China makes space program breakthrough, bye bye Elon!

As of now, the ASML tin droplet thing is the only one.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Cambridge Instruments was started by Horace Darwin, Charles Darwin's youngest son, on the 1st January 1881. It grew for many years, and went bust around 1975. The bit I worked for was the unsaleable hi-tech bit that finally got taken over by Terry Gooding in 1979,and was progressively (and profitably) dismantled by him over the next forty years.

It had 800 employees when I joined (1982) and was down to 400 when I got made redundant nine years later (1991). It kept on shrinking after that.

John's company is rather less ambitious, and John does seem to want to keep it running, rather than acting as a vulture capitalist.

Less ambitious? Nonsense.

Most small companies run circles around the big ones. Like the oil biz I am working for now. They make measuring equipment that none of the big ones was ever able to touch in terms of precision and cost efficiency. Mainly because we think outside the box while big corp does not.

One can set up a very nice garage lab for under $1000 nowadays.

And a contract manufacturer like JLCPCB will make your gadgets for astonishingly low prices.

The real problems are having ideas, doing good design, and selling. If you can do those at small scale, you can grow on earnings.

Startups around here raise things like $20 or $50M, hire a lot of marketing types, lease and "improve" big spaces, and usually fail.

The startups around here have fancy coffee bars. All the walls are whiteboards. And little things like glass phone booths with a shelf and a stool inside. I think those are punishment cells.

I see a lot of ads for analog designers, with top salaries above $200K.

Yes. I need a new generation of real electronics designers. I'm working on that.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Agreed. I just want to design circuits. Customers present interesting problems and pay the bills for the help. Money is an accident.

I did some fun oil rig electronics when I lived in Louisiana. We designed a generator that ran on natural gas. It did't burn it, it just used it to spin an alternator.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

It can be difficult to access Russia Today in the European Union.

(S.

Problem is, not many want to live in California anymore and even less so in Silicon Valley. That was one of the non-negotiable points for me when they tried to drag me out of Europe.

Nearly all my clients are now in Texas.

Someone typed: |----------------------------------------------------------------------| |"It should be clear by now that China's science and technology are at | |the point of being self-sustaining and self-bootstrapping. It won't be| |long now before the West is scrambling to duplicate their | |achievements." | |----------------------------------------------------------------------|

Persons in the West already started copyings Chinese inventions after persons in China invented writing and gunpowder. (S.

Lots of people invented writing. The Chinese version was and is especially clumsy.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Bill Sloman snipped-for-privacy@IEEE.org wrote: |------------------------------------------------------------------------| |"It's not looking like a crisis at the moment. Countries that need them | |still seem to be able to import immigrant. [. . .] | |[. . .] | | | |[. . .] | | | |[. . .] | |[. . .] There were laws but they don't seem to have been enforced." | |------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Immigrants suffer abuses. Cf. @book{Irish-Nurses-in-the-NHS, author={Louise Ryan and Gráinne McPolin and Neha Doshi}, title={{Irish Nurses in the NHS: An Oral History}}, publisher={Four Courts Press Ltd}, address={Dublin, Ireland and Chicago, IL and Exeter, England}, year={2025} }

Countries disregard laws. (S.

In sci.electronics.design Richard <legalize+ snipped-for-privacy@mail.xmission.com> wrote: |-----------------------------------------------------------------------| |"Yes, China invented gunpowder; then it took the Europeans to turn it | |from court fireworks and ceremonial noise into artillery, firearms, | |naval power, siegecraft, and a continent-spanning military revolution,"| |-----------------------------------------------------------------------|

Europeans are not the Europeans. Europeans are evil. (S.

I don't understand all this cheerleading for China. It sounds like a dreadful place.

Relatively few ideas are significant. Committing them to an AFFORDABLE practice is where the rubber meets the road.

Betamax was a much better technology, design, implementation, etc. than VHS. Yet, failed (relatively speaking) in the market as VHS was so much more available and accessible.

/Le mieux est le mortel ennemi du bien/

Or, more on-topic:

/Premature optimization is the root of all evil/

I suspect this is how China will quickly surpass the West in the application of the upcoming technologies.

That you know about.

Apparently VHS was loosing out to Betamax and Philips, so the importers were faced with a warehouse full of unsaleble video recorders. At the same time, a lot of potential buyers were delaying their purchase until it was clear which system would eventually win, so they turned to rental as (what they thought was) a non-committal stop-gap.

A major television rental company, faced with unexpected demand, bought the warehouse-full of unsaleable machines and rented them out. This meant that their customers were now committed to VHS if they wanted to watch their favourite video recoordings, so when they eventually bought their own video recorder, it had to be VHS.

Thus, by a quirk of economics, the worst system became the most popular,

Can you cite a reference? In a country of 100+ million households, it would have to be one helluva big "warehouse" to make that big of a dent in the market! Consider anyone renting a player would hold it for at least a week to watch the titles rented at the same time.

Most of what I find confirms the price point (due to multiple vendors) advantage VHS had over Beta. Note that Motogorilla adopted a similar ploy with the 68K's initial offering (I think 7 second-sources?)

Consider two use modes: prerecorded software and "home recordings". The latter almost always OTA broadcasts (thus limited by broadcast technology) or hand-held cameras at sporting events -- quality taking a back seat to convenience (like "Super 8" movies).

For prerecorded software, laser video discs far surpassed either recordable technology. And, titles were often available for a fraction of the "tape" price. E.g., I paid ~$25 for Star Wars when VHS copies (that degrade with each playing) were selling for $75

That might explain the preference in the UK. But, wouldn't translate to the US (or other) markets.

If someone is volume manufacturing sub-micron chips with anything other than DUV eximer lasers or tin droplet EUV, please tell us about it.

GigaPhoton gave up on EUV, and synchrotrons are too wimpy for production.

I suppose there might still be some mercury vapor lamps exposing diode or transistor wafers at micron sorta resolution.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

It was different in the USA for 2 reasons. Sony charged manufacturers a license fee for Betamax machines. VHS also had a license fee, but it was only $1 per machine. VHS had a larger capacity (longer runtime) than Betamax. There was a constant battle between VHS and Betamax for longer record times. At maximum quality, VHS had about twice the record time of Betamax, which was important when recording over the air content, where Betamax required 2 or more tapes, while VHS could record everything without switching tapes.

More:

"VHS vs Betamax: Standard Format War"