TigerBeetle actually already donated around ~$100K this past year. We just didn't announce it.
With revenue increasing, we wanted to increase our donation to the foundation to $128K per year going forward, and Synadia were keen to match. The only reason we announced it this time is to encourage other companies to join us.
Finally, as I wrote in TB's post [1], both companies have already donated the first installment, and Derek and I have also both been donating as individual donors in our personal capacity since around 2018.
United Airlines Flight 173 ran out of fuel while circling Portland International Airport trying to troubleshoot a landing gear. Six more minutes of fuel could have helped the airliner to land in the Columbia river by the airport or belly land on the runway. The captain chose to keep troubleshooting and crashed just 6 miles away from the airport.
"The Internet doesn't use MAC addresses, and Internet packets don't have MAC addresses" is a wrong assumption. What's an "Internet packet"? Without MACs there's no networking. Without networking there's no Internet.
True. In the Second Edition the Preface mentioned that "Finally, the number of UNIX installations has grown to 10" and some of those systems were connected mostly via telephone lines.
The article refers to a "typical packet found on a typical network" then describes an Ethernet frame, so the author clearly refers to MACs in an Ethernet setup.
MAC is part of the Ethernet standard. The clue of why is needed for is in the name "access control". Without MAC there's no Ethernet. Without Ethernet there's no Internet.
Media Access Control (MAC) address is the method to control access to the physical transmission medium. A switch doesn't care about your upper layers (IP, TCP, etc.) but won't find your host without a MAC address. That's why MACs are called hardware address and work on the local link only, from the port on your cool network interface to the other end of the cable or radio signal.
The Itanium was a new 64bit architecture. AMD64 is just addition to the 32bit Intel architecture. Itanium didn't make it, so we're stuck with backward compatibility all the way to 8080 in today's x86 processors. That's all in the past! What I'm looking forward is to the future SoC releases with Intel cores and Nvidia graphics.
Funny enough when Intel and DEC settled their lawsuit Intel got StrongARM[1] from DEC which was pretty fast for its time. It was a pretty cool, literally, chip that didn't need a heatsink. I had a Shark set-top appliance prototype. The offical name was DNARD — Digital Network Appliance Reference Design.
