conservation of Euros

trust

Exactamente!

work

No, I get my ideas about productivity by doing it, and helping other people do it. Your career seems to have been punctuated by a series of technical failures; the most productive thing you have done is quit designing electronics. We thank you for that.

John

Yes, that was al the transition period. Before technology caught up with fertility.

The period is getting shorter, and nobody with any sense is doing anything to lend stability. Quite the opposite.

If workers are massively productive, where is the stuff going to go, but to the workers? Where else could it go? Why would Henry Ford want to personally own a million model Ts? Why would Edison want a billion light bulbs for himself?

Widespread productivity is better than widespread lack of same.

In the Victorian era most

All business people want to maximize profit. As productivity and competition increase, we go from pre-Victorian poverty to modern car-in-every-drivway. Nobody guides the process... it has its own dynamic. There's no credit and no blame; actors act and the system changes.

John

My gut feeling says this is all a bunch of nonsense. Countries are still waiting in line to start using the Euro:

Maybe they should wait a little until the exchange rate versus whatever they are using now has dropped some more? Yesterday it fell to under $1.24.

The exchange rate is probably fixed already. Before the euro was actually introduced the exchange rates where already fixed. Balancing exchange rates between European countries has been going on for a long time:

Yep! Bring in those third world "economies" :-) ...Jim Thompson

Sure, Germany has lots of cash to spare.

John

of

is

It's you who needs to pay attention. The EU - as a whole - is under- writing the Greek borrowing. The individual memebers of the EU have to pass legislation to approve their particular country's part of the package. The Dutch lower house approved the Dutch component recently. It's still a collective decision.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

No. I told you not to get your explanation from your usual suppliers.

Since you clearly don't know much about the world you claim to understand, I'd like to know why you think that it should be obvious, when it is clear to me that the proposition is obviously wrong, for the reason that I gave in the post to which you responded - you snipped it out of your response, but I've put it back in again above.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

e,

se

se

VAT is conceptually simple, and gets rid of many of the defects of simple sales taxes, which is why it was invented in the first place.

There's no prestidigitation involved, as James Arthur would have known if he'd ever bothered to find out how value added tax actually works, as opposed to abjuring it as a European heresy.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

So, what exactly does "state-backed" mean in your opinion?

Your notion that "The trouble that Greece is now in will be fixed by Greece" will IMHO not come to pass. They are unlikely able to fix the damage that living beyond their means for years has done. It's other European countries who will fix it, also countries overseas such as the US (via IMF).

Yeah, but: Nothing will prevent any country (and the people living there) from buying bonds denominated in USD or other currencies before a switch and then selling them at a convenient time later after the multiple crises in Europe have settled. Hoping that they do settle soon ...

I do my own thinking, so I'm the usual supplier.

But surely, as worldly as you are, you can figure it out yourself.

John

People don't gamble with currencies. They buy gold and other metals.

their

re

ted on

h safety

the work

ive on.

away

y two

to the

level

Oddly enough, my designs weren't technical failures - they all worked pretty much as intended, and if the firms involved had been in state to put them into production and get them into the hands of customers, they would also have been commercially successful, if the original demands of the marketing people had been well-founded.

The shaped-beam electron beam microfabricator project foundered because the cost of finishing the project turned out to be more than Cambridge Instruments could afford (largely because they'd mismanaged getting the S.360 electron microscope into production and couldn't produce it fast enough to satisfy the demand from the market) - which wasn't a technical failure (or at least not in an area that I could do anything about).

The digital stroboscopic electron beam tester was canned after we'd built a working prototype - the problem was that we would have needed to sell 18 over about eighteen months to get the necessary cash flow, and the original marketing estimates turned out to have been about 50% too high. It didn't help that the original marketing specification had included an irrational demand that we should be able to place our

When I proposed using GaAs to solve the problem, I thought that I was satirising the technical specification, but unfortunately the solution I sketched was actually technically feasible - I really am a good circuit designer and systems engineer, and even my jokes will really work.

The smaller stuff did better, perhaps because marketing had a clearer idea of what the cusotmers actually wanted and needed.

Since I got to answer the questions from production and final test when they ran into problems in producing my stuff (which didn't happen often) I think I too can also claim to have tested my ideas about productivity by actually doing it.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Oh, then I suggest you ask George Soros about that :-)

The GBL parts were fabulously expensive, and weren't long for this world anyhow. Tek was making sampling scopes ca 1968 that had 10 ps resolution and jitter, using all discrete transistors. Heck, the HP185, around 1962, managed about that good with tubes. 10KH ECL is fine for 10 ps timing.

I cleaned out our library before we moved a few years ago, and tossed a VW-sized dumpster worth of datasheets and databooks, including the GBL databook. Pity, I should have kept that one. I still have one of their samples, a $150 pin driver thing.

Hittite is sort of repeating that pattern: very fast, high power dissipation simple gates and comparators, made from exotic materials, very expensive. I haven't bought any so far.

Betting the farm on one product is dangerous. Our approach is to design a lot of products every year and accept that some will sell and some won't, and survive on the ones that sell. That means that they all have to be turned around fast.

John

Back then, 100k ECL cost roughtly ten times as much as TTL and Gigabit's GaAs cost ten times as much as the 100k ECL. More important, there were three suppliers of 100k ECL - Philips, National and Motorola, none of whom were going to go out of business, while there was just one Gigabit. I really would have much preferred to go with National's 300k ECL - the masks were made with a Cambridge Instrument EBMF 10.5 electron beam microfabricator, whose beam-steering electronics I'd personally up-graded to meet the demsnds imposed by the new, fast electron beam resist that National were using.

I was digitising the trigger time delay position vis avis the 800MHz clock by digitising a period between 1.25 to 2.5 nsec to eight-bit accuracy and feeding the digtised result into the digital time delay generator, and using the low order bits of the output to generate a delay with the same resolution. the whole process - from input to output - took about 40nsec, which rather restircted the A/D converters and the D/A converters that I could use.

At the time 100k ECL would have supported a 200MHz clock and 10psec resoluton in 5nsec is 9-bit accuracy, which wasn't on offer at the time. The guy running the project was primarily interested in being able to sell the machines after they had been built, and the 10psec specification would have made that part of his life easier, though in fact it slowed down the development enough that he was never in a position to actually sell a machine.

I've still got my databook, but no samples. They were a bit too expensive to snaffle for souveniers.

I've used Motorola's ECLinPs parts, back when they were good for

The electron beam tester would have sold for about half a million dollars a unit, and we spent something like five million dollars on the development. You can't design a lot of that kind of product every year, and you can't turn them around fast, particularly if you push the envelope as far as we - foolishly - did.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen