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Jeez, what a scoop. Isn't this feature all about tracking ?

"Flash Can Rob 2 Hours From MacBook Air's Battery Life" should be "Ads can rob 2 hours from macbook air's (and anything else) battery life", I presume.

FYI, "Duke Nukem Forever" is entirely coded in perl6. Hence the delay.

It seems that most people who complain about memory usage don't know how memory is managed on modern operating systems, so they go all apeshit about "OMG HELP linux is using so much memory it sux0rz!!!"

I agree with you on that, but feel like the diagnostic is somehow ... opposite: "it seems that linux developers fail to show memory usage in a way that average user can understand".

6. Dealing with memory leaks on most browsers (ex: ff) is nearly impossible

On your #2 point, my experience is that coding for: FF3, Safari4, Chrome and IE8, is no longer a compatibility nightmare. Dealing with performances and memory remain a nightmare on my view (except on Chrome which rocks on garbage collecting).

Memory usage comes with a bad side effect: memory fragmentation, which tends to eat a significant share of CPU cycles for no reason other than allocate/reorganize/etc memory blocs. That's a problem.

Seeing how well FF shows on TFA is just amazing to me. My own experience tells me the contrary: FF performs bad when it comes to memory usage and, more importantly, leaks. At some point, just exiting FF (usualy because it reached the swap area) on my linux box takes about 30s. ff guys think using the exit() syscall is not good enough, hence ff tries to unallocate everything before exiting, which takes forever and tells a lot on how the memory is badly fragmented with tons of leaked small memory blocs.

I gave safari a run on my web app, which uses a lot of clientside scripting and has been designed to "work" on FF, IE7, chrome. I did not optimize anything for any browser, it was just a test to make sure I would make mac users happy. I was amazed by performances, really. The JS runtime is way better than anything else I've tested, and even beats chrome which is also really good. More importantly, it seems almost immune from memory leaks, compared to ff3 which needs a restart when approaching 1GB.

Your solution might works for 5% of the population; the remaining 95% will keep buying preinstalled machines running windows, macosx and occasionaly linux, and won't have a clue about what is an OS and how to install them. Maybe my numbers are wrong, but the figure is probably accurate and I fail to see how more (some?) courtesy from microsoft would change that. End user education is necessary, but not really practical.

As noted by many Perl fans (like I am) you do not write in Perl - you think in Perl

I usually say something slightly different to people that I'm teaching perl: when writting perl, you think algorythm and data structure more than anything else, and that's what matters. You don't waste much of your time to fight with dumb API, stupid syntaxes or strange behaviors (php anyone). Perl is sometimes intimidating for outsiders, partly due to the way some people overuse its felxibility, but there is an easy way to write clean code without much of the glue you usually need in some alternate languages.

Having arrays, hashes and regexps natively accessible is one of the killing feature. I only miss a better prototyping in method/function calling.

Ahhhh, that explains. That's like comparing apples and cats.

I'm surprized safari scored this bad. Anyway, Browsers are likely the most complex software to properly benchmark. Writing a tangible and useful conclusion from all those charts and numbers is nearly impossible.

I have coded a few large javascript/DOM-intensive applications and my overall feeling is that chrome rocks both on compliance and speed. It also seems much better on garbage collection than FF3, which stills badly suffers from unreleased memory. My experience with safari on those applications is good overall; faster than FF3 and a little slower than chrome.

You can map special keyboard key sto mark begining or end of a block, and a few others keys to save/load/delete the block.

INSERT => mark begnining of block
END => mark end of block (and yand the block)
F2 => save block into a buffer file
F3 => insert buffer file at current position
DELETE => remove block

Here is what I do in .exrc to map those keys:

map ^[OH mx
map ^[0F my:'x,'y y^M
map ^[OQ :'x,'y w! /tmp/bufferfile^M
map ^[OR :r /tmp/bufferfile^M
map ^[[3~ :'x,'y del^M

You need to type CRTL-V before hitting the function key to get its escape sequence properly set in the file. You also can use special names for function keys ( I believe?) instead of storing your terminal-dependant sequences. ^M is a single character (hex code 0x0d) which you can type using CTRL-V followed by the ENTER key.

cd /somewhere &