5 ms·
With strange failures like that, I'm surprised the system even booted at all.
by plerpin 6y ago
With strange failures like that, I'm surprised the system even booted at all.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- FullyFunctional 6y agoPope was a QA engineer - that means he worked on systems that weren't qualified for shipping. Actual CMS bugs in a shipped device was extremely rare, but the big promise of Transmeta was that would _could_ ship fixes (and did, in at least one case). The perf impact of a CMS fix was typically trivial as it was fixing a translator, unlike an interpreter like the microcode in an Intel core.
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoI mostly worked on development boards that were the same size that you'd put in a regular AT/ATX case. I did some work on notebooks, too, both on prototypes & production models, too.
- FullyFunctional 6y agoI think I know you (Hi!), but my point is that by definition, QA's work is to find the bugs before the customers, so they don't see them. Talking about bugs you find without that qualifier might make people get the wrong impression.
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoHola!
- ethbro 6y agoOne thing to remember is that this dropped circa-2001. The dominant Windows versions were ME and XP. Both of which featured driver models of... not too much system protection. So applications (especially games) looked a lot more like their console cousins, in that they took advantage of all kinds of weird hacks and did things 1,000 different ways. As opposed to now, when you have more strict intermediary layers, and software sits on top of more defined interfaces. So things like "the MechWarrior developer in charge of jump jets decided to base timing off the PCI bus speed" or god knows what, isn't that surprising.