Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Siri is so frustrating (Score 4, Insightful) 17

It's like they spent all their time on cutesy little behaviors versus doing the hard work of building an actual functional digital assistant.

Anyone other than me get annoyed when you try to ask Siri something and, midway through while you're still talking, Siri decides to interject "Uh huh?" It's incredibly irritating and distracting. And then, 75% of the time, Siri either does the wrong thing or silently just goes away without doing anything.

This guy put together and managed a crappy team that probably should be let go in its entirety. I'm sure he's got a nice retirement package though, nice work if you can get it.

Comment Re:Only part of the story... (Score 1) 115

What always puzzled me about Intel's...more peripheral...activities is that they seemed to fall into a weird, unhelpful, gap between 'doing some VC with the Xeon money; rather than just parking it in investments one notch riskier than savings accounts' and 'strategic additions to the core product'; which normally meant that the non-core stuff had limited synergies with intel systems; and had the risks associated with being a relatively minor program at a big company with a more profitable division; and thus subject to being coopted or killed at any time.

Seemed to happen both with internal projects and with acquisitions. Intel buys Altera because, um, FPGAs are cool and useful and it will 'accelerate innovation' if Intel is putting the PCIe-connected FPGA on the CPU's PCIe root complex rather than a 3rd party vendor doing it? Or something? Even at the tech demo level I'm not sure we even saw a single instance of an FPGA being put on the same package as a CPU(despite 'foveros' also being the advanced-packaging hotness that Intel assured us would make gluing IP blocks together easy and awesome). They just sort of bought them and churned them without any apparent integration. No 'FPGA with big fuck-off memory controller or PCIe root we borrowed from a xeon' type part. No 'Intel QuickAssist Technology now includes programmable FPGA blocks on select parts' CPUs or NICs. Just sort of Intel sells Altera stuff now.

On the network side, Intel just kind of did nothing with and then killed off both the internal Omni-path(good thing it didn't turn out that having an HPC focused interconnect you could run straight from your compute die would have been handy in the future...luckily NVlink never amounted to much...) and the stuff they bought from Barefoot; and at this point barely seems to ship NICs without fairly serious issues. I'm not even counting Lantiq; which they seem to have basically just spent 5 years passing on to Maxlinear with minimal effect; unless that one was somehow related to that period where they sold cable modem chipsets that really sucked. It's honestly downright weird how bad the news seems to be for anything that intel dabbles in that isn't the core business.

Comment Re:Quality Work Can't Be Rushed (Score 1) 115

Not delivering on schedule is absolutely a symptom; it's just a somewhat diagnostically tricky one since the failure can come from several directions; and 'success' can be generated by gaming the system in several places, as well as by successful execution.

In the 'ideal' case things mostly happening on schedule is a good sign because it means both that the people doing the doing are productive and reliable and the people trying to plan have a decent sense(whether personally, or by knowing what they don't know and where they can get an honest assessment and doing so) of how long things are going to take; whether there's something useful that can be added or whether forcing some mythical man-month on the people already working on it would just be a burden; keeping an eye on whether there's anything in the critical path that is going to disrupt a bunch of other projects, and so on.

If you start losing your grip on the schedule, that fact alone doesn't tell you whether your execution is dysfunctional or your planners are delusional, or some combination of the two; but it's not a good sign. Unhelpfully, the relationship between how visibly the gantt charts are perturbed and how big a problem there is is non-obvious(a company whose execution is robust but whose planners live in a world of vibes-based theatre and one whose execution is dysfunctional and crumbling and whose planners are reusing estimates from the time before the rot set in might blow a roughly equal number of deadlines; despite one having mostly a fluff problem and one probably being in terminal decline); but it's never a good sign.

Comment Much as I enjoy mocking Russia... (Score 5, Insightful) 70

This sort of thing just happens sometimes.

But I will be curious to see how this plays out, given the Russians have already gone back and forth regarding whether they're going to stick with the ISS to the end of its operational life. They might decide the decision's been made for them.

Comment Re:What next, ban under-16s from installing Firefo (Score 1) 226

First off, kids will just find lesser-known social media sites that aren't blocked. Or they'll all install some free multiplayer mobile game that has public chat and use that to communicate.

I work at a university. Even old me is aware that Discord is used quite a bit by our students. Good luck regulating THAT.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."

Working...