<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META content="text/html; charset=windows-1252" http-equiv=Content-Type>
<META name=GENERATOR content="MSHTML 8.00.6001.18813">
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=#ffffff>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2 face=Arial>A few pithy
observations:</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2 face=Arial>-Short summary - no point
complaining!! (as Eckhart Tolle said "suffering only starts if you cannot
accept what is real")</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2 face=Arial>-I have the impressions MS only
started supplying free windows updates around the time of XP SP2 once they
started getting such bad press about the security holes in Windows, around
2003/2004. If they had not they would have had taken very very bad press
and general reputation from the security problems in XP. This
effort also had much to do with derailing the then development of what
ended up as Vista as they moved a lot of staff to fixes. Most technical
commentators say they did a pretty good job of redoing their coding standards -
which lincluded a whole list of standard C routines that could not be used
anywhere in code because of the potential abuses of them - (stcat was I recall
among them - which is geting pretty severe!). It was still however
an exercise in patching a system designed as open as possible for program
interoperation and is only partially successful compared to say industrial
Unix</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2 face=Arial>-The only knowledge I have of D2005
was a friend was happy using it for work doing heavy graphics. He
updated to D2006/D2007 later and compared using all of them quite
favourably. My inital experience with BDS2006 was there were
increasing memory usage over time that did get fixed steadily with
hotfixes and D2007 was better again. ( Firefox 2 was worse, also
cleaned up a lot in Firefox 3 and Firefox 3.6/3.7 - coming)</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2 face=Arial>-Yes upgrading Delphi costs
money. Remember its the only way that E gets money from developers, and a
professional version is reasonable price - the D2007 Professional edition
contains much of and more than the Enterprise edition had in D5 (eg Client
datasets, Intraweb, XP/Vista themes and Rave reports). If
you are wanting to earn good money from your tools you expect to pay for good
ones. Look at it as betting money that Delphi has a future. If
you are a Jade developer you used to and probably still pay a percentage of all
sales to Jade on deployment (used to be 25%) - would you rather such a
scheme?</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2 face=Arial>-$500, $1000, $1500 for complete IDE,
really how many hours work needed to pay it off? less than paying off your
PC I bet. If you buy a lemon PC you triy to get it fixed,
but after a while if its a waste of time you generally go get a newer one
and pay again.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2 face=Arial>-If you want free tools get
Eclipse/Lazarus. Delphi is better. Or get the Turbo Delphi
version. There is a lot to be said for using only the standard VCL to do
everything anyway (I use almost nothing else and am pleased about that -
but still get the Professional version).</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2 face=Arial>-If people are stuck on D7 and want a
cheaper upgrade path, I suggest some lobbying to E for a special upgrade period
and jump on it. D2007 has been so much better than D7 anyway overall
that you have had lots of chances up to now, that you almost took a gamble by
not upgrading that you would be able to as cheaply later. Personally
I would have not been surprised if I got no upgrade rights from D2007 if the
owner had changed and 3 years had passed - I get no cheap upgrade from Vista to
Windows 7 and thats only a year old with the same owner who could well have
offered a cheap upgrade for PR from an unpopular version of
Windows....</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV>John</DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV>>You are right, and its worth noting how far along MS have moved their
"bug fix" policy since they tried to charge for >cdroms to fix bugs.
Many mnay more years support now.</DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"><FONT
color=#000000 size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </BLOCKQUOTE></BODY></HTML>