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Momentum behind the ten-month-old trend called physicalization is accelerating, and Ars tackles the key questions. Why are small servers all the rage? Will the trend continue? Will it give ARM a place in the server space? Should Intel and AMD fear physicalization or embrace it?

Interesting article on the costs and reasoning of physicalization versus virualization.

Look at CNET, breaking news left and right. The site ran a little survey asking its UK readers how many times their video game consoles crashed. No surprise: the Xbox 360 leads the pack with a full 60 percent of heaving died (due to the red ring of death). The PS3 comes in at 16 percent (yellow light of death?), and the Wii is only 6 percent.

Let’s focus on the Xbox 360 numbers. The most amazing thing to come from the survey is how quickly people’s Xboxen broken. It turns out that only 25 percent of those broken Xboxen lasted more than 18 months. So, 75 percent of those Xboxen didn’t even make it to month 18. That’s ridiculous.

One thing to keep in mind about this survey: it wasn’t a random sample. So we’re not saying that 75 percent of all Xbox 360s will, or have, broken within the first 18 months, but that 75 percent of respondents’ Xbox 360s broke within the first 18 months. It might well be that put-off Xbox 360 owners filled out the survey to “stick it” to Microsoft. Owners of broken Xboxes, unite! That kind of thing.

But the overall story—the Xbox 360 is not reliable—is nothing we didn’t know before. I’ve had two Xbox 360s die on me since August, 2006.

How awful.

by Darren Murph

posted Nov 18th 2009 at 2:41PM

It ain't flashy, but so long as you don't ever plan on having more than 1.5TB of junk to store on an external hard drive, Transcend's latest should do the trick. The StoreJet 35T promises average write speeds of 42MB/s, and the one-touch backup feature enables your mind to be at ease with the simplest of gestures. You'll also get intelligent backup scheduling, StoreJet Elite software that offers 256-bit AES file and folder encryption and... well, little else. Mum's the word on pricing and availability, but for those who find this one too rich for their blood, a 1TB model should be landing soon as well.

[Via FarEastGizmos]

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A year after its release, Google’s open source Android operating system has become a sensation. After a slow start, it is now available on at least 12 phones, with more devices waiting in the wings.

 

Good news for Android fans, right? Not really, say some developers. A slew of problems have made managing Android apps a “nightmare,” they say, including three versions of the OS (Android 1.5, 1.6 and 2.0), custom firmware on many phones, and hardware differences between different models.

For users, it means apps in the store could be buggy, might not work well depending on their handsets, and could deliver a frustrating experience. Unaware of the increasing back-end complexity, they would then be more likely to leave bad reviews for those apps — a potentially lethal blow for small businesses, say developers.

“Instead of working on updates to our apps, we find we are trying to make each app work for multiple versions of the OS and different hardware capabilities,” says Chris Fagan, co-founder at Froogloid, an Android focused application development company. “We are not complaining about all the growth, but if you are a small or a new Android developer coming in and trying to learn I could see your head exploding. It would be overwhelming,” he says.

The problem echoes similar concerns over Java in the 1990s. Originally touted as a way for developers to build apps that would run on any computer (”write once, run anywhere”), developers found that wide variations in Java virtual machines as well as available hardware meant that Java’s promise was really “write once, debug everywhere.” While Java is still used — particularly in the mobile space, where it powers games and other apps written for Java-capable cellphones — it is not nearly the cross-platform panacea it was originally conceived as.

Fagan’s concerns about the fragmentation of Android is being echoed by other developers, says Sean Galligan, vice president of business development at Flurry, an mobile app analytics company.

“There’s no question that we are starting to hear developers express concern,” says Galligan. “Android is growing very fast and there’s a lot of excitement for it but it’s also a lot for work, especially for medium and small developers.”

Since the launch of the first HTC T-Mobile G1 phone running Android OS, a number of handset makers have jumped on the bandwagon. HTC alone has five Android handsets available, while others like Motorola have shifted completely to the Android platform. In the past two months, Motorola released two new Android-based handsets, the Cliq and Droid. And in a bid to differentiate themselves, handset makers are creating custom user interfaces like the HTC Sense, the Motorola Blur and the Rachael UI from Sony Ericsson.

Android phones vary significantly in the hardware, too — phones with and without camera flash, some have physical keyboards, others don’t.

“You may build an app that works perfectly with all three firmwares, but then when you run it on carriers’ ROMs it completely blows up,” says Fagan. “So we find ourselves having to create apps that are compatible with multiple firmwares, multiple ROMs and multiple devices with different hardware.”

It’s in sharp contrast to the iPhone platform. Apple has tightly controlled the introduction of new iPhones and updates to its operating system. It has just three iPhone models available since it first introduced the phone in 2007. And all iPhone users are prompted to update their phones to be on the same version of the operating system.

While Apple pioneered the app store idea with the iPhone, Android, too, offers Market, a store for distribution of third-party programs. Unlike with the Apple app store, Android developers do not have to go through an approval process to get their apps on the Android Market.Currently, the Android market has about 10,000 apps compared to the 100,000 in Apple’s app store.

For developers, Apple’s autocratic ways may be frustrating, but they can pay off.

“Apple maintains an iron grip on what they do and there’s an advantage to that,” says Kelly Schrock, owner of Fognl, which has three apps on the Android market. “IPhone developers don’t have to worry about fragmentation and creating apps for the iPhone is much easier.”

Continue Reading “Android’s Rapid Growth Has Some Developers Worried” »

雲端運算（Clound Computing）概念正夯，已成為明年電腦市場新顯學，除了局端的伺服器市場醞釀世代交替新商機，終端的個人電腦平台為了解決串流視訊、線上遊戲等龐大運端運算需求，自然擴大了繪圖晶片及繪圖卡市場的世代交替浪潮，也難怪英偉達（NVIDIA）執行長黃仁勳表示，的確低估了市場對繪圖晶片的需求，才會導致現階段嚴重缺貨問題。

    　雲端運算是平行運算（Parallel Computing）的應用之一，主要是透過多核心處理器或繪圖晶片的共同運算，尤其是利用繪圖晶片的強大計算能力，模擬出多個計算核心，讓各類應用程式得以加速，否則使用者若要在數億個網站中找到所需資料，或是在玩線上遊戲時需要在多台伺服器中找到資料，單靠一台電腦計算，可能要算個10年或20年。

I understand graphic chips (GPU) are in demand now, I am aware of that cloud computing is taking off, and I know the GPGPU concept that exploits the surplus computing power of GPU to make computers run faster, but for now it's tough for me to connect the ideas to "prevalence of cloud computing is igniting the exploding demand to GPU" and "using GPU to...emulate multiple computing cores" as said in the newspaper story. I probably know what the writer was trying to say, but...

Maybe it's me lagging too far behind.