Dimensional Data

Let’s face it; we humans can be drawn to exaggerate and over-generalize when it comes to modern technology, especially during its early-adoption, nascent phases. This is understandable, many major tech introductions have the potential to change the way the world works or how we execute specific tasks. For that particular reason, the uprise of not-seen-before technologies can create ripples of attention as the start to shake-up the status quo. Moreover, Sci-Fi movies with not-so-accurate technology themes can feed that disquiet, causing the public to create exaggerated notions of what technologies like artificial intelligence would mean for humanity. Time-traveling liquid metal murder robots from the future may seem too far-fetched, but computers which have all the smart answers and can bring about World peace by exposing crimes before they’ve happened? Yes, much more plausible to the average non-technical person even though this would require a coordinated effort from multiple disparate government agencies who are suddenly magically released from the constraints of fiscal budgeting and the regular popularity contest of elections. These plausible possibilities, in turn, increase the need to define what’s real and what isn’t with modern technologies like AI.  There are a lot of misconceptions about artificial intelligence. From intelligent robots eventually turning against and enslaving humans in a dystopian societal apocalypse to AI replacing humans in all areas of life. The AI hype is real. In this article, we’ll be discussing some common AI expectations and defining their underlying reality.  Are we about to face an AI Apocalypse? From The Matrix to The Terminator, almost all AI-related movies portray a future where mankind is overwhelmed by technology which has turned from friend to a foe whose main, single-purposed goal is our annihilation. The AI turns against the human race or tries to take over the world. This isn’t entirely bad, as long as it is all understood to be as fictional as a world populated by dragons and reincarnated dinosaurs. But this is not often the case; the media influence is, tangibly, stronger than ever, and a large percentage of the public translates this easily-consumed fiction into an absolutely likely reality. In other words, such movies add to how the world sees AI innovations. No matter how close to modern times you foray, you’ll find that the narrative remains the same; machine revolting against humans, often with an underlying moral narrative of “well, we got what we deserved”. Almost none portray a world which results from a more probable extension of the various forms of artificial intelligence that actually exist, with fiction being mainly about the human-like type AI.  The Royal Society Report explains the implications of exaggerated expectations and fictional narratives. It reads as follows; “Both fictional and many non-fictional narratives focus on issues that form either a very small subset of contemporary AI research or that are decades if not centuries away from becoming a technological reality. This disconnect between the narratives and the reality of the technology can have several major negative consequences. The prevalence of narratives focused on utopian extremes can create expectations that the technology is not (yet) able to fulfill. This, in turn, can contribute to a hype bubble, with developers and communicators potentially feeding into the bubble through over-promising. If such a bubble bursts because the technology was unable to live up […]

uses   System.IOUtils;   procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject); begin   case TOSVersion.Platform of     TOSVersion.TPlatform.pfWindows:       PlatformPath := ‘Windows’;     TOSVersion.TPlatform.pfMacOS:       PlatformPath := ‘macOS’;     TOSVersion.TPlatform.pfiOS:       PlatformPath := ‘iOS’;     TOSVersion.TPlatform.pfAndroid:       PlatformPath := ‘Android’;     TOSVersion.TPlatform.pfWinRT:       PlatformPath := ‘WinRT’;     TOSVersion.TPlatform.pfLinux:       PlatformPath := ‘Linux’   else       PlatformPath := ‘Unexpected platform’   end;     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘TPlatform: ‘+PlatformPath);   Memo1.Lines.Add(TOSVersion.ToString);     {$IF DEFINED(IOS)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: IOS’);   {$ENDIF}   {$IF DEFINED(IOS32)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: IOS32’);   {$ENDIF}   {$IF DEFINED(IOS64)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: IOS64’);   {$ENDIF}     {$IF DEFINED(ANDROID)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: ANDROID’);   {$ENDIF}   {$IF DEFINED(ANDROID32)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: ANDROID32’);   {$ENDIF}   {$IF DEFINED(ANDROID64)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: ANDROID64’);   {$ENDIF}     {$IF DEFINED(MACOS)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: MACOS’);   {$ENDIF}   {$IF DEFINED(MACOS64)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: MACOS64’);   {$ENDIF}   {$IF DEFINED(OSX)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: OSX’);   {$ENDIF}   {$IF DEFINED(OSX64)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: OSX64’);   {$ENDIF}     {$IF DEFINED(MSWINDOWS)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: MSWINDOWS’);   {$ENDIF}   {$IF DEFINED(WIN32)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: WIN32’);   {$ENDIF}   {$IF DEFINED(WIN64)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: WIN64’);   {$ENDIF}     {$IF DEFINED(LINUX)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: LINUX’);   {$ENDIF}   {$IF DEFINED(LINUX32)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: LINUX32’);   {$ENDIF}   {$IF DEFINED(LINUX64)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: LINUX64’);   {$ENDIF}       {$IF DEFINED(DCC)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: DCC’);   {$ENDIF}     {$IF DEFINED(CONSOLE)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: CONSOLE’);   {$ENDIF}     {$IF DEFINED(POSIX)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: POSIX’);   {$ENDIF}   {$IF DEFINED(POSIX32)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: POSIX32’);   {$ENDIF}   {$IF DEFINED(POSIX64)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: POSIX64’);   {$ENDIF}     {$IF DEFINED(CPUX86)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: CPUX86’);   {$ENDIF}   {$IF DEFINED(CPUX64)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: CPUX64’);   {$ENDIF}     {$IF DEFINED(CPU32BITS)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: CPU32BITS’);   {$ENDIF}     {$IF DEFINED(CPU64BITS)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: CPU64BITS’);   {$ENDIF}     {$IF DEFINED(CPUARM)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: CPUARM’);   {$ENDIF}   {$IF DEFINED(CPUARM32)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: CPUARM32’);   {$ENDIF}   {$IF DEFINED(CPUARM64)}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘Defined: CPUARM64’);   {$ENDIF}     {$IFDEF DEBUG}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘DEBUG is Defined’);   {$ELSE}     Memo1.Lines.Add(‘DEBUG is Not Defined’);   {$ENDIF} end;

Hello. This article is part of a series where we speak with professional software developers, ask them what it’s like to write code for a living, and perhaps gain a few insights into the software development industry along the way. Our guest today is a Delphi MVP and author David Cornelius. David describes himself as “a programmer through-and-through”. He runs a small software development business from his home office and seems to have his priorities right when he says “I love family, music, strategy board games, and the great outdoors”. Living, as he does, half-way between the Pacific Ocean and the Cascade Mountains David says means he is offered a wide variety of places to explore—either on a motorcycle or by hiking from a campground. Hi David, thank you for talking to me today Well, it’s very nice to meet you, Ian!! 😁 David, in his “auditioning for James Bond” pose Which Embarcadero product(s) do you use a) the most b) regularly? a & b: Delphi XE, 10.4, 11. Every day. How and/or why did you become a developer? When I was in grade school, my favorite subject was math. I got a programmable TI (Texas Instruments) calculator and would compete with my grandfather on the most complex calculations we could come up with in its limited 32 steps. The small high school I attended had a TRS-80 with a cassette “drive” for storage but I got impatient waiting for it to load/save and with its many retries and errors so lost interest. But later, when the school set up its first computer lab with three Apple IIs, I spent all available time teaching myself AppleSoft BASIC. When I got to the end of the tutorial book and realized a friend of mine was writing games that could not have been done in BASIC alone, I knew there was so much more to learn—I was hooked on programming by that point! Majoring in Computer Science in college was the obvious next step and the rest, as they say, is history. Do you think you will ever stop being a developer? If so, what would be next? No—I have too many ideas to ever stop, even if I sell my house and travel the country in an RV, I’d still be programming part of the time. What made you start using Delphi/C++ Builder? College exposed me to several different programming languages. I studied assembly on three different processors, enjoyed the structure of FORTRAN, got bored with COBOL and dropped the class, looked at some niche languages like SNOBOL, and taught myself C using Mark William’s Let’s C. But the most useful class was one that taught general programming concepts using an inexpensive tool that allowed us to edit, compile, and debug all in one IDE, a new concept in the mid-80s. It was Turbo Pascal. Later at my first long-term programming job, I was given the opportunity to start a brand-new application and I could choose whatever programming tool I wanted. I went with Turbo Pascal, then at version 4, because I already knew how to use it, I could drop to assembly if I needed to (which I actually did occasionally), and it was starting to get popular—it was the logical place to start. As the application grew over the […]

An Application Programmable Interface or API allows two applications to interact with each other using the API as a bridge or intermediary. If you are not familiar with how to integrate an API then you may be spending a lot of time unnecessarily writing a lot of code from scratch. In other words you may be working too hard! Are you wasting time by writing a lot of code from scratch? This is the main reason you need to start considering integrating APIs into your software. So, we will talk about how to avoid reinventing the wheel every time you design an application. It’s not just the time expended coding things that could have been handled by the API; writing lots of additional code also means you open yourself up to the possibility that you inadvertently introduce errors – bugs – or unintended behavior. Your new code doesn’t benefit from the ‘wisdom of crowds’ which APIs can bring. A professional API from a specialist source often has many thousands of users/consumers who have used the API before and that means any problems and kinks have probably been caught and rectified before you even begin. Letting someone else do the work is always the hard work is always the smart choice, isn’t it? Is it hard to use an API? When I got my first programming internship 4 years ago, in my first whole month, I spent my time integrating different APIs into the web app. I found integrating hard, but after integrating one API, it all become so easy and fun. All I had to do was pay attention to the documentation of the APIs. Using RAD Studio Delphi we also get some additional help to supercharge our skills. RAD Studio has tools such as the REST Debugger and the marvelously powerful REST components do all the hard work for us and help promulgate low code from us and maximum power from our apps. By the end of this tutorial, you will learn how to employ these kinds of useful yet easy to use tools to easily and quickly integrate one of the market-leading APIs into your cross-platform Delphi application. This is the best-kept secret about Delphi that users of other computer languages often overlook – the “RAD” in RAD Studio stands for “rapid application development” and it’s not some kind of tricksy marketing trope; RAD Studio brings your apps from ideas into reality as fast as possible with that legendary rock-solid Delphi application stability means they keep on working too long after many competing technologies have fallen out of fashion or simply become obsolete due to their reliance on runtime support which atrophies over time. What does this article teach me about using APIs in my desktop and mobile apps? I hope that this tutorial will help you start your API Integrator career. We will cover: Explore various APIs and see what they can do for our desktop and mobile applications Look and at how to integrate APIs for use in our own apps Code a demo cross-platform app using Delphi that integrates API The only thing you need is a copy of RAD Studio and basic knowledge of the Delphi programming language! Are you using automation to connect to an API? We have dozens of tutorials on building a […]

Hello. This article is part of a series where we speak with professional software developers, ask them what it’s like to write code for a living, and perhaps gain a few insights into the software development industry along the way. Our guest today is a Delphi and C++ Builder developer who has an amazingly impressive set of pictures of him smiling nonchalantly on the slopes of some absolutely stunning volcanoes at various locations dotted around the world. Stephane Jordi, also known as Steve, is a Swiss geophysicist who made the move from computer geek to computing applied to real-life needs. He specialized in monitoring solutions, first for volcanic activities, then for nuclear power plant seismic surveillance, and enjoys porting all tools to most known platforms. Hi Steve thanks so much for taking the time out to speak with us today – I think you just came off a long flight? Yes after this I am off to bed. I woke up 26 hours ago and am jetlagged 🙂 Which Embarcadero product(s) do you use a) the most b) regularly? I would say Delphi for my current cross-platform developments and C++Builder for scientific software. Since I’m involved in data acquisition, I need very low level access to digital boards and things like that. C++ is more inclined to do so as it is compatible with a very wide 3rd party tools environment. How and/or why did you become a developer? A little bit by chance. Back in 1980 (started very early), I bought a handheld calculator in New York and discovered overnight on the flight back to Switzerland that it was programmable. I had no clue what that meant. The idea that you could let it record and play back sequences of instructions was like magic. It was an HP-33C with 49 lines (keystrokes) that could be recorded. Then my High School was offering optional classes like cooking, theatre and also computing. That world was still very closed and not accessible. Believe it or not, but I came to software development using punch cards doing Fortran IV on big mainframes. I got hooked. Steve has incredible photos which look like they were designed to be desktop wallpapers Do you think you will ever stop being a developer? If so, what would be next? No. Impossible. Once you get this into your DNA, you just want more. I love everything that comes with development: understand a problem or a need, break it into small pieces, imagine what and how they would perform operations, write the code, swear a lot, and eventually see that it works. The road from complexity to delivery is marvelous. What made you start using Delphi/C++ Builder? I was hired for summer job by a company that had only TurboC v2 at the time. That’s how I discovered the C language and the Borland product line, from Prolog to C and Pascal. Then Delphi was released and I really did enjoy the RAD aspect of it. I did know Pascal so it was an easy jump. Then I used all flavors of Turbo C/C++, Borland C++ and then C++Builder which was a natural evolution to follow Delphi. I used Turbo C++ 3 to write my first volcano monitoring software in… Guatemala. I designed the full GUI framework under DOS […]