That's a reason why an ICS application wouldn't have a gingerbread counterpart, but not a reason why you couldn't have Chrome on gingerbread.

It's not a reason you couldn't. It's likely a reason you don't.

Gingerbread applications work fine on ICS

Hell, sometimes an app that was fine on 4.x will exhibit bugs on 4.y.

samsung galaxy s

Haha, the Galaxy S, worst thing to ever happen to Android. My S 4G is, likewise, a piece of shit that I hate using, and has guaranteed that I'll be buying an iPhone soon. I can't name a single thing I like about this thing, and if not for barely-usable GPS and web-browsing features I'd have switched back to my "feature phone" with its slide-out texting keyboard and no apps worth mentioning, because that was a better phone than this.

I might, might consider a 4.x Nexus device—Android is quite a bit better in the 4 series—if they'd get rid of the stupid always-on-screen menu buttons. Part of what I hate about my Galaxy are the touch-sensitive menu buttons under the glass which I'm constantly hitting by accident, and now they made that part of the OS itself? There's no way that "feature" was prototyped and tried out on actual users before being greenlit.

Is there seriously anything required for Chrome that isn't in gingerbread?

Man-hours ($$$) to maintain a fork for 2.3 Android.

2.3 APIs and OS behavior are pretty damn different from 4.x.

I ran Win95a (the Upgrade version, even) until eventually moving to 98se. I think I must have had a very unusual experience, but 95a ran better for me than 98se ever did. Way fewer crashes, felt cleaner. Maybe it was the hardware. Good ol' 100Mhz Pentium. All my 98se boxes over the years were faster machines, but maybe the mix of hardware in them just didn't have a certain magic.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's either not true, or it was true but only briefly before they abandoned the effort. The only people I knew who ran 2K on their home desktop were geeks, and even those were fairly rare because it had spotty driver support and was sometimes tough to get working on any given Win98-era franken-box—besides, games had a tendency not to play nicely with it even if all the drivers were present.

I worked on a lot of home users' machines around that time and I don't recall seeing a single one with 2K on it. Quite a few with ME when it came out, unfortunately. "Here's Windows 98, but inexplicably slower and more crash prone, and with some config options moved to different locations for no reason. Have fun!" Fuck that OS.

My phone's running 2.3, but it's got touch-sensitive areas under the glass to represent the system buttons, and I hit 'em by accident all the damn time. Add some extra and very much undesirable challenge to Fruit Ninja.

Hell, I occasionally manage to hit the button on my iPad Mini and back out of the book I'm reading or whatever, so I can imagine how much more frustrating a Nexus 7 would be. We've got several 4.x devices where I work, and as far as complaints about the OS from a user's perspective, those buttons are at the top of the list for the guys who have to use them often.

It doesn't help that Android apps tend to be even worse than iOS apps about consistently recovering their state when you briefly pop out of them like that, either.

I'd settle for docs that don't read like they were written by the people who wrote the code, and any attention at all paid to their bugtracker.

Getting rid of the goddamn stupid always-on-screen home and back buttons would be great, too. They're a usability nightmare. Go back to physical buttons, or some solution that doesn't cause so many accidental presses while also wasting screen real estate.

Like most things, it would benefit from being managed by Git :-)

This ea support chat screencap posted in one of the reviews seems worth sharing far and wide, and judging from the way it ends I would guess the owner doesn't mind my posting it here.

Because if it's possible to do something one way, adding a different way to accomplish the same thing will never affect outcomes. If people want something and there's any way whatsoever to achieve it they will always achieve it at the same rate regardless of what that way might be.

Oh, wait, that's not true at all.

Yep. I didn't understand why Apple went with 4:3 until I'd used both an iPad and a few 16:9 (or 16:10? don't remember) Android devices. 4:3 is better for pretty much every single task except watching movies, and it's not much worse for that. Web browsing especially is much nicer in 4:3; both orientations remain usable on most web sites, and there's rarely wasted space.

SSL is used on non-443 ports all the time. It's not just for HTTPS.

I'd assumed that's what encrypted Bittorrent traffic uses, though looking in to it farther it appears they use something else. It is used for encrypted peer-to-tracker communication, though. Either way, telling what a user's downloading over encrypted BitTorrent protocol is non-trivial without a peer connected to the same tracker.

Deep packet inspection versus SSL, who wins?

Seems more likely they'll have machines sitting around on popular trackers grepping for IP addresses from blocks they own. At least if they want it to be even sort-of effective.

or if you want a movie reference to back this up, how about humans can also defect on their own with large war machines...that is the basic Hunt for Red October lesson

Easy fix—prevent the drones from sending fewer than two pings.

I find a picture or two a day on vacation is plenty, personally. Just enough to jog memories, not so many that you have to put any effort in to pruning them, and it only takes a minute or two out of each day, at worst. Maybe one or two short videos over a week, quality is nearly irrelevant (phones are fine). Just enough to capture some voices, some movements, and some sounds around you.

Never capture more than you are willing to sort/store/tag/backup when you get home, and never enough that you have to dig to find what you're looking for, even if it's decades later.