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James Curran, an animator and fan of the Tintins, cleverly created a title sequence that incorporates all 24 Tintin books somehow. It's fresh and engaging and cute and funny and reminds me of childhood. Can you make out the references? [Slim Jim Studios via The Awesomer]
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114. That's how many HP EcoPOD server systems it would take to power all of Google.
The problem with traditional, brick-and-mortar data centers is that they require a huge up-front investment of both time and money; they're often under-utilized; and generally cost more money and energy in terms of overhead than actual computing. All horribly inefficient, even if you don't take into account that they cost more than $15 million a year to operate on average. Modular Data Centers, on the other hand, address many of these issues with increased efficiency via smaller footprints, faster deployment, better scalability (since you're only paying for the capacity you currently need, you can add and reduce capacity more easily) and lower operating costs than their brink-and-mortar brethren.
The HP Performance Optimized Data Center 240a, more commonly known as the HP EcoPOD, is the King Kong of Mobile Data Centers—if they were the height of Scrappy Doo. It provides an extremely energy-efficient, high-performance server center with a higher power density, lower operating cost, faster deployment time and a footprint 1/10th the size of the traditional data center.
First, the EcoPOD can be up and running within 12 weeks from the time of the order—up to 88 percent faster than the average 24-month lead times of traditional centers. The entire system is modular—including integrated power, cooling, security, fire suppression, management, and monitoring suites—and it all comes pre-assembled and pretested to the customer's specs directly from the factory. Much like a pre-fab home, it's built via assembly line, which decreases production time.
Built from two, 40-foot shipping containers, the EcoPOD measures just over 45 feet long, 23 feet wide, nearly 21 feet tall, and weighs 425,000 pounds. However, within this minimal space, you can cram as many as 44 industry-standard, 50-server racks—each weighing 3,500 pounds—for a total of 2,200 servers with more than 7,000 server nodes. It can also support up to 24,000 large form factor hard drives. The EcoPOD uses dual, flywheel-based power sources—known as the CleanSource UPS, created by Active Power in Texas and valued at nearly $2 million—that combine for a maximum total of 2.3MW.
They produce average rack power densities of around 44kW and as much as 69kW under the right conditions—versus traditional centers that produce roughly 6 to 8 kW per 42U rack. And because it's so much smaller than a traditional server farm and completely integrated within itself, it requires significantly less site prep and fewer external safety systems.
To keep all this equipment from overheating and melting itself, the EcoPOD employs an advanced cooling system—Adaptive Cooling—that automatically adjusts between three ventilation modes: Free air that uses ambient air pumped in from outside whenever possible, Direct Expansion (DX) assisted (part ambient air, part A/C), or Full DX, based on the server load and environmental conditions. In Direct Expansion systems, the evaporator coil sits in direct contact with the air flow and also acts as the cooling coil. With either mode, more than 3800 cubic feet of air circulate past the servers every minute.
What's more, the EcoPOD boasts an absolutely insane PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) of between 1.05 to 1.3, depending on the server load and which cooling system is active. A data center's PUE measures how much of the electricity it uses actually goes toward computing, rather than cooling or monitoring. Ideally, a center's PUE should be 1.0—all the energy the center consumes goes towards the computers (PUE=total power/IT power). Normally, a Brick-and-Mortar data center averages about 2.4—double that of the EcoPOD! Altogether, the EcoPOD server system costs a paltry $500,000 a year to operate—31 times less than a similarly powered traditional data center.
[HP (.pdf) - HP (.pdf) - Marc Hamilton - DataCenterKnowledge - Trane - The Register]
Monster Machines is all about the most exceptional machines in the world, from massive gadgets of destruction to tiny machines of precision, and everything in between.
You can keep up with Andrew Tarantola, the author of this post, on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+. Related StoriesView the original article here
Today we heard that the UK is getting jobbed out of its final shipment of $100 TouchPads, with only HP employees being eligible to buy them. Sozzlepops, UK chaps.
But that got us to thinking: With all the fuss over the TouchPad firesale the past few weeks, when will this very obvious demand for a good, cheap tablet be met?
First off, yes, there are a ton of reasons why a good, cheap tablet hasn't happened yet. For starters, there's cost. Building the TouchPad cost $306 in materials and manufacturing per tablet, and the 32GB model $328—plus whatever R&D went into it. That's a bloodbath. And no one's really in position to challenge Apple's incredible integration, from supply chain to retail, which allows it to keep its price lower than competitors.
But this can definitely be done, people. The Nook Color is the closest we have so far, but it's a measly 7 inches and still $250. It has also to be rooted to run Android at the moment. Any tablet that's going to make a run at the saliva-inspiring TouchPad price range is probably going to have to run stock Android by default.
What probably needs to happen, though, is for tablets to make a much bigger impact than they have to this point. There's plenty of room: as of May, only 8 percent of Americans owned a tablet, even though 90 percent wanted one. If Amazon's Kindle tablet sells at a hurricane clip, it should go a long way toward pushing down supply chain costs across the board.
And if tablets can make that inroad, it's basically a waiting game for them to hit their sweet spot, like anything else in tech. The first iPhone cost an insane $500 and $600—on contract! Now you can get a 3GS for 50 bucks. And we don't really need anything near that level of price depression to see a good tablet for ~$100. We just need a few generations to go by to lower manufacturing costs to where the previous gen is both good and affordable. Would you jump on an iPad 1 for $150 next year? I think you would.
Know this going in: the TouchPad firesale is in all likelihood a singular event, and you're not going to get this class of hardware for ~$100 anytime soon. But obviously we're willing to make concessions—we're all drooling over the same chunk o' junk that we poo-pooed with lukewarm and disappointed reviews just a few months ago. But it also can't be so dumpy that it's basically one of the cheap ass Android tablets that are already available.
The reason the $100 tablet is so attractive is that every decent tablet to this point has been at least $500. So those of us who want a tablet to be a unitasker device (sorry Alton!), but don't necessarily want to pay handsomely for handsome performance in every other area are sort of stuck. I just want it to read comics; Sam Biddle only wants to watch movies on the subway; Matt Buchanan wanted an Instapaper and magazine machine. I suspect most folks fall into a similar category.
That list of tasks means it probably has to be around-or-about 10 inches, and pretty good quality. The TouchPad's screen was $69, so that's a good chunk of our budget straight away, but we can also probably skimp on accuracy a bit for the capacitive touchscreen to make up a few dollars.
As for what's important specs-wise, it's probably the classics: an above-average processor, a usable amount of RAM, and decent battery life. The TouchPad has 1GB of RAM, but the iPad 2 gets along just fine with 512MB. We could also probably tolerate a thicker profile, and the battery doesn't have to last all day—just long enough to get through a movie on a plane, and maybe catch up on news in the cab.
Whoever makes a run at this is going to have to have an established marketplace in place to reap the benefits of bringing in a huge amount of users with a low-maybe-negative-margin product—sort of like Sony did with PlayStations for several years.
Google seems like a possibility, since they've shown that they're willing to give stuff away just to get people on the internet and in their sandbox. But even with their recent acquisition of Motorola, they don't really have the infrastructure to make a big tablet push.
So it probably falls to Amazon. Again. They have the ecosystem in place to capitalize on a huge influx of users, they're already jumping into the tablet game, and they've already been rumored to consider straight up giving hardware away to funnel customers to their services. And actually, they might already be working on all of this.
Or I suppose the alternative is for us all to start hoping really hard for Samsung to go under so we can make a run on Galaxy Tabs.
You can keep up with Kyle Wagner, the author of this post, on Twitter and sort of Google+. Related StoriesView the original article here
As details emerge about Facebook's plan to integrate with music services to let friends share their listening experience, one thing is abundantly clear: Music fans and the music industry desperately need this—or something like it—to happen.
Here's the core of the problem. When music fans use an online music service, whether that means free music on YouTube or a paid subscription from Spotify or another subscription service, they're more-or-less alone. If I use Spotify, you use Rhapsody, and our friend Bob uses MOG, the three of us might as well be in different universes when it comes to sharing and talking about what we're listening to. Our playlists, comments, and "likes" don't translate.
The inability to share music degrades the experience for all three of us—perhaps to the point that we won't renew our subscriptions, or would never sign up in the first place.
It reminds me of when I used to DJ a small room in San Francisco. We weren't too serious about it—this was basically a way for us to play music we liked over big speakers and showcase our friends' bands. Still, we had a problem: People would show up throughout the night, and leave when they saw a mostly-empty floor. Another group would do the same thing, and so on. If they all arrived at the same time, that night may have gelled.
Likewise, when people try a paid music service today, they are isolated. The chance that all of their friends will decide to subscribe to the same music service is virtually nil. If you share a Spotify, Rhapsody, MOG, or other link on Facebook or Twitter, only your other friends who have that service can play it. YouTube is a cross-platform exception.
There's not much "connective tissue," as Reuters' anonymous source described Facebook's upcoming music strategy, to bring these paid services together. (See also "4 Ways One Big Database Would Help Music Fans, Industry.")
Facebook will announce an initiative to integrate tightly with multiple music services on September 22, according to various reports. Apparently, and here GigaOm's June 19th report is particularly instructive, the company plans to introduce new sections that show us what our friends are listening to, giving us something else to talk about, which is a reason to stay logged on. Nice move.
You can already share songs on Facebook with multiple services, but the upcoming reported integration would show you what I'm listening to in real time among other things.
We should be able to comment on what they've been doing, in classic Facebook style, and listen to their songs if we use the same service, which is already possible with Spotify, Rhapsody, MOG, Rdio, and others (screenshot to the right).
We might even be able to chat about the same song as we listen, which we've termed "synchronous group listening," and which is already possible on "Google+YouTube".
Hopefully for music fans, Facebook will also figure out a way for people to share songs across music services so more of us can hear shared tracks in full. Even if it doesn't, people will reportedly be able to track each other's listening and figure out how to hear stuff by searching on their own.
We've seen similar functionality elsewhere, but Facebook is massive. People use it daily. Prominent music sharing features there could bring to the mainstream all sorts of formerly nerd-like behavior—stuff like scrobbling music from Turntable.fm.
Social music on Facebook could be big. What will it look like?
First, it will be cool, because the non-stop hangout on Facebook would have a socially-customized soundtrack for those who want it. We can already sit near our Facebook friends at shows courtesy of Ticketmaster, so we should be able to listen together at home, too.
The Social Network makes no secret of letting app developers and outside marketers see what we do there. Earlier this year, we learned that our faces could end up in Facebook ads if we don't set our preferences right, among other seemingly-periodic issues. If Facebook's reported music plan succeeds, it will know who listens to what, who influences them, who they influence, what they did while they listened (to an extent), and more.
That might be fine. Apple won't even tell the Financial Times or any other app developer who their customers are. But for Facebook, that sort of user information appears to be the name of the game, and music is another way to get a lot more of it.
On the other hand, who cares? Many of us (present company included) like using Facebook today despite the privacy issues. Group listening among so many people can only add to the fun. Who knows, it might make more people pay—happily—for music.
Image: Flickr/Jason Steinschaden
Evolver.fm observes, tracks and analyzes the music apps scene, with the belief that it's crucial to how humans experience music, and how that experience is evolving.
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Hey look! There are three new Symbian phones out today. What? Where? Why, they're over there, next to the pennyfarthings and the ham radios: the obsolete section. What the crap is going on here, Nokia?
Look, we all get it: Symbian used to be boss and blah blah first to blah blah N-Series blah groundbreaking blah blah. SHUT IT. Nobody knows this more than me: In 2005, I started using a Euro-market Nokia N95. It was dope. It had a GPS and a 5 megapixel camera—Zeiss optics!—and Wi-Fi and stereo speakers and Bluetooth. It was a world phone. Nobody had ever seen anything like it.
Sure, it was a little difficult to use, but that was like a badge of honor at that point. I carried that thing until 2006, when I got an American-market version. It had 3G. Most people were still toting around edge, if they had smartphones at all. And if someone did have a mobile device that did more than make calls, send texts, and snap VGA photos, it was usually an office-issue electronic leash like a Blackberry or a Windows mobile brick. The lucky ones had Treos running ancient Palm software. (Bejeweled 2 holla!) Nobody had a smartphone because it was fun. Except me.
I had a decent music player (hey, it got the job done) on my cell while everyone else's pants were bulging with multiple gadgets. I was taking almost all of my photos with my 5-megapixel phone, and surfing the Web without a computer. I had apps. I could get driving directions from my cellphone. (As long as I wasn't in a city.) Remember 5 years ago when this stuff was a rarity? It's worth thinking about for a second, just to appreciate what an amazing trip the last few dozen months have been.
So yeah, back to me loving my mobile life: Yes the operating system—Symbian S60—was for shit, but it seemed a necessary price for living in the future: the tithe of the early adopter. Yes, the apps were hidden in an obscure menu within an obscure menu within an obscure menu, but I had apps; and yes, every app would run in the background, sucking the life out of your battery until you manually quit it, a procedure that required you to hit a button, scroll down to the end of an incredibly long list of functions, and hit exit. But *you could install programs on your phone.* You could copy and paste. In 2005. You could multitask. In 2005. Nokia was way ahead of anybody else in terms of what its customers were doing with their phones. And then what the hell happened? Nothing. Symbian received some much-needed "updates," but they didn't fundamentally alter the user experience.
By 2008, I felt like I was driving a Stanley Steamer while everyone partied at the gas stations. I joined the throng and got an iPhone. I was tired of playing Snake, even the fancy Tron-like "3D" version.
It's a bit of an old saw at this point, but Symbian got lapped. The UI is a bit whizzier these days, but it has still barely advanced on a fundamental level. Even the latest build I've used (and to be fair, I have not yet had the pleasure of experiencing Belle) feels devoted to a legacy platform. Functions are too complicated; simple tasks take too many button-clicks or movements to accomplish. The app store feels dangerous, filled with half-baked indy joints from devs who may or may not be looking to install a botnet on your phone.
And yet there's this bright light in the distance: That soon Nokia phone will run Mango. That the company which has been consistently cranking out the best mobile hardware for the past decade will get a software dance partner worthy of its shiny shoes.
Then Nokia up and comes out with three new Symbian phones today. QUIT IT. Seriously. Finland. Do you read me? Stop making Symbian handsets. Repeat: kssshhhh Stop making Symbian handsets. Save your money for the Mango models. Do you copy? Wow us in October with something unexpected: competition for the iPhone. I'll switch in a hummingbird's heartbeat. And I won't be alone.
Getting some really awesome comments already. Some worth noting:mconheady:
Don't ignore that those phones are cheap and hugely popular in china because they support QQ and Weibo. In asia they sell millions upon millions.Sean Harrington:
We buy shit like Symbian phones because, for our kids and technophobic elders, it's the only cost-effective way to get them connected with us.Thinger
The Ham radio is very much in use and very much needed. It's likely what emergency crews used yesterday when the earthquake knocked out cell coverage.
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