anyone interested in this distinction might appreciate the model described in finite and infinite games by james p. carse. it's a kind of convolution of the tao te ching, distilled down to:

A finite game is played for the purpose of winning. An infinite game is played for the purpose of continuing the play.

carse might say that performance-orientated people (paul) are occupied with the resulting claim - title, status, accomplishment, authority, etc - that they can make looking back on the win. those that are mastery-oriented (matt) are more concerned with developing ability to continue the play into the ("horizonal" - always in the advancing distance) future.

Surprise causes finite play to end; it is the reason for infinite play to continue.

and

To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility, whatever the cost to oneself.

and

Because infinite players prepare themselves to be surprised by the future, they play in complete openness. It is not an openness as in candor, but an openness as in vulnerability. It is not a matter of exposing one's unchanging identity, the true self that has always been, but a way of exposing one's ceaseless growth, the dynamic self that is yet to be. The infinite player does not expect to only be amused by surprise, but to be transformed by it, for surprise does not alter some abstract past, but [by discovery of what actually happened,] one's own personal past.

(i wonder whether those interested in this kind of topic would more tend towards the mastery/infinite-play perspective?)

anyway, one of the most illuminating books i have read, along with the tao te ching (and, the one other on my paltry list, the politics of experience by r. d. laing).

ken

hmm. i'm running more in the background now than i was before, because there are some apps which have background jobs (eg, google voice, selfhelp) which i couldn't afford to have on the phone at all, space wise. no problems now, except for some problematic apps (eg, where).

i would often try killing background tasks (using advanced task manager, very nice), but never got signficant improvement - to the point of killing all.

(on second thought, i suppose the eeprom must be used, to preserve dynamic parts of the filesystem across reboots. in any case, the phone performance gets awful as apps increase.)

i don't think so, but i could be mistaken.

the specs are 192 MB RAM and 256 MB EEPROM. i believe that the eeprom holds the firmware loader and static OS elements, while the RAM is used for active operating memory and varying elements of the internal-phone filesystem, including apk storage, data caches for things like gmail and the browser, and so on.

i can tell you that the space available for the .apks starts at something like 75 MB total. that's quickly consumed (with some substantial apps taking several MB apiece), and i experienced awful performance problems even though i left 12 to 17 MB (depending on how recently i cleared the caches).

i understand the bind that google/android is up against, and think it is terrible both in principle and in personal impact.

in order to limit copy-access to android app executables, android depends on sequestering apps in phone storage. while most app producers don't care about limiting access to their executables (apk's), some commercial vendors do. (some common evidence of this is the way that most apps are available for copying by android backup programs like MyBackup Pro, but some aren't.) of course, root access defeats this sequestering - and, in fact, the biggest performance advantage on machines like my G1 is due to jiggering things, with symlinks, etc, so that app storage (as well as some resource cache storage) is physically on the SD card.

the terrible bind is that, on phones like the G1, the phone-storage RAM (192 MB) is a critical resource shared across operational and storage functions, so that the phone works terribly if you have too many apps. and "too many", for a phone that's supposed to be very multi-purpose and extensible, is disturbingly few. it really is a fatal flaw - until i upgraded to cyanogen's mod, things like scrolling would fail to respond most of the time, returning to the home screen or starting an app could take on the order of minutes, etc. and this after i removed a lot of apps, including ones that were occasionally crucial. after upgrading to cyanogen the device works like an, um, dream. i can run everything i need, and more, and the phone is sliced-bread-caliber useful with quick, smooth responsiveness. happy dance!-) now they're bringing down the boot on my savior. darn.

it seems obvious to me that google can't afford to allow undermining of their key provision for proprietary vendors who don't want their .apk's loose in the wild. it's a platform-policy agreement they made. it seems equally obvious to me that this is a damn shame - a profound architectural restriction solely for the purpose of a few overly restrictive vendors, who also happen to be some of the big vendors.

(from many comments, elsewhere, about similar relief from upgrading to cyanogen, i see that my experience with the G1 is not unusual. going back to the standard android release is not an option, so figure i'll stick with my cyanogen install until my contract is up, sometime early next year, and by then there should be other android devices with a physical keyboard and without the cripplingly insufficient amount of RAM. i truly am sad that google is in this bind, and feel that the current arrangement for securing apk's is profoundly flawed, and finding a different approach deserves substantial effort.)

ken