IMHO the use of vendor prefixes was the right thing to do, and remains exactly the right thing to do.

The problem instead is that the standardisation process is taking far too long.

2D transforms, 3D transforms, transitions and animations still aren't officially standardised. They've existed for years, and are now supported in all major browsers (if one includes IE10), and are all essentially compatible. There's mostly only been minor tweaks to them all since they first appeared. Yet these CSS3 features are all at "working draft" stage. Indeed, the 3D transforms spec is a working draft, dated March 2009, over 3 years ago. It's absurd.

The real solution should be instead to expedite the standardisation process. That way the vendor prefixes can vanish much faster.

Thing is though, there are so many software patents that developers usually will not know the approach they have taken was already patented. Developers don't spend their lives searching patent databases for solutions to their problems - if they did they'd be spending more time searching patent databases than writing code. So instead they just invent. They will re-think designs anyway as part of their normal software development process.

Give a dozen talented developers a complex problem, and it would not be surprising to see them come up with a dozen different solutions. If it's a problem that's been solved before then it wouldn't be surprising to find that most if not all of their solutions were covered by pre-existing patents.

I really don't think you get it. This is not about the "lulz", and it's not about making money. They haven't entered into this blindly, and they know it's unlikely to turn a profit on any reasonable timescale, even "playing the long game".

Ironically, given your sig line, I think the best piece of text to read to try to understand why they are undertaking this venture is (with one line removed) the following:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

I could not agree more.

Let's face it, Perl is an abysmal language by itself. (Yes, the regex engine is good, but that's about it IMHO.) Add in CPAN though, and you've got a massive wealth of libraries to use. The pain becomes worthwhile.

Surely the advantage of optical cables though is that although the speed of a signal through the cable may be slower, you can carry many more simultaneous signals through a single cable by just using different frequencies of light?

I can read maps. I've used maps for navigating whilst driving, and also walking and orienteering. One very useful technique I was taught when map reading was to rotate the map to match my direction of movement. Doing so makes the map much easier to comprehend.

Having a GPS showing a 3D POV map (or a 2D view where up is your direction of travel) is common sense. The translation of a 2D map into a 3D POV map is essentially a prerequisite step in properly understanding the map. Removing the need to perform that step means significantly less processing required to interpret the map, making it less of a distraction.

For my part, I greatly appreciate having a POV map on my GPS. It means that when I'm driving fast down twisty-turny country lanes I can glimpse at the GPS for a tiny fraction of a second and instantly know which way the road is going. I can react and prepare accordingly, and won't get caught out by unexpected sharp bends.

As for your assertion that people that cannot read maps have no spatial awareness, I don't think that's really true. Sure, they might not have a particularly well developed sense of spatial awareness, but it really just means that they haven't learnt how to read a map.

I must admit I haven't read Hunger Games, but what you're saying reminds me very strongly of my experience reading The DaVinci Code. That was in my opinion a truly dreadful book, but back in 2004 it was the "must read" book of the year.

You're right - people like these things because they're "cool", and if you've read the book then "you're in the club". Marketing plays a big part, hyping up a book to generate sales, getting book clubs to push it. It's nothing more than fashion.

In the case of Brown's crud, I think the reason why it was marketable, and why it became popular is that the plot is quite intriguing. (The writing is disastrously bad, and Brown's "style" of cutting action at completely arbitrary points to swap to a different plot-line just for the sake of generating artificial suspense I found incredibly irritating.) Had the plot been dull, then it wouldn't have stood a chance.

A big part of the success of such books is that most of the people that read them only read fashionable books. They've not read anything that's genuinely good, so they can't tell how bad they are. Since they don't know any better and have enjoyed the plot, they'll rave about the book, which perpetuates the myth that it's a "good" book. It's highly unlikely that they will expand their reading to any decent authors; at best they will read other books by the same author, keeping them away from genuinely good reading material.

This meme that you cannot create on tablet computers has to die. It's really not helpful, and just shows a profound lack of imagination.

The best selling iPad app of all time is Pages. A word processor.

Lolz. "Jehova's Witnesses" and "more sane" right next to each other. Thanks for the laugh. I needed that. :-)

(I'm very thankful that my family escaped from that cult before I was born...)

Meh - Huxley stole the line from Shakespeare... I'm not quite so sure that he'd have disapproved. ;-)