I have a high-deductible PPO medical plan: if I go to a Doctor, I pay the bill directly. It's not unusual for there to be a discount "If you pay at the time of services." Generally, it's around 25%, but sometimes it goes as high as 50%. I interpret this …

Alan Zeichick, in today's SD Times News on Thursday, observes two aspects of Borland's re-org that are troubling: "The first is combining sales and professional services together into one field operations group. The other is folding customer support into research & development."

Zeichick says: "Knowing that the goal of a sales …

Marco Cantu (hi, Marco!) notes my posts on Delphi and makes some very well-taken points, notably:

• Delphi's "class helpers" are equivalent (or at least similar) to C# 3.0's "extension methods," so Delphi itself could be used as an example of my "trend away from structural explicitness";
• There's nothing inherent …

Microsoft was granted patent 7,039,699 today, which on reading the claims appears to be: use a GUID as a database ID, send it back as a cookie, and share usage data between computers within the domain with access to the central database. The entire claim (that's the important …

In response to a post by Don Box complimenting Ruby, Patrick Logan says: "If Microsoft looks at Ruby as competition> then Microsoft has already lost the war."

I take two possible meanings from Logan's post:

1. If Microsoft thinks Ruby is important, they're ignoring the threat to them posed by X …

Huw Collingbourne turned me on to Sapphire in Steel, a Ruby programming environment implemented as a VS2005 plug-in: "Ruby In Steel 0.5.12 provides syntax sensitive code colouring and collapsing; a fully integrated interactive console which can be docked within the Visual Studio environment; integrated syntax error handling - click …

The other shoe is dropping.

This was inevitable; one of the "hard decisions" that Borland and DevCo had to face. Still no word on a buyer for DevCo.

"Most of the layoffs will come from a restructuring of Borland's international operations," says the wire and I don't take the news …

Rot in peace.

It's probably not shocking to hear that as a teen I played Dungeons & Dragons. Rob, the super-cool guy who worked at "Games People Play" (he wore leggings, a buck knife on his belt, and occasionally carried a bo staff. We worshipped him), told me there were some good DMs at …

John Montgomery is wondering how people learned to program, especially non-professional programmers. Well, some years I make more money writing than programming, so here's my story:

My desire to learn programming was sparked by my Dad bringing home Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" -- an oversized paperback that contained cartoons …