Sounds like you're suffering from Motorola's own software they've placed on top of plain vanilla Android. I did have a quick look, and unfortunately Defy development seems pretty low-key at the moment, but if someone can get Cyanogen running on the Defy I'm certain you'll have a much better time with your phone.
I had pretty much the same experience with my HTC Desire. Once I got HTC's "Sense" software off it, and Cyanogen modded AOSP goodness onto it, it was a whole lot nicer to use and a lot smoother too...
Well, the new Archos line has only been out a month or two!:)
For another, is this authorized by Google, or is it an infringing copy of the Market application? And is Google likely to block Market access from this app?
It's almost certainly not authorised by Google, but I doubt Google cares that much; certainly they've made little attempt to shut down various gApps copies floating around. I know of only one ROM distribution that's ever been told not to distribute the gApps, and that's Cyanogen; every other Android ROM (and there's gazillions of them) happily packages them up without issue. If they care about gApps, they're doing a good job of hiding it.
As for blocking... hell, they haven't even tried to block the Nook Color from accessing the marketplace! And why would they? It's their own revenue and reputation they'd be hurting here; and if people can't get apps from the marketplace then they'll just grab them from somewhere else. In fact, I'd argue that if Amazon does set this up, it'll ensure that the Android Market is never blocked by Google:)
I think you can safely assume that for every Android device that gets a decent userbase, someone will find a way of putting the Android Market on that device. And I'm pretty sure Google won't be that unhappy about more users that can give them money...
Fair enough, my bad:) Sounds like someone in Google was being a bit overzealous in coming up with such a silly definition, though, and I suspect the rest of Google know it. Google thus far seem to have shown a lot of commonsense in the regulation of Android, which is why so many of us have switched to it from Apple's malodorous walled garden.
Because all movies and games, everywhere, for all time, are only available in flash. Yup. Got it.
No, you really didn't.
I know you think you're being funny, but really you're just being dumb. Apple isn't prohibiting a single thing on the new MacBook Air. They don't ship it with Flash preinstalled, but you're completely free to install it should you desire to be bombarded with horrible popover ads and lose 1/3 of your battery life.
I think you're missing the point. This is part of a coordinated attack on Flash by Apple, and a tacit justification for not including Flash-enabled browsers on the iPhone/iPad. Note that I'm not making any comment as to whether Flash is Good or Bad; only that I find Apple's attack on Flash bizarre and concerning.
Clearly I'm not in the/. Apple-worshiping majority here. Ooops, silly dumb me.
So running CPU-intensive software reduces battery life. Who knew?
In other news, Apple is disabling playing games or movies on its new MacBook Air line. "People's batteries are suffering," an Apple spokesperson said today. "Clearly, when customers' batteries are being used, the customers are not free. We are now giving customers freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom."
The spokesperson further hinted that the next addition to the MacBook Air line will not be allowed to be turned on at all. "Our market research shows that people are happiest with an Apple product when it is turned off and on prominent display to their friends. The next MacBook Air will not only give the user freedom from software, but it will have a battery life measured in years."
but it sure looks like they're trying to be an iPad, only less useful.
But also much less costful. I dunno... root this baby, get an active developer scene and you've got a tablet at a price point where even I might buy one. It's a great pity B&N didn't allow access to the Android Market, and it does rather make me wonder why... (You have the option to sell an ipad-killer at half the price, and yet you cripple it. Why??)
I can relate to the grand-parent poster... the issue isn't about how much it's swapping when it can choose whether to swap or not, it's about what happens when you do run out of ram.
But when that happens, you're going to be screwed no matter what OS you're using. If you need to use disk IO to access the memory you need, then it doesn't matter how that IO is scheduled -- you're going to be soundly fscked whatever you do. Opening a new process (i.e. in your case a terminal), when there's a rogue process constantly trying to grab more memory, will take forever.
I generally find the best thing to do in those situations is to switch to a VT (which doesn't need much memory to run) and kill the offending process from there. It doesn't take very long.
Remember, the Apple ideology is that people should not have any desire to hack their systems; they should simply use them, and rely on Apple to take care of technical details. This has been the case for a very long time now, and as long as Steve Jobs is in charge, you can bet that there won't be any change.
To be fair, although it's Apple's fault for promoting this idea in the first place, the idiotic masses have lapped the idea up and claim to love it.
Personally, I'm wondering why the app developers even tried to release this emulator in the App Store. I'd imagine that anyone who'd want to use this would be geeky enough to have a jailbroken iphone, so why not just release it in Cydia? As an added bonus, if they wanted to charge for it, they'd be much less likely to have the app pirated if they released it through the Cydia Store (since piracy of Cydia apps is much harder).
I don't know if it's all that related, but swap slowdown is an appalling issue as well. If a single program spikes in RAM usage, I often have to reboot the whole system as it hangs indefinitely. As I work with Octave a lot, often a script will gobble up a few hundred megs of memory and push the system into swap. Once that happens, it's often too late to do anything about it as programs simply will not respond.
I'm surprised you're seeing this with a process taking up a few hundred Mb -- that suggests to me that you have very little RAM in your system. But if it really is the kernel's fault for being more swappy than it should be, doing something like
echo 10 >/proc/sys/vm/swappiness
(as root) should fix your problems fine. (Swappiness can be a value between 0 and 100; 0 means never swap out, 100 means swap out all the time; 60 is generally the default value). See Ubuntu's swap FAQ for lots more info.
Of course, if you simply don't have enough memory in your system to support the RAM-intensive process and basic system functions, buying more memory might be the best solution...:)
It may not be a perfect solution, but assuming your ipod Touch is jailbroken you can back up all your apps (and notes, contacts, etc databases) via ssh (or do it automatically with rsync). Don't forget to change the permissions of the folders back to what they should be when you want to restore. Rhythmbox under Ubuntu will transfer music on and off the ipod for you seamlessly and just as easily as iTunes.
It's been half a year since I used iTunes with my iPod touch, and I have no intention of ever using it again (unless it's required for jailbreaking).
If you can move entirely to software which runs on Linux, you won't need Windows. Microsoft is therefore suffering the death of a thousand cuts
It's Linux that suffers the death of a thousand cuts with each port of a FOSS app to Windows.
It's only a bad thing if a developer of software stops working on linux and switches to Windows. This, I feel, is rather unlikely...
The actual non-coding userbase has (practically) no bearing on the development of OSS -- it's mostly written to serve the developers' own needs (although bug reports/feature suggestions do help a bit). Users don't affect the strength of the OS; developers do.
OK. "Truthy", and "Truthiness" are terms coined by Steven Colbert (or one of his writers), so why don't I see him getting any acknowledgment?
OK. "Coin" and "Coined" are terms originally used by George Puttenham (in 1589), so why don't I see him getting any acknowledgement in your post?:)
Seriously, are you suggesting that every word we write should include an acknowledgement of etymology and coinage?? I don't think that's gonna work, somehow...
I'm a happy owner of a Nook. The only faults ebooks have right now is that even basic typesetting is almost entirely non-existent on them. Things that could be done automatically by the ereader -- things you don't realize you want until you don't have them, like paragraph-optimized justification, automatic hyphenation, preventing lone paragraph lines on page boundaries, hanging punctuation, and ligatures -- aren't there. Ebooks are displayed either with left-aligned text or with an obnoxiously-spacious justification.
I completely agree -- the main thing that's holding me back from buying an e-ink device is a complete lack of decent typography in the software. If ebook readers want to be treated in the same category as real books, they have to look like real books, and that includes the basic typography rules you've mentioned. It's not hard... I don't understand why even large companies like Amazon haven't invested in this simple, obvious step. The hardware is there now, it's only the software that is completely lacking.
Mind you, I've noticed that print publishers are becoming more and more compromised in terms of their typography too -- ligature marks are rapidly disappearing, meaning that even in print we now get fugly "fi"s half the time. Drives me insane!:(
Use the best tool for the job, and at the moment, the iPad is a better tool for this type of usage scenario.
Actually, the best tool right now for a reference text is a physical book -- best resolution, best at adding margin notes, and far better for flipping through quickly.
It's generic in a different market. "Apple" is generic in the fruit business but Apple still has a trademark on it in the computer business.
Er, the point being that "facebook" has been a generic term in the looking-up-people-you-might-know business decades before facebook.com sullied the world with its presence. (As many others have pointed out, that's the whole reason Facebook is called Facebook -- it was using a known word with appropriate connotations for their product.)
And in any case, from what I can gather Teachbook.com is about sharing teaching resources, not social networking. Even without the generic origins of Facebook's name, this is like them attacking a cookbook.com site which encouraged people to share recipes.
I'll give it a look (for the house). I can't use that at work, which is where I have about 18 different accounts, each with seemingly different password requirements.
There are multiple options that work on smart phones (1password for the iPhone is one example, I used to use keyring on PalmOS (also works on maemo) and there's software that works on Nokia phones too. I've never used Android, but I'd be very surprised if there weren't a hundred options.) All use a single master password to protect your password database, and if you make that password long enough (mine is well over ten characters and uses uppercase, lowercase, numbers and punctuation) it'll never be cracked even if you lose your phone.
This type of software has been available ever since PDAs have been around. I'm amazed that nobody else has mentioned it as an option, for it is the obvious one.
Humour aside, this problem of tab groups got solved yonks ago with the TreeStyleTabs extension. Tabs are in a vertical tree, indented to show their relationship to one another, and the position -- and relationships -- between tabs can be adjusted by dragging and dropping tabs.
It basically does all that this Tab Candy thing claims to do, but much more effectively and without needing swanky eye candy. Plus you can see all your tabs all the time; you don't have to zoom out.
Not that Tab Candy doesn't look neat, but I seriously question its practical usefulness over something like treestyletabs.
Half-a-dozen tabs is where you go wrong. Try with a hundred and then talk to me about piggies.
That said, FF is using 140Mb right now with only nine tabs open (I have about the same number of extensions as you do running, maybe a few more on one box, a few less on another; adblock, treestyletabs, neodiggler, livehttpheaders, personalmenu and noscript are the main ones). FF also has some very suspiciously memory-leak-esque issues in my hands -- open a hundred tabs, close them all, and the memory footprint is much larger than a fresh instance; keep the browser running for days and watch the memory grow. This could be due to extensions, but I'm a little concerned about this as FF spent more energy in its early days denying the existence of memory leaks (which turned out to be there nonetheless) than actually trying to find and fix them.
FWIW, my experience with Chromium -- which has been limited, admittedly -- is that Chromium has a smaller memory footprint than FF. That, and FF's extraordinarily buggy and laggy "awesome" bar, are the only reasons why I'd ever consider switching to Chromium.
I'm a big FF fan... but I still remember the early, heady days of Phoenix 0.1, when the aim was to make the browser as sleek and as small as possible. Maybe they forgot to turn left at Albuquerque...?
Do you still have to use some behind the curve hacked version to keep all your data from being sent to Google? Because Google's data mining and installing "updaters" that refuse to uninstall with the app made it a non starter for me.
Erm, it's called Chromium, and it's kinda more ahead of the curve than behind it, since it's what Chrome is based upon. (Google just adds its data-mining crap to the OSS Chromium code base in order to release Chrome.) So if you use Chromium, you get all of the good stuff and none of the Google rubbish. It's also worth remembering that Chromium's sandboxing of tabs provides some level of security against web malware exploits, even if it can't replace all that noscript offers.
But I've got no dispute with your other comments. And until Chromium makes --enable-vertical-tabs work under linux, it'll never replace Firefox for me in a million years. It's a viable browser alternative for the less computer-literate, though, and I often wish Firefox had the lithe memory footprint of Chromium, rather than one of a giant elephantine beast...
What are you people doing that causes Firefox to have such horrible stability problems? I leave Firefox open for literally days at a time, with anywhere between 10-25 tabs open, and I have no stability problems.
Ditto, but with often several hundred tabs open. Firefox seems pretty stable for me, but it does chew up the memory. I've found Chromium to be much leaner in memory on a per-tab basis than firefox (but that's kinda moot since there's no vertical tree-style tab option in linux Chromium and I therefore can't use Chromium with several hundred tabs open).
Mind you, I use noscript on firefox to make sure some of the viler and more odious objects on the internet don't affect me. Maybe Firefox without noscript is less stable?
Unless Apple just doesn't know what they are doing, the real reason behind Apple's restrictions on multitasking is more likely the same as their restrictions on scripting languages and alternative development environments: they want to keep control.
I've always supposed it's about not wanting to put more memory on the device. Apple apps are relatively memory intensive to run, and there's not much free memory on anything less than a 3GS. Just try doing multitasking with backgrounder -- on my ipod touch 2G, I can have maybe one extra app running in the background with Safari and Music already running, no more than that -- and I have to keep monitoring free memory. The memory argument would also explain why on the 3GS and the touch 3G (the only iOS devices to have a decent amount of memory) will be allowed iOS4 multitasking.
Bloody frustrating Apple. Why can't they make things that just work from the start?:(
It isn't meant to have the same resolution as the retina, it is meant to have sufficient resolution at reading distance, just that pixels are not detectable by the retina.
Uh, detectable resolution is the topic of the article. And the point being, unless you read your iPhone held 18 inches away from your face, your eyes can detect more detail than the iPhone screen has -- hence being able to see pixels. The colour argument is a little spurious, incidentally, since fine gradations of colour look fine on even much lower resolution screens -- it's the regions of high contast, i.e. black and white, that irritate with current screens.
Mind you, 18 inches is about the right reading distance for me when reading books on my ipod touch, and it's still an awesome screen resolution irrespective of whether I can see the pixels...
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Sounds like you're suffering from Motorola's own software they've placed on top of plain vanilla Android. I did have a quick look, and unfortunately Defy development seems pretty low-key at the moment, but if someone can get Cyanogen running on the Defy I'm certain you'll have a much better time with your phone.
I had pretty much the same experience with my HTC Desire. Once I got HTC's "Sense" software off it, and Cyanogen modded AOSP goodness onto it, it was a whole lot nicer to use and a lot smoother too ...
For one thing, it's only been two weeks.
Well, the new Archos line has only been out a month or two! :)
For another, is this authorized by Google, or is it an infringing copy of the Market application? And is Google likely to block Market access from this app?
It's almost certainly not authorised by Google, but I doubt Google cares that much; certainly they've made little attempt to shut down various gApps copies floating around. I know of only one ROM distribution that's ever been told not to distribute the gApps, and that's Cyanogen; every other Android ROM (and there's gazillions of them) happily packages them up without issue. If they care about gApps, they're doing a good job of hiding it.
As for blocking ... hell, they haven't even tried to block the Nook Color from accessing the marketplace! And why would they? It's their own revenue and reputation they'd be hurting here; and if people can't get apps from the marketplace then they'll just grab them from somewhere else. In fact, I'd argue that if Amazon does set this up, it'll ensure that the Android Market is never blocked by Google :)
I think you can safely assume that for every Android device that gets a decent userbase, someone will find a way of putting the Android Market on that device. And I'm pretty sure Google won't be that unhappy about more users that can give them money ...
Please see my reply to slim.
Fair enough, my bad :) Sounds like someone in Google was being a bit overzealous in coming up with such a silly definition, though, and I suspect the rest of Google know it. Google thus far seem to have shown a lot of commonsense in the regulation of Android, which is why so many of us have switched to it from Apple's malodorous walled garden.
For example, Archos 43 is supposed to be the Android counterpart to the iPod touch but doesn't have Android Market because it lacks 3G data
You sure about that ...? You certainly don't need a 3g connection to use the market app if you've got wifi!
Because all movies and games, everywhere, for all time, are only available in flash. Yup. Got it.
No, you really didn't.
I know you think you're being funny, but really you're just being dumb. Apple isn't prohibiting a single thing on the new MacBook Air. They don't ship it with Flash preinstalled, but you're completely free to install it should you desire to be bombarded with horrible popover ads and lose 1/3 of your battery life.
I think you're missing the point. This is part of a coordinated attack on Flash by Apple, and a tacit justification for not including Flash-enabled browsers on the iPhone/iPad. Note that I'm not making any comment as to whether Flash is Good or Bad; only that I find Apple's attack on Flash bizarre and concerning.
Clearly I'm not in the /. Apple-worshiping majority here. Ooops, silly dumb me.
So running CPU-intensive software reduces battery life. Who knew?
In other news, Apple is disabling playing games or movies on its new MacBook Air line. "People's batteries are suffering," an Apple spokesperson said today. "Clearly, when customers' batteries are being used, the customers are not free. We are now giving customers freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom."
The spokesperson further hinted that the next addition to the MacBook Air line will not be allowed to be turned on at all. "Our market research shows that people are happiest with an Apple product when it is turned off and on prominent display to their friends. The next MacBook Air will not only give the user freedom from software, but it will have a battery life measured in years."
but it sure looks like they're trying to be an iPad, only less useful.
But also much less costful. I dunno ... root this baby, get an active developer scene and you've got a tablet at a price point where even I might buy one. It's a great pity B&N didn't allow access to the Android Market, and it does rather make me wonder why ... (You have the option to sell an ipad-killer at half the price, and yet you cripple it. Why??)
I can relate to the grand-parent poster... the issue isn't about how much it's swapping when it can choose whether to swap or not, it's about what happens when you do run out of ram.
But when that happens, you're going to be screwed no matter what OS you're using. If you need to use disk IO to access the memory you need, then it doesn't matter how that IO is scheduled -- you're going to be soundly fscked whatever you do. Opening a new process (i.e. in your case a terminal), when there's a rogue process constantly trying to grab more memory, will take forever.
I generally find the best thing to do in those situations is to switch to a VT (which doesn't need much memory to run) and kill the offending process from there. It doesn't take very long.
Remember, the Apple ideology is that people should not have any desire to hack their systems; they should simply use them, and rely on Apple to take care of technical details. This has been the case for a very long time now, and as long as Steve Jobs is in charge, you can bet that there won't be any change.
To be fair, although it's Apple's fault for promoting this idea in the first place, the idiotic masses have lapped the idea up and claim to love it.
Personally, I'm wondering why the app developers even tried to release this emulator in the App Store. I'd imagine that anyone who'd want to use this would be geeky enough to have a jailbroken iphone, so why not just release it in Cydia? As an added bonus, if they wanted to charge for it, they'd be much less likely to have the app pirated if they released it through the Cydia Store (since piracy of Cydia apps is much harder).
I don't know if it's all that related, but swap slowdown is an appalling issue as well. If a single program spikes in RAM usage, I often have to reboot the whole system as it hangs indefinitely. As I work with Octave a lot, often a script will gobble up a few hundred megs of memory and push the system into swap. Once that happens, it's often too late to do anything about it as programs simply will not respond.
I'm surprised you're seeing this with a process taking up a few hundred Mb -- that suggests to me that you have very little RAM in your system. But if it really is the kernel's fault for being more swappy than it should be, doing something like
echo 10 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
(as root) should fix your problems fine. (Swappiness can be a value between 0 and 100; 0 means never swap out, 100 means swap out all the time; 60 is generally the default value). See Ubuntu's swap FAQ for lots more info.
Of course, if you simply don't have enough memory in your system to support the RAM-intensive process and basic system functions, buying more memory might be the best solution ... :)
It may not be a perfect solution, but assuming your ipod Touch is jailbroken you can back up all your apps (and notes, contacts, etc databases) via ssh (or do it automatically with rsync). Don't forget to change the permissions of the folders back to what they should be when you want to restore. Rhythmbox under Ubuntu will transfer music on and off the ipod for you seamlessly and just as easily as iTunes.
It's been half a year since I used iTunes with my iPod touch, and I have no intention of ever using it again (unless it's required for jailbreaking).
So, you don't put glasses in a case; carry violins in a case; transport laptops in a case?
If I was wanting to hold my laptop up to my ear half the time, I wouldn't want to be constantly putting it in and out of a case!
Phones need to be used quickly and easily at a moment's notice. They should be designed such that they don't need cases.
If you can move entirely to software which runs on Linux, you won't need Windows. Microsoft is therefore suffering the death of a thousand cuts
It's Linux that suffers the death of a thousand cuts with each port of a FOSS app to Windows.
It's only a bad thing if a developer of software stops working on linux and switches to Windows. This, I feel, is rather unlikely ...
The actual non-coding userbase has (practically) no bearing on the development of OSS -- it's mostly written to serve the developers' own needs (although bug reports/feature suggestions do help a bit). Users don't affect the strength of the OS; developers do.
OK. "Truthy", and "Truthiness" are terms coined by Steven Colbert (or one of his writers), so why don't I see him getting any acknowledgment?
OK. "Coin" and "Coined" are terms originally used by George Puttenham (in 1589), so why don't I see him getting any acknowledgement in your post? :)
Seriously, are you suggesting that every word we write should include an acknowledgement of etymology and coinage?? I don't think that's gonna work, somehow ...
I'm a happy owner of a Nook. The only faults ebooks have right now is that even basic typesetting is almost entirely non-existent on them. Things that could be done automatically by the ereader -- things you don't realize you want until you don't have them, like paragraph-optimized justification, automatic hyphenation, preventing lone paragraph lines on page boundaries, hanging punctuation, and ligatures -- aren't there. Ebooks are displayed either with left-aligned text or with an obnoxiously-spacious justification.
I completely agree -- the main thing that's holding me back from buying an e-ink device is a complete lack of decent typography in the software. If ebook readers want to be treated in the same category as real books, they have to look like real books, and that includes the basic typography rules you've mentioned. It's not hard ... I don't understand why even large companies like Amazon haven't invested in this simple, obvious step. The hardware is there now, it's only the software that is completely lacking.
Mind you, I've noticed that print publishers are becoming more and more compromised in terms of their typography too -- ligature marks are rapidly disappearing, meaning that even in print we now get fugly "fi"s half the time. Drives me insane! :(
Use the best tool for the job, and at the moment, the iPad is a better tool for this type of usage scenario.
Actually, the best tool right now for a reference text is a physical book -- best resolution, best at adding margin notes, and far better for flipping through quickly.
But an iPad sounds sexier. Or something.
It's generic in a different market. "Apple" is generic in the fruit business but Apple still has a trademark on it in the computer business.
Er, the point being that "facebook" has been a generic term in the looking-up-people-you-might-know business decades before facebook.com sullied the world with its presence. (As many others have pointed out, that's the whole reason Facebook is called Facebook -- it was using a known word with appropriate connotations for their product.)
And in any case, from what I can gather Teachbook.com is about sharing teaching resources, not social networking. Even without the generic origins of Facebook's name, this is like them attacking a cookbook.com site which encouraged people to share recipes.
I'll give it a look (for the house). I can't use that at work, which is where I have about 18 different accounts, each with seemingly different password requirements.
There are multiple options that work on smart phones (1password for the iPhone is one example, I used to use keyring on PalmOS (also works on maemo) and there's software that works on Nokia phones too. I've never used Android, but I'd be very surprised if there weren't a hundred options.) All use a single master password to protect your password database, and if you make that password long enough (mine is well over ten characters and uses uppercase, lowercase, numbers and punctuation) it'll never be cracked even if you lose your phone.
This type of software has been available ever since PDAs have been around. I'm amazed that nobody else has mentioned it as an option, for it is the obvious one.
Humour aside, this problem of tab groups got solved yonks ago with the TreeStyleTabs extension. Tabs are in a vertical tree, indented to show their relationship to one another, and the position -- and relationships -- between tabs can be adjusted by dragging and dropping tabs.
It basically does all that this Tab Candy thing claims to do, but much more effectively and without needing swanky eye candy. Plus you can see all your tabs all the time; you don't have to zoom out.
Not that Tab Candy doesn't look neat, but I seriously question its practical usefulness over something like treestyletabs.
Half-a-dozen tabs is where you go wrong. Try with a hundred and then talk to me about piggies.
That said, FF is using 140Mb right now with only nine tabs open (I have about the same number of extensions as you do running, maybe a few more on one box, a few less on another; adblock, treestyletabs, neodiggler, livehttpheaders, personalmenu and noscript are the main ones). FF also has some very suspiciously memory-leak-esque issues in my hands -- open a hundred tabs, close them all, and the memory footprint is much larger than a fresh instance; keep the browser running for days and watch the memory grow. This could be due to extensions, but I'm a little concerned about this as FF spent more energy in its early days denying the existence of memory leaks (which turned out to be there nonetheless) than actually trying to find and fix them.
FWIW, my experience with Chromium -- which has been limited, admittedly -- is that Chromium has a smaller memory footprint than FF. That, and FF's extraordinarily buggy and laggy "awesome" bar, are the only reasons why I'd ever consider switching to Chromium.
I'm a big FF fan ... but I still remember the early, heady days of Phoenix 0.1, when the aim was to make the browser as sleek and as small as possible. Maybe they forgot to turn left at Albuquerque ...?
Do you still have to use some behind the curve hacked version to keep all your data from being sent to Google? Because Google's data mining and installing "updaters" that refuse to uninstall with the app made it a non starter for me.
Erm, it's called Chromium, and it's kinda more ahead of the curve than behind it, since it's what Chrome is based upon. (Google just adds its data-mining crap to the OSS Chromium code base in order to release Chrome.) So if you use Chromium, you get all of the good stuff and none of the Google rubbish. It's also worth remembering that Chromium's sandboxing of tabs provides some level of security against web malware exploits, even if it can't replace all that noscript offers.
But I've got no dispute with your other comments. And until Chromium makes --enable-vertical-tabs work under linux, it'll never replace Firefox for me in a million years. It's a viable browser alternative for the less computer-literate, though, and I often wish Firefox had the lithe memory footprint of Chromium, rather than one of a giant elephantine beast ...
What are you people doing that causes Firefox to have such horrible stability problems? I leave Firefox open for literally days at a time, with anywhere between 10-25 tabs open, and I have no stability problems.
Ditto, but with often several hundred tabs open. Firefox seems pretty stable for me, but it does chew up the memory. I've found Chromium to be much leaner in memory on a per-tab basis than firefox (but that's kinda moot since there's no vertical tree-style tab option in linux Chromium and I therefore can't use Chromium with several hundred tabs open).
Mind you, I use noscript on firefox to make sure some of the viler and more odious objects on the internet don't affect me. Maybe Firefox without noscript is less stable?
Normal humans never emphasize a positive immediately before a negative, it has no meaning.
I think you should get out more ... :)
Unless Apple just doesn't know what they are doing, the real reason behind Apple's restrictions on multitasking is more likely the same as their restrictions on scripting languages and alternative development environments: they want to keep control.
I've always supposed it's about not wanting to put more memory on the device. Apple apps are relatively memory intensive to run, and there's not much free memory on anything less than a 3GS. Just try doing multitasking with backgrounder -- on my ipod touch 2G, I can have maybe one extra app running in the background with Safari and Music already running, no more than that -- and I have to keep monitoring free memory. The memory argument would also explain why on the 3GS and the touch 3G (the only iOS devices to have a decent amount of memory) will be allowed iOS4 multitasking.
Bloody frustrating Apple. Why can't they make things that just work from the start? :(
Unless you like to read books while sunbathing
... and you don't?? Surely I'm not the only person who likes to read whilst sitting in the sun ...
It isn't meant to have the same resolution as the retina, it is meant to have sufficient resolution at reading distance, just that pixels are not detectable by the retina.
Uh, detectable resolution is the topic of the article. And the point being, unless you read your iPhone held 18 inches away from your face, your eyes can detect more detail than the iPhone screen has -- hence being able to see pixels. The colour argument is a little spurious, incidentally, since fine gradations of colour look fine on even much lower resolution screens -- it's the regions of high contast, i.e. black and white, that irritate with current screens.
Mind you, 18 inches is about the right reading distance for me when reading books on my ipod touch, and it's still an awesome screen resolution irrespective of whether I can see the pixels ...