World's Largest Lite Brite Has Over 300,000 Pegs, Is Real Effing Brite

Jason Chen — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 19:40:00 EDT

Shoe-maker ASICS commissioned a gigantic Lite Brite in NYC in celebration of something or other (probably a shoe launch) this month that takes the Guinness World Record for largest Lite Brite painting. You know, those things you played with when you were six? At 300,000+ pieces and 11x15 feet, it demolishes the previous record of 125,000+ pieces by PA artist Mark Beekman that took him over 15 months to complete. Mark's was a recreation of The Last Supper, which while classy, just doesn't quite have the same je ne sais quoi as a ginormous shoe advertisement. Sorry about that year and a half of your life, Mark. [Freshness Mag]

Microsoft's $1 Billion Xbox 360 Recall Problems Caused By Chip Cheapness

Jason Chen — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:30:00 EDT

Microsoft's red ring Xbox 360 problems have cost the company about a billion dollars in warranty repairs, but the research vice president and chief analyst at Gartner said that the hardware problems were caused because Microsoft wanted to be cheap. Instead of using an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) vender to make a graphics chip for the 360, Microsoft decided to design it themselves and have Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing create it. This saved "tens of millions of dollars" in design costs. Yes, only tens of millions.

The good news is that when Microsoft said that their red ring problems are fixed on newer units, they were probably right. They went to "an unnamed ASIC vendor based in the United States and redesigned the chip." Probably ATI, is what EETimes thinks. Moral of the story is to not skimp on chip design so you can save tens of millions, because that may come back and bite you in the ass down the road. [EETimes]

Gizmodo: asic

World's Largest Lite Brite Has Over 300,000 Pegs, Is Real Effing Brite

Microsoft's $1 Billion Xbox 360 Recall Problems Caused By Chip Cheapness