Just put a static DHCP lease in your router config, problem solved?

So clearly I must be imagining the Samsung WI-FI All-Share Cast Hub, Wireless HDMI Display Adapter, which...and I quote, "Mirrors phone screen on HDTV".

I tried really hard to find the point to all this, but to say the author is vague would be a huge understatement.

The claims are that Perl is slow. Slow how, exactly? The only reference given for this observation is a heavy floating point matrix math algorithm. That's hardly a job that would prompt many to reach for the Perl hammer, but if you're making that choice we have PDL.

The complaints are about Perl's "magic" and how that's the core of its perceived performance problem. RPerl promises a "low-magic" Perl...what parts are you planning on cutting out? I hazard to guess from the marketing that the list includes anything that isn't well suited for raw number crunching. That would basically make it not-Perl.

While Perl is a full feature language well capable of performing across a very wide range of domains, it really feels like the author has decided he only works in one of Perl's least natural settings. Having still chosen Perl as his tool of choice, he declares the entire thing bunk because it under-performs in his one niche domain. Brilliant! :-/

The first thing any decent Perl Hacker will tell you is use the right tool for the job... Clearly, for his job, Perl isn't it. There's precisely zero chance of RPerl returning Perl to "its former glory" (whatever the fuck that even means) because it's increasingly clear that RPerl wants to blow up Perl to save Perl. And that's just stupid.

Either download PDL and move on with your life, or pick another language that performs in your niche domain: Ripping out everything that makes Perl be Perl under some strange and highly selective notion of "performance", is a waste of time. Of course, it's pretty clear the author is smart...but a mathematician, which might explain some of this strange obsession and odd way of approaching the "problem": Mathematicians as a generalization just aren't good software developers (or much of anything else that has to do with the daily grind of the computing world), and Perl really wasn't built for them. Perl is a practical tool for solving practical problems, which doesn't typically include plotting the paths of planets in the universe. That's just not its optimized use case.

All the reasons Perl is fantastic are extremely likely to drive mathematician types absolutely bonkers, the same way it drives (real) Computer Science types bonkers. And they can curse it as they always have, while they tinker away at their elegant minimalistic research toy langauges, and yet Perl is still the duct tape that continues to hold the Internet together.

It really doesn't seem like it should be, does it?

Yet I swear, 9 out of 10 applicants we get for a job literally can't get much past Hello World. It's mind boggling. And these are the applicants that have made it through the filters, not even the raw stack! I don't care if they have a decade of verifiable experience, they're still bunk. These are the guys applying for "Senior" positions....I can't imagine what we'd scrape up if we were looking for less seasoned canidates.

And we're not even all that picky. We'll quickly jump all over competent.

I think that's the mistake gifted programmers make: This stuff comes naturally to us so we can't really understand that it's difficult for most others.

Or... It could just be that the tech boom is back, with a vengeance.

Everything I hear out of my friends in the San Francisco area is that the industry is booming bigger then even the dot.com days. The unemployment rate for software engineers has fallen through the floor, now nationally around 2% and below 1% in some major markets.

It's far more than simply a question of experience or training.

Developing software (in most realms) is more art than science and few would suggest being a good artist of any sort is simply a matter of experience. No amount of practice is going turn a no talent ass clown into the next Jimmy Page.

Sure, true talent needs to be nurtured to turn potential into greatness, no doubt. But here's the rub: Most software developers in the marketplace (and by a LARGE majority)...simply have no potential. Add on top of that for those few that do have real talent they will largely nurture themselves better and faster then you ever could through your "training programs".

So if the majority can't be helped, and the majority of the minority is going to help themselves anyway, you are left with only a very small slice of the demographic that A) Has the talent yet B) Isn't motivated enough to help themselves improve. THAT is the entirety of the group that you will significantly help through "training and retraining your coders". The group is just so small it isn't worth the time or effort: Employers help those who help themselves.

Once you've wrapped your mind around the math of this reality, you'll begin to understand why the hiring practices of development groups are so strongly skewed towards finding those in the majority minority of "Good Talent + Self-Motivation".

The assertion was that the technology for autonomous operation didn't yet exist or at least wasn't widespread.

And that assertion is utterly false and incredibly naive. Pulling a gun trigger is, from a technological standpoint, no different than snapping a camera's shutter.

The only thing stopping Reaper Drones from pulling their own triggers is a human choosing not to use that (already existing) feature. If that brings you comfort, you're an idiot.

Good god no...not WoW.

The Pandarian expansion saw the last tiny relevance left of the skill trees erased for good. Any nuance or creativity in builds or play style gone. Blizzard had been working to years to stomp out any actual variety, inventiveness, or frankly skill from the game for years. With Pandarian they finally saw their dreams realized: A utopia for ultra-casual players to button-smash their way to phat lootz.

The actual game of WoW is now so bad even the game designers realized it wasn't worth playing...and added in an entire pokemon-style meta game to play instead. It's no different then when idiots would log into Ultima Online just so they could play chess inside someone's virtual backpack.

WoW is dead.

Drones are not fully-automated killing machines. They aren't just thrown in the sky to exterminate an area. They're still piloted by humans from a distance.

Your perception of drone technology is at least a decade out of date. Hobby level R/C planes were doing fully-automated flights at least a decade ago (which means they weren't really R/C of course).

Stability comes in many forms, not simply up time.

For example, Linux has a long, long history of badly managed architectural transitions:
a.out to ELF
libc to glibc
virtual memory manager musical chairs
filesystem flavor of the month
32bit to 64bit
package manager du jour
sound
MAKEDEV/devfs/udev.

Stack on top of that the variety of distributions, with their own often wildly different ideas about where things should live and how they should be managed, frequently causes stability issues by introducing human error points. Many of those ideas are also inherently bad and affect stability, such as RedHat and friends throwing everything and the kitchen sink into /usr. -Yes, some packages can be retargeted...but not many, and doing so breaks convention (albeit a bad one) causing the same sort of management stability issues that multiple distros cause just on the local level.

All of that ends up being a make-work program for Linux System Administrators...honestly at leat 50% of your daily job only exists because of the instability of the Linux ecosystem.

Linux (all distros, all of it) is a Configuration Manager's worst nightmare.

While I feel for your plight, the idea of running without hardware acceleration in 2013 is pretty uncommon. It's certainly nothing any sane person would bother optimizing for. We're optimistically talking about 0.1% of users. You'd effectively be optimizing for actually broken systems. That's like optimizing a car's high speed handling for cases where one tire is flat; The answer isn't to optimize for conditions of only 3 healthy tires...the answer is to change out the flat tire.

Any chance you can offer a link to any of these particularly intensive PDFs?

I'm not discounting your experience, I just have yet to encounter anything like you're describing.

That's completely opposite of my experience.

On my not-so-hot computer I regularly open very complex, 400+ page PDFs (music scores mostly). We're talking 30MB w/o any imbedded images, just pure intensive processing instructions.

Chrome, from a total standstill (the process not even running yet), takes just slightly longer then it takes me to blink to start, load the PDF, and render. It's an order of magnitude faster in every way then every other PDF viewer I've tried, and I've tried quite a few.

It lacks features (PDF bookmarks, etc), but render speed is fantastic.

Programs are thought.

Wait, I thought they were math?

Math is not abstract. Math is not thought.

Math is a symbolic representation of the computational laws of the universe. When we eventually find intelligent life on another planet, they too will understand that 1 + 1 = 2. Guaranteed. The written symbols they use will differ, but the math won't. Not the teeniest, tiniest bit.

Programs are creative thought. There isn't anything even slightly creative about math any more then there's anything creative about discovering the Higgs boson.

Just because you can think about math in no way suggests that math is thought. I can think about cute puppies too, but that doesn't mean my dog is just an abstract thought.

By that logic programs are also all particles, electrons to be precise.

You can't say something isn't patentable simply because it can be described by math...because absolutely everything can be described with math, very much including the thought in your head at this very moment.

You can't use math as a distinction because math makes no distinctions.