General Tasks

[Troydude6]

We will all be doing big things with the pandora but what about all the small things?

We shouldn't have an individual app for every messager, email, irc, torrents, ect...

We should simply have a single at called general tasks.


Things that could be included:

BitTorrent Client
IRC
Various Messagers (AIM, Yahoo)
Email
Paint
Notepad
Calculator
Weather
Maps
Planner (Calendar, Contacts)
Sound Recorder
Time/Timer

Post stuff and I might edit them in

 

[lulzfish]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Start_menu

I think Matchbox already has that feature built in.

We could also get some of these going:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_icon

But I think people are already working on touchscreen-friendly icon-based program launchers for people whose typing and pointing skills have weakened from i* abuse.

 

[Username]

No. Why would you do this?

 

[danielliu88888]

No. Why would you do this?

+1

 

[Troydude6]

No. Why would you do this?

I wouldn't want a bunch of 1 job apps filling up my desktop

 

[Kramy]

Oh my god. Torrent client on device using SD cards? No thanks!

 

[lulzfish]

Oh my god. Torrent client on device using SD cards? No thanks!

:huh:
I don't know what you meant by that, but here are some potiental responses:

1. Actually, mine is going to get an external 160GB hard disk, and a network share on my 320GB internal laptop drive.
2. Torrents are network-blocked, not disk-blocked. SD cards should be fine unless you and some of the guys who are seeding have killer Internet connections.

 

[PSyMastR]

Oh my god. Torrent client on device using SD cards? No thanks!

Most torrent clients can pre-allocate the data space needed, so it wont have data scattered all over the SD card, and once its done, reading isn't that bad.

 

[Kramy]

Oh my god. Torrent client on device using SD cards? No thanks!

Most torrent clients can pre-allocate the data space needed, so it wont have data scattered all over the SD card, and once its done, reading isn't that bad.

Flash-thrash.

 

[Vorporeal]

No. Why would you do this?

I wouldn't want a bunch of 1 job apps filling up my desktop


That's what a start menu does. You have no applications on your desktop - you can just launch them all from the menu...

There's NO point to having one app do everything. It would probably actually make stuff worse, as it would have to be coded well to function at the same speed as everything running separately. Also, if one part of the program crashed, everything you were doing is gone. If one program crashes normally, all the other ones that you are running aren't affected.

 

[lulzfish]

QUOTE
Flash-thrash.


*sigh*
You should really be more specific, I still don't know why you wouldn't use a torrent client on the Pandora.

Here's a guess:

by "flash-thrash", you meant:
The high amount of reading and writing to the Pandora's SD controller will slow down other operations.

To which I respond:
1. Most Internet connections aren't even fast enough to strain an SD card. It will be difficult to notice the download unless you're trying to download over, say, a LAN connection to another computer, or unless you're also running a few file move operations in the background, which you should expect to slow down somewhat.

Of course, it won't slow down as much as a mechanical drive would, since flash storage has trivial seek times.

2. Most torrents will go to the SD card, since it is larger.
Most programs will load from the internal NAND and run within RAM, since it is internal.
I do not think they will overlap, unless the Pandora's I/O bus is shared between these devices and it is also slow, which is unlikely.

3. There's little difference between torrenting and HTTP/FTP downloading as far as the storage medium is concerned. The only difference, really, is the seeding, which won't hit too hard since flash reads much faster than it writes, and I suspect the network connection will be a much worse bottleneck for WLAN torrents.

 

[Kramy]

QUOTE
Flash-thrash.

*sigh*
You should really be more specific, I still don't know why you wouldn't use a torrent client on the Pandora.

...

3. There's little difference between torrenting and HTTP/FTP downloading as far as the storage medium is concerned. The only difference, really, is the seeding, which won't hit too hard since flash reads much faster than it writes, and I suspect the network connection will be a much worse bottleneck for WLAN torrents.

Most torrent clients I know of write to disk far too often.

What I'd be most worried about is silent failures. The torrent client writes to the SD card, but upon next trying to read, that data is corrupted. Then you're left wondering why your download doesn't work.

But that's only a problem with some SD cards - not all. Most have at least 10k writes per cell, so unless you're using a stupid filesystem like FAT32, that should take a while to run out.

 

[fiveseven]

Have a go at using some of these 'all in one' apps on your pc. Notice how much slower they run than the individual apps?
That said, I have an 'all-in-one' on my phone to handle msn, skype, etc, and found it to be very useful so far.
As far as cluttering the taskbar with loads of small apps, would it be possible to group tasks together?

 

[sindbad]

There's no point in reinventing a desktop environment inside an application. Your idea is plain stupid.

 

[hobbyman II]

QUOTE
Most torrent clients I know of write to disk far too often



and? ..... I think you are misunderstanding something here, writing frequently to the flash isn`t an issue other than you are filling it up faster the more often you write, it will not shorten the life of the flash, the driver will buffer and write to each segment as the buffer fills, so each write will be to a new segment.

you are maybe thinking that writing to the SAME flash segments repeatedly shortens their life, this is true, BUT flash drives (or their drivers) have "wear leveling", so that each time a new segment is written it is written to NEW physical segment on the SD card , this means that if you have a write life of 1 million writes per segment and your segments are 1mb in size, then on a 1tb sd card you can write one thousand million 1mb files to the sd before you reach the claimed write limit.

or in other words

allowing for perfect wear leveling (not in real life natch...but close enough in general use when the system is properly configured) you can multiply the size of the SD card by the claimed cycle life, and assuming you don`t open and close lots of very small files that are a lot smaller than one segment, then the life of the card will be the resulting number of GB, so one million write cycles x 16GB means your card will wear out after it has WRITTEN 16millionGB to itself, you can ignore reads since they don`t affect the life of the SD noticably, writes cause the wear.

this also means that torrents are actually one of the kinder uses for sd, since you download large files (filling each segment fully in turn), making best use of the wear leveling, bad use of SD is things like Linux writing lots of "small and often" (a few k) log files and then closing them (forcing the buffer to write to disk and wasting a segment for the sake of a few k), but you can configure Linux to use a ram disk and write files at shutdown to reduce wear, and IIRC one Linux file system supports SD friendly writing by default, reducing wear automaticaly.

so using a SD card for torrents puts no more wear on it per MB than installing a game, video or a bunch of MP3s, SD cards last well as long as the driver software supporting them has wear leveling or (like most modern cards) has wear leveling built in, I would say that in portable applications SD cards last better than physical hard drives anyway (try rapping a HD Ipod on the edge of the table a few times), plus with the Pandora it just takes a few seconds to replace one if it goes on the fritz (and they are getting cheaper by the day).

 

[Vorporeal]

This is entirely false. Imagine you fill up almost all of the space, but there's a bit free. This means that the wear-leveling can only take place in a small amount of free space, killing off that space earlier. You're WAY oversimplifying the situation.

 

[lulzfish]

Kramy's overspecifying the situation.
Torrent clients download random pieces of a file, HTTP downloads it in sequence, but as long as you're writing huge files to disk, you're going to fill up the filesystem and you're going to gradually wear down the flash media.

As long as disk buffers are set up right, torrenting shouldn't be any different from any other large file write operation.

 

[dflemstr]

As long as disk buffers are set up right, torrenting shouldn't be any different from any other large file write operation.


...as long as you don't forget one thing: do not, I repeat, DO NOT preallocate the disk-space for the torrent. This doubles the number of writes required to save the file and is completely unnecessary, since flash media doesn't become "fragmented" (aka there's no reason to "defragment" flash media)

 

[Caine]

Troydude6, the program you are looking for is called EMACS.

 

[lulzfish]

Troydude6, the program you are looking for is called EMACS.

Only if it has a good text editor built-in like SciTE or leafpad. gedit is pretty good, SciTE and gedit have competing features. I like them both in different ways.