The engineering teams were probably running both programs in parallel. I've had this happen to me several times. Sometimes, project B is just leverage [1] so that a better deal can be negotiated, so you half-ass project B, and that's fine and just business. But sometimes it's not, and that situation sucks.
[1] Factory resources are scarce, so it's obvious to the engineering team how serious management is about things. Word spreads.
"Seamus Blackley apologized on Twitter to the AMD engineers who worked with Microsoft to create the prototype Xbox consoles that the company used in the lead-up to the OG Xbox's release in November 2001. To AMD CEO Lisa Su, Blackley said, "I beg mercy."
"I was standing there on the stage for the announcement, with [Bill Gates], and there they were right there, front row, looking so sad," he said of AMD engineers in the room. "I'll never forget it. They had helped so much with the prototypes. Prototypes that were literally running the launch announcement demos ON AMD HARDWARE."
One example of a "Project B" happening was between Nintendo and Citizen during the time of the Game Boy. Citizen had a color LCD screen available, and there was progress on designing a handheld game console to use that screen. But it turned out to be a Project B to negotiate with Sharp and use their black and white LCD instead. Then Citizen proceeded to work with Sega instead with the Game Gear.
Given that this was circa 2000, could have had provisions for 2 more prototypes for Transmeta and VIA. I doubt they would have gotten far or even start given that they likely wouldn't have very competitive options, but it's fun to think about.
That's kinda what I was thinking too. There is a privacy loss for sure, but the average consumer also gained things for that loss.
Maybe Amazon in 2000 wasn't so icky but there was also no free same day shipping. Apple II could be repaired without "special tools" but those machines were huge, heavy, mostly empty space, and gap and glass alignment was way worse. I wish I could say something smart about Windows 95 but I've worked hard to erase it from my memory, so I can't. :)
Electronics things, just in general, did a lot less in the past. With that comes good and bad.
Privacy is a trade-off and right now the general public doesn't place a high value on privacy so they're happy to trade it away for anything. Honestly I understand it. I'm convinced I'm going to get bombarded with marketing nonsense regardless so I might as well get something for it.
> I wish I could say something smart about Windows 95 but...
Remember how its uptime was limited to 49.7 days because of a timer's numeric overflow (and in something like an audio driver, too, it shouldn't have been system critical). Good times.
A lot of computing in the 90s and earlier was terribly unstable. And that was without considering how prevalent viruses were in the 90s, too.
> Maybe Amazon in 2000 wasn't so icky but there was also no free same day shipping.
And that was absolutely okay and would still be okay. We don't need free same-day shipping. Free same-day shipping is basically a drug that people have gotten addicted to.
I just remembered your article on the standard cells of Pentium and there you noted bicmos was used by some gates for a reduction in propagation delay in some instances. Were any of the gates in the adder structures bicmos?
No, the adder was all CMOS. But there are some BiCMOS drivers visible at the bottom of one of the photos. The NPN transistors are big squares, unlike the CMOS transistors.
A difference in potential between grounds in industrial settings is also really common. Especially if one plugs two different pieces of equipment into two different branches of the building's circuit, without knowing it, and then connects those devices with something like ethernet. With 20m+ cables, it happens. :) You'll be very happy for isolation then. 1 to 5V difference is enough to damage electronics.
"-march=...", e.g. "-march=skylake" or "-march=znver3" or whatever CPU you are using.
When you do not know the correct type, and you do not cross-compile, you can just use "-march=native".
I recommend to never use either gcc or clang without giving an explicit "-march=..." option. Otherwise you do not know which is the default compilation target and it is almost certain that the quality of the generated code will be bad. Even for code that will be distributed in binary form for multiple computers, you must choose consciously a compilation target that is the minimum that should be supported and you must not depend on a random default choice that may change at each compiler update.
For ARM, there are similar options for specifying the CPU model, e.g. "-march=armv8.2-a". However there are much fewer models and counting leading zeroes has been supported for about 20 years, so even the default ARM CPU model must include it.
On ARM only the compiler options for specifying the floating-point instruction subset can be tricky (an example of such an option: "-mfpu=fpv4-sp-d16"), when you are targetting embedded computers or microcontrollers, because there you can still encounter a lot of older ARM cores that have a much more restricted floating-point support than in more recent models. Moreover, some vendors of ARM-based devices may choose to reduce the cost by disabling some floating-point features, so knowing the name of an ARM core may be not enough for the selection of the compiler options, you must also know whether the optional core synthesis options have been enabled or disabled.
There is a huge amount of software in every single step of making an ASIC, digital or analog. Or even a PCB for that matter. Long gone are the days of cutting tape and etching anything yourself. Apple's M3 has 25 billion transistors. No human drew those.
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You complete a detailed form including giving your company registration and the reason for use of each cookie. You list each company with access.
You pay into escrow €10 per user per company (eg 10 users, sending data to 1200 companies; 120000€) you wish to gather/keep data on, providing that users details and an annual fee.
Any non trivial infringement and you get DNS blocklisted, the escrow money is paid out, CEO of the registered company is fined one years income (max of last 4 years) and legal proceedings are started against the company and its executives.
On application to the cookie ombudsman I can see all companies who legally have access to my data (and via which gateway company), I can withdraw access, they can withdraw service.
[1] Factory resources are scarce, so it's obvious to the engineering team how serious management is about things. Word spreads.