Linked List: July 8, 2009

Wednesday, 8 July 2009

The Impact of the iPhone 3GS RAM Increase 

John Casasanta makes an interesting point: the 3GS has twice as much RAM as previous iPhone OS devices, but from the perspective of developers, the result is much more significant than that: after a fresh boot, the 3GS has about 150 MB of free memory; on an old 3G, there’s just 40 MB free.

Fake Steve on Chrome OS 

Fake Steve:

If you ask me, Google is getting a little nutty about the Borg and it’s starting to show. They’re starting to look like the new Scott McNealy. Remember him? Ran a company called Sun, which had a great little business going until McNealy became obsessed with Gates and started doing things like paying millions of dollars to buy StarOffice so he could get into that booming free software business.

David Pogue on Bing 

Pogue’s review of Microsoft’s latest attempt to compete against Google’s core business. (Oddly enough, appearing the same day that Google announced its plan to compete against Microsoft’s core business.)

The Last Phone Booths in New York 

Scouting New York on the four remaining phone booths in Manhattan:

It’s funny to think how the idea of an enclosed space to have a phone conversation now seems like an incredible luxury.

(Via Scott Simpson.)

I don’t remember the last time I saw one here in Philadelphia.

Update: Fireballed at the moment, but it’s in Google’s cache.

‘Easy’, Eh? 

Love this piece by Benjamin Pollack responding to claims in this Hacker News thread that it would be easy to clone StackExchange, the software powering the Stack Overflow developer community.

Google Apps Is Out of ‘Beta’ 

Google’s Matthew Glotzbach announces that Gmail and the other Google Apps are no longer labeled “beta”:

We’re often asked why so many Google applications seem to be perpetually in beta. For example, Gmail has worn the beta tag more than five years. We realize this situation puzzles some people, particularly those who subscribe to the traditional definition of “beta” software as not being yet ready for prime time.

Imagine that — people thought that what Google meant by “beta” was what everyone else means by “beta”. Shocking. Anyway, though, glad to see the sham is over.

SnapTell Was Acquired by Amazon in June 

Perhaps this is why Amazon is refusing to allow mobile apps to use their APIs or data. They want to do it all themselves.