Mannerisms

International shipping has almost come to a halt at the entrance of the Strait of Hormuz. Last Sunday, German ⁠shipping group Hapag-Lloyd said it had suspended all ⁠vessel transit through the strait until further ⁠notice. Close  to 27% of all maritime oil trade transited through the strait in the first quarter of 2025, making it one of the world’s most ...

Iran ranks poorly in international indices on democracy, corruption, and press and internet freedom, occupying some of the lowest positions. Iran ranks 176th out of 180 in the World Press Freedom Index 2025. In The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index 2024, Iran ranks 154th out of 167 countries, making it an authoritarian regime. In the Corruption Perceptions Index 2025, Iran ...

Thanks to Gartner for this one – the top ten semiconductor vendors in 2025: Top 10 Semiconductor  Vendors 2025 Rank 2024 Rank Vendor 2025 Revenue 2025 Market Share (%) 2024 Revenue 2025-2024 Growth (%) 1 1 NVIDIA 125,703 15.8 76,692 63.9 2 2 Samsung Electronics 72,544 9.1 65,697 10.4 3 4 SK Hynix 60,640 7.6 44,186 37.2 4 3 Intel ...

Nvidia’s results followed the usual pattern: superb figures, bullish forecasts, rousing comments about the future of AI from the CEO and a fall in the share price. No one can be sure if this is going on forever or even till the end of the month and  no one can be sure it won’t. The hyperscalers talk about spending $600 ...

The ‘Transdeptor’ – a remote reading fluid depth gauge developed bySolartron’s Transducer Division – provides a reliable method of transmitting depth measurements over considerable distances. So, 65 years ago started a story in Electronics Week,y’s edition of January 25th 1961 The story continues: The pressure sensing element, a type NT4-980 Solartron pressure transducer, consists of a thin-walled metal cylinder which ...

There seems to be a pattern here: In July 2025, in a filing with the SEC. Intel stated: “We are focused on the continued development of Intel 14A and on securing a significant external customer for such node. However, if we are unable to secure a significant external customer and meet important customer milestones for Intel 14A, we face the ...

Only the PM could make such a dog’s breakfast of the Chagos thing because he can’t see any issue in terms of popular appeal, or political fallout or even common sense because as a lawyer, his job is simply there make the best case for either side of an argument, Ed confides to his diary. So he’s given in to ...

Electron projection lithography (EPL) is moving out of the R&D lab and into manufacturing evaluation sites, according to chip consortiums International Sematechr and Selete. That’s the word from the 2003  annual workshop on the technology, held in Cambridge and sponsored by Austin-based Sematech and Tsukuba, Japan-based Selete. Forum participants revised the technology’s top ten technical challenges, which include a mix ...

Norway was No1 at the Winter Olympics with 18 gold medals of which six were won by cross-country skier Johannes Høsflot Klæbo, who completed a clean sweep of all cross-country events, taking his personal gold medal tally to 11. Aside from the U.S. in second place, the 2026 Games were dominated by Europeans, with the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, France, Sweden ...

18 years ago things weren’t looking good for private equity as David Rubenstein co-founder of Carlyle Group which had a former UK PM on its board, told the 2008 Davos World Economic Forum. The  private equity industry had passed through its golden age and was then in its ‘purgatory age’, said Rubinstein. It is not known what the former PM ...

Next month a lot of  people are expecting Lenovo and Dell to come out with PCs powered by Nvidia CPUs. For years, Nvidia has been rumoured to be prepping its own CPUs for consumer PCs , and the rumours are now coming thick and fast. Nvidia has two PC processors – the N1 (for desktops) and N1x (forlaptops) which run ...

Every year, around 3 million people die of work-related accidents and diseases, says the International Labor Organisation (ILO) most of them caused by occupational diseases (89 percent) and about 11 percent due to work accidents. In addition, an estimated 400 million additional people are victims of non-fatal work accidents each year. According to the latest available data from the ILO ...

OpenAI—$850 billion Anthropic—$380  billion   xAI—$200+  billion.  Databricks—$134 billion. CoreWeave—$19  billion  Scale AI— $13-14 billion  .Figure AI—$3.2  billion Perplexity AI—$2.2 billion Runway—$5.3  billion Skild AI— $14  billion

1.53 billion people speak English – 20% of the world poulation – making it the most spoken language, according to Ethnologue. Second comes Mandarin Chinese, which is spoken by 1.18 billion people. Third is Hindi, spoken by around 609 million people. It is different in the digital world. 49.2% of websites are written in English. Chinese  accounts for only 1.1% ...

65 years ago, this ad appeared in Electronics Weekly’s edition of April 26th 1961:  

Blue Owl, a New York shadow bank which helped finance the Meta and Coreweave datacentres, has told its investors they can no longer take money out of one of their funds. Blue Owl’s suspension of investor redemptions has caused a fluster in the financial system because many of the datacentre construction projects have been financed by shadow bankers. Shadow banks ...

We’re training up an AI to be a humanised version of the PM, Ed confides to  his diary, jokes, empathy, common sense are all being fed into the model. The PM will have storage ICs for the model embedded in his backside which will relay the humanised PM AI content to a chip implanted behind his ear. “No difference then ...

In 2008 the world was in crisis as bankers’ excesses threatened to destroy the financial system. “We are in one of the most difficult crises the industry has faced,” Alain Dutheil, CEO of ST-NXP Wireless and chairman of the European R&D programme AENEAS, told the European Nanoelectronics Forum 2008 in Paris this morning. “Visibility is poor. R&D is more than ...

Istanbul airport (IST) has more flight connections and destinations served than any other airport, according to the OAG megahub rankings for 2025, with 82,733 connections and 327 destinations. Frankfurt (73,221 connections, 307 destinations) is second,  Schiphol (66,798 connections, 275 destinations) third and  O’Hare fourthbwith 65,141 connections reaching 297 destinations, while Heathrow rounds out the top five. Asian airports also make ...

A famous computer (pictured) used about 2,800 ICs, mostly dual three-input NOR gates and smaller numbers of expanders and sense amplifiers. The ICs, from Fairchild Semiconductor, were implemented using RTL in a flat-pack. They were connected via wire wrap, and the wiring was then embedded in epoxy plastic. The computer had 2,048 words of erasable magnetic-core memory and 36,864 words ...