Feb 26
Jeff LaMarche on the Nexus One:
“Multitasking” is one of the much lauded benefits of Android over the iPhone. Of course, it’s not really multitasking. Everybody except most “tech pundits” knows that the iPhone’s Mach kernel supports full preemptive multitasking and also knows that at any given moment there are somewhere on the order of twenty daemons and other processes running on a stock (non-jailbroken) iPhone.
What people mean when they misuse this term is the ability to run more than one GUI application at a time, the way we do on our regular computers. And the Android certainly allows this. Only, it’s not really a point in Android’s favor. When you hit the home button, the previous application keeps running, which means it keeps eating memory, keeps using processor cycles, and keeps eating battery. To truly quit most applications requires a multi-step navigation that is neither intuitive nor well-documented. The ability to have more than one GUI application at a time on a device with such a small screen isn’t as important as some make it out to be, since you can’t actually interact with more than one a time.
Lots of interesting points in the post.
Feb 20
Safety wear is essential.
Feb 19
Overnight Snow and slippery slush. Big wet lumps are pattering off the trees constantly.
Feb 17
Jim Ray:
More importantly, though, with something like browser rendering engines, I’m philosophically opposed to a monoculture.
First, I was observing more than celebrating. (But if any one rendering engine had to win the whole mobile shebang, I’m delighted it’s WebKit. But I’d love to see Mozilla get its mobile balls on.) But, bigger point: if any individual WebKit platform vendor disagrees with the direction of the mainline WebKit trunk, or simply thinks they can do better, they can do so. Real open source.
And:
For one, replace “WebKit” with “Flash” and suddenly the iPhone is the holdout.
Really? Every WebOS, BlackBerry, and Android phone today ships with Flash? I didn’t know that. (Not to mention Windows Mobile 7, phones with which aren’t shipping until “holidays 2010”, and which apparently aren’t going to ship with Flash.)
★
[From Jim Ray on the WebKit Mobile Browser Monoculture]
On the desktop Adobe had years to develop a Flash player to run properly on Mac OS X and Linux and failed. If they can’t provide a good implementation for more than one desktop platform how can they possibly provide a half-dozen or so mobile versions that aren’t dreadful?
Feb 11
Chris Hudak
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Take your latest CGI of an improbably-hued accretion disk and shove it. I wanted to watch future or other-world parents ragging on their conflicted, rebellious teenaged offspring;
Resources:
Caprica DVD
http://www.capricadvd.com/
Jane Espenson
http://www.janeespenson.com/
[From Down To Earth: An interview with Caprica Executive Producer Jane Espenson]
I’ve seen the first few episodes of this now, and it’s very good. Good enough that cancellation is inevitable I fear 
Feb 11
What Do the Experts Say?
Ben Goertzel, Seth Baum, Ted Goertzel
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When will human-level AIs finally arrive? We don’t mean the narrow-AI software that already runs our trading systems, video games, battlebots and fraud detection systems. [From How Long Till Human-Level AI?]
It’s been RSN for a long time 
Feb 09
Bumper year for finger-friendly phones The world’s smartphone makers shipped more touchscreen models in Q4 2009 than at any time in the past – and more touchphones than devices with buttons.…The power of collaboration within unified communications [From Touchscreens take lead in smartphone biz]
And Apple is the leader in touchscreen smartphones.
