essentially an arduino with a 32 bit processor. They have even taken great care to make sure that the programming environment is identical and many of the Arduino shields work with minor code or hardware modifications. https://www.digilentinc.com/Pr...

Actually, maybe I am stupid and ill-informed. There were a couple that had CPU/ABI option as "Atom(x86)". However, it has now been about 4 minutes on my 8 core i7 machine with 6GB of RAM, running nothing but ADT, the emulator, and this web browser and Android is yet to finish booting inside the emulator even running the "Atom(x86)". With VirtualBox + x86 Android images, even from cold boot it takes maybe 40 seconds and if I resume from a paused VM it takes seconds. Now at minute 6 and the ADT emulator still hasn't finished loading. Conclusion, VitrualBox+x86 Android images is infinitely better.

How exactly do you launch the x86 android emulator? When I go to the Android Virtual Device Manager and try every single one of the options in the "Device:" pulldown menu and subsequently try to change the "CPU/ABI:" pulldown menu, the only option is "ARM (armeabi-v71)". So, if such an option exists, they sure make it hard to find (or I am just stupid and ill-informed, so please inform me).

Pretty simple and super fast. Now, I suppose that the Android Development environment could include a stripped down virtual machine, but no one has done it yet (I think the current emulator uses QEMU to actually emulate ARM). http://kamyanskiy.blogspot.com...

you just have to find the right one (possibly not an easy process). I attended Engineering State at Utah State University and had a lot of fun. It helped me decide between computer engineering and electrical engineering. http://www.engineering.usu.edu/htm/engineering-news/e-state

Why try to optimize Octave for ARM? Instead you should spend time optimizing the {BLAS, LAPACK, FFT, sparse matrices, etc.} libraries on which Octave depends. I don't think there is a lot in the Octave source code itself that would benefit from a lot of time spent on optimization. For the most part, if there are processor optimized version of the aforementioned libraries, then Octave will perform quite well for vectorized code.

I have been contributing small bit to Octave for a couple of years now. I can attest to the fact that the core Octave developers are helpful, do good work, and are always looking for more help. Currently I work on two different parts: an IDE for Octave called OctaveDE (which I am looking for more help on, but is more UI work than math work) and I am rewriting the image reading and writing routines to be Matlab compatible. There is also a lot of OpenGL work going on implementing a faster plotting backend as an alternative to GNUPlot. Because Octave is ofttimes in "Matlab catchup mode", any help would be greatly appreciated and you would be given direction on the best way to contribute early while you get used to the code base and the way the core developers work.

http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/2007/09/netapp-sues-sun.html The victim has become the offender.

As for whether you own your own ideas or not, many companies make you sign away patent right for anything you come up with (while working for them, whether on the job or not) that is related to their business interests. Sometimes very skilled or well-known people can weasle their way out of clauses like this, but for the most part you probably signed away your right to patent tech stuff when you signed you offer acceptance letter. go read it.