That was Intel Quark. It was too expensive for the “big microcontroller” use case and too power hungry for the “small Linux” use case.

The marketing was confusing, I’m not sure Intel even knew what it was for, except to show investors they had an IoT play.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quark

I found some of these boards in a box last year and was unable to do anything with them… Intel has thoroughly erased all documentation and SDKs from the internet. If anyone has those artifacts, please push to archive.org

Making 20 y/o CPU with today's process? It is cool but yeah not really a wise business decision.

Industrial microcontrollers and power electronics use older process nodes, mostly >=45nm. These customers aren’t competing for wafers from the same fabs as bleeding edge memory and TPUs.

The world ran just fine on DDR3 for a long time.

Okay, but what about the rest? The ones that aren't embedded in someway and use industrial grade PCs/control stations? Or ones with large buffers like network routers? I'm also wondering about the supply of the alternate nodes and older technologies. Will the manufactures keep those lines running? Was it micron that abandoned the entire retail market in favor of supplying the hyperscalers?

> The ones that aren't embedded in someway and use industrial grade PCs/control stations? Or ones with large buffers like network routers?

Not sure if they require DDR5 but the AI crisis just caused the prices of DDR5 to rise but the market supply of DDR4 thus grew and that's why they got more expensive too

> I'm also wondering about the supply of the alternate nodes and older technologies.

I suppose these might be chinese companies but there might be some european/american companies (not sure) but if things continue, there is gonna be a strain on them in demand and they might increase their prices too

> Was it micron that abandoned the entire retail market in favor of supplying the hyperscalers?

Yes

..DDR3 that's no longer being produced. Why do people just assume old tech to be abundant in supply?

Spanner depends on having a time source with bounded error to maintain consistency. Google accomplishes this by having GPS and atomic clocks in several datacenters.

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

And more importantly, the tighter the time bound, the higher the performance, so more accurate clocks easily pay for themselves in other saved infrastructure costs to service the same number of users.

I've been using Cloudfront Functions to do some of the filtering that a WAF would do. It's quite flexible, but you've gotta figure out your own rules.

AWS WAF has some presets you can use

I wonder if we'll start to see instance type shortages or price increases from EC2 and GCP if they can't get enough DRAM for latest gen servers.

Every time you see an ellipsis "..." you know that the designer put form over function. Hiding data from the user is never the right answer.

They could use their fancy AI to generate shorter titles.

And if someone puts in a 500 character title, it still can't be truncated?

YouTube making up a shorter title would be so much worse...

Release notes https://sqlite.org/releaselog/3_51_0.html

Which chips specifically are we talking about? Nexperia's products page looks like it's mostly basic semiconductors and standard logic ICs, all of which are available from several manufacturers. Sure, they might have to modify the PCB layout if the pinouts are different, but that doesn't seem like a major hurdle.

https://www.nexperia.com/products

Respinning a PCB can be a bigger deal than you'd think, if regulatory certification is required. In the EU automotive sector, I'd guess it is.

It appears that the industry learned exactly nothing from the COVID shortages.

> It appears that the industry learned exactly nothing from the COVID shortages.

To be clear, automakers during pandemic canceled all their chip orders, then after the wafer slots were reallocated, proceeded to uncancel all their orders leading to even more chaos in the industry. I think that this point, fabs should stop giving the auto industry any preferential treatment.

When I was at RIT (2006ish?) there was an elective History of Computing course that started with the abacus and worked up to mainframes and networking. I think the professor retired years ago, but the course notes are still online.

https://www.cs.rit.edu/~swm/history/index.html

To strenghten GPs point a bit: There are courses on conceptual art (1966-72) or minimal art alone. One "History of Computing" course, while appreciated, is not doing its history enough justice.

To be fair, the history of computing is only ~200 years old even if you go back to Babbage and Lovelace. The history of art is literally as old as recorded history.

Hello fellow RIT alum! I don't think I knew about this class when I went there, though I started as a Computer Engineering student (eventually switched to Computing Security).

I have a cron that writes daily backups to S3 buckets in both us-east-1 and eu-west-1. I was a bit surprised that both buckets were inaccessible during the outage.

Now I have it writing to Backblaze B2 instead of eu-west-1. Hopefully that’s completely independent.

> I was a bit surprised that both buckets were inaccessible during the outage.

Can you provide more details? I did not observe that. If that was the cause, would that not mean the outage would even more massive, with companies outages across all regions?

The DNS names- `bucketname.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com` and `bucketname2.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com` failed to resolve during the outage.

Thanks for sharing that. Interesting detail. Do you know if those lookups came from workloads inside us-east-1 ?

No, I was trying to download from my home internet- Astound in Seattle. I run a local recursive resolver that was unlikely to have those subdomains cached.