start trying to transcribe the entire URL to the laptop next to my main system during work hours: I've got much more important things to do. Of course, simply putting up a TinyURL without explanation is at least as bad as posting a long URL which risks attracting enforced line breaks: I don't know about anybody else, but I'm blowed if I'm going to click on every URL I'm given whatever my level of safeguards :-) The ideal- and this is a convention that I'm used to from a private conferencing system I use- is to post the original URL, the TinyURL equivalent, and a very brief description... I was going to give an example from XKCD but I see that that already uses concise URLs, possibly because the artist has a clue. So again, to avoid any possible doubt: I am not complaining about URLs in the general case. I /am/ complaining, politely as a non-moderator, about the assumption that a URL embedded in a mailing list message is appropriate or intelligible, although it's clearly not as bad as an animated GIF in somebody's sig. And finally- and this one's for you Graeme- I wouldn't be complaining about the URL being less than useful if I hadn't made a minimal attempt to view it, on the basis that you're not a total idiot and might be making an interesting or at least amusing point. -- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues] ___ fpc-other maillist - fpc-other@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-other
Re: [fpc-other] Goodbye, and thanks for the fishes
Marco van de Voort wrote: In our previous episode, Mark Morgan Lloyd said: But I suppose all this begs the question: if one decides not to use Object Pascal, what are the viable alternatives? While hobbywise, I won't let go of FPC (and Wirthian languages) that quickly, professionally it is different. Currently, for me it is not really a problem (small company, my preference has the most weight), but there was some discussion a while back of hiring more programmers and cooperating with certain other (SCADA like) companies, so there was some discussion. The SCADA package we inherited was written in a bastard mix of three versions of MS C, plus a spreadsheet in MS Pascal and assembler interfaces to an IBM communications controller. I replaced it by Delphi code with PostgreSQL as backend, and am completely impenitent. In my case the only viable alternative is C++, but I'm somewhat embedded with a bit of realtime requirement. Sometimes I think it would be easier even now, but I have previous MFC experience, and that still scares me a bit. (IOW, if you go back to C++, what will you use as GUI?) In my previous job, I was more standard business apps, and then the only viable alternative is C# IMHO. One doesn't have to like it, but if I'm leaving Pascal because it is too tiring to defend being in a niche, then you won't pick up some other niche, and the above are (to me) the only viable choices. But is MS really committed to C# and .NET, and if not could it drown Mono etc. out of spite? Which leaves C++, which as I see it has the same issues as Object Pascal except that lots more people use it. -- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues] ___ fpc-other maillist - fpc-other@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-other
Re: [fpc-other] What does Embarcadero spend there time on
On 2013-03-08 20:29, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote: I didn't say it was inappropriate, I said that providing a TinyURL alternative would have helped people who- for some reason or other- couldn't cut-and-paste the full one. Well.. there's the flip-side which is more important: Sites that provide tiny/shortened URL services have a habbit of retiring/expiring thosed links after a certain period of time --leaving the referred URL going nowhere. Perhaps you've never encountered such a situation but I have --several times-- found myself profusely employing profanities towards people doing just that. This is particularly the case for YouTube, which typically demands a fairly recent browser/Flash combination which might not be present on somebody's primary work computer. In the current case, Google doesn't throw up a link to that video on trivial searches (and more credit to Graham for finding and sharing it as a result) but there's no way that I- for one- am going to start trying to transcribe the entire URL to the laptop next to my main system during work hours: I've got much more important things to do. Well.. if you have more important things to do, the first thing I'd expect you to do would be to ignore that link --which is exactly what I did--; plus, one would save more time by not complaining about a link posted in fpc-other. And finally- and this one's for you Graeme- I wouldn't be complaining about the URL being less than useful if I hadn't made a minimal attempt to view it, on the basis that you're not a total idiot and might be making an interesting or at least amusing point. Interesting approach indeed... While I understand/realize that other people will/can have different approaches; If I had found myself in such situation, I'd have rather adressed my complaints at/to YouTube or the manufacturer of my device/os/software or even blamed myself for not having installed the necessary codecs or whatever.. ___ fpc-other maillist - fpc-other@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-other
Re: [fpc-other] Goodbye, and thanks for the fishes
It's sad to see a Pascalian go, but no problem, I've seen this before. Well, if you've tried several other languages developed by more than one team (C, C++, etc. that has standards or widely implemented) you'll feel the same way as you wrote in your blog. They do have extensions (sometimes a lot, weird, sometimes so Pascal :)). Actually, if you keep using only what you want to use, having those unPascalish features shouldn't be a problem. But it's your choice anyway. Feel free to come back when you've faced what I said. From: ik ido...@gmail.com To: Other FPC related discussions. fpc-other@lists.freepascal.org; lazarus-ot...@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org Sent: Saturday, March 9, 2013 12:04 AM Subject: [fpc-other] Goodbye, and thanks for the fishes Hello, After too much thinking I'ved decided to leave here. I don't know if this is permanent or not, but I can't for now continue to be here. I'ved wrote about it here: http://idkn.wordpress.com/2013/03/08/goodbye-pascal/ Goodbye and thanks for the fishes Ido ___ fpc-other maillist - fpc-other@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-other ___ fpc-other maillist - fpc-other@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-other
Re: [fpc-other] What does Embarcadero spend there time on
On 2013-03-08 17:38, Tomas Hajny wrote: - I believe that the response of Graeme to comment from Jonas was clearly inappropriate (calling others idiots is always inappropriate in my view and never leads to any positive outcome) Please note: I did NOT mention any names, so there was no finger pointing. I simply said it in a general term. Just like you would say they are a friendly bunch of people or fishermen tent to stink or scientists are clever or programmers are a different bread. It's a general observation. Now if I said John Smith is an idiot - well, then that is a whole different matter. Regards, - Graeme - ___ fpc-other maillist - fpc-other@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-other
Re: [fpc-other] Goodbye, and thanks for the fishes
On 2013-03-08 18:22, Marco van de Voort wrote: bit. (IOW, if you go back to C++, what will you use as GUI?) You would be crazy [@Mark Jonas: it's a figure of speech] if you don't choose Qt. One doesn't have to like it, but if I'm leaving Pascal because it is too tiring to defend being in a niche, Bickering in the community should also be taken into account. Though that will make me leave the community, but maybe not the language (yet). On a side note: I too am retraining in another language that has a better commercial future for me. For those that didn't know, I am an independent contractor. Regards, - Graeme - ___ fpc-other maillist - fpc-other@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-other
