Think Atom processors running Android, or High-performance computing applications. Neither of these require a huge external ecosystem, but if you get a 30-40% boost in some workload, they are worth it. It's my understanding that small-cache Atoms benefit from this more than huge Xeons.

My Nissan Frontier and Toyota Sienna were both manufactured in the US, though it's more likely the vehicles themselves are tailored to the NA market in the first place. I've worked at companies that do a fair amount of domestic electronics manufacturing, and it is really difficult to get a big, complex design even 95% defect free when human error is involved. Designing products and packaging that can survive shipping and various installation mistakes (even domestic, first class shipping) seems to be a big portion of the nightmare. Unless you have a very high margin or volumes, RMA costs can completely erode your profit. And often by the time you've solved all of the problems, the product is next to obsolete :P.

In my opinion, it is designed pimarily so that Intel's embedded processors run Android well in the short term. Atom architecture in particular benefits in that some pointer offset calculations are faster when done in 32-bit vs 64-bit. Here are some great discussion links: http://blog.flameeyes.eu/2012/06/debunking-x32-myths http://lwn.net/Articles/503412/

Likely a lot of subscribers downgraded their combined plan and chose streaming or discs only. Say, roughly half of the remaining 23.2 million became 7.99 streaming or disc-only subscribers, that's a ~10% loss in revenue by itself.

An XFI-SFI interconnect runs up to 10.3 Gbps on a single serial link. It is double-pumped (bit on each end of the clock) so the clock rate is half that. This is the connection that links a 10Gbps phy to the transceiver module. You do have to keep the interconnects pretty short though.

http://www.altera.com/technology/high_speed/protocols/10gb-ethernet-xfi-sfi/pro-xfi-sfi.html

XDR ram can transmit 8 bits per clock on a serial line: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XDR_DRAM

Also, note how this is not a single serial 50 Gbps link - it's 4 parallel 12.5 Gbps links. You can run light in parallel with no interference, the trick is to make sure that each independent channel uses a different wavelength instead. So, they are doing it in parallel. Some 100 Gbps ethernet standards use 10 parallel 10Gbps lasers running at different wavelengths, but they are amazingly expensive because of this.

When did they get rid of C-style string formatting? That's news to me.

bcook@bcook-box:~$ python3
Python 3.1.2 (r312:79147, Apr 15 2010, 15:35:48)
[GCC 4.4.3] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> "%d %s" % (1, "Hello")
'1 Hello'

It is definitely not hundreds of times more - here, you can compare every manufacturer for the last 20 years.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124235858

Well, the Native Development Kit (NDK) lets you build native code. There is a regular C/Unix environment underneath. If you look at a project like the Android Scripting Environment, they've managed to make Python, Ruby and Lua work on the phone, packaged as an .apk and not requiring root access. http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/

You can compile pretty much anything for the phone, without needing root/Debian, though its not always as simple as 'apt-get install', for sure.

One way is to use the Native Development Kit, which lets you run regular C code on the phone. Here's a post explaining how to bind to bluez: http://blog.blackwhale.at/2009/08/android-bluetooth-on-steroids-with-the-ndk-and-bluez/

The other way is to use the existing android bluetooth API: http://code.google.com/p/android-bluetooth/

What that developer has done is use java reflection to wrap the existing (just not documented) android.bluetooth class API. I've been using it to communicate with an OBD-II adapter with some success (thought the dynamic port discovery API doesn't work entirely.)

For tethering, Wifi Tether works pretty well, since it doesn't even require the laptop to support bluetooth. It makes your phone a portable ad-hoc access point. Does require root access, for which there are some one-click solutions out there.