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Comment Re:This ought to be an opportunity (Score 1) 34

Nope, they are going the other way. There's a proposal to dramatically increase residential power rates, in part to fund the 'increased demand due to datacenters". They want residents to pay for stuff instead of making those poor, cash-strapped AI companies have to pay for what they are inflicting...

Comment Re:Anti-features (Score 1) 31

Not a weirdo, and it's all about their business interests against the users.

A user increasingly keeps their device over a longer term, 8 year old devices are common. Between their needs not evolving and to the extent they are, they focus on their phones. As a result, Microsoft gets thrown a few dollars by the OEM when the device sold, and that's it.

Meanwhile, if they get someone into a microsoft account, they can upsell them on subscriptions to office and onedrive, and easily make more money per user per year than they made from many of those users over a decade.

Comment Re:And this helps how? (Score 1) 140

That really depends on exactly what definition you are using. I suppose you could argue that yogurt could be made at home in a normal kitchen, but cheddar cheese couldn't. And I've never actually seen anyone make sauerkraut, though people certainly used to do so.

I.e., the first published definition of "ultraprocessed" specified "things that couldn't be made in a normal kitchen". I'll agree that it's a very sloppy definition, but I haven't heard a better one.

Comment Re:And this helps how? (Score 3, Informative) 140

The real problem is that minimally processed food doesn't keep as long, and often takes more time to prepare.

Actually "ultraprocessed" is too broad a category. It includes things like cheese and yogurt. Probably also sauerkraut. But there definitely are ultraprocessed foods that should not be sold without a strong warning, and many do have deceptive advertising that appears intentionally deceptive.

Comment Re:English (Score 2) 90

To make his suggestion at *least* vaguely closer to reasonable, even if not there, could just say text will be in the phonetic scripts. So maybe not Kanji, but sure, Hiragana and Katakana.

If it is true that no one will reasonably provide fonts for cheap to cover the thousands of Kanji, you could still be in native language with a manageable scope by sticking to the phonetic scripts.

Comment Re:Only part of the story... (Score 1) 124

I had heard that conceptually, they couldn't find a benefit for having the FPGA on-package but it was a big thermal/power challenge. So the integrated case was actually worse.

On the Omnipath side, similar story though they actually shipped a version... It got watered down to PCI-e attached even while on-package and so it was just a pain with zero benefit for being on-package. Very weird board/cooling design needed to let cable go straight to CPU, having to share the TDP budget between the loosely logically coupled, but tightly physically coupled functions...

But yeah, Intel doesn't seem to know what to do except processors, and they've squandered even that by now...

Comment Re:Engineers start up, MBAs and DEIs close down (Score 2) 124

Particularly striking as they started from a pretty solid premise, that mismanagement broadly is the cause. Especially citing Boeing, which was *well* documented that the changes can be traced back to acquiring McDonnel Douglas, which was ripe for the taking after being mismanaged into failure and Boeing having the genius idea that the best thing they can do with a leadership team that tanked their former company is to put them in charge of the still viable Boeing. People who wanted to scream DEI pointed to DEI initiatives that started *after* the troubled MAX program was already in the air.

Comment Re:We don't know how to Engineer (Score 1) 124

I wager engineers are willing to agree, as they see their work as solid but the business mismanaging things to make good engineering infeasible.

"We (the broader company) doesn't know how to engineer, but *I* still do" I could easily imagine being the takeaway. I think most of us can relate to being part of a broader mismanaged whole.

Comment Only part of the story... (Score 3, Insightful) 124

I'd say the big thing is they took their core product as granted, and focused a great deal of their income on almost anything else, aiming/hoping for some horizontal growth instead of investing to preserve their processor market share. Intel is flush with cash and could either invest in CPUs, or, say, buy McAfee, a brand that had lost most of it's value a decade prior. Or maybe acquire some HPC products to try to build an in-house all-in-one HPC solution to compete with their partners, then decide that was a bad idea and mostly abandon that expensive effort. Or maybe buy an ethernet switch chip company, and then promptly do nothing with it. Since it worked out so swimmingly the first time, do the exact same thing with another ethernet switch chip company and again just shrug and never do anything with it. Maybe spend a boat load of money trying to make "Optane" a thing, including heavy evangelizing to try to convince people to fundamentally rework core concepts of how they work to justify the apparently awkward in-between of PCM which was never going to be as fast as SDRAM nor as cheap as NAND. Along the way spend money on all sorts of weird random projects someone had without any target customer expressing interest in the hopes they stumble upon some unexpected Model T moment in a new market segment.

Intel just assumed their position in the market was unassailable and went about trying to start *something* else because protecting their core business wouldn't deliver adequate growth (they pretty much had the market cornered). So you have a lot of big 'lottery ticket' investments with inconsistent execution on top of dubious justifications in the first place. They failed to coalesce around a common accelerator/GPU strategy leaving them critically disadvantaged compared to AMD and nVidia, their CPUs surpassed by AMD, their fabs long passed by TSMC and none of their gambles paid off, so now they are just boned. I suppose on the upside, *now* they have growth opportunity in their core competency since they ceded so much ground...

Comment Re:Godzillomycota Chernobilli Kosmonautikus (Score 1) 47

Damn. You're right. That article doesn't say it, and I didn't find the one I originally read, which was about bacteria living deep in the earth where the radiation generated ionization states that they used. IIRC it was about bacteria living in a granite based low-level uranium source. And they were living a lot deeper than previously detected bacteria. (This was about 3-4 decades ago, so it's not surprising that I can't find that article. I think it was in Science News, but possibly it was in New Scientist. In any case, what I read was a magazine article. And it was rather explicit...though of course not detailed.)

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