41–50 of 65 posts
> "Both the iPad and iPhone, as mobile devices, have limited memory (256MB in the current incarnations) and no hard drive. No hard drive means no swap file." He loses me here. My iPhone has a 32GB SSD hard drive. Sounds like a perfect medium for swap space to me...
> "Both the iPad and iPhone, as mobile devices, have limited memory (256MB in the current incarnations) and no hard drive. No hard drive means no swap file." He loses me here. My iPhone has a 32GB SSD hard drive. Sounds like a perfect medium for swap space to me...
His tweet seemed to indicate that this is a bad idea: http://twitter.com/rlove/statuses/11609100128
> "Both the iPad and iPhone, as mobile devices, have limited memory (256MB in the current incarnations) and no hard drive. No hard drive means no swap file." He loses me here. My iPhone has a 32GB SSD hard drive. Sounds like a perfect medium for swap space to me...
Obviously you've never used an Amiga. No swap file + no virtual memory + lots of stuff pre-cached onto RAM disk = snappiest user experience ever.
> "Both the iPad and iPhone, as mobile devices, have limited memory (256MB in the current incarnations) and no hard drive. No hard drive means no swap file." He loses me here. My iPhone has a 32GB SSD hard drive. Sounds like a perfect medium for swap space to me...
Swapping has been demonstrated to be seriously detrimental to the life expectancy of solid state drives.
If it's correct that at least Palm's webOS and Maemo dare to swap on flash storages, we shall see soon...
> "Both the iPad and iPhone, as mobile devices, have limited memory (256MB in the current incarnations) and no hard drive. No hard drive means no swap file." He loses me here. My iPhone has a 32GB SSD hard drive. Sounds like a perfect medium for swap space to me...
(they can cut corners in data storage requirements right now because the drives are written-to/read-from much less often than on a PC, so both longevity and speed are much smaller concerns)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Has it? Everything I've read that is not just speculation has concluded that you'd have to constantly write a great deal of data to wear out an SSD, even with a swap partition (or file). http://serverfault.com/questions/23720/should-you-disable-pa...
SSD drives have substantially longer life than embedded flash drives since they are SLC, meaning each bit is represented by one cell. Embedded flash devices are MLC, meaning each cell represents multiple bits. Your drive's life expectancy goes down dramatically with each bit you try stuff into a single cell.
> "Both the iPad and iPhone, as mobile devices, have limited memory (256MB in the current incarnations) and no hard drive. No hard drive means no swap file." He loses me here. My iPhone has a 32GB SSD hard drive. Sounds like a perfect medium for swap space to me...
Yeah, that's poor wording. The techie in me was aghast at the idea of Apple shipping iPhones with a full Unixy kernel but with no swap (and minimal background processing -- and for that matter, I wondered why its Objective-C runtime didn't support garbage collection) until I actually laid hands on one and realized how fluid things can be when they don't stutter and stop randomly while swapping in parts of the foregro…
It was in the 80's that PCs couldn't even scroll a line of text without making odd stops at times, it was in the 90's when I was surprised to still keep seeing the phenomenon, and it's these days that I can still see a modern Windows screensaver stutter for no reason. Or just some mouse click taking a few seconds "to deliver".
The reason I (and so many other people) so adored the Amiga still late in the 90's is that anything like that was completely unheard of. The computer was just so snappy. Everything happened pretty much immediately. I remember that around 1995 or so there was a web page that had 256 GIF animations playing on it simultaneously. My bare Amiga could run them all smoothly despite me even doing something else in another window. My friend's Pentium pretty much choked on the very same page.
Linux desktop is nothing compared to Amiga. BeOS was close but died as well. I want a completely 100% responsive, stutter-free multitasking desktop/ipad/phone because I know it's possible. I don't want to settle for too slow latency or live with the false claim that to be snappy you can only run one application at a time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is why Safari IS actually multitasking. You can leave it, launch another app, go back to it and be right back where you are. Sometimes Safari doesn't quit and you're back in a millisecond. Other times the OS closes the browser in the background, and you will have to wait a few seconds while Safari reloads the page you were visiting. It's surprising how few people realize that the built-in apps (Mail, iPod, SMS…
But Safari being multitasking only solves the "browsing -> other -> back to browsing" case, right? "Something else -> Safari -> back to the first something else" needs the something else to be multitasking enabled or good at storing its state. Trying to predict what the users will and won't ever need to switch to and from and back to again is a crap shoot in general. Sure one can get it right much of the time, but wh…
The only issue I take here is the iPhone is supposed to not need an instruction manual, everything is supposed to be intuitive. Adding multitasking like the Android means every user becomes an accountant keeping track of what's running and what should be killed. Activity or task managers are most definitely not intuitive. Most apps don't have any business running in the background, saving and resuming states seems to…
Android actually has a pretty damn clever model where normally Activities are killed whenever they're not visible (similar to the iPhone model). However, and application can register service processes that run in the background to do things like play music, check for updates (email, IM, etc).
The difference between the Android and the iPhone model is actually pretty small. The main difference is that on the iPhone, only certain Apple provided apps can do things like play music in the background, get background notifications, etc. In Android, third party applications can also be written to do those things.
But in the most common case of apps that don't do things in the background, the application lifecycle of iPhone apps and Android apps is actually quite similar.
And in practice, its still wrong. The 3rd party repos have an app called Backgrounding that does precisely that... And no sdlowdown on most apps.
I'm not sure how Pocket Tunes Radio is able to play in the background, but they've found some Apple-sanctioned solution that works for MP3 and AAC+ streams. Or I can use Safari to start an MP3 stream and it will background just fine.
I'm sure Apple could just make a policy decision to let some apps they approve run in the background.