Mannerisms

Here, 63 years ago, is an ad from Electronics Weekly’s edition of February 1st 1961

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) – the EU’s move to rein in the power of big tech companies – went into effect earlier this month. The six-month grace period for the six companies designated as “gatekeepers” ended on March 7th, meaning they now have to comply with the rules set out in the DMA and outline the measures they’ve taken ...

Mutabilogica, my AI-at-the-edge-optimised programmable logic company, is shaping up as a sprat to catch a whale-sized mackerel, Ed confides to his diary. Where are the whales? Very clearly the Middle East is the place to go for the big-fish investors. As  His Majesty’s Secretary of State for Science, Technology and Digital Industry it is not difficult to fix up an ...

“A trend is a trend is a trend But the question is: Will it bend? Will it alter its course through some unforeseen force And come to a premature end,” so doodled Sir Alec Cairncross Nowhere is this more true than in the semiconductor industry.  In  its mid-year forecast for 2000, IC Insights forecast a $250bn market for 2001. It ...

So here you are, you’re boss of a group of red-hot coders who can make world-warping AI applications. Obviously the dough is in tailoring apps for sale to big organisations to use to oppress their staff and make it cheaper to get their customers off their back. Maybe the reason why MS is the most valuable company in the world ...

There was once an American genius who had the unusual distinction of being expelled from Harvard twice. He invented many things and tended to give them the same name. Here is car which he invented: and here is a house he designed Both house and car were called by the same name. He was awarded the US Presidential Medal of ...

Equal Pay Day in the US was Tuesday. It is the date in the year at which a woman’s combined earnings for the current year and the previous  year equal the previous year’s earnings of a man. For instance EPD in the US this year is March 12th which means that to make the same as a man made in ...

The US Chip Act looks as though it’s going the same way as the hundreds of billions of dollars China threw away on its chip industry – ruined by incompetent execution.. In China, the money got wasted because the fund managers and bureaucrats dispensing the money seemed to have no idea of who was a genuine semiconductor operator and who ...

Whether it’s crazy or not, thanks to CompaniesMarketcap for this list of the world’s most valuable companies as of last Monday morning: T = $trn  B = $bn Microsoft. 3 T Apple 2.6 T Nvidia. 2.2. 7 Saudi Aramco 2.1  T Amazon 1.8  T Alphabet  1.7  T Meta  1.3  T Berkshire Hathaway  874   B TSMC  760   B Eli ...

According to conventional wisdom, how conservative or liberal someone is would largely be determined by their age. However, a major shift has taken place in the US. Now, gender is a better indicator of U.S. political leanings – as seen in data collected by Gallup. As of last year, 18 to 29-year-old men as well as women over the age ...

PROBLEMS facing mllitary communications – past, present and future – were described by Major-General Eric Cole, Director of Teleconmmunications, War Office, in his presidential address to the Radio Society of Great Britain at the IEE, London. So, 63 years ago, started a story in Electronics Weekly’s edition of February 1, 1961 The story continues: Of future trends he forecast: the ...

Greece, which has a classical tradition of homosexual love, didn’t  legalise same-sex marriage  until last month, Same-sex marriage has advanced in countries and regions where acceptance of homosexuality is high and globally, half of countries that allow it are in Western Europe. More recently, countries in Latin America have also seen advances, with Cuba and Mexico legalising same sex marriage ...

It’s too much of a temptation seeing these sky-high valuations of tech assets and not doing anything to cash in, Ed confides to his diary, so I have come up with a wheeze. For many years now I have owned a moribund  company which started out as a programmable logic startup with an innovative chip design which  failed when it became obvious ...

Atiq Raza who founded and was CEO of NexGen and then became President and COO of AMD, tells of his first meeting with Jerry Sanders. NexGen had created a superior 386 clone and Bill Gates, who had an interest in seeing multiple-sourced 386s, suggested to Raza that he ask AMD to fab it. “The first time I was introduced to ...

21,000 employees have been laid off by Meta since January 2022 and 460,000 people have been laid off  from Amazon in the past two years. 34,000 employees were laid off from tech companies between January 1 and February 13, according to  Layoffs.fyi, In January, Microsoft and Google, announced plans to lay off 1,900 and 1,000 people, respectively. Twitch, Salesforce, Citrix ...

33 years ago two scientists made this proposal to management aimed at facilitating access to data in a complex organisation: ‘This proposal concerns the management of general information about accelerators and experiments. It discusses the problems of loss of information about complex evolving systems and derives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system.” It changed the world Moral: Ideas ...

The Chinese self-driving car aspirants appear to be losing their enthusiasm for being tested by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). In 2023  the distance travelled  by Chinese self-drive cars in road tests in California was 70% less than it was in 2022.  The brands which put in most test miles were US brands – Waymo, Cruise snd Zoox. ...

The only answer to what is the value of  a tech asset these days  is how long is a piece of string. It is whatever someone says it is. The ideas of raising Arabian trillions for fab-building, of paying a CEO $55 billion for a year’s work, of claiming that the stagnant $8 billion programmable logic market could be a ...

Thanks to the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2024 for this – the top 15 universities: Oxford  Stanford MIT Harvard Cambridge, Princeton Caltech Imperial College UC Berkeley Yale  ETH Zurich Tsinghua Chicago Peking Johns Hopkins

Smartphone shipments dropped to the lowest level in a decade last year. According to IDC, smartphone vendors shipped 1.17 billion devices last year, down more than 20 percent from 2016 when smartphone shipments peaked at 1.47 billion units. While many experts think that “peak smartphone” is already behind us, market research group IDC remains hopeful for the industry to return to ...