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March 8, 2007

China's Genius

Probably the best thing China could do was done this week, with the announcement of free schooling for university students.

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June 20, 2007

My French Whore

Between glugs of iced pink wine, the odd nap, and the occasional dip down here in the South of France, I read the debut novel of Gene Wilder, the famous American film director and actor.

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October 4, 2007

Shigeru Miyamoto, Wii's Genius and Gates' Pal

The Nintendo Wii changed the games market forever, according to J.J Yamaguchi, a board member at NEC Electronics which supplies the graphics controller for the Wii.

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October 23, 2007

The Mad, The Good, And The Ugly

The sheer breadth of American eccentricity is breathtaking, as you discover after a few days tucking into the newspapers over here.

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March 13, 2008

Microelectronics And Nature by Tsuyoshi Kawanishi

“Microelectronics is not unrelated to nature. Of course, it is not a product of nature, but it is a product created by the natural creativity and inquisitiveness of man”, writes Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, former CEO of Toshina Semiconductor, in his book Chip Management..

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April 21, 2008

Making The Best Of Things

After nearly three weeks in America I’m asked what was the best bit, and it has to be breakfast at Kokomo's Surfside Grill on Huntington Beach.

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April 28, 2008

The Woman Who Wouldn't

Well it’s Monday morning again and, if you want something to make the world seem a better place, read Gene Wilder’s new novel: ‘The Woman Who Wouldn’t’.

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May 22, 2008

Good For Gated Communities

Gated communities seem to me to be a good idea. The only problem with them is that they are currently self-selecting.

 

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June 5, 2008

Merci M. Thomas

Have you tried 2007 Sancerres? My first bottle of 2007 Sancerre tasted fabulous. So good that, as soon as we'd had the first sip, we ordered another case.

 

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June 2, 2008

The Violins Of Agrate

Talking last week abouy STMicroelectronics' plans to return the company to its roots as an analogue house, Carlo Ottaviani, ST's corporate vice president for communications, mused: "No one has ever managed to perfectly replicate the sound made by a Stradivarius violin."

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June 10, 2008

How To Make Chips Profitably, by ST Microelectronics

The semiconductor industry used to be about strokes of genius, stunning flashes of innovation and huge technological breakthroughs but today's reality is that it's about making a profit and keeping costs down.

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July 17, 2008

Has Intel Evolved Since Noyce?

An interesting piece on the US news site Marketwatch by Douglas McIntyre, argues that "Intel's main business has not evolved much since Noyce died." Bob Noyce, co-inventor of the IC, co-founded both Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, and was the founding CEO of both companies. He died in 1990.

 

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September 12, 2008

50th Anniversary Of The IC

21jun05JackKilby1.jpg50 years ago today, Jack Kilby demonstrated the first working IC for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2000.

Kilby's chip contained transistors, resistors and diodes all made out of germanium and connected to eachother with gold wires. Making them from the same material was a revolutionary concept in 1958. Industry practice then was to make discrete devices in the material best suited to their function.

 

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September 26, 2008

Space Elevator To Catch Short-Sellers

Surely that Arthur C Clarke idea of the Space Elevator is something mind-blowingly many years away from reality? Isn't it? Believe it or not, a body called The Japan Space Elevator Association has just published plans how to build one.

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October 30, 2008

The Right Kind Of CEO

It was good to meet a founder-CEO last week. These days so many CEOs seem to be parachuted onto a founding team by the financial backers. This kind of CEO tends to be a cool, financially-savvy, managerial type totally lacking in passion for the company and its products. So that's why it was good to meet Bob Swanson, Founding CEO, now Executive Chairman of Linear Technology.

 

 

 

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November 10, 2008

How To Make Money In Semiconductors

If you want an object lesson in how to make money in the semiconductor industry, there's no one better to give it than a guy who's been doing just that for 27 years.

 

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November 17, 2008

The Grim Granite Gaelic Nemesis

As the bringer of Nemesis to the hubristic, there could be no more appropriate character than Gordon Brown.

 

 

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December 5, 2008

The Aladdin Of The Boulevard Saint Germain

Sitting at the last presentation before lunch with my attention drifting, my fingers involuntarily type 'wine shop paris' into Google and up comes a list. Suddenly I am all-attention. There is a shop which sells only Bordeaux. and, by the look of it, every Bordeaux.

 

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January 14, 2009

Jack Gifford, Industry Legend, Dies

Jack Gifford, the founding CEO of Maxim, died earlier this week, He made his name at Fairchild, as a co-founder of AMD, and at Intersil before founding Maxim Integrated Products which became an outstanding success.

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January 29, 2009

Romantic Merger Between Sanyo and Matsushita

The merger, now underway, of Matsushita and Sanyo is an unusually romantic business story.

 

 

 

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February 14, 2009

Our Ten Point Plan For NXP's Recovery

See: Ten Point Plan For NXP's Recovery


Challenged by a reader to come up with a ten point plan for the recovery of NXP, I am now thinking, and asking questions, and trying to figure out what could be done. It is a task far beyond my competence so I'd be more than grateful for any suggestions you care to make, either by replying to this post, or by emailing david.manners@rbi.co.uk.

 

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April 16, 2009

FABLE: Even Geniuses Can Be Wrong

One day the greatest man in the semiconductor industry was asked a question by his wife. Should she invest in a start-up company in Cupertino.

 

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February 17, 2009

Solutions For America's Problems

It's clearly going to take genius to fix the world's problems and the question is: Are Barack Obama, Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy et al geniuses?

Well my case rests. But here's an engineer who was at TRW and Ball Aerospace with a novel take on how to solve America's problems: http://www.ideasforourfuture.com/

March 24, 2009

Woz The Samba Man

What a star Steve Wozniak is, not only as an engineer but as a human being. In the USA's answer to 'Celebrity Come Dancing' he puts on a charming performance at samba dancing while suffering from a pulled hamstring, then faces the brickbats of a crabby panel of judges with great good humour.

March 31, 2009

CTO Of The USA

We haven't heard much recently about the CTO of the USA, though it was a big talking point just before the US elections. Is this because the President's choice was Steve Jobs?

 

 

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Good Old America

Waking up in America yesterday, woozy from jet-lag, I fumble for the remote and turn the telly on. As usual for American TV it's showing an ad. But this is no ordinary ad. The banner headline is: 'Learn how to get your share of the trillion dollar bail-out.'

 

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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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June 26, 2009

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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About Genius

This page contains an archive of all entries posted to Mannerisms in the Genius category. They are listed from oldest to newest.

Generosity is the previous category.

Limerick Corner is the next category.

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