It baffles me how often folks like yourself seem to truly believe because a particular path was taken to get where we are today that that path was the only possible way we could have gotten here. And you fools believe it's a given that we're better off for it.

If the BSD stack code wasn't available, do you really think no one else could have written a compatible alternative? Especially considering how many have done exactly that? Coding a network stack against a well written open specification isn't magic, it isn't a gift that can only be handled down from the Heavens.

And why is it a given we're better off with happening the way it has? Maybe if MS had to write their own stack they would have contemplated and predicted the shortcomings in TCP/IP v4 and jumped directly to (and helping craft) TCP/IP v6. With the historical market pull of Windows we could have all been running a v6-like stack a decade ago, rather than still limping along with v4.

The fact is we don't know how things would have turned out, yet there's still just as much reason to believe we'd all be better off today as there is to believe we'd be worse off.

You have to look up and right, taking your eyes away from the road.

Nav info is pretty basic and generally presented with simple image/icons, which can easily be consumed simply with peripheral vision most of the time.

So no need to even glance over most of the time, and even when you do the entire road is still well within the rest of your peripheral vision (which even w/o any screen is what you use to receive 95% of visual driving information with anyway).

That's wildly different than most standalone GPS units which require a much farther eye shift as well as huge focus change, while reflective HUD devices (like Glass) can be focused to appear at the average viewing distance of important traffic around you (50 feet give or take, about where the car in front of you will be at speed).

(Creative) writing is oddly different for many. Needlessly difficult tools can often help the creative process somehow and writers are frequently drawn to them. Or maybe they're just nostalgic, or mentally masochistic, it's hard to say. Whatever it is book writers often have other productivity issues that far out-shadow poor typing skills.

It's a special case. For the rest, they'd better have their typing skill shit together.

Seriously, if you have not already, give node.js a spin if you do any Internet-related development work. And I don't mean anybody should necessarily start using it, just that it is something to know today.

Here's all you need to know to day about node.js: Node.js Is Bad Ass Rock Star Tech

Funny....absolutely every use case you listed strongly benefits from having solid keyboard skills (ie, touch typing). Frankly anything less should be considered incompetent, or at least very junior. In this day and age it's more important to know how to use a keyboard fluently than it is to know how to write fluently. That's been the case for decades now.

There's nothing "clearly" about it. It entirely depends on what, if anything, the Glass is displaying.

GPS, navigation: Far less distracting then a traditional GPS unit as your eyes don't need to leave the road.

Vehicle information: Far less distracting then even the built in speedometers and such, again because your eyes need not leave the road. For example, Glass linked up with http://www.automatic.com/
 

Yep, I'll agree with you: If you're pulling a crappy trailer that probably shouldn't be on the road at all, the F350 will compensate for the trailer's defects better than the F100.

The point still stands, however: Using bigger trucks to compensate for defective trailer designs is nothing short of a kludge.

If it's got "really good trailer breaks", and loaded to spec and properly, you could be pulling it with a moped and still stop in the same distance.

So you and I probably have a differing opinion of what would qualify as "really good trailer breaks".

You don't always get to tow under ideal conditions.

Ideal? No. But properly rated and safe? Absolutely.

Otherwise you should not be on the road. It's that simple. Just because some backroad hicks do it all the time and they haven't offed themselves yet doesn't mean jack shit.

When I drive through the country and see "cowboys" driving shiny new $60k trucks pulling a rusted out tin can excuse for a trailer, it's pretty clear what happened: They sink all their money into their sweet ride and just can't stomach "wasting" anything on a proper trailer when the 40 year old rusted junk pile is still 'hauling just fine.

Of course, it's not just the hicks that do this. There's plenty of city folks hauling huge $100k boats with a $70k truck on a $2,000 trailer they picked up on craigslist for $500.

And yet, every big rig crossing the country is pulling a trailer 3-6x the weight of the tractor. And the rating towing capacity of light trucks is commonly about double the truck weight (limited more by engine and transmission cooling than anything else).

Of course, that's properly equipped, which at those upper limits implies active breaking on the trailer.

Even a tiny load on a trailer without its own breaks will make the entire rig go squirrelly when stopping. With good trailer breaks however, the tow vehicle will barely feel it at all.

Weight is about STOPPING a load and trailering it in a stable fashion.

Clearly you've never hauled anything more impressive than a jet ski.

Any trailer of enough weight to matter is going to have its own breaking system and sure as hell not rely upon the truck for any significant breaking force.

Weight is only going to possibly matter when pulling under averse conditions (very heavy load, up a steep hill, on a wet or loose road).

So if you can build a cheaper equivalent... why aren't you in business, building cheaper equivalents and getting rich off the fact that it's costing you less to build equivalent hardware?

Because if you haven't figured it out yet, the vast majority of the market place is not rational. Cheaper, faster, better, etc is all very far down the list of factors that bring about success in business. Apple is the pinnacle example of that fact, and they know it. Apple laughs all the way to the bank at anyone and everyone who actually believes "economics 101" bullshit.

Consumers are humans and humans are simply not rational beings. So the key to understanding markets is to understand not logic and reason (as MBAs would tell us), but psychology. The absolute single key to Apple's business success is their understanding of psychology and ability to manipulate it into making irrational purchasing choices.

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.