Things must of changed drastically since you were there. I just left a few months ago and the article describes very well what I and many others go through. My main complaint about the article is how it doesn't describe how employees are gaming the principals and metrics to look better and punishing those who call them on it.

From what I've seen the ARM manufactures are still huge offenders of this. Google is amplifying it by how they push people into managing code.

After a career of working on Linux OS development, from embedded to cloud I decided to give Android a try. I recently started at a company where my task was to bring up Android on a new hardware platform. One of the first things I learned is that the hardware manufacture has to get their source code for Android from their SoC provided. If you go with AOSP they refuse to support you in any way if you have issues with their drivers. They do incredible hacks to get their hardware working. As someone who has submitted patches to the mainline Linux kernel I die a little inside every time I see what they do to it. Their own section for thier own hardware. No integration into the mainline kernel and I won't even begin to speak of the code quality. Google themselves force you to use an Androidized kernel with specific patches from them. There is a project to mainline these but Google has been resistant to working with the mainline kernel guys in changing things. One of the things I really don't understand is why Google had to throw everything out thats standard in every Linux distro and do their own thing. Android throws out the entire Linux filesystem heirarchy and uses its own thing which is undocumented and a huge mess. They have their own init manager, logger, use busybox AND toolbox for some reason. The source tree itself is managed by a tool called repo which manages about 100 git repositories, each a project which is a part of Android. The SoC vendors often make small changes to things like bluedroid. Like the kernel changes they have no intention of ever upstreaming any of this to the open source projects or Google. This collection of projects are built with Androids own Make build system, where they heavily hack up Make. If Google wants Android users to all be up to date they need to take a standard distro like Fedora or Debian and make it run its own window manager which is Android and its GUI. They need to get vendors to focus on upstreaming their changes and maintaining high quality code. Ideally Android should be a Linux distro you run on your phone with full package manager with updates from Google. Google has the power to do this. No one else can because it will cause Google's CTS tool to fail verifying which won't allow you to ship with Google Play.

The problem is being a developer and running an infrastruture are both full time jobs. When you ask developers to run their own infrastructure things get neglected. When things get neglected things eventually break and they break bad. I've seen this happen when development should be focused on customer facing issues.

This seems like something you could fix by hard coding the supported freqencies in silicon.

If you RTFA you'd see that this is an on-line publication in which you can choose to get a print copy. They promise to release their content 9 months after the print/premium user copies go out under the CC. They're also promising to donate part of their profits to open source projects.

An open source based HDMI key so I can finally get one device that plays all my content over DLNA. This has great potential to also work for PC gaming in the living room. From the Gogo description I gather it has a hardware h264 decoded, which would make it an interesting PC in the living room(think NVIDIA Shield)

The kernel of any operating system serves software in the same way governments serve the people. Its taking the politcs out of government. The goal is to make the best system which fairly distributes its resources amounst its users/people most efficiantly so that they maximize their utilization. At the same time it is secure enough to withstand unruly users/citizens and out side agressors.

If you read through the slides the core OS is only capable of running a single thread. What this looks like to me is a highly specialized OS that relies entirely on the hypervisor to do everything for it. Its basically a specialized version of Java with enough glue and support to run on a bare hypervisor. They started with Java and just implemented everything it needs to run on a hypervisor. Assuming the JVM is fully implemented it should greatly increase a Java apps performance because its gotten rid of all the extra OS overhead. Because of that you would have to exploit the JVM and be limited to what you can do in Java. At that point you could fully read the file system but on this system the only files on this system would be for that one application. The only password file on the system would be the one for this application which if exploited on a normal system would be all the attacker would have access too.

Well up until Sony disabled the otheros option you could buy a PS3.

How is this not any different then IBM's Cell Processor? You know the one in the PS3. Sure it didn't have as many cores but its the exact same thing and it didn't do well. A big part of the problem was the overhead caused in memory transfer from the host system to the individual cores. The other part was each core only had 512Kb of RAM, these only have 32Kb!

I'm perfectly happy having corporate e-mail on a phone I pay for 100%, but I refuse to allow anyone to have control over my phone but me. My company encourages e-mail on our personal phones but require stock firmware, non-rooted, the ability to remote wipe, and the ability to change security settings on my phone. I'm fine if there is a requirement that I have remote wipe ability but I should be the only one in control of it. And telling me that I can't run alternitive firmware due to "security concerns" is ridiculous! Until I can get just get corporate e-mail on my device the way I want it I'll be happy with it and use it, until then they can pay for the phone if they want to control it.

His whole review is on KDE. Now granted Fedora might of setup KDE wrong but their main suggested desktop is gnome. I really didn't see anything wrong with the installer. Still better then Windows.

Does anyone else find it weird that he released this, espcically before a fix is out? Thats common courtesy in security. Even more wouldn't this hurt his company more then Microsoft?