I used to work for a company making CD and DVD drive chipsets. We had industry-wide CD and DVD standards to work to -- the Red Book, Orange Book, Cooked Orange book (IKYN). Great. We also had to work around other people's failures, like an infamous motherboard manufacturer's screwed-up implementation of the ATA bus spec. It wasn't deliberate but by the time they got around to fixing it there were millions of computers out there with non-standard IDE channels in hardware. If we had designed our silicon to the exact ATA spec then it would fail occasionally when connected to that manufacturer's mobos, locking up the bus. Not our fault but we'd get the blame as everybody else's devices would work OK since they also knew about the bug and designed around it.
We also had a rogue's gallery test suite of weird CDs and DVDs -- Chinese music CDs with 100 minutes of music, 1100Mb CD-ROMs, odd VCDs etc. that our silicon also had to cope with or it would mean those drives couldn't be sold into certain markets around the world.
Standards are nice, in Theory. I want to live in Theory. Everything works in Theory.
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Standards
I used to work for a company making CD and DVD drive chipsets. We had industry-wide CD and DVD standards to work to -- the Red Book, Orange Book, Cooked Orange book (IKYN). Great. We also had to work around other people's failures, like an infamous motherboard manufacturer's screwed-up implementation of the ATA bus spec. It wasn't deliberate but by the time they got around to fixing it there were millions of computers out there with non-standard IDE channels in hardware. If we had designed our silicon to the exact ATA spec then it would fail occasionally when connected to that manufacturer's mobos, locking up the bus. Not our fault but we'd get the blame as everybody else's devices would work OK since they also knew about the bug and designed around it.
We also had a rogue's gallery test suite of weird CDs and DVDs -- Chinese music CDs with 100 minutes of music, 1100Mb CD-ROMs, odd VCDs etc. that our silicon also had to cope with or it would mean those drives couldn't be sold into certain markets around the world.
Standards are nice, in Theory. I want to live in Theory. Everything works in Theory.