Mannerisms

Russia has overtaken Iran as the most-sanctioned country in the world, with 14,081 sanctions on Russian individuals and entities currently in place, according to  Castellum.AI Before the invasion of Ukraine, Iran was by far the most-sanctioned state in history, with 3,616 active sanctions by the United States, the United Nations, the EU and countries like Australia, Canada, India and Israel. ...

The NBT du jour is AI chatbots – clearly HMG should develop one and I should find a way to profit from it, Ed confides to his diary. I call in the Permanent Secretary. “Chatbots,” I tell him. “Aha, the NBT du jour, Secretary of State,”  replies the PS amiably, stealing my line. “That’s as maybe,” I reply glowering at ...

When pricing the 8080, Intel’s marketing boss Bill Davidow decided that, as it had 10x the performance of its predecessor the 8008 which sold for $36, the 8080 should sell for $360. Intel sold every 8080 it could make and recovered the 8080’s development cost in two months but the pricing decision was wrong, says Davidow in his book Marketing ...

According to the critics, the best game ever made is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The N64 game was released in 1998 and with its almost unbeatable average score of 99/100, it’s going to take something very special indeed to topple it. Of course, in the age of the internet there are a lot more reviews written for ...

This was the start of something new: Moral: Every journey starts with a single step

In a Gallup poll which has been running since 1946, asking Americans who they most admire, Billy Graham has been in the top ten more often than anyone else. Jimmy Carter has remained one of the country’s most beloved presidents and has been revered for his long-standing commitments to NGO Habitat for Humanity and teaching Sunday school in his hometown of ...

The US Chips Act funding may look like free money but Uncle Sam is looking for some concessions in return. One is he wants companies which take the money to invest in childcare, because getting women back to work after having children is becoming seen as important in the US. Another is companies taking the money mustn’t do business in ...

Thanks to IDC for this one – the five biggest selling smartphone vendors last year:   Top 5 Companies, Worldwide Smartphone Shipments, Market Share, and Year-Over-Year Growth, CY2022 (Preliminary results, shipments in millions of units) Company 2022 Shipment Volumes* 2022 Market Share* 2021 Shipment Volumes 2021 Market Share Year-Over-Year Change* Samsung 260.9 21.6% 272.1 20.0% -4.1% Apple 226.4 18.8% 235.8 ...

OpenAi, the company which developed ChatGPT, is investing in startups which build on to of its models to address specific areas. OpenAI has a $100 million fund to invest and has invested in rwelve early stage startups. The chart shows CBI Insights’ view of areas in which the OpenAI’s investment fund may be spent.

THE arrival of the solid state device on the domestic market has resulted in a concentration by the MO Valve Co on industrial devices up to a present limit of 6,000Mc/s, said Mr. J T Bell, who succeeds Mr.G.A. Marriott as managing director of the company on April 1. So, 61 years ago, started a story in Electronics Weekly’s issue ...

China has entered a ‘dark forest’ now it has been cut off from US chip technology, says an article co-written by Luo Junwei, a researcher at the China Academy of Science (CAS) Institute of Semiconductors, and CAS vp Li Shushen. “Over the years, all the fundamental research achievements in the global semiconductor and micro-electronic sector have been included in the ...

Smuggling has gone crazy, the grey market is booming like there’s no tomorrow, the semi companies and the disties are besieged by customers over-ordering and dodgy customers trying to get parts, I’ve never seen anything like it, Ed confides to his diary.  My department has a role to play  in this because, with so many people wanting to get into ...

Cryptoshit is how Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet’s long-time side-kick, sums up crypto currencies. Last week, at the AGM of one  of the companies he chairs, Munger let fly on the subject. ”Sometimes I calk it Cryptocrappo, sometimes Cryptoshit,” said Munger, “it’s ridiculous that anyone should buy this stuff.” “You can think of hardly nothing on Earth that has done more ...

Masayoshi Son is personally liable for about $5 billion under compensation deals done with  Softbank, reports Bloomberg. 35% of Son’s total stake in Softbank is pledged as collateral for loans from financial institutions. SoftBank has debt of $170 billion. Softbank’s financial situation is being hard hit by losses at its two Vision Funds which accounted for most of Softbank’s $5.9 ...

There was once a boss who told an engineer that he had a contract from General Electric for a video game which required sophisticated video-positioning techniques. The boss gave the engineer a very detailed description of the kind of game he wanted and said that GE had specified that it should be done with no more than 20 chips. With ...

Can you imagine how irritating it is when you’re trying to run a dictatorship and someone takes the piss out of you? It’s not so bad if it’s a dissident – they can be jailed, shot or re-educated, but what if it’s a robot ? Getting stroppy with an robot makes you look silly, and Xi has decided to make ...

Golden passports – i.e. residence permits granted in exchange for investments in the economy – exist in several EU countries. Spain, Greece, Cyprus and Malta, among others, grant residency rights in exchange for economic investments. According to a 2019 study by the EU Commission, more than 130,000 people were either naturalized or granted residence rights between 2011 and 2019 – ...

Thanks to AFL-CIO for this – the ten semiconductor CEOs with the largest salaries last year: $m Hock Tan $60.7 Vincent Roche 30.8 Pat Gelsinger 26.3 Lisa Su 29.5 Sanja Mehrotra25.3 Jrn Hsun Huang 23.7 Cristiano Amon 20.6 Rich Templeton 19.2 Liam Griffin 16 Ganesh Moorthy 3.8

Here is the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart for January 2023. Bias has always existed in the media – we’ve always had leftie media and right-wing media – but in media which aims to be politically neutral it, the  journalists and presenters openly display their personal bias these days.     blah

62 years this innovative ad for transistor engineers appeared in Electronics Weekly’s edition of March 8th 1961