Linked List: January 3, 2011

Monday, 3 January 2011

The Care and Feeding of the Android GPU ★

Sharp criticism from Charles Ying on Android’s lack of GPU acceleration for UI rendering:

Android has two major technical UX problems: animation performance and touch responsiveness.

Android’s UX architecture needs work. UI compositing and the view system are both primarily done in software. Garbage collection and async operations frequently block UI rendering. […]

Android engineers say that better hardware will eventually solve the problem — an insane rationale for the problem. On mobile, power efficiency is king. Throwing dual cores or more GHz at the problem is just going to get you more average performance with zero battery life, and even then, as long as your screen doesn’t get too big.

Todd Alcott’s Seven Part Analysis of ‘The Shining’ ★

Speaking of Kubrick’s The Shining, Todd Alcott’s analysis of it is smart and wonderfully detailed.

‘iSPEC’ ★

2003 short by Tron Legacy director Joseph Kosinski, presenting a futuristic iPod that allows the user to enter an immersive virtual reality recreation of settings from feature films. The user’s choice in Kosinski’s demo: The Overlook hotel from Kubrick’s The Shining.

There’s a higher-res version available here at Kosinski’s own site.

The Macalope Looks Back at 2010 ★

The Macalope:

Initially, it did seem like corporate IT was going to run the standard anti-Apple playbook against the iPad. But the pages of the playbook, worn from years of overuse, may have finally fallen out of their three-ring binder. The aging quarterback has proven unable to execute on the field, leaving Apple way ahead in this already annoying football playbook analogy.

IT executives smell a winner with iOS, and they want to hitch their careers to that wagon. It helps too, of course, that it’s a great platform.

Goldman Invests in Facebook at $50 Billion Valuation ★

The New York Times:

In a rare move, Goldman is planning to create a “special purpose vehicle” to allow its high-net-worth clients to invest in Facebook, these people said. While the S.E.C. requires companies with more than 499 investors to disclose their financial results to the public, Goldman’s proposed special purpose vehicle may be able get around such a rule because it would be managed by Goldman and considered just one investor, even though it could conceivably be pooling investments from thousands of clients.

It is unclear whether the S.E.C. will look favorably upon the arrangement.

Unclear, eh?