edderly

On mobile devices it would seem sensible to also run your benchmark until the battery is "flat", it might be a crude heuristic but it probably the best you can do with product devices where you can't easily break out power rails and the like.

You should treat benchmarks with a heavy pinch of salt, simply because it's caught up in the bullshit messaging world of marketing where the aim is just to produce the bigger or smaller number where appropriate.

The necessity to satisfy marketing ignores a lot of things. Benchmarks often translate poorly to real use.

Does GLbenchmark 2.7 provide any useful insight into the performance of the top fifty games in the Android mobile market? Probably not with a few 3d heavy exceptions.

Some benchmarks will never die, you'll still see Dhrystone trotted out to this day. http://www.eejournal.com/archives/articles/20090602_coremark...

And then you hit a grey area where software can behave badly on one piece of hardware versus the other because of implementation. So if the benchmark hits this area, is it a hardware problem or a benchmark software problem?

Realpolitik. Although Wayland 'could' support Android based/styled graphics drivers Mir should be able to work easily with these drivers.

My understanding of the GPU vendor world is that generic Linux GPU support is way below the priority given to Android. This isn't to say that there couldn't be some alignment/commonality for a driver in Linux or Android, but Android will get a lot more testing and biz focus.

The Wayland and 'open software community' GPU advocates either have not considered this, don't care or hope that GPU stack implementations will move towards their world rather than Android's. Although ironically the licensing for Wayland and libdrm and whatnot are MIT rather than GPL like Mir.

I disagree with your first point if I understand it correctly. Even relatively right wing or libertarian economists like Tyler Cowen consider that the low hanging fruit for most businesses is now gone. There is a dearth of investment opportunities and the demand for labor especially at the low end is not there in the west.

Though I agree that there are people who can work but won't work, I think this is overestimated. This is a point of principle hardly worth arguing.

I'll take you up on your response to the expenditure of the poor ends up in the pockets of the rich.

The point is that the poor get "blamed" for needing this money. The market will allow the price of a piece of land with some bricks on it to increase due to demand. But clearly the market can't magically create land.

No worries. Perhaps as a long time reader it's easier for me to forgive this guys short hand. It is a blog not a academic paper after all.

I'm fairly happy that the author as a former investment banker and a current journalist for the Investors Chronicle understands capitalism pretty well.

I've read Chris Dillow's blog for a long time. If you scratch away the Marxist sheen, which some people will find toxic at first glance, he has a few basic themes which are pretty hard to argue with:

Modern capitalism has failed to keep everyone employed. It may have helped countries out of poverty but there remains a persistent and growing underclass.

Most subsidies to the poor end up directly in the pockets of the rich. i.e. rent accounts for 50% of the income of people on welfare.

The poor are statistically less happy i.e. Frank Gallagher maybe pissed up all the time and maybe happy, but most people are not.

The stability of corporate entities is overestimated. Most companies have the life expectation of a forty year old man.

Managerialism is a failure, and an unhealthy obsession of the modern left.

Whether you agree with the Marxism bits or not he is generally an interesting read.

I don't think you get any guarantee that just because you pay for software that it works well and is not buggy.

I can't just help thinking that if this software was truly both non-trivial and useful that it would be relatively easy to pick up $30k "after" open sourcing it via consulting or customization work.

A relatively recent Nexus device is a good proposition, Google are pretty good at providing the latest OS revisions on the devices and if needed you can flash it to older versions of the OS.

https://developers.google.com/android/nexus/images

It doesn't sound like anything new. The current SoC specific solutions typically have dynamic firewalls configured on a per IP block basis interacting with some crap in trustzone.

I suppose the thing that is new is ARM offering this kind of IP off the shelf (maybe).

I would recommend Yourdon's book, "Death March" as mentioned in one of the answers. Although it feels a little dated it is a well reasoned analysis that at worst can give you perspective on a bad situation. When I was in a true Death March project I was surprised that there are so few books on the same issue.

Very cool. There seems to be a lot of very detailed posts from the Wayland/Weston developers recently, is this coincident with the Mir (for want of a better expression) fork?

Still, the synchronization and swapping between GLES and using hardware overlays is a problem that has been solved for sometime on Android. Unfortunately this magic maybe hidden in a proprietary framebuffer Android HAL or more recently the platforms hardware composer HAL.

I had the same experience, this time around I'm going to give it an extended try and hopefully it will be worth parting with some cash for.

Pretty good background here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13626046

TL;DR Jersey Shore (sometimes minus the tan).

The GPU used in an SGX530 which is an earlier generation of the GPU used in the iPhone 3 (SGX535). TI traditionally use their own IP blocks for video processing but this is absent in the AM335x, and the GPU lacks any dedicated video processing functions. You're probably looking at use CPU based codecs (ffmpeg) and 720p will be a reach I hazard to guess (but I don't know for sure).

They'll be IMGTec blobs for the SGX GPU then

edit/clarification: These won't be blobs in the kernel but they'll be IMGTec binary libraries. So in practice it's slightly less annoying for kernel hacking.

I haven't looked but I think you'd find the config file be in their kernel source under arch/arm/configs/.

Of course. I think a lot of companies don't want to offshore some engineering jobs, however, if push comes to shove they'll do it. I'm not sure a government mandated limit helps this not occur.

It's a rather naïve conclusion. If the job is relocatable the supply of workers who remain abroad will also reduce wages too.

This reminds me why I hate real names on public social networking when talking about these types of issues.

Whatever this woman's original motive was got immediately lost in the shallow exchanges which follow, but the commentary becomes important because it is now personal.

I feel more contempt for the real name trolls now gloating over her firing too. None of whom I assume were present at the original event. The internet is full of bile, but I'm happier with anonymous bile.

Google isn't deprecating Reader, they're eliminating it.

Perhaps it is unfair to Google. However, there is just a rising level of distrust about the kind of company that Google is, or is becoming.

Arguably that trust has underpinned much of their efforts.

For me, too many good things happen through the medium of blogging and RSS, and Google provided a decent gateway to that. Now they've signaled that they don't want to be a part of that.

I don't entirely distrust Google now, but I trust them less.

I'd agree that SurfaceFlinger is pretty minimal as a compositor. However, because of the power / performance limitations on mobile devices. you're losing if you're compositing with the GPU rather than say overlays, which SurfaceFlinger does facilitate with the HW Composer (as I'm sure you know).

I wouldn't recommend this approach for the desktop but the reason I like this approach for mobile ubuntu initially is that you will get a more mature GPU integration with SurfaceFlinger/ANativeWindow than generic Linux.

Edit: we also know the limitation of glesv1 is because of the problems for glesv2 support in some is emulator environments. So it s a trade off. Agree that the multiple display support is a big problem too

Here's the original link that SurfaceFlinger (and other Android services) are running:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMwO...

It's a very pragmatic choice in the short term. Most if not all ARM SoC GPU stacks are very much Android first with proprietary implementations. There's not a lot of ARM based manufacturer backing for generic Linux implementations (DRM/GEM/TTM etc) .

Maybe if Google sway towards something which works better in the generic Linux world the manufacturers might move.

It's worth being careful with the provocative title. You should consider that innovation can involve in recycling existing businesses, and the point here is whether they are either generating growth or productivity.

So what this means is that there can be a whole load of innovation occurring, but when it comes down to it, it may not be generating a lot of new growth.

That observation about work as transactional vs social is great, thank you. It has summed up a problem which I hadn't found an adequate definition for.

It tallies with my experience that remote workers, integrated into a mostly office based environment does largely end up being transactional. Another problem is that there can be transactional workers in the office, and I would characterize those folks as usually the least likely to participate with remote workers too. So you can get a double hit.

However, the best remote setups I've seen have been where someone who largely works remotely is heavily social usually using their occasional time in the office effectively.

Funny thing is, the different facilities are probably more problematic than remote workers. It can be more prone to politics and the organisation as a whole pulling in different directions.

The exception is where the remote does have some well defined autonomous reason for existing, for example a sales office.

In comparison remote workers obviously are usually tied to a particular office.

Maybe this tells you more about Mayer's lack of trust of Yahoo's (maybe former) managers that she wouldn't trust their recruiting decisions.

Personally, I do believe that remote employees can work well but it is a very selective decision.

> Most H1-Bs return back to India within a year and a new person will be sent to fill in the same position next year.

That sounds wrong. The period of the H1-B visa stay is three years.

By definition any increase in supply of labor will lower wages somewhat. However, as I'm currently on an H1-B and being paid a pretty hefty wedge I suspect your assertion is wrong.

In this market the only good engineers I see having problems looking for jobs are those who are unwilling to relocate or older guys.

Yes, PDAs existed and you could see an evolution of phone to smartphone which included PDA like features.

However, in the early 00s the money was in dumbphones simply because the BOM cost of the RAM/ROM, AP and modem was pretty high.

The real migration path was from phones, either in terms of incorporating PDA like features in to existing platforms like Series 40, or using an OS capable of running in low memory, execute in place environments.

IMO Symbian was much more capable of achieving that need than either Palm or MS, at least because of it's low memory requirements and it's OS architecture was more advanced so it didn't have pseudo-arbitrary limits such as the 32 process limit that W/E had:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Embedded_CE_6.0

Also obviously the Symbian heritage was from PDAs (EPOC32 from PSION). I'm not saying that Symbian was a great OS, however, it really had the measure of MS technically in those times and Palm OS at that time was well known to be in the stone-age OS wise.

And as long as the poorest in the US are richer than someone in the world that is somehow satisfactory?

I'm fairly content to talk about happiness, it's fairly fundamental.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_liberty_and_the_pursuit_o...