It's similar to FedRAMP systems like AWS GovCloud (US), which can only be accessed by someone who is a US person (US citizen or lawful permanent resident) and on US soil (physically in the US at the time of access).
LACK tables specifically are well proven to be quite sturdy actually. They happen to be just the right width for servers / network devices, and so people have used them for that purpose for ages. Search for "LACK rack", or see e.g. https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/LackRack. 20kg is nothing; I've personally put >100kg on top.
They're a bit less usable that way now. The legs are basically completely hollow these days so you're not actually able to bear much weight on the screws so the only option is stacking the items so the weight is born by whatever surface is below the "rack" at which point you could just as easily call stacking the equipment an air rack (or an iLackaRack maybe /s).
It really depends. The DMCA does have limited exemptions for reverse engineering for interoperability. The EFF has a good overview: https://www.eff.org/issues/coders/reverse-engineering-faq (search for DMCA). My personal takeaway is that this question cannot be definitely answered outside of court.
I have had a question for a long time, and this may be my one chance to ask someone who actually knows how these things work.
When you were working on this, have you considered playing music that (and please don't take this the wrong way; this may be exaggerated but maybe you will understand what I mean) pre-retirement non-musicians would listen to, where the composer is still alive, and that hasn't been played in the same venue a hundred times? Looking at the Gewandhauses schedule right now, there's absolutely nothing for me.
The San Francisco Symphony plays a top-tier movie (Top Gun, Titanic, Lord of the Rings, etc.) with the film music performed live by the orchestra every few months, and I go to many of these. I got tickets for the Game of Thrones series finale concert (different venue). I absolutely loved Video Games Live, which actually has been in Leipzig too, but in the Arena, and well over a decade ago. I went to a Lindsey Stirling concert, who I knew from YouTube.
So my question is: Why can't the Gewandhaus do something like that regularly? Why can these events only be available in large cities like San Francisco? It's actually frustratingly difficult to find such events in smaller cities. Is it licensing/artist fees? Not interesting for the local musicians? Events like this reliably book out large venues several times in a row, so can it really be lack of demand? Maybe only from the wrong customers?
Thank you! I always wonder this as well. Maybe part of it is "what is the difference between classical music and music played by a symphony/orchestra?"
I suspect it boils down to such things being done far more for social status and such than actual enjoyment.
Windows 11 recently pushed an update to discontinue Windows Mixed Reality (WMR), bricking my <5 years old, $500 Reverb G2 VR headset, which I bought after Meta bought out Oculus and started requiring a Meta account, essentially bricking my Rift S. No thanks.
Delphi and Visual Basic 6 were definitely not the pinnacle of UI development.
For example, all layout was pixel based. Making windows resizable required much complex ad-hoc code, and internationalization was hard as well. Very early in my career, I have spent person months clicking through every single screen in a large desktop application to find words cut off due to words having different lengths (measured in pixel) in different languages. I knew what "Ok" and "Cancel" meant in half a dozen languages. At the time, Java was really breaking ground with container based layouts in Swing. Delphi and Visual Basic caught up only in the .NET era.
Don't know about VB6, but at least Delphi had Align property and TPanel/TGroupBox. Together, it allowed to make apps that handle resizing just fine without any custom logic.
(it has been a very long time, but I think those only handled internal composition and not overall window size.. so you'd still need some custom code if you wanted dialogs as compact as possible. But as long as you never missed setting Align property, you did _not_ have to manually resize every control for different text/font size).
It's actually not entirely correct with respect to VB6. It did indeed use absolute layouts, but unlike Delphi with its pixel units, in VB everything was measured in "twips" (1⁄1440 of inch, or 1⁄20 of point). This would then be converted to actual pixels based on the DPI setting of the system.
> Delphi and Visual Basic 6 were definitely not the pinnacle of UI development.
> All layout was pixel based.
I'd say that was a very reasonable trade-off at the time, when most screens were somewhere between 640x480 and 1024x768 resolutions at 72 DPI. This simplified UI design sufficiently enough that VB/Delphi provided an optimal solution that, yes in hindsight, would most accurately be described as a "local maxima" for the environment and the time.
> Making windows resizable required much complex ad-hoc code
I remember there were ActiveX controls one could drop onto their form that would attempt to derive the layout based on initial positioning of controls, i.e. that a lower row of buttons should be anchored to the bottom of the window, while textboxes are took up a larger area would automagically resize with the window.
These sort of excuses always come up when Delphi and its insane productivity is mentioned. The same thing happens in conversations about how slow software has gotten.
High-DPI displays, internationalization, and accessibility are a pain but don't introduce enough complexity to hand-waive away the criticism.
Going a bit off-topic, but the browser is carrying around so many legacy concepts and ideas - it's a complete disaster - but it's the only option. The document object model is slow and weird to use to build reactive user interfaces.
We should demand something better. The browser is a local maximum as an application platform, and we should stop defending it.
You can’t look at the language in isolation. Visual Basic was backed by the fantastic Visual Studio for development. That ecosystem was way more mature than Java ever got with Swing et al. IMO, if there’s one thing MS ever did right, it was how they nailed WYSIWYG GUI app development. Now they’re going backwards with the WinUI XAML crap.
The experience has become worse with WinUI 3. They got rid of the designer view. So now you're developing the UX code first. This is very unlike the prior paradigm, where you would typically drag and drop the components in your workspace/design view and then code the interactions. It is precisely what made Windows programming so accessible to the millions of developers. This is a step in the wrong direction IMO.
I came from Visual C++/Basic world when I first got my Mac and dove into Xcode for the first time (2002? 2003?). Flexible layouts, connecting UI elements to datasources, localization...
VB6 (and its predecessors) didn't ship with windows resizing and alignment out of the box, but there were 3rd party components that did that nicely. This happened way before Java.
Yes it did, IDE tooling was the answer, and Netbeans still provides its Matisse, WindowBuilder on Eclipse, and as does InteliJ.
Back in the day, JBuilder offered a Delphi like experience.
What I would agree is that the thing that actually made Swing hard are the defaults, which required books like "Filthy Rich Clients" as gate into making wow Swing applications.
