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Comment Re:Make it nearly 70 (Score 1) 521

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.

Comment Re:Make it nearly 70 (Score 1) 521

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.

Comment Re:Make it nearly 70 (Score 1) 521

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.

Comment Re:Make it nearly 70 (Score 2) 521

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).

Comment Re:So if you can build a cheaper equivalent... (Score 1) 804

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.

Comment What's the point? (Score 1) 4

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.

Comment Re:There is no "shortfall". (Score 1) 381

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.

Comment Re:There is no "shortfall". (Score 0) 381

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".

Comment Re:Not the same... (Score 1) 211

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.

Comment Re:WoW, ESO (Score 0) 555

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.

Comment Re:Not the same... (Score 0) 211

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).

Comment Re:For surely (Score 3, Insightful) 83

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.

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