Broadcom doesn't care. They just want to milk VMware for all it's worth to goose their short-term profits.

Yeah this was clearly willingly and knowingly done.

They did the same rugpull to PLX customers. This is Broadcoms business model. Never ever do business with Broadcom.

Difficult for me because I really like Raspberry Pis.

You're not doing business with broadcom there. Though most people working at the raspberry foundation are broadcom people. Most from the time before broadcom turned full evil though.

They explained it to their investors when they announced the purchase

Definitely Grok because I can distract it by asking it to create a deepfake of Taylor Swift. While it's doing that, I run away.

"This makes the machine transparent in a way that microcode-based designs cannot be."

Every output bit m of microcode can be equivalently expressed as a logic function of n inputs where the microcode has n incoming address lines. This no less transparent than pure logic if you know the contents of the microcode. Microcode is often preferred because changing it is much easier than changing a bunch of gate logic. IMHO factoring your design into registers vs. control signals and putting the control signals into microcode makes the design more transparent than having a giant sea of gates.

He did it while airplanes were still there and afterwards had no way to fly out.

Rivian would have gone out of business a year ago if VW had not approached them with an offer of $5.8B to rewrite all of VW's car software [0]. Because VW knew their own software sucked.

I wonder if this is a result of Rivian writing VW's software or if that effort hasn't yet borne fruit.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivian_and_Volkswagen_Group_Te...

You can have high-mileage diesel cars or low-emissions diesel cars but not both at the same time.

VW knew this but lied to customers and told them they could have both. Dieselgate was their attempt to convince everybody the lie was true.

This was official EU policy, based on french reports, as the french and italian manufacturers actually came up with common rail diesels first. The EU then changed regulations to tax based on CO2, which diesels are better at. They also made diesel taxes lower, to offset the higher prices for diesel cars (often 2000+ euros more than the petrol versions). This was all done in the framework of reducing foreign oil imports.

What VW did was to save money from ThinkBlue systems. Not every manufacturer failed the tests, especially the ones who used exhaust gas treatment did pass, and were more economical than petrol engines. After that, the EU changed emission standards and made them more strict, so VW switched to using dual exhaust treatment. Which made the cars more expensive.

What finally killed diesels was the removal of the tax reduction on diesel fuel. Since it is now taxed the same as petrol, there is no more any advantage that can offset the higher purchasing costs of the cars.

TIL you can treat bug bites with something electrical.

Yeah it uses a tiny ceramic heating element to heat the bite area up to uncomfortable temperature. It's supposed to denature the toxin and/or counter inflammation. Either way it does reduce moskito itchiness with me.

Rare earth magnet motors require software too if you want them to be maximally efficient. You could embody that software in e.g. an FPGA of course, but it's still software.

"Brushless DC motors" are good because brushed DC motors are constantly switching polarity, which causes arcing of the brushes, which causes wear. The brushes are not there to energize the rotor; the rotor is just magnets after all. The brushes are there to tell the stator to change polarity.

Brushless DC motors don't arc -- because they switch stator polarity with electronics that sense the position of the rotor without rubbing parts. (They can also fine-tune the stator current spikes to make the motor very efficient over a wide speed range, which brushed DC motors cannot do.) The lack of arcing is more important than the fact that they don't have rotating contact points.

Brushed AC motors have rotating contact points (slip rings) but they don't arc (ideally), so the contact points don't degrade as fast as brushed DC motors do. But they do carry a lot of current because their purpose is to energize the rotor. Brushed AC motors are not ideal, but making an AC motor "brushless" is not nearly as big a win as making a DC motor brushless.

Wait. You're saying DC motors require current that's constantly switching polarity? So they're sort of really AC internally?

Yep. All motors require constantly changing current. The distinction between AC and DC motors is whether you feed the motor externally with current that is already alternating sinusoidally, or whether the motor itself turns external DC into some kind of AC.

We had that process too, and I insisted on it. Any PR not matched to one or more issues gets automatically rejected. The friction this injects ensures people are not wasting company resources bikeshedding.

I'm a world champion bikeshedder, and I both hated this policy and insisted we keep it.