21 Oct 09 The PS3's "Yellow Light of Death"

Xest writes "More and more reports are appearing about PlayStation 3 consoles failing in a similar way to the earlier models of the Xbox 360, except for Sony, it's the 'Yellow Light of Death.' The BBC has an interesting article which suggests the problem could be almost identical to that which caused the Red Ring of Death — poor soldering connections. From the article: 'Several of those businesses have told Watchdog that the vast majority of consoles they see with the "yellow light of death" can be repaired by heating up specific parts of the circuit board. This process is called solder re-flow. By heating the connections between the components and the circuit board to temperatures in excess of 200 Celsius, the metal solder joints melt, just like they did when the device was first assembled. Console repairers say that this process method is commonly used to repair fractured connections, or dry joints.' But that's not the only rule from Microsoft's playbook Sony has been following; while they have admitted 12,500 out of 2.5 million systems have failed (a convenient 0.5%), they refuse to release full figures of failure rates, citing them as being 'commercially sensitive.' Unfortunately, Sony does not appear to be following Microsoft's lead with regard to an extended warranty, stating that if a PS3 fails after 12 months, it is not their problem. In the UK at least, the Sale of Goods Act would disagree with that statement."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tagi: ring of death, failure rates, sale of goods act, extended warranty, xbox 360, watchdog, joints, ps3, bbc, xbox, temperatures, regard, warranty, models, microsoft

06 Nov 09 Going Head To Head With Genius On Playlists

brownerthanu writes "Engineers at the University of California, San Diego are developing a system to include an ignored sector of music, dubbed the 'long tail', in music recommendations. It's well known that radio suffers from a popularity bias, where the most popular songs receive an inordinate amount of exposure. In Apple's music recommender system, iTunes' Genius, this bias is magnified. An underground artist will never be recommended in a playlist due to insufficient data. It's an artifact of the popular collaborative filtering recommender algorithm, which Genius is based on. In order to establish a more holistic model of the music world, Luke Barrington and researchers at the Computer Audition Laboratory have created a machine learning system which classifies songs in an automated, Pandora-like, fashion. Instead of using humans to explicitly categorize individual songs, they capture the wisdom of the crowds via a Facebook game, Herd It, and use the data to train statistical models. The machine can then 'listen to,' describe and recommend any song, popular or not. As more people play the game, the machines get smarter. Their experiments show that automatic recommendations work at least as well as Genius for recommending undiscovered music."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tagi: recommender system, california san diego, wdom, university of california san diego, fashi, collaborative filtering, insufficient data, artt, c world, artifact, pandora, crowds, herd, bias, genius, algorithm, university of california, peoe, popularity, mod

07 Dec 09 Apple acquires music service Lala

SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Apple Inc has acquired digital music service Lala, as the dominant online music retailer explores new models for selling songs.
Tagi: dominant line, ape inc, digital c, c service, line c, reuters, music service, lala, apple, models

19 Dec 09 Lego Silver Rings Will Brick Your Marriage [Lego]

The only rings I've ever liked are nipple rings, The Lord of the Rings, and Ringo Starr. I love these silver Lego rings, though. You can customize them putting any brick you want on top.

As you can see in the gallery, you can use any Lego brick or piece you want to change their appearance. They come in three different models, with one ($140), two ($151) and four studs ($165). If I only knew when I asked Addy to marry me. [Edition Mathea via Make]

Tagi: lego brick, ringo starr, silver rings, studs, lord of the rings, appearance, marriage, models

28 Feb 10 ASUS Eee PC T101MT convertible gets handled twice (video)

What's better than one hands-on report to whet your appetite ahead of the release of a new gadget? Why, two of them, of course, and it's the convertible ASUS T101MT getting the stereo impressions. The machine has netbook specs (1.6GHz Atom N450 CPU, 2GB RAM, 320GB HDD, etc. etc.) combined with a 10.1-inch multitouch screen, which both of the sites giving early impressions rated poorly. Responsiveness is said to be less than stellar, and while one of these previewers was able to improve it with some extra calibration, precision near the top of the screen still sounds bad. Build quality looks good (for an Eee) and the form factor certainly looks nice, but we're losing a little faith in this entrant after watching the video below. Check it out for yourself and see what you think, but don't write it off just yet: these are still pre-production models and a little firmware magic could whip this tablet into shape before its release -- whenever that will be.

Continue reading ASUS Eee PC T101MT convertible gets handled twice (video)

ASUS Eee PC T101MT convertible gets handled twice (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 28 Feb 2010 11:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tagi: little faith, netbook, preci, eee, multitouch screen, asus, firmware, gadget, appetite, atom, nbsp, shape, magic, models, sun