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Well, you may not have to worry, but if you have large unpoured areas on a design with a professional PCB manufacturer (of the traditional, high-touch kind), they will ask if you want to pour some copper there. Reason being that it makes the process faster, more consistent and reduce possible side-etching on lanes. It may not a make a difference in most cases, but you may just save some time and effort by doing this.

The reason is that the copper is already there, it gets etched away. So it actually costs more to not have copper than to have it.

At industrial scale, surely they recover that copper from the etching fluid?

Even if they do, the recovery itself would surely have costs. It can't be easy.

Indeed, the enchant is very nasty stuff, it's not easy or clean to do so.

Yes, but this costs pales in the cost of redoing in case of problems with side-etching and the overall tightened manufacturing constraints.

And yes, they get to recover the copper, at the very least to make treatment easier for discarding (copper is a very bad pollutant). But not only there's a cost, this is dealt with by waste treatment companies that will at most use the copper value to recoup some of the cost of the treatment.


The dom comes from some of the tame ads...


I went through the same thing, it was a really unfortunate choice of words in the context.


> It's also a counterexample to the bureaucracy of standards bodies --- the standard that actually became widely used was the one that got released first.

Sounds like a cautionary tale: whatever gets released first will stick. If you make a blunder, generations will have to live with it (like IPv4).


> Parliament absolutely can, legally. The issue is that it’ll set a bad precedent that’ll get brought up by the buyer the next time the government want to privatise something.

Great, maybe they'll be more wary of taking advantage of this kind of blunder if they can get corrected.


It matters as in it makes it easy for this kind of issue to cause this much damage with little to no recourse for a fast correction.

Not that Linux or whatever are all immune, but it definitely matters.


You should look into what a kernel driver is. You can panic a Linux kernel with 2 lines of code just as you can panic a Windows kernel, they just got lucky that this fault didn't occur in their Linux version.

And to be honest, I don't think recovering from this would be that much easier for non-technical folk on a fully encrypted Linux machine, not that it's particularly hard on Windows, it's just a lot of machines to do it on.


In Linux it could be implemented as an eBPF thing while most of the app runs in userspace.

And, for specialised uses, such as airline or ER systems, a cut-down specialised kernel with a minimal userland would not require the kind of protection Crowdstrike provides.

I’m sure the NSA wasn’t affected by this.


ebpf works in Windows as well.


Move fast, break things.


And move to the next cushy job paid millions


Is this the part where someone says the rest of us are working too damn hard?

Because on days like today, I do wonder….


The problem isn't working too hard. It's working for others. We should be starting companies and then not selling it to FAANG.


I'm not hardware designer and I'd like to learn more about getting into freelancing and consulting, do you have any pointers?


For sure, feel free to reach out, contact info is in my bio.


Oh, yes. Hardware products and projects, specially those complex enough to need an FPGA, will usually have a long development pipeline and even one year seems pretty short.

And you can very often prototype with either an overpowered development board or you own prototype board with another FPGA, and then downsize appropriately as the project advances. Most importantly, if you know there will be a viable version in a year, you can postpone the final decision and Xilinx get to avoid having you choosing Altera now if it's possible that their new offering will match your project.


Do companies really gamble on their supply chain that hard?


They don't have a choice. FPGA's aren't like vanilla logic chips: they are highly proprietary both in terms of their specific hardware functionality as well as software tool chains and you can't second source them. Some of the larger customers are using them for government contracts (think military and space applications) where they are signing up products they are contractually on the hook for from years to decades.


Yes I know. So any product being developed today or in the next year would be done on a well established option that will be produced for many more years. It still isn't clear to me why such a long runway on the announcement does for anyone. It shouldn't be changing anyone's plans.


I live in a single-family unit in Uptown and would be surprised if my rate is anywhere below 95%, I'd be shocked and demand a recount. I order several times a week, often several times a day (yeah, a lot of items I need are same-day delivery, most are next-day), and I recall two or three packages missing this year. And those were likely never delivered of to the wrong address, as they had no picture.


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