Sep26th
This week, in a bit of internal promotion, I’d like to draw your attention to Engineeringtalk’s excellent “enquiry service”, which - as the thousands of you who use it every month know - is the simplest way to get product information from suppliers of all shapes and sizes. Our IT team really got this one right when they designed it: getting your name-and-address details to a manufacturer for a brochure request takes just a single click. Yes, just one click. (more…)
Sep19th
Electronics manufacturer Intel this week announced a launch date for its next generation of processors, and once again “Moore’s Law” was dusted off and found to be alive and kicking. Of course, the “law” is no such thing: the sequence of events was that Intel co-founder Gordon Moore wrote an article in 1965 predicting that the density of transistors on integrated circuits, at minimum transistor cost, was likely to double each year for the next ten years. He was not the first to predict this, by the way. Five years on, this was found to be true, and his prediction was described by others as “Moore’s Law”. (more…)
Sep12th
An announcement on Tuesday from the European Union to give up on extending the deadline for Britain to completely drop the metric system has been hailed - ridiculously - by the conservative press as some sort of “victory for ordinary people over Brussels”. It is of course nothing of the sort, rather it’s a political move aimed at softening the prescriptive image of the EU. Our own government still needs to press on with implementing the changeover wherever and whenever it’s politically expedient to do so. (more…)
Sep5th
Britain (or at least, south-east England) joined the world of high-speed railways on Tuesday with the inaugural journey on the completed “High Speed 1″ line from London to Paris. I’ve mentioned in previous issues both the remarkable engineering of the line itself under east London, and the restoration of the maginificent St.Pancras station. (more…)
