iPhone/iPad/iPod Multitasking -- stop the silliness!

We interrupt this otherwise-productive workday to get this off my chest:

Stop mis-using the term multitasking. Most people don't really use multitasking anyway.


From CNet News:

How important is the ability to multitask on tablet-class devices like Apple's iPad? Important enough that the feature will likely be touted as a trump card for Intel-based smartphones such as a tablet-size phone from LG due later this year.

From The IPhone Blog:

iPad — What We Didn’t Get: Multitasking, Notifications, TV Subscriptions, Camera, Tethering, Textbooks, iTunes.com

Multitasking. Apple only showed one iPhone app or iPad app running at once. We’ve heard it’s running iPhone OS 3.2, and multitasking might be an iPhone (and iPad) OS 4.0 feature, but again, we wanted to see it now.

How often does a normal Windows XP or Mac OS X user actually make use of multitasking? There are two defensible arguments, because of the fuzziness of the way the terms are used:

Normal People Almost Never use Multitasking. In fact, when you're using a Windowing environment like Mac OS X, only one window is active at a time. The other programs are almost always sitting completely idle. If you don't believe me, and you actually care about truth, honesty, and the American Way use the "Activity Monitor" or "Task Manager" to watch the process state on your system. It's incredibly rare for multiple applications to actually be Runnable. In practice, most programs are sitting quietly, doing nothing, even though you can see them on your screen.

It turns out the iPhone OS can do this already. When you switch between programs, the iPhone OS retains the memory state of the application you just left.

When do ordinary people REALLY use multitasking?

• If you're waiting for Microsoft Word to do something like print, or re-format, you can switch back to some other application, such as email. In reality, you're slowing MS Word a bit, but it can continue processing in the background while you're looking at your email.
  
• When a message arrives from the network that needs to be displayed; e.g., an instant message. The task you're using is momentarily paused while the new message is processed. This is useful because your display is large enough to display both your main application, and the Instant Messenger client.
  
• If you're actively viewing incoming data from multiple data feeds. E.g., if you're watching multiple incoming security cameras. Again, this is mostly interesting because your display can display multiple sources simultaneously.
  

If "multitasking" means that we can switch between applications (as often demonstrated on the Palm Pre), then the iPhone/iPod OS does this already. They're just smart enough to know that the screen on a pocket-sized device is too small to display multiple applications simultaneously in any useful way.

And the iPhone/iPod OS can handle incoming messages from the network, and render notifications. For example, when you get a new email, the iPhone can notify you of the change.



Normal People Are Multitasking All The Time, they just don't know it.. Another reasonable argument is that people are multitasking all the time. The operating system utilities are running regularly in the background handling maintenance task.

But the iPhone/iPod is doing this already. E.g., when it synchronizes a calendar, it's doing it in the background.

From "Top Tech News" today:

Google might think Chinese censorship of the Internet is unacceptable, but Bill Gates says it's not that bad. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC's Good Morning America, Gates called China's attempts to censor the Internet "very limited," and said its controls are not much different than other countries' policies.. . . The People's Daily, the official Communist Party newspaper, trumpeted, "Bill Gates Bats for China," The Wall Street Journal reported.

Gates said it's "easy to go around" the Chinese government's system of controls. "And so I think keeping the Internet thriving there is very important," he said. Other countries also censor the Internet -- to ban porn, for example, or the way that Germany censors references to the Nazi Party. "And so you've got to decide: Do you want to obey the laws of the countries you're in, or not?" Gates asked.
-----------------

Is Microsoft in favor of blindly following unjust laws, or are they in favor of "going around" the laws?

It is not noble, Microsoft, to "follow the laws of the country you're in" if those laws are unjust. There is a higher standard in the world than the Communist government of China.

Two Great Challenges for Computing's People

It seems like there are two really interesting challenges in
computing, for us humans involved:

(a) Learning skills that are valuable and enduring.

E.g., Learning how Ethernet works in 1985: good investment of time.

E.g., Learning intricacies of Turbo Pascal 6.0 modules in 1991: that
knowledge has expired.

E.g., Learning Unix system administration in 1987: good investment of
time.

E.g., Learning intricacies of the Windows ME registry in 1997: poor
choice of time.

E.g., Learning ANSI C++ in 1991: good use of time.

(b) Designing systems that are a good fit for the application, and,
harder still, are a good fit for changes we don't yet know about yet.

E.g., Choosing OS/2 as the desktop platform for Bank of America in
1995: not a long-term choice.

E.g., Choosing Unix as a server OS in 1994: good, flexible choice.

E.g., The Berkeley Sockets API for Network Programming: awkward
choice. (The fitter choice: file handles.)

E.g., SQL-accessible database for multi-user applications: flexible,
long-term choice.

E.g., Filesystem database for multi-user applications: tough choice to
maintain.

Canon replaces 5-year-old out-of-warranty camera -- Free

Canon just replaced my old, malfunctioning digital camera with a new
model camera -- for free! This was all part of a recall program they
setup years ago.

I'm quite surprised and grateful to them. In 2004 I bought a Canon
SD110 digital camera. It worked fine, until images started to be
distorted.

Google revealed that Canon had a recall program related to this issue,
for this model of camera. It covered repairs even for cameras whose
warranties had expired. Canon replaced my camera free. They took my
long-used, 3 megapixel SD110 and gave me a refurbished, 8 megapixel
SD870. They even paid all the shipping fees.

(Footnote: When they first shipped the SD870, it too was
malfunctioning. The lens had a problem. So I had to ship it back for
repair immediately. But they fixed this for free as well. It wad
important that I called immediately after receiving the broken,
refurbished model.)