Once the leading player in the semiconductor industry, the company is attempting to pull off one of tech's most complex turnrounds. From a report: It was nearly a decade ago when Intel, then the undisputed leader in global semiconductor manufacturing, made a fateful decision. A new technology, extreme lithography, was offering a way to pack more computing power on to the silicon wafers from which tiny chips, essential for widely used products like smartphones and PCs, are cut. Using light to etch complicated integrated circuits, EUV promised an unparalleled degree of miniaturisation, but Intel executives believed it would take years for the method to become practical. Instead, they stuck with older manufacturing techniques for their next generation of chips. This turned out to be a historic mistake, one with consequences that are being felt at a time when the US has put advanced chipmaking at the centre of its national industrial policy. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which adopted EUV in 2019, has leapfrogged Intel to become the world's most advanced chip manufacturer, closely followed by Samsung. Along with other slips, the judgment call has left Intel -- and the US -- scrambling to catch up.

"Hindsight is 20/20," says Ann Kelleher, head of technology development at Intel and the executive charged with restoring the US chipmaker's manufacturing processes. "It's very easy to look back and say, 'If something different was done...'" Intel is today at another crucial juncture. If, as planned, the company finally produces chips made with EUV in large volume later this year, it will be an important step on the road back. Nowhere will progress be watched more anxiously than in Washington, where the Biden administration is facing an imminent decision about how much financial backing to throw behind the company. Last year's US Chips Act committed $52bn in direct subsidies to support semiconductor manufacturing and boost research and development, along with an estimated $24bn worth of tax credits over the next eight years. The law was designed to reverse a slide that has taken the US share of chip production to 12 per cent, from 37 per cent in 1990. The centrepiece of that plan is to bring leading-edge manufacturing back to the US. For better or worse, that leaves Washington with little choice but to bet heavily on Intel, despite it being the laggard in one of the tech world's most important races. Yet falling behind in advanced chip production is not the only problem hanging over Intel.

Big shifts in its customers' needs -- such as the rise of artificial intelligence -- are threatening to sideline its traditional PC and server chips. Its attempt to go into direct competition with TSMC by becoming a so-called chip foundry, manufacturing chips on behalf of other companies, represents the biggest change to its business since it abandoned its original memory chips for processors nearly 40 years ago. To make things even harder, a yawning financial hole has opened up under the company at just the moment it is trying to make up for years of under-investment with a surge in capital spending. The depth of the reversal, which the company says is caused by a temporary inventory correction, shocked Wall Street in January, when Intel warned its revenue would tumble 40 per cent in the first three months of this year. The setbacks mean that a central piece of US industrial policy is now riding on one of the most difficult and complex tech turnrounds ever attempted. As the US Department of Commerce begins to weigh how to distribute the Chips Act subsidies, deciding how fiercely to back Intel will be a central question.:

Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) tipped us off to "Amiga present and future," an interview with Trevor Dickinson of A-EON Technology, a group funding ongoing hardware and software development for the Amiga community. "Amongst the topics are the still in betatest Mini-ITX and quad-core PPC Amiga motherboards. Trevor regularly writes editorials for the Amiga Future print magazine [English-translated version here] and his company will be attending and is sponsoring the Amiga34 event in Neuss Germany on the 12th and 13th of October 2019."

A-EON now has about 50 part-time developers and beta-testers working on software projects for Classic and Next-Generation AmigaOS, Dickinson reveals: I've been a Commodore and Amiga enthusiast since the late 1970s but only really got involved in the business side of Amiga in 2007 when I provided funding to Michael Battilana of Cloanto to help fast track the development of 'Amiga Forever'. [An Amiga preservation, emulation and support package] The funding allowed Michael to hire Nicola Morocutti, the 'Bitplane' magazine Editor, to embark on a major project to catalogue the tens of thousands of Amiga games and software titles which lead to the development of the one-click 'Retro-Platform' player which made its debut in 'Amiga Forever 2008' and the subsequent development 'C64 Forever' in May 2009. But, if you discount my Hardware donation scheme, it was the 'AmigaOne X1000' project [a PowerPC-based personal computer from A-Eon Technology CVBA intended as a high-end platform for AmigaOS 4] that was my first Amiga next-generation funding...

I've always said as long as Amigans keep supporting A-EON by buying the hardware and software we develop, we will keep developing both for AmigaOS. The motherboards names, 'Nemo', 'Cyrus' and 'Tabor' are characters and place names from the Jules Verne novel, "The Mysterious Islands". There are plenty more names available in that book.
Dickinson also discusses various projects that are attempting to build a portable Amiga laptop -- and his own early efforts to fund hardware donations to encourage Amiga developers to write productivity software, games and applications for AmigaOS 4.0. ("I resorted to buying second hand AmigaOne machines from eBay and other online sources...")

He also describes ongoing efforts to bring Libre Office and better web browsers to the Amiga. "Anyone who has the coding skills and is interested in helping out on such projects should contact me."

An anonymous reader cites a report on The Guardian: Perhaps there's nothing more annoying than going in for the kill to suddenly be "pooped on" by a Windows 10 automatic installation taking out your computer mid-stream to your 130,000 or so followers. After deciding to advertise during the weather by attempting to automatically install midway through a forecast, Windows 10 is starting to wreak havoc with gamers. Ex-professional Counter Strike player turned full-time streamer Erik Flom was rudely interrupted mid-game and live on Twitch by Windows 10 automatically installing on his PC. "What. What!? How did this happen! Fuck you Windows 10!" Flom said. "Oh my God! You had one job PC. We turned off everything. Update faster you fuck!"

It seems that the requirement to be online and save games on a remote server even in single player mode is leading to a less than ideal launch for SimCity 5. choke writes "Players attempting to play EA/Maxis' new SimCity game are finding that their save games are tied to a particular server, are facing problems with disconnects, inability to track friends or search for specific coop games online and failures to load game, and wait times of 20 minutes per login attempt. The question is, why the online restriction? Does this possibly indicate future micro-transactions in game?"

Jon Brodkin writes "The Wii U has been out for two weeks, with most of the attention naturally focusing on the console’s tablet-y GamePad and blockbuster titles such as New Super Mario Bros. U and Assassin’s Creed 3. But $60 games aren’t the only draw on Nintendo’s new system. There are exactly five games on the Nintendo eShop for $20 or less: Nano Assault Neo, Little Inferno, Mighty Switch Force! Hyper Drive Edition, Chasing Aurora, and Trine 2: Director’s Cut. You could call most or all of these indie games, depending on your definition of an independent developer." Read below for the rest of Jon's review.

benrothke writes "Anyone who has worked in information technology knows of Gartner. They are one of the leading information technology research and advisory firms. Most of their clients are CIOs and senior IT leaders in corporations and government agencies, high-tech and telecom enterprises. Gartner is huge with over 5,000 associates, over 1, 200 research analysts and consultants and clients in 85 countries. Their revenue in 2011 was nearly $1.5 billion. While Gartner is the world's largest, there are over 650 independent analyst firms worldwide. Barbara French's Directory of Analysts provides a comprehensive list. With all that, very few people understand how Gartner works and what makes them tick. In UP and to the RIGHT: Strategy and Tactics of Analyst Influence: A complete guide to analyst influence, ex-Gartner analyst Richard Stiennon takes the mystery out of Gartner. In particular, a good part of the book deals with Gartner's vaunted Magic Quadrant." Read below for the rest of Ben's review.

basscomm writes "Just the other day, it was discussed here on Slashdot that Final Fantasy XIV was released into the world as a buggy, incomplete mess. Now, it's been announced that due to 'generous amounts of player feedback' that lots of changes are coming (honest!). And, as a result, anyone who registers their game before October 25th will have their 30-day trial upgraded to a 60-day trial. But will it be enough to keep the game from hemorrhaging players once the free trials end?"

captainktainer writes "In one of the largest tests of EVE Online's new player sovereignty system in the Dominion expansion pack, a fleet of ships attempting to retake a lost star system was effectively annihilated amidst controversy. Defenders IT Alliance, a coalition succeeding the infamous Band of Brothers alliance (whose disbanding was covered in a previous story), effectively annihilated the enemy fleet, destroying thousands of dollars' worth of in-game assets. A representative of the alliance claimed to have destroyed a minimum of four, possibly five or more of the game's most expensive and powerful ship class, known as Titans. Both official and unofficial forums are filled with debate about whether the one-sided battle was due to difference in player skill or the well-known network failures after the release of the expansion. One of the attackers, a member of the GoonSwarm alliance, claims that because of bad coding, 'Only 5% of [the attackers] loaded,' meaning that lag prevented the attackers from using their ships, even as the defenders were able to destroy those ships unopposed. Even members of the victorious IT Alliance expressed disappointment at the outcome of the battle. CCP, EVE Online's publisher, has recently acknowledged poor network performance, especially in the advertised 'large fleet battles' that Dominion was supposed to encourage, and has asked players to help them stress test their code on Tuesday. Despite the admitted network failure, leaders of the attacking force do not expect CCP to replace lost ships, claiming that it was their own fault for not accounting for server failures. The incident raises questions about CCP's ability to cope with the increased network use associated with their rapid growth in subscriptions."

Michael J. Ross writes "Of the leading content management systems used by developers for creating websites, Drupal is highly regarded for many characteristics, including a much smaller initial footprint, compared to Joomla and other CMSs. Yet some developers find this a disadvantage as well, because one of the most common criticisms leveled against Drupal is its lack of built-in support for images and multimedia elements — thereby forcing new Drupal developers to choose from the thousands of contributed Drupal modules those that would be optimal for implementing their websites' multimedia functionality. Aaron Winborn's book Drupal Multimedia is intended as a guide to help such developers." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review.

Champions Online is Cryptic Studios' latest entry into the Superhero MMORPG genre, representing several years of advancement in game design both for Cryptic and for MMOs as a whole. It's no longer a new field, and there are now certain expectations about what an MMO should contain, and how it should play. Two major factors to a new game's success or failure are the standards they embrace and do well, and the ones they reject and do differently. Champions Online succeeds at adapting many established concepts, while still setting themselves apart from the typical swords & sorcery backdrop. Read on for the rest of my thoughts.

Next Generation (now happily fully merged with Edge) is carrying a story entitled Videogame Usability 101, attempting to lay out some standards for interacting with games. Some of them, like '3. Always let players remap controller buttons to suit their preferences' seems fairly straightforward and hard to disagree with. Others may be a bit more controversial: "4. Always let players skip cut scenes no matter how important they are to the story. What a predicament cut scenes create. As a designer, you want all your hard work to be acknowledged, even the cut scenes. Sadly, interactive entertainment is the name of the game, and it always comes first. That's why gamers play these things. So rather than assume every player wants to watch your story-telling chops, allow them to bypass cut scenes, tutorials, and even speed up the showing of logos when a game boots up. Tell your story through engaging gameplay, and you'll easily be remembered and praised regardless of what you accomplished in a cut scene, tutorial, or start screen branding." Anything on there that you categorically disagree with?

It's been about six months since we took the pen and paper gaming industry's temperature. There have been some important product releases since November, many of them well worth looking at. Steve Jackson Games continues to release books for its Fourth Edition of GURPS, and Wizards of the Coast works to expand the appeal of both the core Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) setting and the Eberron campaign world. Read on for some highlights from the world of tabletop gaming.

The rich IP backgrounds of Square/Enix and the Disney Corporation were thrown together for the first time in 2002. The Square-developed game, entitled Kingdom Hearts, surprised players with a story that blended two very different flavours into a compelling whole. The extent to which that game drew on the respective company's products made for a breathtakingly large world, and a storyline twisty enough to satisfy even the most jaded RPG player. Unfortunately, weak gameplay detracted from the overall experience of the unique title. The sequel, Kingdom Hearts II, picks up the pieces where the original left off and makes noticeable improvements in both story and gameplay. Read on for my impressions of a solid RPG that does fan service like no other title out there.

Via Cathode Tan (who has some commentary of his own on the subject), a Guardian article attempting to ascertain who is at fault for crappy game movies. From the article: "Because, unlike cinema, computer gaming is a medium which requires the player to make things up for themselves. An individual game may be laden with 'plot points' but its narrative is always up for grabs. It is a format of scenarios rather than stories, elements which can be bolted together in differing orders with varying outcomes. Cinema, on the other hand, is designed for people who like to watch and listen, and who expect the film-maker to get their story straight before the movie reaches the theatres. Viewing a film based on a computer game is like hanging around in an amusement arcade, peering over the shoulders of other people playing video games. It has less to do with story-telling than conceptual shelf-stacking. And it is symptomatic of the painful death of the art of narrative cinema."

Late last week, Sony Online Entertainment announced a fundamental revamp in the way that the Star Wars Galaxies MMORPG will be played. The Everquest-like autoattacking gameplay and multitudes of player classes are being removed. This marks the most dramatic change ever made to a MMOG already live, and Sony Online President John Smedley is willing to take questions from the Slashdot community about the changes. One question per comment, and we'll send the ten best questions on to Mr. Smedley. We'll post his answers as soon as they're returned. More details are available below, as are some preliminary responses from Mr. Smedley about the broad picture they're aiming for.

Hardcore gaming gets a lot of press attention for the intense graphics and the meaningless violence. Despite this, there are millions of gamers who enjoy their entertainment in a more casual vein. One of the champs of the casual PC market is Maxis behemoth The Sims 2. The sequel to the original, much expanded, Sims is now working its way through a series of content additions of its own. The most recent expansion for Sims 2 is "Nightlife". This out-and-about addition incorporates much of the "Hot Date" material from the original game, with a generous helping of extras. Read on for my impressions of the latest attempt by Maxis to improve your virtual person's social life.

Spacefaring races always seem to get into trouble, and game designers love to put us into the shoes of the explorers and soldiers of tomorrow. Unfortunately, futuristic titles can be just as tiresome as Dungeon Crawl #457. Both MechAssault 2 and Nexus: The Jupiter Incident are examples of this truism. Both games are well conceived, with fine pedigrees behind them, but neither manages to deliver satisfying gameplay or long-term enjoyment. Read on for my analysis of these two titles...in spaaaaaaaaace.

AdamBa (Adam Barr) writes "Juiced is not a great book. The writing is workmanlike but not particularly entertaining, none of the stories are more than slightly amusing, and its protagonist projects an unappealing mixture of vanity and whining. There is a bit of dirt on players, and a couple of nuggets about Madonna and the sex lives of baseball players (and the intersection of those two), but as a baseball autobiography, it pales besides better competition. And yet, Juiced may be one of the most important baseball books ever written." Specifically, the book provides an insider's account of one aspect of biotech that has achieved widespread use, if not acceptance. Read on for the rest of Barr's review.

An anonymous reader writes "Gamasutra is running a post-mortem on an interactive love story that was written by students. They were attempting a solution to the game designer's challenge from the GDC 2004. From the article: Interaction with video games is currently done at an almost entirely rational level. The player may react to a game emotionally, but the game will never know about it, and thus, never respond to it. We wanted to change this, and have the player interact with the game solely through his own emotions."

Last week, Tycho mentioned a set of questions they'd sent in the direction of the folks at Blizzard regarding the downtime World of Warcraft has been experiencing. Today Blizzard responds to their questions. Tycho agreed to the interview being reposted below the cut, so read on if you'd like Blizzard's response in the face of player frustration.