Apple sucks compared to Android. The hardware is antiquated before Apple can get it onto the shelves, and yet they charge a premium for the little Apple logo. And then there's the app store, with a smaller audience, less choice, and Apple robbing both the creators and the consumers.

From the outside, all I can do is order another bag of popcorn and watch Apple users pay a tax for being stupid.

100%.

A little over 5 years ago, when it came time to build a new desktop machine, the number of hours/days lost to recovering broken VMs, lost files, jacked up drivers, etc., due to Microsoft updates was the deciding factor in making the move to Linux. I chose Mint because I wanted simple install experience and a familiar GUI layout. I haven't regretted it once. I run Windows (various versions) in VMs if I need to for software development, but the host is Linux.

That worked out so well that, when a Windows update killed the sound drivers on my laptop and could not be fixed, I installed the latest Mint, dual boot, and I haven't had a problem since. When my daughter bugged me to give her my old laptop, I installed Mint on that as well, showed her how to find and install software, and she's perfectly happy with it.

Why people put up with Microsoft's antics, I can't understand.

And here I am on my Linux Mint desktop workstation congratulating myself once again on my move to the Linux world SPECIFICALLY because Microsoft's updates kept screwing up my work environment.

First off, it was Turbo Pascal until version 4. Then it was Borland Pascal. BP 5.5 and 7.0 were incredibly easy to develop applications with. The beta diskettes that Delphi came out on were labeled "AppBuilder". And Delphi is still around, still being used. I know this because my primary development languages are Object Pascal, Java, Javascript, and C#. In fact, I picked up TP 3.01b in college and I've been using Pascal and Object Pascal ever since. I still have install disks for every version... in a box somewhere...

You can now develop for Windows, iOS, Android, and Linux using the same code base. It's amazing what it can accomplish right out of the box. While the world may have moved on and other languages are more popular thanks to Embarcadero's high price for the high end version of Delphi and it's dwindling development community, it's still an incredible development tool, and I say that as a contract programmer who, again, also develops in other languages.

So I find it funny that you refer to it as a coding dinosaur. I can develop applications from beginning to end quicker in that IDE than any other I've used. The language wasn't the reason Delphi didn't squash Microsoft's offerings. It's because Microsoft hired away all of Borland's senior developers, and after that Borland couldn't seem to find its footing, either in advancing its IDE or in its marketing.

Having said that, would I recommend Delphi to a company that was just starting up? No. Like I said, It's expensive and it's difficult to find developers with actual experience. But I know a number of large companies that are Delphi shops and cling loyally to the Delphi line of tools.

It's not dead yet.

Exactly what I was going to post. Musk has products and services he'd like to sell, and these pronouncements are based entirely on his desire to "actualize" his dreams of planet-buying wealth. We are more than capable of installing enough wind, solar, and wave power generation facilities to keep up with demand.

Apparently I'm pulling my company out of GoDaddy just in time.

After years of having to call up GoDaddy support once every 4 to 6 months because our website would suddenly "disappear" from the web, they abandoned the courtesy email accounts that were bundled with their hosting plans and forced their customers onto Microsoft 365 for email and calendaring. That adversely affected our business for several days and would eventually cost us a lot of money for something that, when we first opened our account, was free. I was fed up. So far, in the past week, I've had all our major hosting accounts moved to another hosting company, and the remaining parked domains and minor hosting accounts are moving this weekend. Our business with GoDaddy should be terminated by end of next week. Our cloud web services were already on a different hosting company just because we didn't trust GoDaddy to do the job.

We don't use WordPress, but once a system is compromised, everything connected to that system is threatened. It's the ISP's job to keep the service software they host up-to-date and to patch vulnerabilities ASAP. GoDaddy's security misfire puts their customers at risk. Since we also build eCommerce and business websites, our advice to our customers on possible hosting companies will not include GoDaddy.

This was my reaction as well. From the article: "“The design of topics was informed by our learnings from the earlier FLoC trials...And this resulted in a bunch of great feedback from the community, as I’m sure you know."

If the feedback didn't include an overwhelming percentage of "f*** you"s, then the audience was corporate entities with an Orwellian interest in your private data. No thank you.

Firefox is looking better all the time.

I *wish* I worked 8 hours a day. My current job not only requires my full attention from 7am to 4pm, but I often find myself studying the latest tech and articles until late into the evening. By the time Friday rolls around, I'm exhausted. And COVID has only made it worse.

Did you just say comments must be processed?

How long have you been programming?

The majority of programmers with any experience with it hate C++, not OOP. I've never met a programmer that hated OOP.

It's a plutocracy. Insufficiently regulated capitalism poisons any attempt at truly representative democracy. Mix in Mango Mussolini and it starts to morph into fascism.

I was good with it until you got to the voting part. It makes a difference. Don't vote fascism. Vote blue all the way down the ticket to save our democracy.

To answer the title, No. Trying to make every idiot on the planet a "coder" is a trillion dollar waster.

OOP is a tool that, at its heart, should have resulted in increasing code reuse while decreasing conceptual confusion. I was a procedural programmer long before I adopted OOP, and proper use of object oriented concepts and yes, even some patterns, resulted in far more highly maintainable code.

The biggest wastes of money I've seen have been:

1. hiring incompetent people;
2. toying with the technology stack in mid-cycle instead of producing deliverables;
3. programmers who feel an overwhelming desire to rewrite everything they touch instead of first *understanding* the code they're looking at (yes, Flora, I'm talking about you);
4. Facebook. I had to include it. It's a total time suck.

But OOP is not the problem. Incompetence is the problem.