July 3, 2009

The Genius Who Was Prosecuted For Mail Fraud

 Lee De Forest inventor of the Audion tube, also called both the 'De Forest valve', and the 'triode valve', which allowed the amplification of radio waves so they could travel long distances  was, in 1913, sued for mail fraud by the Attorney-General of the USA.

 

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Will Q3 Be A Good One?

Is end demand for semiconductors beginning to grow? Some analysts seem to think that Q3 could see a return to growth in real end-user demand.

 

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July 2, 2009

FABLE: The Company That Depended On One Man

There was once a company founded in 1951 that was a by-word for successfully managing technological transition.

 

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Good Old EU (Again): Cheaper Calls And Texts

To start two posts in a week with 'Good Old EU' is totally unexpected. On Tuesday it was the EU's action in standardising mobile phone chargers, now it's bringing down the cost of phone calls and texting while abroad.

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July 1, 2009

IPO Market Coming Back To Life

The IPO market is sputtering back into action with Morgan Stanleyforecasting 35 to 40 floats in Europe in the next two years, with 127 floats in the worldwide IPO pipeline according to Thomson Reuters, and with a  big IPO success yesterday in the US with software start-up LogMeIn.

 

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Top Ten Semiconductor Companies 2008

Thanks to IC Insights for this one - the top ten semiconductor companies for 2008. Here they are:

 

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June 30, 2009

Good Old EU: Phone Chargers To Be Standardised

Good Old EU. Now one doesn't often say that. But getting the mobile phone manufacturers to agree to introduce a standard socket for chargers is just brilliant.

 

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New York Air Traffic Control To Get Height-Indicating Radar.

'Following the investigation of the disastrous mid-air collision of two aircraft over New York late last year, the Federal Aviation Agency is hoping to speed up installation of altitude-indicating radar.'

 

So starts the 'American Letter' feature in the edition of Electronics Weekly for March 8th 1961.

 

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June 29, 2009

Intel Unveils Futuristic Product Concepts

Intel has unveiled some futuristic product concepts at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California

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Europe Is Second Largest Electronics Producing Region.

The electronics industry is worth €1.14 trillion, compared to the car industry's €1.8 trillion. Half of the industry's production comes from Asia, and half of the industry is in the data processing and telecommunications sectors.

 

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June 26, 2009

Acorn's First Overdraft

Winning the contract to supply the computer for the BBC's series aimed at educating the UK on the use of computers was, initially, a mixed blessing for Acorn Computers.

 

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How Jolly Impactful

My thanks to Brent Przybus of Xilinx for a great new Americanism - the word 'impactful'.  Impactful is a pearl of the genre: you know immediately what it means, it's useful, and it's a concise way of saying: 'it has impact'. One word instead of three, an obvious meaning, and it serves a purpose - the three qualities of a top-flight Americanism.

  

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June 25, 2009

FABLE: The Company Which Couldn't Make A 256k DRAM

Back in the 1970s there was a large company which paid $380 million for a semiconductor company which had been the first to market with a 4k DRAM, a 16k DRAM and a 64k DRAM.

 

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XMOS And The Unreasonable Man

The trouble with government agencies is that they are run by people with consensual mind-sets. So when the government establishes an agency to foster innovation, it's establishing an oxymoron.

 

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June 24, 2009

What Are Intel And Nokia Up To? If Anything?

Here comes Intel, again, making a run for the mobile phone market. First time it tried buying start-up telecoms IC companies; second time it started making ARM chips (X-Scale); now, it's going the big company route - a new chip (Atom), a new OS (Moblin), a big acquisition (Wind River), and a big company collaboration (Nokia). Third time lucky?

 

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Ten Best Honours Received By Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell received numerous awards and honours in his lifetime. Of the many, these seem to be about the ten best:

 

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June 23, 2009

What Europe Does Best

It's good to see the EU doing something sensible. Apparently it is trying to cut European road deaths from 40,000 a year in 2001 to 20,000 in 2010.

 

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Too Few Students Studying Technological Subjects

'The reasons for comparatively fewer students choosing to read for technological qualifications in this country than in the US and Russia are to be investigated by the University of oxford Department of Education'.

 

So starts a story in Electronics Weekly's edition of March 8th 1961.

 

 

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June 22, 2009

Teleportation A Done Deal (for photons), says Kaku.

Last month Dr Michio Kaku, Professor of Theoretical Physics at City University, New York, and co-inventor of string theory, was in Bristol telling the Festival of Ideas that the impossible is not so impossible as you might think.

 

 

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Berkeley Memory Could Out-Last Egyptians

A memory technology to beat all memory technologies has been developed by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley.

 

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