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Comment Book? (Score 2) 124

In the small-ish world of open-source & embedded graphics, toolkits, and SW / HW rendering implementors, there are few who have been at it as long and have such a breadth / depth of experience in so many areas as yourself.

As someone who has done a fair bit of searching for resources on the theory and practical design of such systems, I must say, that there are few books out there that concisely describe the "how" and "why" in a design-patterns kind of way tie in with immediately relevant topics (e.g. fbdev, widget & drawing libs, scene-graphs). Naturally, implementors often pick up the talent and ensure that trade secret is kept that way, but you are at a bit of an advantage I think, no?

You've been at E for a *long* time and you've done an insane amount of work making SW rendering almost as efficient as HW rendering - I'm sure there is no shortage of material.

Have you ever thought about writing a book - sharing some of your expertise with the world in a less formal language? Not something that's all-encompassing by any means but maybe with references for further reading. What about a techno-biography of E?

Comment Re:A question (Score 1) 141

The OpenSSL libraries in Android are in the /system partition, and hence, can be patched via OTA update. So yes, they are provided by the OS. And unless the API has changed for OpenSSL (likely not), all Android apps require no modification to be considered secure after said OTA update. Rather than attempting to discourage Android app developers, the linked article really should just be putting pressure on Google, OHA members, and carriers to release OTA updates that include a patch to OpenSSL.

Submission + - Pixel Qi introduces 10 inch, 1280 x 800 pixel sunl (liliputing.com)

timothy writes: Compared to their dumber e-ink cousins, tablets with LCD screens suffer at least two notable disadvantages: their batteries last hours or days, rather than weeks (or months), and they're notoriously hard to read in the sunshine. Neither of these problems are likely to be licked soon, but the gap may be shrinking: Mary Lou Jepsen's OLPC spinoff Pixel Qi has now shown off a 10", 1280x800 panel. Pixel Qi's screens are well-known, though not currently widely adopted, for their ability to run in a high-contrast, low-power greyscale mode as well as a still-frugal color mode. Though the company is currently showing prototypes rather than a shipping version of the new high-resolution screens, it's reason to renew hope for a long-lived, daylight-readable, color-screen tablet.

Comment my $0.02 (Score 1) 79

My first question would be about the power that board is consuming ddr3 support (800+ MT/s). Keep in mind that transistors sink the most amount of current (i.e. consume power) when they are in the process of switching from '0' to '1' and vice versa. So if The bus speed has just increased by at least a factor of 4, then power consumption might have increased proportionally. A think a performance-per-watt graph comparing the Exynos chip and a dual core atom is in order (ahem.... tom's ... cough... hardware... sniff).

My next question would be, "where are the Mali GPU drivers?" A free as in speech implementation of all patent unencumbered interfaces of this GPU would be brilliant. Can't wait to talk to the Linaro devs ;-)

Comment Re:Nice, but... (Score 4, Interesting) 77

It's often ___immeasureably__ useful to get some (any) kind of console output when porting Linux to an existing device running e.g. windows mobile 5 or 6. Take a look at HaRET. Porting is often harder than most would imagine, as some manufacturers actively use hardware obfuscation methods to prevent hacktivists from getting console access.

Try to imagine how long it would take to use LEDs or haptic feedback to iteratively check all conditions required to bring up Linux on a board without a serial port. The first thing you would probably do is try to use a hardware subsystem that was known to work and fashion a serial port out of it. This is the same concept but graphical.

Great work!

Comment F*CK... (Score 1) 245

yeah!

Seriously - if a company no longer supports a product that still has a fairly large market, a lot of (particularly north-american) people will just throw the product in the garbage. Look at the billions of __WORKING__ cellular phones that end up in landfills. If users were given the freedom to improve the firmware on these aging products and make them relevent and useful again, we could give those devices away for free to people in the world who need them, or resell them.

It's better than waiting 1 million years for something to decompose in a landfill.

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