Are you sure this is right, and if so would you mind sharing a source for this?
According to the Nexperia 2024 annual report [1], they had just committed to _invest_ in the Hamburg site for their WBG/SiC/GaN production lines. Closure of the fab in Nijmegen was actually reported by NXP[2] not Nexperia - different companies.
Very cool work.. and frustating running into walls imposed by manufacturers, I imagine! I've also been working on GPU-based audio plugins for a long time and have done some public material on the subject.
Just my two cents: have you considered using a server/daemon process that runs separately and therefore more controllably outside a DAW (and therefore a client-server approach for your plugin instances)? It could allow you to have a little bit more OS-based control.
Very anecdotal and stereotypical, of course. Doesn't quite paint the whole picture, though I agree there's usually a sentiment of risk aversion in the _conservative_ part of any population, perhaps more so in countries where employment for anything beyond SMEs is more normalized, like Germany and Austria that have adopted a "Rhine capitalism" model that is much more constrained.
Just to give some counter-weight to this, the Netherlands has a self-employment rate that is significantly higher than the EU average [1], one of the higher EU rates of high-growth micro/small enterprises [2], a whole array of tax benefits for the self-employed and SMEs and a relatively fast moving law system that makes it increasingly easier for SMEs to be founded. And let's not forget a bunch of capitalist/financial scoops (first stock market, 1602; first investment banking, 1700s; first investment fund, 1774; etc.) some of which still have a presence today. Needless to say my experience is quite the opposite.
I don't believe its accurate to say that most EU states have no separation between executive and legislative branches.
The split is around 50%-50% with a majority of states actually having a bicameral system where these branches are separated, and this practically includes all major economic states of the EU as well as Poland and the EU itself. [1][2]
In recent legal material, your country (Poland) is a well-known example of an EU state where the governing party has been systematically breaking down this bicameralism and state of law to accomplish exactly what you're describing though.
The OP point was, that no matter how many chambers you have if one party wins majority in all of them and forms also the government (which usually happens), it will decide pretty much all it wants and go forward full steam with the opposition hopelessly running along barking. It's by design. The only chance is with coalitions as there will be more internal friction, but it's a very minor improvement indeed.
History is funny because at that time in the 90s there was a company called Bitboys Oy. That company was founded by some Finnish demoscene members and was developing a series of graphics cards, Pyramid3D and Glaze3D, with a programmable pipeline around 1997-1999 [1]. This was at around 5 years before the first commercial shader capable card was released.
Even though Wikipedia classifies it as vaporware, there are prototype cards and manuals floating around showing that these cards were in fact designed and contained programmable pixel shaders, notably:
(As far the companies go: VLSI Solution Oy / TriTech / Bitboys Oy were all related here.)
They unfortunately busted before they could release anything, due to a wrong bet in memory type choice (RDRAM, I think) and letting their architecture rely on that, then running out of money, perhaps some other problems. In the end their assets were bought by ATI.
As for 3dfx, I would highly recommend watching the 3dfx Oral History Panel video from the Computer History Museum with 4 key people involved in 3dfx at the time [2]. Its quite fun as it shows how 3dfx got ahead of the curve by using very clever engineering hacks and tricks to get more out of the silicon and data buses.
It also suggests that their strategy was explicitly about squeezing as much performance out of the hardware, and making sacrifices (quality, programmability) there, which made sense at the time. I do think they would've been pretty late to switch to the whole programmable pipeline show, for to that reason alone. But who knows!
The short answer is "hardware support". ravynOS should run on most commodity x86_64 hardware using FreeBSD's very stable and performant drivers.
The longer answer is that plus I don't see any real advantage to using xnu. We have merged in Mach support now (big thanks to NetBSD, NextBSD and the iX Systems folks for that) so the xnu approach just seems to add complexity and the effort of writing and maintaining drivers.
Considering how big this project is already, I opted to stick with the BSD kernel - at least for now
Regarding hardware support, will this run on actual Apple silicon? If not, it seems like Linux would have been the better choice for maximizing hardware support, if only for Asahi Linux's work.
(btw, I don't know much about this kind of work, so I have no idea if it's feasible to port the drivers from Asahi to FreeBSD, or if they'll have to start mostly from scratch)
I know nothing about the project apart from the website, but the front page says they aren't a fan of the "ever-closing hardware", so I guess Apple silicon might not be a priority.
Darwin is still open sourced, but mainly because of drivers and differences in certain other things (threads maybe, Mach ports / IPC, etc) that don’t have the integration or implementation with existing software is a major headwind to attempting a full encompassing Darwin OS.
PureDarwin was (is?) an attempt that hasn’t been able to break through those headwinds.
Yeah, though I would say human readable bytecode, and it is interesting to see that in the actual context. For anyone who's interested, there's a git repository containing a historical reconstruction of the original BSDs.
From what I grasp, it started as an extensive dynamic parser that needed to understand a lot of rules, and I guess with each new RFC and version, the rules needed to be extended too. And the config file could be loaded into a memory image to improve performance.
Compaq were already using Torx for their products in the 80s and 90s, including some Torx variation screw with a slot cut across.
I don't know whether this was for some simple form of tamper resistance (I do not believe they actually used the security Torx), or rather for some reasons related to manufacturing and maintenance, which I find much more likely.
As the article points out, Torx does have superior torque handling, especially in a time where "lesser" screws may have been more common in PCs, and the use of automatic torque-limiting screwdrivers during manufacture and service would've been an advantage.
According to the Nexperia 2024 annual report [1], they had just committed to _invest_ in the Hamburg site for their WBG/SiC/GaN production lines. Closure of the fab in Nijmegen was actually reported by NXP[2] not Nexperia - different companies.
[1] https://www.nexperia.com/dam/jcr:fc307e7e-e159-482c-b21b-0f9... [2] https://bits-chips.com/article/closure-of-nxps-nijmegen-fab-...