For the subtle variants, I believe it's how they price discriminate. It's all the same part, but they use fuses to disable various peripherals. Way easier to do that than to fabricate a whole bunch of different chips.
Most likely when it's moderate/major features. Sometimes it can be as simple as a case of packaging (i.e. fewer pins so they can't bring everything out.) I've always assumed that some of the packaging options were driven by large customers who wanted something just a bit different for whatever reason. (PCB space, power consumption, just to be difficult... who knows)
Depends on your model of capital flow. One reasonable answer would be the factory owners or investors. Another reasonable answer is that the workers did, because their work led enabled the factory to succeed.
The workers whose labour generated the value the looms were paid for with. To some extent, also the workers that put together the looms while only being paid a fraction of the value they created.
What you or I want is no longer a question afforded to us sadly.
I'm genuinely curious: Are there periods of history where people could choose what to go into without it having a large effect on their income or quality of life? From my point of view, it seems like our standard of living is at an all-time high and our freedom to choose what we do with our lives is unprecedented. But I'd be open to being shown empirical evidence to the contrary.
I use it do Anki on my bike ride to/from work. Wrote some scripts in Python. They take my deck, convert it to speech using IBM Watson’s TTS. Then i made a small PCB with 4 buttons that is fixed to the handle bar. That way I can interact with the program.
Our products are programmed in C and contain Blackfin DSPs and PIC microcontrollers. Embedded programming and DSP experience would be great. Electronic design experience would also be great.
Email with subject heading starting with HN if interested.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-type_semiconductor (property 2)