I think this image metaphorically illustrates the situation surrounding Delphi 10.4.1. High-speed police chases… they happen basically every day. They all end the same.
The “bad guys” always seem to have such confidence when they are speeding down the highway at 90mph. Unfortunately for them, they are typically not looking into the sky, and therefore do not notice that they are royally f*cked by the chopper following them with infrared cameras. They also are unaware that the cops have already coordinated spike strips 10 blocks ahead, and they are about to lose their tires.
Arrogant and ignorant, they barrel on as-if they believe they can get away and evade judgement…
People like to put Jesse Ventura and Donald Trump in the same category. They both have affiliations with the entertainment industry, including the production of “Pro Wrestling”. They both were insurgent candidates who shook up the political party system… but speaking as someone who actually voted for Jesse Ventura (and did not regret doing so)… let me tell you, Donald Trump is no Jesse Ventura.
AMD has been selling us 99% Intel-Compatible chips for as almost as long as I can remember. It was in the mid-late 90’s when Intel compatible motherboards started including ZIF Sockets, making it easy for customers to insert, remove, and swap CPU chips attached to their motherboards. But have Intel clones been a good choice over the years? Are they a good choice now? Let’s ponder.
I was going through my spam email, and came across a typical spam from Embarcadero that made me throw up in my mouth a little.
Instead of releasing 10.4.1 hot on the heels of the horribly failed Rad Studio 10.4, Embarcadero is trying to “sell” it to customers who don’t have a support/upgrade agreement in place.
ClickHouse offers a friendly, unassuming, first impression. With it’s compatibility with MYSQL’s wire protocol, many may think that it should be easy to integrate with your existing system. With it’s promises of speed, it may seem like like a compelling option for your database application.
However, doing even the most simple thing in ClickHouse becomes a mess incredibly quickly, and the speed advantages often come at the cost of data accuracy. Programmers are often left out in the cold to design/redesign systems specifically to play nice with ClickHouse, which operates on a paradigm that relatively few are familiar with.
With the nVidia Geforce 3090 release just around the corner, I gotta be honest… I, and a lot of people, felt pretty ripped off about the 2000 series GPUs. A very privileged few could actually afford the 2080ti, which was the only card that came close to delivering acceptable performance in RTX-enabled games at high resolutions. Will I bend over and accept the $1600 cost of upgrading to a Geforce RTX 3090 when it launches Sept 24, 2020? Let us ponder…
A recent review on Tech Crunch emphasized that the Bing Maps data scrubbing in Flight Simulator 2020 is beautiful when it is on target, but frequently is quite obviously off-target. This, combined with new leaks that show blatant artifacts in heavy traffic areas such as San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge, reinforces everything I’ve been saying all along about Flight Simulator’s relationship with Bing Maps and Azure AI for months.
Multiple Leaked videos show satellite projections beneath major bridges in San Francisco and New York City.
Don’t get your hopes too high when Microsoft claims that they’ve modeled the entire world in 3D. We all know they’ve done a much poorer job than Google in this regard, and even Google has barely scratched the surface. In reality, what you’re buying is a fraction of what’s available on Google, some hand-crafted airports (40 of them in the Premium-Deluxe edition), a few models of landmarks (even Pyongyang’s May Day Stadium has a model), with a whole bunch of auto-gen scenery in between (which is how 99.99% of the world will be rendered by my estimation). The auto-gen techniques are probably just an evolution the same techniques you would have found in FSX, but clearly updated for the first time in 13 years.
A recently leaked video of Flight Simulator shows just how ugly the scenery can get when you travel off the beaten path in the upcoming Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.
Microsoft has been careful to control the messaging coming out of FS2020, only publishing screenshots and videos that are polished and show the simulator in it’s best light.
If you are using the standard Delphi Memory manager in your Delphi applications, you’re probably missing out.
One of the things, I really like about Delphi is that it ahs always offered an easy way to replace the memory manager with your own, or one that you get from a 3rd party. Being a nuts-and-bolts kind of programmer, coming up with a better memory manager for Delphi naturally became an intense personal obsession.
I have also always been particularly fascinated by the idea that a computer could have multiple CPUs and, therefore, do more than one thing at the same time. I built Big Brain as a personal challenge… to see if I could make Memory Allocations run faster on systems with multiple cores and CPUs.
The first version was released circa 2000, and was eventually adopted by hundreds of companies and organizations. I stopped “selling” it in 2007, giving it away for free on a boring, white web page with just a couple of links.
20 years later, I am still just as obsessed with nuts and bolts and multi-processing, and I test out my designs on an AMD 2990WX chip, which has 32 cores, capable of handling 64-threads in addition to various 16, 8, 6, 4, and 2-Core Intel and AMD chips.
As I argued yesterday, you can’t Azure AI your way past complete utter, total lack of accurate data. Flight Simulator 2020 will leave Flight Simmers wishing that they had Google’s data. How bad will it be? Well, here’s a side-by-side comparison — a mix and match, including some major cities and mid-sized cities that you might want to fly a plane to.
UPDATE: It should be noted that this is a comparison of Microsoft vs. Google data sets and none of these screens are from FS2020. However, it is relevant to note that FS2020 is using Microsoft’s Bing Maps to inform the sim about areas of the world that human artists don’t have the time, incentive, nor budget to painstakingly comb through. I do not have insider access, so I can’t tell you, for example, how good or bad Tokyo looks in FS2020, and even if I had insider access, I’d be bound by NDA to say nothing, however I can tell you that Microsoft published a pretty poor screen shot of Warsaw, Poland that was missing virtually all of the Warsaw skyline. None of these screenshots are from Flight Simulator 2020 therefore I am making no observations about what the actual scenery in FS2020 will actually look like, and in fact, much of what I’m talking about here is pure speculation. Microsoft could, for example, rely on additional surveys and artwork hand-crafted by 3D artists to render Tokyo… however… the point I’m trying to make here is that the forgotten parts of the world are going to be only as accurate as Bing Maps and Azure AI can artificially make guesses.
We all know that Google and Microsoft both have good data for New York and San Francisco… but what about Honolulu, Tokyo, Flint, Rockford, IL? What about the mountain ranges? This gallery might leave you wondering how in the heck Microsoft expects to employ Azure AI to auto-gen all this missing architecture. It would probably, honestly, be easier for them to just buy it from a vendor.
