Tuesday January 14, 2003 18:20

Companies will spend their 2003 technology dollars on networking gear and systems to store data but handheld computers and wireless gadgets will fall by the wayside, a survey of global tech buyers said Tuesday.

The pension fund money did not evaporate. The money was stolen. Some of it using high tech!

JDS Uniphase is a financial disaster!

For example, Cronos, having previously heen sold to JDS Uniphase for $750 million in early 2000,

JSD Uniphase makes even Palm look good!

The study, by Wall Street brokerage firm UBS Warburg, also found that businesses intend to spend more on tech products this year than they did in 2002, going against a recent survey by rival Goldman Sachs that showed a spending decline.

UBS Warburg questioned 85 Chief Information Officers, who hold the technology purse strings of global corporations, during the month of December.

According to the survey, the CIO's expect tech spending to grow 4 percent in 2003 over 2002, with spending on storage products and networking equipment topping the bill.

Unfortunately, since the peak in the economy and the stock market two years ago, the expansive credit and monetary policy has not been able to compensate for the fall in stock prices and the credit defaults resulting from the mal-investments during the boom. However, low interest rates and lax credit requirements have resulted in residential real estate appreciation and massive mortgage refinancing. So far, this has kept the consumer part of the economy relatively healthy. It appears that this credit generating engine has about run its course. Overall though, the credit destruction through bankruptcies and the fall in asset prices in the private sector has put our financial system in jeopardy. There are also immense nascent threats to our financial system from many different sources including possible rating reductions in the fig leaf AAA ratings of credit insurance companies that guarantee $1.5 trillion in debt, the potential for massive dislocations in the $75 trillion derivative market, the uncertain financial condition of Fanny Mae, Freddy Mac and the Federal Home Loan Bank that have financed the $2 trillion in residential mortgages and the potential drop in home prices. There is a threat of a run on the U.S. dollar by foreigners who own more that $7 trillion of our assets ($2 trillion more than we own of their assets) and must continue to be net purchasers of our paper at the rate of $1.4 billion per day to finance our balance of payment deficits which now amounts to 5% of GDP. A run could be effectuated by either political or economic reasons. A run could even be precipitated by our own institutions and individual seeking profits or diversification. And, there appears to be impending wars and their aftermath with indeterminate costs. Perhaps, the government (government and Fed are used interchangeably just as Mr. Bernanke does in his speech) is thinking along similar lines. In spite of what they say, they are not worried about the prices of goods but financial deflation which would lead to the mother of all depressions.

Responding to a piece by Gene Epstein, who writes a weekly column about economic issues for Barron's, which stated, "Over the 56 years since 1946, consumer borrowing habits don't appear to have changed at all," The Prudent Bear's Doug Noland recently produced the following figures: In 1946, as a percentage of national income, total personal sector liabilities were 31%, non-farm mortgages 13%, and consumer credit 5%.

At the end of 2001, however, total personal sector liabilities were 133% of national income, non-farm mortgages 70%, and consumer credit 21%. Non-farm corporate liabilities stood at 44% of national income in 1946, compared to 101% at the end of 2001; total mortgage debt was 23% compared to 93%; security credit 3% versus 10%; state and local government debt 7% versus 17%; and total credit market debt 192% versus 359%.

In addition, in 1946, the personal savings rate stood at 9%, compared to around 2% now.

Many high tech businesses are merely fronts for ripping off pension fund money.

The object is to get the investor money then attempt to create the appearance of great technical achievement while taking, say 5% of one billion dollars.

Crace [read other Grace article below] laments investors finally wising up high tech fraud. Want to be injected with a micromachine?

The American Stock Exchange biotech index, a widely used measure of the industry's health, plunged roughly 40 percent in 2002. That put biotech on an even steeper decline than the embattled Nasdaq, which slumped 30 percent, or the S&P 500, which fell "only" 20 percent.

If the closely watched Amex biotech index is any measure, last week's conference gave the industry a mild boost at best. Executives from more than 250 biotech, drug and medical device firms took turns last week delivering 30- minute pep talks to pension fund managers and other institutional investors. The index was flat until a last-minute flurry on Friday pushed it up 10 points to close at 356, a gain of nearly 3 percent. It was better than nothing, but less than a ringing endorsement.

You need a team of highly intelligent high tech swindlers to convince lowly unintelligent money managers to invest.

We will be exposing more of the peripheral microcontroller fraud in the future. They don't have the bucks or talent to produce the peripheral side software!

But there is good stuff too.

But, of course, you are wisely advised about 80C32s and USB 2.0

Read-up below, Moe has something important to say.

Get the right numbers as opposed to wrong or random numbers. Remote digitization works but not very well.

• Digitize at the sensor Monday January 13, 2003 09:59
• Gigahertz PCs
• Microsoft's Visual Basic 6.0 integrated into Microsoft Office, Visual C/C++ with exquisite in-line assembler
• USB 2.0
• Super fast 80C32 USB 2.0 SOCs running BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth operating systems, of course!
• Internet software distribution and maintenance.
• Interactive hardware and software problem diagnosis over Internet with Netmeeting ... using BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth operating systems, of course!, on the peripheral end.

Digitizing at the sensor is very important if you want to stay in business - random or wrong numbers shouldn't sell very well.

Monday January 13, 2003 20:32

Ray Duncan furnished Sandia labs its 8085 Forth using Jerry Boutelle's metacompliler.

We needed interactive incremental assembler support.

Boutelle's metacompiler did not implement <BUILDS DOES> which was required for incremental assembler support.

The morning bill, Joseph, and Konrad arrived to pick up the software at Laboratory Microsystems, Duncan received software from England which implemented <BUILDS DOES> with Boutelle's metacompiler.

Here's who did it in England

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stephen Pelc"
To: Sent: Friday, October 25, 2002 8:30 AM Subject:
Re: Nautilus 1 metacompiler, ray duncan, and

Bill

>Are you the guy that did the for the Nautilus 1?
Yes. Our V6.1 compiler is a linear descendant of v1.

Regards,
Stephen

"did the", oops I omitted <BUILDS DOES> but, hey, we all make mistakes.

So if you want to do an ARM project, you fool, and have fun too, buy MPE FORTH!

Bill
Thanks for the link.

Despite your qualms about ARM pricing, one of my clients is paying US$7.50 for a 50MHz ARM with 2 serial ports, 2 HDLC ports, the usual I/O and timers, and an integrated 10/100 Ethernet controller.

These days, the CPU core is less than 10% of the silicon.

MPE also sells 8051 Forth!

We can't do it all by ourselves!

So let's have some fun doing it together and sharing code that we would otherwise have to try to reinvent. And probably screw up.

Glossary of Terms

Most windows driver writers are from Russia.

Bill was told he is one of the very few in the US.

Litigation caused bill to get into the driver writing business!

Russian equities continued their world-beating run in 2002, with the benchmark RTS index gaining nearly 40 percent to trump all but Pakistan's main bourse. But market players see little chance of similar returns in 2003. ...

Except for the Pakistan Stock Index's impressive 118.21 percent gain, the dollar-denominated RTS outperformed all other indices in the world, followed closely by the main exchanges in Prague and Budapest, which gained 38 percent and 34 percent, respectively. Indonesia's Jakarta Composite Index rounded out the top five with a gain of 26 percent.

The world's two largest emerging markets -- Argentina and Brazil -- suffered the most, with Buenos Aires' Merval and Sao Paulo's Bovespa benchmark indices losing 47.11 and 45.83 percent of their value on the year.

The United States' tech-heavy Nasdaq fared little better, dropping 37.58 percent, followed closely by Turkey's ISE National and the German DAX, which shrank 34.08 and 33.88 percent, respectively.

Beware, say two finance experts in an alarming study recently published in the Financial Analysts Journal. They say that history--or at least the interpretation usually put on stock market history--is bunk. If they are right, the risk premium in coming decades won't be anything like 5% and you shouldn't count on the S&P 500 to provide you with a fat and comfortable retirement. Let's tour their findings and, for those who accept them, suggest an alternative to abandoning equities.

The U.S. has a bad debt problem. Debts can’t be paid from cash flows. Total Credit Market Debt for the U.S. is up to $31 Trillion – that is clearly more debt than a $10 Trillion economy can pay back. Cash flows that are needed to sustain asset prices aren’t there. The debt is bad. As the debt fails, the asset prices it support fall to true value. Indeed, deflation in massively overly valued assets can’t be prevented. Many individual stocks will drop. The general level of stock market prices remain extraordinarily expensive. Moreover, so much new credit has been extended on real estate, that prices have been driven up to unsustainable levels. Deflation in real estate markets has already started. ...

In the end, both deflation and inflation are symptomatic of the exact same problem - A massive Credit Bubble that leaves debts that can’t be repaid. Bankruptcy (deflation), or inflation are inevitable, and they can exist side by side. If you are a debtor, rest easy. You can file Chapter 11 now, or wait for inflation. If you are a saver, watch out. If the bad debts don’t get you, the inflation will.

---

What ought to follow a spectacularly absurd boom is a spectacularly absurd bust....

For the moment, the U.S. economy continues to run ahead of 'all reasonable expectations.' Eventually, reasonable expectations will catch up. Or, at least they ought to.

---

"This is the most dangerous period in financial history." - John Templeton, The Miami Herald, April 2000

As President Bush courted Democratic and Republican lawmakers Wednesday at the White House, the controversies swirling about his tax-cutting plan include a debate about deficits --- which the plan is almost certain to deepen.

In general, the mix of tax cuts and increased spending spells deficits. And 2001 saw both: a 10-year, $1.35 trillion tax cut and a huge, post-Sept. 11 boost to the military budget.

The equation became more lopsided Tuesday with Bush's announcement of a $674 billion package. The 10-year plan combines with increased government spending to virtually guarantee that those deficits will deepen --- at least in the short term. ...

"The deficit is now only about 1.5 percent of GDP [gross domestic product].

We survived with deficits of 2 or 2.5 percent during the mid-90s," Dhawan said.

Still, there is eventually a reckoning.

"You can't do it forever," Dhawan said.

Public debt

Reagan became president with promises of smaller government and less taxes, but then he spent money like there was no tomorrow. From the end of World War II until the year Reagan was elected president, the national debt had slowly increased by $649 billion over thirty-five years but during his administration it skyrocketed by 1.7 trillion in just eight years. When he left, the debt was $2.6 trillion-almost three times what it was before he became president. The amount owed for each U.S. citizen shot up to $10,534. As a result, much of today's national debt is the interest owed on the money spent during the Reagan years. This also resulted in the United states becoming a debtor nation in 1985, losing its status as the world's financial leader - a position it had maintained since 1914 - to Japan.

Feeling okay?

We getting too much stuff on the main page! We know but we are too busy most of the time with our other big project.

Some states are selling bonds to try to cover pension underfunding.

The PBGC bailed out 150 bankrupt plans in the past year, compared with 104 the year before. The size of your insured benefit depends on when you retire and what kind of pension you take. Workers can get up to $3,665 a month if they quit at 65 with a single-life pension. But if you retire at 55 with a lifetime annuity for your spouse, your maximum drops to $1,484. The PBGC does not insure state and local government pensions, where underfunding may be twice as bad as in the private sector. Taxpayers blindly defer this cost.

Each of these instances reflects a powerful wave sweeping the economy -- overcapacity.

In the factory and in the office, it has a more concrete dimension: Businesses can produce far more than we need. Supply has simply outstripped demand. When that happens, production slows, equipment sits idle, costs go up, workers are laid off, and investments are postponed. ...

U.S. companies overbuilt in the 1990s, believing that the good times would never end. But the ``bubble'' popped with the turn of a new century and with the economy tipping into recession in March 2001 and then stumbling more after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

As a result, the human toll of what economists call a ``jobless recovery'' is still mounting. The national unemployment rate, only 3.9 percent in September 2000, hit 6 percent in November, and many analysts doubt it will fall in the foreseeable future. Since September 2000, 3 million jobs were lost, almost 2 million of them in manufacturing.

Where did the pension fund money go? It did not evaporate or get erased as some economic journalist would like to have us believe.

These problems have little to do with any change in the number of people retiring, or an increase in their benefits. Rather, investments by the pension funds have fared poorly in recent years. As the prices of stocks and other investments have fallen, so has the return on the money set aside for the more than 44 million current and future private-sector retirees who qualify for traditional pensions.

At the same time, unusually low interest rates are further undermining pension plans. The effect of the bond rates is on the financial calculations used to determine the present value of the pension liabilities, not on the pension funds' return. Falling rates make future pension obligations look bigger on current balance sheets. To meet their obligations to workers, and to stay in compliance with pension laws, companies have been forced to set aside more money. ...

Still other companies, including Lucent Technologies, Boeing and Delta Air Lines, have been forced to reduce their net worth to reflect the way their growing pension obligations have outstripped their assets. ...

The sickest pension plans, by far, are at steel companies, followed by airlines. Other ailing sectors include the auto industry and its suppliers, the rubber and tire industries, and telecommunications. At worst, having to make a large pension contribution can push a company with insufficient cash flow into bankruptcy

Sunday January 12, 2003 19:46

"I don't think we're seeing depreciation in the low- to mid-price ranges," he said. "In fact, it's actually a hot market in the lower-price ranges in many areas. But if you look at the upper-price ranges -- starting at $200,000 to $250,000 for example -- you may see that prices are off by 10 to 20 percent, or more, compared to where they were several years ago."

Thousands of homeowners could soon be facing the prospect of negative equity, the Halifax is warning.

The bank, with two and a half million customers the largest mortgage lender in Britain, said a cooling housing market will soon see many with homes worth less than the value of their loans, the Sunday Telegraph reported.

Frank 't Hart, general counsel to SNS, said that when the bank confronted Citibank with its poor performance, it was assured that the portfolio would not fall much further. But by late 2001, SNS had lost three-quarters of its $15 million investment. Now it is worth $3 million. "With respect to this kind of investment, Citibank had a certain expertise we did not have," Mr. 't Hart said. "We hired Citibank because we believed them to have a certain level of professionalism and integrity and they have violated the trust we had in them." ...

Of the seven debt issues in the Captiva portfolio that have defaulted, five were bought by the Citibank manager. These include obligations of 360networks, a manager of fiber optic networks; Big V Supermarkets, a privately held food retailer; ICG Communications and Winstar Communications, both defunct; and the LTV Corporation, the steel maker. The LTV bond was underwritten by Salomon Smith Barney, another Citigroup unit. ...

Once again: Buyer beware.

Guys, we are interested in things other than computers, 8051 Forth, BASICs, assemblers, real world economics, pension fund fraud, microcontrollers, microcontroller operating systems, killing Iranian kids, counterfeit PhDs,

Bill, Lewis's MS and Ph.D thesis advisor, warned about professional birth control 29 years ago.

William H. Payne: Graduate Education: The Ph.D. Glut. CACM 16(3): 181-182 (1973)

deficient crypto and authentication algorithms, digitizing at the sensor, reloading, Alaska, fishing, hunting, fixing old VWs and Ford trucks, Internet. ..

But there are other interesting things too

February 1, 2003. It was the first day in the Year of the Horse. It is Year 4700 by Chinese calendar.

For those interested in astrology, it is the year of the Goat (sheep, ram).

Patty and bill are working out celebrations plans.

Random numbers or wrong numbers are sure interesting. And can be produced lots of different ways!

We got this thing about random numbers. And their avoidance in measuring sensor outputs.

But this leads to discussion of purple engineers. Those who advocate and use remote digitization.

This doesn't work very well.

In nearly all cases, there are better and more positive things to do.

Like

When is the Chinese New Year's Day in Year 2003? February 1, 2003. It was the first day in the Year of the Horse. It is Year 4700 by Chinese calendar.

Patty and bill and working are working our celebration plans.

Aclara, Affymetrix, Caliper, Cepheid, Orchid, and, of course, JDS Uniphase

Then there are peripheral microcontroller companies. Like ARM.

Let's look at the numbers to make a guess what may happen in 2003. Like 3COM.

IT'S THE $7.5 TRILLION QUESTION. That's how much market value has been destroyed since stock prices began their slide nearly three years ago, and now investors demand to know: "When will this @!&#$% bear market be over?"

Below is going to cause a big shake-out in the peripheral micrcontroller industry .... and those do don't digitize at the sensor too, of course.

Tax cuts, while nice, do not increase corporate earnings nor increase the ability of corporations to pay dividends. Overvaluation is the mighty demon that today’s perma-bulls are vainly battling, not socialist taxation issues that can be fixed with the mere stroke of a pen.

Stock prices will be relentlessly and mercilessly pummeled down by the Great Bear until they are historically low relative to both earnings and dividends. Low P/Es and high dividend yields will mark The Ultimate Bottom, quite unlike the staggeringly high P/Es and unfathomably low dividend yields we see today. ...

The Great Bear is not over and there remains a long, long way to fall yet before we reach The Bottom. Caveat Emptor!

But the smart money says: Just because the market has racked up four straight years of losses only once from 1929 to 1932, doesn't mean it can't do it again.

"If there is a fourth down year, many investors are likely to look for a fifth -- or a case of them," says James Dines, editor of the Dines Letter.

"What bugs me is that economists insist America is still in an economic upturn, but I find myself disbelieving their numbers and conclusions," he says. "Are they fools or knaves?" ...

"One of the notions is that the market can't decline four years in a row since the only other time it has done so was during the Depression, and we're not in a depression," says John Hussman, professor of economics at the University of Michigan and head of Hussman Econometrics, a research firm.

"The difficulty is that the market's decline from its 2000 peak began when stocks commanded a price/peak earnings multiple that was fully 50 percent higher than the valuation at the 1929 peak," he says.

In March 2000 when the speculative bubble burst, the P/E ratio was more than 30, the highest of any bull market in history.

What's a P/E? It's a ratio that gives investors an idea of how much they are paying for a company's earnings power. So the higher the P/E, the more investors pay for the stock and therefore, the more earnings growth they are expecting.

Here's another story of a success, not a failure.

This success is having gotten away with the $1 billion ... of likely pension fund money.

Having piled up more than $1 billion in losses from 1996 through August, the interactive-television software firm announced Wednesday that it was laying off 240 employees, or 40 percent, of its workforce. The stock, which reached a peak of $128 in late 1999, now sells for $1.35 a share.

In some ways, it's another verse in the dirge heard everywhere in Silicon Valley.

If we can catch the president's father as mastermind of killing between 150,000 to 3/4 million Iranian kids, rooting-out high tech fraud should be relatively easy!

Let's look at the financials of some of the micromachine biomed companies mentioned by Grace.

Aclara, Affymetrix, Caliper, Cepheid, and Orchid

Only Affymetrix finally showed a profit.

2003 looks to be the year for more spectacular high tech bankruptcies.

But, hey, these companies succeeded in what they were trying to do all along. Steal the pension fund money.

The pension fund money did not evaporate which some financial journalist would like us to believe. And Grace has helped us identify four, maybe five, biomed companies which pocketed the money.

Lewis has concerns about bonds as investments.

Moody's Investors Service said today that bond defaults hit an all-time quarterly record $34 billion in the first period of 2002, although the global speculative grade bond default rate fell for a second consecutive month in March to 10.3%. By the end of the year, Moody's forecasts a default rate of 7.4%.

Let's look at some data.

Late 2003?

Pierre Belec, of course, should write about this.

Some companies and even states are trying to fund missing pension fund payments by selling bonds.

Lewis warned of the Crash of 2000.

But got, not 2001, 2002 totally wrong. Where did bill fail?

Let's see what's going to happen in 2003.

Bill, Lewis's MS and Ph.D thesis advisor, warned about professional birth control 29 years ago.

William H. Payne: Graduate Education: The Ph.D. Glut. CACM 16(3): 181-182 (1973)

We must keep in mind that some of these high tech ventures were merely fronts to get at the pension fund money. And they worked really well help steal the money!

The pension fund money did not evaporate. The money was stolen. Some of it using high tech!

JDS Uniphase is a financial disaster!

For example, Cronos, having previously heen sold to JDS Uniphase for $750 million in early 2000,

JSD Uniphase makes even Palm look good!

Let's hope money managers are going to be a bit more careful where they invest the pension funds.

But there's good stuff too. USB 2.0 and may, if Lewis is right, Firewire

> Apple's new portables sport Firewire 800 which runs circles around USB 2.0
> and 802.11g which is compatible with 802.11b but 5 times faster. So, once
> again, Microsoft and Intel will have to back off from 802.11a and complete
> dependence on USB 2.0.

Here's a related article by Grace.

Saturday January 11, 2003 20:50

2003 may be the year of technical occupational migration.

• Determine how committed you are to your old field. Do you actually want another job like the one you had, or would you rather try something different? If you want to stay in the same field, get as much information as you can to determine how realistic that is. Are jobs in your area expected to come back in Silicon Valley, or are they being automated or moved overseas? If they do come back, do you have the qualifications employers want? ...

• Consider a career change. Perhaps you never really liked the field you were in. Or you realize that you're not likely to get another job like the one you had, no matter how much you want it.

Csd bought a CEN-TECH 35017 for the reason our previous multimeters didn't have capacitance and frequency measurements.

Deflation?

Sale ends 1/27/2003

First use was measuring tachometer output of an MSD electronic ignition connect to white ford.

Search for Here's the compressor

The CEN-TECH works great. As well as do their cheaper, about $4.95, digital counterparts!

We've measured electronic components with it and our previous expensive multimeters. The CEN-TECH gets the same answers!

The CEN-TECH is a microcontroller product!!!

Bill ordered gobs of chips while at Sandia labs. As a result he know lots of chip reps.

A former [he was over 50] TI employee alerted bill to TI DLP technology.

We are using high tech for our projects.

And, of course, csd is watching TI/BB 80C32 mixed signal technology very carefully.

And firewire v USB 2.0 technology!

What the hell is DLP and why am I about to buy it?!? The beginners guide to better video through projection! Digital Light Processing is HOT! Over 75% of new projectors are now using this radical technology from Texas Instruments that uses hundreds of thou- sands of tiny "micromirrors" to produce the image. LCD is about 20% of sales and less than 5% are CRTs (actually. I believe it is now less than 1%!). And just about 5 years ago. DLP was barely even a blip on the radar screen. When the DreamVision DLP projector came out about 3 years ago, we picked up on it right away because it had a "breakthrough price" of $6800 and, combined with the then new $700 Scan line doubler, it provided an unprecendented level of picture qual- ity. Two years later, the Plus Piano came out and produced a picture that was twice as good for less than half the price AND included the $700 iScan linedoubler internally for free. Now we have an improved version of the Plus Piano and the new InFocus 7200 featuring the amazing new HD2 "Mustang" chip for twice the detail and twice the contrast ratio. Buckle up. DLP it's getting exciting! The big thing about DLP front projeciion is that it looks DRAMATICALLY betrer and more filmlike (even beyond film in many ways) than ANY rear projection TV. Even the finest, most expensive rear projectors look bad after seeing a DLP image. Why? Well, several reasons. One is that rear projectors have to bounce the video off of several mirrors which adds refraction distortion. Then, the image is splashed onto the back of a fresnel screen designed to scatter the light so that you can actually see the image. However, this screen adds even more refraction distortion and blurs the image to the point where computer data looks visibly fuzzy. And, because the screen can't scatter the light evenly and isn't even truly flat, you get "hotspotting" that makes some parts of the screen look brighter than others. Front projectors do NOT have any of these prob- lems. When you look at a front projected image on a screen, you see a crispness so precise, you can count the pixels and even see the dimple in the middle of the DLP mirrors IF you get close enough to the screen. Rear projection TVs simply don't have the kind of resolution required to show this level of detail. And computer generated data looks "pixel-per- fect". More than a few recent buyers of rear projection TVs have seen the Plus Piano front projector and said "Aw....crap. NOW you tell me." Hey we DID send out the info last springl Don't you read the newsletter?!? So, here are our thoughts on video. We DO NOT recommend, nor will we sell Plasma "flat screen" TVs. They are too expensive, too unreliable and not very good looking. We arelukewarm about rear projectors. They are a good compromise of big, day-to-day use video, but do not really pro- duce a "high-end" image because of optical problems. New TFI LCD panels (the new flat screen computer monitors) look promising and already produce a better image than either Plasma or CRT, but are too expensive and are not fast enough to produce a clean image when there is fast motion. However, at the rate they are going, they WILL be price/size competitive with Plasma by next year and will almost certainly supplant it within a few years. In fact. I personally believe that Plasma. rertainly as we know it. won't exist as a technology in 3-5 years. TFT LCD is moving so fast, conventional tube televisions will be in mortal danger in a few years. Until then, we think the BEST way to get great video is to keep your old tube TV for normal day to day use and a DLP front proector for primetime and movie watching in a somewhat darkened room. Then you have the best of both worlds. A good bright image for daylight watching and a huge. high-end theater-like image for movies for more serious night-time watching. TOP 10 REASONS TO DO A DLP FRONT PROJECTION SYSTEM 1. A picture up to 4 times the size of a "big screen" TV A DLP front projector can put out a picture up to 120" (bigger if you have the wall space). That is 4 times the size of a typical 60" rear projector. In a typical house. that gives you an image that appears as large or larger than the largest movie theater. 2. Razor sharp graphics for computer video games - These projectors do double duty with computer graphics and produce a sharper. more precise image than ANY other technology. Simply tell your computer to put out the same resolution as the projector and you have a virtually perfect representation of your computer screen. And there's no burn-in like conventional CRTs! 3. Better reliability than other technologies - DLP is the most reliable technology to ever come out for video reproduction. Each DMD is designed to work flawlessly for approximately 100.000 hours. That's 11 years of continuous use with no LCD pixel drop-outs. no CRT fade or burn-in, no catastrophic failure. All you have to do is replace the bulb every 1000-3000 hours and keep the projector clean. We can't guarantee that the projector itself will last 100.000 hours as that would be about 100 years in normal use, but you get what I'm talking about! 4. Virtually no impact on the sound of your speakers - Unlike a big TV. a projection screen on the wall doesn't significantly impact the imaging of your speakers. And. after all, creating a realistic soundstage is the entire point of 5.1 surround sound. Not only is front projection the ultimate in video quality, it actually can make your audio system sound better! 5. Gives you back the space in your room - Even though you can easily get a 100" or larger diagonal screen, the screen itself, including the frame is less than 2" thick. That's thinner than plasma! And it's bigger AND it's better. Get rid of that enormous rear projector and get something bigger. And smaller! 6. With a drop down screen, disappears when not in use - If you think TVs are ugly, you'll LOVE the idea of a drop down screen. Many of our customers have a beautiful painting on the wall, but when it's time to watch a movie, the screen simply comes out of the ceiling or out of a thin tube on the wall and gives you the movie theater experience of your dreams. 7. Screen investment remains, even if you upgrade the projector - Projector technology is improving almost as rapidly as computer technology, but your screen is an investment you can keep for decades. So. while a newer, more exotic projector may catch your eyes in 4 or 5 years, your screen will be with you for a long time. 8. Looks as good in 20 years as it does today - Unlike a typical TV that begins degrading the moment you turn it on. DLP won't fade or lose color. Simply replace the user-installable metal halide bulb when it burns out. DLPs don't lose quality For as long as they work, they produce their max- imum quality. 9. Better overall picture quality than any other technology or design - DLP is at the cutting edge of image quality. While other technologies are attempting to catch up. DLP is maintaining its edge. Only ultra-expensive CRT's can claim to be as good, and that's only if you have the patience and skills to tune them and converge them properly And if you don't think DLP is good enough yet, you haven't seen the new InFocus 7200! 10. The price/technology has finally become ~right" - Our first DLP projector showed the promise of this exciting technology. The new Plus Piano significantly improved on that and dropped the price to 40% of the award-winning DreamVision. And now, the InFocus has removed all doubts with double the resolution, contrast and brightness of the Piano (for twice the price!). If you're on a budget. you'll be shocked at the per- formance of the Plus Piano and InFocus projectors. especially compared to "big screens". If you're lusting after the hottest picture available this side of $20,000. the new InFocus 7200 will blow you away and keep you sat- isfied for years and years to come. If ever there was a time to "get in" to DLP. NOW is the time. Composite Video - Composite is exactly what it sounds like. It is a "composite" of all of the signals that make up the image. It uses a single RCA type cable and is analog land therefore easily susceptible to distortion I. Unfortunately, to create an image. the signal has to be split out into a three-color RGB signal. Composite is the lowest form of video-only signals because it is difficult to sepa- rate out the signals without significant distortion. However, almost all video components have either composite in or output because it is so common. S-Video - This is a noticeable leap over composite video. By keeping the Y or "brightness' signal separate from the C or "color' signal. there is a cleaner video with much fewer artifacts. S-Video is always preferred over composite. Satellite. new cable boxes. DVD and S-VHS all use S-Video for a better, smoother picture. S-Video uses a fragile DIN connector similar to a computer mouse cable, so be careful when plugging it ml Component Video - Component is the best consumer form of analog video. It has a Y signal. presumably identical to that of S-Video, but the color is created through a "color difference" method. One signal. R-Y or "Pcr' creates colors towards the red end of the spectrum and B-Y or "Pcb" creates colors towards the blue end of the spectrum. This is easily translated into the RC,B standard that TV actually runs on. Component uses three RCA cables. typically marked red. green and blue (green being Y). DVI - Digital Video Interface is a newer. computer-oriented digital connection that is gaining popularity for HDTV. A newly adopted copy-protection scheme (HDCP) is needed at both ends to send and receive high-definition digital signals. DVI is now being used on many new DLP projectors and now for high-end HDTV boxes. both of the oft-air and satellite varieties. Upcoming HD1'V cable boxes may also use DVI. DVI is an exceptional method of transferring video as it is com- pletely lossless. and since DLP is all digital. the signal goes through no analog cir- cuitry or filters whatsoever. Firewire/EE1394 - Firewire is even more advanced than DVI as it can handle two-way communication and audio as well. It is more complicated and a little less standardized. but it is poised to be the other standard for the future of audio/video. Firewire is the standard for HDTV recorders such as D-VHS and hard drive recorders. Firewire can be a bus master while USB 2.0 cannot. The Spanish civil war taught those of us who read and understand a very valuable lesson. 1 You can be right and lose. To: "bill payne" Sent: Saturday, January 11, 2003 6:52 PM Subject: Re: firewire and dlp > Apple's new portables sport Firewire 800 which runs circles around USB 2.0 > and 802.11g which is compatible with 802.11b but 5 times faster. So, once > again, Microsoft and Intel will have to back off from 802.11a and complete > dependence on USB 2.0. > > Ted Lewis, Ph.D. > tedglewis@friction-free-economy.com > ph# 831-484-1240, -0730fax NTSC/ATSC - Traditionally. video standards are named after the committee that standardized them. The National Television Standards Committee developed the old broadcast standard. The Advanced Television Systems Committee developed HDTV. NTSC is an analog "interlaced" format. It produces the odd lines of an image in one "field" and then produces the even lines in the following field. ATSC HDTV is digital can be either interlaced or "progressive". Progressive runs at double the speed and can show the entire frame in one field. Therefore, it looks dramatically smoother than interlaced and has dramatically less noticeable "motion artifacts" which is the edginess that occurs when things move on the screen. HDTV is also scaleable to different resolutions. One channel of 120 or 1080 lines (three times NTSC TV) can be transmitted or up to 5 channels of 480 lines can be transmitted simultaneously. You'll see terms like 480~ and 72 Op with HDTV. The first number stands for the lines of resolution. The 'i' or 'p stands for interlaced or progressive. CRT- Cathode Ray Tubes (hence the phrase "the Tube") fire electrons at a grid of posphers to create an image on a screen or via three large "guns" to produce a projected image. These are bulky and are quickly being replaced by a host of new technologies. Within 5 years. there almost certainly will be no more tube TVs or projectors. Once newer. more glamorous technologies reach price parity with CRTs. there will be no desire on the part of consumers to buy the old-fashioned "tube" any more. Plasma - Plasma uses millions of small phosphor coated bubbles that are activated by electrical currents to glow in the right color. In a sense. it is similar to a CRT. but instead of one gun that aims the electrons at each phosphor one at a time, the phospors are fired by electrically and individually operated plasma inside the bubble. Plasma's major problem is expense and reliability. They also do not work well and squeal at high altitudes. It also seems to be stagnating in price/development and is in danger of being overcome by TFT LCDs (see below). We don't recommend or sell Plasma for these reasons. TFT LCD - LCD panels have been around since the first portable computer. However, new models use a 'Thin Film Transistor" design that has individual transisters to drive each pixel element. TFT LCDs are signficantly brighter, faster and have a wider viewing angle than older LCDs. Most, if not all, new portable computers use TFTs. The only major problem with TFTs right now is that they are a little too slow for fast action and therefore blur a bit at times and the price. However. TFT's size/price ratio is advancing at a rapid pace and some of the newer ones don't seem to blur at all. We believe, barring a more advanced technology. TFT LCD will eclispe Plasma within a few years. We are considering selling these, but are waiting for the price to become more attractive. They will never be as large as a projection system. however. DLP - Digital Light Processing uses Digital Micromirror Devices ( DMDs) to produce startlingly clear images on a screen. It is a reflective technology and uses hundreds of thousands. soon to be millions of mirrors only microns across (they all fit on a small chip) to reflect an image through a lens. Despite the apparent complexity, reliability is exceptional. The picture needs to be seen to be believed. Current popular chips are the 480x848 and 720x1280 16:9 chips. Working prototypes for 1080x1920 projectors have been built. but there is no immediate plans for producing these for mass sale. yet. However, it is almost certainly only a few years away as production technologies and the competition improves. DLP now accounts for nearly 80% of all video projectors now being sold. The next big evolution will be more affordable 3-chip designs which will be even brighter and smoother looking, but those are more than $30,000 at the moment. Front Projection - Front projectors send an image that is reflected off of the front of an opaque video screen. It is the best way of producing an accurate image as it is optically simple and there is no distortion due to refraction or the absorption by the screen. It's main liability is that it needs to be relatively dark for a good image. It is best used in tandem with a standard TV for daytime use. Rear Projection - Rear projectors are a good compromise of size and all around use and project an image THROUGH a screen from the rear. However, they ARE a compromise. Video quality is generally poor relative to other technologies. including CRTs and LCDs. This is because the plastic screen that disperses the image adds a significant amount of distortion seen as a blurring of the signal. Also. like most TVs. it is sensitive to bright light and can be washed Out almost as much as a front projector if there is any direct light in the room. If you blew up the size of a rear projection TV to front projection size. it would be immediately apparent how much more blurred the image is compared to a reflective image. Once you see a good DLP front projector. you'll never want to own a rear projection TV again. 4:3/16:9 Aspect Ratios - The aspect ratio is the ratio of the width to the height of the image. Standard TV uses 4:3 ratio. In other words, a screen that is 3' high would be 4' wide. It is also known as 1.33:1. A 16:9 ratio has a wider aspect ratio and is more commonly referred to as "widescreen" or "HDTV format . 16:9 is also known as 1.78:1 and is closer to film's common 1.85:1 ratio (often seen as a "letterboxed" format). 16:9 is the main standard for HDTV. although 4:3 ratios are supported. Even computers are now moving to widescreen format. If you buy a projector, you should get a wide 16:9 screen. Letterbox - Letterboxing is the common method of shrinking a movie onto a relatively narrow ratio screen. When the image is narrowed to fit, the height also shrinks, and black bars appear at the top and bottom of the screen. Buying a widescreen TV does not always eliminate the bars as many DVDs are shown in the wider 1:85 and even as wide as the 2:35:1 aspect ratio. However, most HDTV material and many DVDs are in 16:9 ratio and therefore would not be lerterboxed on a widescreen TV. but would be on a standard TV. Anamorphic - Anamorphic widescreen is a method of squeezing a wider image into a narrower profile. DVD is actually a 4:3 aspect ratio format. at least until a more advanced version arrives in a few years. That means a widescreen film either needs to be shrunk in both height and width and then blown back up (letterboxing) by the TV/DVD OR the picture can be squeezed only in the horizontal domain, making everyone skinny in the DVD and then widened again by the TV/DVD to produce and accurate widescreen format. The advantage of anamorphic is that, while letterboxing loses both vertical and horizontal resolution. anamorphic only loses vertical lines of resolution and the image uses all of the available horizontal lines of resolution. Anamorphic DVD looks better on a widescreen TV than letterbox movies which are inherently lower in resolution. Pan and San/Full Screen - These are methods of showing a widescreen movie on a 4:3 TV and filling the screen. Full screen means that the movie is blown up the TV. but the sides of the image are chopped off by the TV. Full screen typically shows the middle 3/4s of the movie from a fixed postion. Pan and Scan is a more active way of focusing on the more important elements of the movie. Since filling the TV screen means throwing out 25% or more of the image. pan and scan hunts and pecks the scene so that the most important action stays on screen and only the "less important" elements of the movie are discarded. However. letterboxing or widescreen TVs allow you to see ALL of the movie, even if you have to shrink the image slightly to fit all of the width onto your screen. If you were to pan and scan Ben Hur. which is shot in a 2.3 5:1 ratio, you would be throwing out 44% of the moviel If you think letterboxing is a problem. you need a bigger. wider TV. let us help? adnm.com Audio Designs 225 J. Wyoming NE Albuquerque, NM 87112 505-298-9185

Pierre Belec strikes again at Yahoo! Finance.

In Austin the prices of houses once doubled, then fell back to less that where it started!

How many people will have been lured into a debt trap once the value of their home starts falling? Trust me, unless you've had it happen to you, you have no idea what it feels like to owe $130,000 on an $80,000 house, as happened to many people in the Texas real estate bust. (In most areas, you can probably double or triple those dollar amounts for today. How many people have that much cash laying around to make up the difference?) Thinking that asset prices can forever be levitated is a pipe dream. Ultimately, the payments on loans have to be paid, and that depends on how well capital has been allocated to meet the real demand of the economy. ...

The Fed will certainly try to continue to inflate. And certainly the prices of some things may go up in value. But my guess is the Fed doesn't have as much power as they think they do. Even if they are successful, it will only take us closer to serious, serious systemic problems. But I do not believe housing prices can be propped up much longer. And when that goes, the real pain will begin. The sooner we take the pain, the sooner we can get back to reality and a healthy economy.

Friday January 10, 2003 18:40

The U.S. economy suffered a surprise 101,000 jobs drop in December, the government said on Friday, underscoring gloom among retailers and other employers and raising the political stakes for President Bush as he touts a $674 billion stimulus plan.

Here's neat email recently received from Kim Komando

MY WEEKLY COLUMN: Making the PC-Gadget Connection

So, you got that new computer up and running. And now you're looking at all the wondrous things you could add to it--digital cameras, music players, printers, memory card readers, wireless keyboards and mice, to name a few. Unfortunately, the boxes tell you to hook it up with USB 2.0, or Firewire, or, maybe even, Bluetooth. These are all protocols to link things to a computer.

Let's demystify them, starting with USB (Universal Serial Bus) 2.0. Of the really high-speed connectors, this is the most common. As its name implies, USB 2.0 is the second iteration of the universal serial bus standard. The original, 1.1, is still around.

The difference? Speed. USB 1.1 moves 12 megabits of data per second. USB 2.0 moves 480Mb of data per second. This means USB 2.0 is about 40 times faster than its predecessor, USB 1.1.

Why is this important? Think about MP3 music files. These are normally 2.5 to 3 megabytes per song. If you were transferring 1,000 songs (some people have that many!) to an MP3 player, you could spend a half hour using USB 1.1. If you used USB 2.0, it would take less than a minute!

How can you tell which you type of USB port is in your computer? Unfortunately, the slots look the same. Check the documentation that came with your computer. If the computer is new, at least some of your USB slots should be 2.0. If it is more than six months old, you may be stuck with 1.1. If that's the case, and you need a faster slot, you can install a 2.0 card in your computer.

Some peripherals don't need a screaming-fast port. Keyboards and mice come in USB versions. They're normally 1.1, because they just don't move that much data. You can hook 1.1 peripherals to 2.0 ports, but they will still run at the 1.1 speed.

Firewire is another screamer. It is known formally as IEEE 1394. It was developed by Apple, and is often used to download video. Those are huge files, and like a slew of MP3s, can take forever with a slower method. Firewire is less common on PCs than USB 2.0. It is built into all Apple machines. Firewire is slightly slower than USB 2.0, running at 400Mbps. That is still awfully fast.

Firewire comes in two flavors: four-wire and six-wire. Six-wire is handier, because it uses power from the computer to run the peripheral. So, if you're downloading pictures from a camera, for instance, you don't have to use the camera's batteries. Four-wire ports require the peripheral to be powered. You can buy Firewire cards to add this port to a computer. If you buy a card, get six-wire.

Both Firewire and USB 2.0 peripherals must be connected by cable to the computer. Bluetooth is entirely different. It is a wireless standard. It is talked about much more often than it is installed. If you decide to retrofit a computer with Bluetooth, you'll find few parts. And there are even fewer peripherals equipped for Bluetooth.

Nonetheless, Bluetooth has been the subject of continuing hype for several years. It is a low-power system, good for about 30 feet. Therefore, it is impractical for networking computers. But it should work well with peripherals.

Bluetooth was named for King Harald II of Denmark. He reigned in the 10th century and had--guess what?--a blue tooth. Used on a computer, Bluetooth runs at 721 kilobits per second one way. A fast parallel port, traditionally used for printers, runs about as fast. Bluetooth is much, much slower than USB or Firewire. When you look behind your computer, what do you see? Mine is a jungle of wiring. Conceivably, Bluetooth could alleviate that condition.

The bottom-line: If you're using a PC and want to buy a peripheral, concentrate on USB (hopefully, 2.0) and Firewire, if you have a Firewire port. If you're using an Apple machine, concentrate on Firewire. Bluetooth is a good choice for wireless keyboards and mice, but not much more than that.

--> MORE ABOUT ME--KIM:

Whew! In addition to my weekly newspaper column, I have a weekly column on MSN's bCentral, this newsletter, a weekly column for USA Today, and other editorial products. Oh, and I have a weekly radio show heard by almost 8 million people.

--> HAVE A WEB SITE? Link your site to my site. The easy instructions are here: http://www.komando.com/fanlinks.asp

Kim Komando web site.

California has to pay about $800 million into the California Public Employees' Retirement System, the largest U.S. pension fund, and the California State Teachers' Retirement System, the third largest. Both funds lost money in the stock market during the past three years. If the state decides to borrow, the pension bonds would be sold in the fiscal year starting July 1.

Assumption v reality!

In slides released in advance of an analyst meeting, the world's second-largest automaker said its worldwide pension underfunding totaled $14.5 billion. Its U.S. pension funds had a negative return of 9.7 percent in 2002 as U.S. stock markets suffered their third straight year of decline

Ford said it was changing the assumptions for future returns on its U.S., Canadian and British plans to 8.75 percent from 9.5 percent.

Over a long period of time the S&P 500 has sold at an average P/E of 15 with a range of 7 to 22 excluding the late 1990s boom. At bear market bottoms the P/E lows have averaged about 11 with none higher than 16. Now the index sells at 30 times estimated earnings for 2002 and 24 times the estimated consensus earnings for 2003, which are probably too high. This is not only far above the level at any bear market bottom in history, but is higher than the P/E at the 1929 peak.

The valuations for leading technology stocks are even worse. Fred Hickey, publisher of the excellent monthly, “The High-Tech Strategist” calculates that 16 leading tech stocks with earnings are now selling at an average of 52 times trailing earnings and 42 times estimated earnings for the following fiscal year. While some will say that this is a result of depressed earnings, the average P/E in 1990, when earnings were also depressed, was 17. For those who don’t trust earnings numbers, the four-quarter trailing price-to-sales ratio is now 7.7 compared to only 2.3 in 1990. We note that the 16 stocks in the calculation account for 32% of Nasdaq’s total capitalization.

Thursday January 9, 2003 18: 46

There are the batteries too.

U.S. technology companies lag foreign rivals in reducing hazardous materials in electronic devices, exposing gadget-hungry Americans to toxins whenever they use computers, according to a new report.

Within the next five years, up to 680 million computers will become obsolete in the United States, producing more than 4 billion pounds of plastic, 1 billion pounds of lead and millions of pounds of other waste products, according to the National Safety Council. According to the CTC report, less than 10 percent of outdated computer products will be refurbished or recycled.

GM said it expects pretax pension expenses to increase from $1 billion in 2002 to $3 billion this year. The company said an analysis showed that its U.S. plans were underfunded by $19.3 billion at the end of 2002.

GM's U.S. plans were underfunded $9.1 billion at the end of 2001.

Based on a study by asset managers and actuaries, the automaker has decided to reduce its assumption for how much it will earn from investments to nine per cent in 2003 from 10 per cent in 2002.

Slumping investment returns in the stock markets and a growing number of retirees are the biggest factors contributing to underfunded plans, which are affecting companies in all facets of the economy.

The stock market just wrapped up its third straight year of losses, but when it comes to pension accounting, that reality has yet to catch up with much of corporate America.

Many companies are feeding their bottom line by assuming their pension assets will grow by at least 10 percent in the future, even though the stock market slump shows few signs of abating. ...

International Business Machines Corp. (nyse: IBM - news - people), for example, notes in its 2001 annual report that since 1986 its actual returns exceeded its projected returns by $5.3 billion. In 2001, the company's pension plans lost $2.41 billion, despite projecting returns of $1.45 billion.

"Phantom pension earnings are portrayed as income," she says. "It's a ticking time bomb."!

GM, the world's largest automaker, also said it is cutting the projected rate of return on its pension fund to 9 percent annually from 10 percent in 2002.

General Motors Corp. (NYSE:GM - News) said on Thursday that its pension costs before taxes will triple to $3 billion this year because assets in the fund, hammered by three years of stock market declines, fell short of anticipated obligations by $19.3 billion in 2002.

The move by GM, which has the largest private U.S. pension fund, had been expected. Analysts have said many companies are likely to follow suit, depressing earnings across corporate America this year. ....

What U.S. papers say about Bush plan

---

Faced with a sluggish economy that bears some similarities to the one that helped sink his father’s 1992 re-election bid, President Bush proposed a stimulus plan Tuesday that would return $674 billion to taxpayers over 10 years.

---

President George W. Bush's $670 billion tax-cut proposal is his biggest risk on the economy because he can't guarantee success, analysts said. Democrats portrayed the plan as fueling deficits and benefiting the rich.

Wednesday January 8, 2003 11:14

On Saturday morning I opened the Business section and found an article by Richard Lambert headlined “US dollar faces year of living dangerously”. He makes many of the points I was planning to make, and makes them very well — the overvalued and declining dollar, the “enormous” US deficit on current account, “the sorry state of the world’s second and third biggest economies, Japan and Germany”, the Asian central banks propping up the dollar, the sharp rise in the price of gold. ...

There have been a number of reasons for this strength of the gold price. Between 1997 and 2002 the US current deficit tripled from an annual rate of 1.5 per cent of gross domestic product to just below 5 per cent. Some projections expect it to reach 7 per cent by 2007; even the present deficit is unsustainable.

The Clinton presidency in the years of the boom between 1997 and 2000 lost control of the US current balance; despite an economic slowdown, the Bush Administration has not regained it, and does not even appear to have a proper understanding of the problem. Gold is priced in terms of dollars. Gold has risen by 36 per cent in terms of the dollar since 1999; that revaluation probably has further to go. Some American commentators now believe that gold has entered a ten-year bull market against the dollar

Feeling even more sick?

The stock market just wrapped up its third straight year of losses, but when it comes to pension accounting, that reality has yet to catch up with much of corporate America.

Many companies are feeding their bottom line by assuming their pension assets will grow by at least 10% a year in the future, despite widespread concern that the current market slump hasn't ended. ....

At the start of 2002, companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 on average estimated that their pension assets -- the bulk of which are invested in the stock market -- would post lofty returns of 9.3% for the year, according to a study by Merrill Lynch & Co. ...

That's because on average, pension portfolios have 60% of their assets tied up in the stock market while the rest usually are locked up in debt or other assets that generate even lower returns.

---

According to its annual report released in March 2002, Verizon Communications Inc., the nation's largest local phone company, had a strong year in 2001. In the opening pages of the report, the company announced an annual profit of $389 million.

Only those investors who dug into the small print at the back of the document learned that Verizon's reported earnings included $2.7 billion in gains from its pension fund investments -- profit that didn't really exist.

The company pension fund actually lost $3.1 billion in 2001, a footnote on page 58 of the 68-page report revealed.

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USX-U.S. Steel, now bankrupt, got 40% of its earnings from pension gains just a few years ago. See how quickly things can turn?

Martin Weiss believes that the pension fund timebomb will be one of the factors driving the Dow down to 5000. GM owes $12.7 BILLION to its pension fund. The September issue of Safe Money Report lists some 50 companies that owe money to their pension funds; ranging from hundreds of millions to billions.

Tuesday January 7, 2003 21:20

Microsoft will officially end technical support for Windows 98 and Windows NT 4 on June 30. The financial implications for Microsoft and others could be significant, even in the short term.

"For years, Korea has long been the low-cost, high-efficiency producer, but now Chinese labor is eating into the South Korean margins," said Scott Snyder, Korea representative for the Asia Foundation, a research group partly financed by the United States government. "The Koreans have to run faster — they are starting to feel the warm breath of China on their backs."

We realize this page is getting too big. But there is important stuff to add.

We have often been accused of inconsistency for criticising the Federal Reserve’s recent promises for radical monetisation to avert a Japanese-style deflation, whilst simultaneously arguing for exactly that sort of policy prescription in Japan. We have chosen to open the New Year by addressing this apparent contradiction. Although both countries share many comparable symptoms of a post-bubble distress, they are clearly at different stages of the economic cycle and concomitantly different phases of economic adjustment. We think the relative time frames of the respective economies highlight a crucial distinction. Yes, the vigorous production of “Why We’re Not Like Japan” articles has some validity; but such analyses should not provide US investors with any degree of comfort. On virtually any current comparison, Japan is far more amenable to improvement given the savings swing from deficit to surplus in its private sector, than the US, which has spent all of its monetary bullets pre-empting, as opposed to accommodating, painful, but necessary, economic adjustment.

Wal-Mart is introducing basic financial services for US customers, using the same low-margin strategy that has turned it into the world's biggest retailer.

The entry of the discount superstore giant into financial services has always been feared by financial competitors worried that it could undercut their margins while facing a lighter regulatory burden.

The Walmart of software is advancing. Forth and BASIC-52, of course! And fun too!

Senior citizen problems

GE said its average health care cost per employee was expected to be $2,350 higher in 2003 than in 1999.

Blowing the whistle on Remote digitization and 2003 microcontroller shake-out.

Isn't it fun to be in an industry leading deflation? We simply love these inexpensive gigahertz PCs!

In that context, today’s deflation risks are global in scope. That’s a key by-product of our baseline forecast of the world economy -- a 2.9% estimate for world GDP growth in 2003 following two years of gains averaging just 2.1%. Not only did the 2001-02 outcome fall a cumulative 3.0 percentage points below the global economy’s longer-term 3.6% growth trend, but our 2003 scenario adds another 0.7 percentage point to the global output gap -- perpetuating the deflationary tendencies of this subpar global growth cycle. Moreover, our first cut at 2004 -- a 3.9% increase -- is only 0.3 percentage point above trend, thereby barely making a dent in the outsize imbalance between global supply and demand. Consequently, notwithstanding the recent pop in commodity prices, traditional macro tells us that a persistently wide global output gap makes it difficult to envision the return of pricing leverage at any point in the foreseeable future. The risk of global deflation can hardly be ruled out. ....

The standard line I hear from equity investors these days is that we simply can’t have a fourth down year in a row. After all, we hadn’t seen three consecutive annual declines in some 60 years. Another down year would hearken back to the rout of 1929-33, utterly inconceivable to most. Unfortunately, this is precisely the same logic that was used on the upside of the Roaring Nineties. Beginning with the unlikely outcome of three consecutive double-digit up years, there was doubt all the way up. By the time the fifth year came along, the lessons of history had been completely tossed aside. Now, a similar mind-set lurks on the downside. With all due respect to the consensus, this debate is not about numerology. It’s about picking up the pieces from the greatest bubble in modern history.

The economic world's disparate interests are currently aligned because it has a common enemy: deflation.

Tech show attendance last year slumped 10% from the year before, twice as much as other shows. Key3Media, the producer of Comdex, the granddaddy of North American tech shows, says it may file for bankruptcy protection because of dwindling crowds. And Macworld Expo in Tokyo, a big Apple Computer-related show, was canceled this year because not enough major exhibitors signed up. Even the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), one of the industry's healthiest, expects only slightly more visitors this year than last. It starts Thursday in Las Vegas. ...

"Trade shows mirror the health of a sector, and the tech industry is in disarray," says Douglas Ducate, CEO of the Center for Exhibition Industry Research. He expects some tech shows to consolidate and more companies to copy eBay and Oracle, who do smaller conventions targeted at customers and developers. ...

Closures and mergers in the tech and telecom industries erased hundreds of companies and about 470,000 jobs last year. Many were habitual attendees of trade shows.

These are excessive manufacturing capacity, record consumer debt, a low consumer savings rate and a ballooning trade imbalance.

Lewis warned of the Crash of 2000.

Let's see what going to happen in 2003. A microcontroller shake-out?

Bill, Lewis's MS abd Ph.D thesis advisor, warned about professional birth control 29 years ago.

William H. Payne: Graduate Education: The Ph.D. Glut. CACM 16(3): 181-182 (1973)

2002 may be the year of technical occupational migration.

John Young forced bill into the internet business.

13 November 1998

William Payne promises that he and Arthur Morales will shortly have a Web site for offering information on their activities and those of others. A URL for that site will be available soon.

Enclosed is a Grand Jury subpoena requiring that Cryptome produce certain records.

Monday January 6, 2003 20:27

Reality?

The trigger for the economic gloom will be a 20% collapse in house prices between a peak later this year and a trough in mid-2005, said Roger Bootle, economic adviser to Deloitte.

Only those investors who dug into the small print at the back of the document learned that Verizon's reported earnings included $2.7 billion in gains from its pension fund investments -- profit that didn't really exist.

The company pension fund actually lost $3.1 billion in 2001, a footnote on page 58 of the 68-page report revealed. ...

Now, the liabilities have become too big to ignore. Many of the largest companies will be spending hundreds of millions -- and in some cases, billions -- of dollars to replenish pension funds in 2003 and beyond, according to Credit Suisse and UBS Warburg.

Csd does not advocate inventing new operating systems when there are acceptable operating systems - especially Forth and BASIC-52, of course!

Likewise there is no sense reinventing analog circuits.

While Bill is not into analog circuit design, he works with people who are. And naturally he got curious about what they are doing. Here's two neat books if you want to learn the rudiments of analog circuits.

Hey, analog circuit designers borrow circuits of others. No sense reinventing!

Bill was told that Forrest Mims lives and Albuquerque and works for the Air Force Weapons Laboratory. Companies like Analog Devices, Linear Tech, Burr-Brown ... offer seminars to teach about their products. And frequently publish these informative manuals. If you come-up with a hardware design, these companies also have engineers who will look at your design and point out what you are possibly doing wrong and a fix! Free!

Harbor Freight!

Don't count on higher earnings. So far, during this 'recovery' stage, profits have been falling - an unprecedented experience. And there is not much reason to think they will get much better soon. Businesses have already cut expenses. Expense cuts produce quick increases in profit margins for an individual company. But one companies expense is another's income...so the net effect throughout the economy is negative. What produces profits is capital investment...of which there has been very little. Companies typically build new factories, hire new workers, and sell new products at a profit - that is what gives them earnings to distribute to their shareholders.

But policy makers have encouraged consumer spending, hoping to hold off a worse recession. This consumer spending by Americans has done wonders for the Chinese economy - currently expanding at an 8% rate. But it merely deprives the U.S. economy of the savings and capital investment it needs to produce profits.

The amount of retail PCs sold over the 2002 holidays dipped from an already dismal 2001, with desktop computers sliding 15 percent to 20 percent, according to preliminary estimates from research firm NPDTechworld. ...

There were bright spots. Notebook computers continued to gain popularity as their prices fell, with retail sales units rising 10 percent to 15 percent, according to NPDTechworld's preliminary figures. ...

With those lower prices, of course, comes shrinking profit margins. Meanwhile, businesses and consumers remain spooked by the threat of higher gas prices, war and an unstable stock market.

Sunday January 5, 2003 21:12

Fundraising in the international capital markets fell sharply in 2002 as issuance was hit by a weak global economy, falling stock markets, rising corporate bankruptcies and political instability.

Securities underwriting volume totalled $3,900bn for the year, down from $4,110bn the previous year, according to new data from Thomson Financial.

Although the overall erosion appears modest, the figures are particularly troubling because much of the decline occurred in the fourth quarter of the year, raising doubts about a recovery in 2003.

Guys, Tice at Pudentbear are publishing negative economy articles because they are selling short.

A rising number of U.S. mutual fund managers, chastened by steep stock declines, are using a tactic once reserved mainly for the riskier world of hedge funds -- they're selling stocks short on a hunch they will fall.

ADVERTISEMENT "After really tough times, people are realizing something we believed was prudent all along," said Paul McEntire, who manages the Marketocracy Technology Plus Fund and uses the strategy. "It's not a bad idea to do some hedging in adverse markets. It does allow you to play both sides of the street."

In short-selling, a fund borrows shares from a broker and then sells the stock, hoping the price will fall. If the stock drops, the fund then buys the stock later at a cheaper price, returns the borrowed shares, and pockets the difference.

Deflation?

Pioneer is struggling mightily to keep its Tijuana factory complex open in the face of fierce competition from China, which has undercut Mexico as a cut-rate producer. The Japanese electronics company already has slashed 900 jobs at its three plants here, moving the manufacturing of smaller speakers to Shanghai, where they can be churned out for as little as $3 each -- half of what they cost to make in Mexico.

"China's cost competitiveness is very strong," said Hirokazu Tsujimoto, another Pioneer executive who makes his home in nearby San Diego. ...

Since 2000, the Mexican government estimates, the maquiladora industry has lost nearly 250,000 jobs and seen its roster of plants shrink to about 3,200 from a high of more than 3,700. Among those that have shuttered operations are Hasbro Inc., Sanyo Electric Co. and Canon Inc. Landing another good position "will be very difficult," said 50-year-old Victor Hernandez, an engineer from Monterrey who was a manager at Canon's printer plant here.

Saturday January 4, 2003 20:21

Heads up, Wall Street. If the market doesn't rally this month, stocks may be on track to post their fourth consecutive losing year.

The month of January is an incredible forecaster of things to come for the market. It may predict whether the year will be good or bad.

On Thursday, the first trading day of 2003, the S&P 500 index jumped 3.3 percent, its best start to a new year since 1988, according to MarketHistory.com. Both the Nasdaq and the Dow Jones industrial average ended up more than 3 percent, with the Dow scoring its third-biggest opening-day percentage gain since the average was created in 1896.

But watch out: Don't fall victim to what could be another suckers' rally. On Friday, the blue-chip Dow average fell after an earnings warning from Home Depot Inc., a Dow stock and the world's largest home improvement retailer. The S&P 500 dipped, while the tech-driven Nasdaq inched higher.

At 5:29:45 a.m., the gadget exploded with a force of 21,000 tons of TNT, evaporating the tower on which it stood. Groves' deputy, General Thomas Farrell, wrote that the "whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined. Seconds after the explosion came first the air blast pressing hard against the people, to be followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved for the Almighty." Oppenheimer was reminded of the quotation from his favorite Sanskrit text, the Bhagavadgita, "I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds." To his brother, Frank, who had helped construct the site, he said only, "It worked.

“In our view, risk remains to the downside for consensus 2003 estimates [for technology companies] while tech valuations remain at lofty levels relative to the S&P 500,” Goldman's analysts said. ...

It found that the outlook for spending in 2003 had deteriorated to a 1 per cent decline compared with estimates of 2-3 per cent growth in a previous survey conducted just two months ago. “

We are surprised by themagnitude of the decline,” Goldman said.

The lack of “game changing technologies” and little pent-up demand indicates a bleak beginning to 2003 for technologycompanies. It also dashes hopes that IT spending in 2002 hadstabilised and would offer moderate growth in 2003.

This has led to a price war in some IT sectors as tech companies have been forced to compete by discounting prices. The Goldman survey indicates that the discounting of IT products is likely to continue, with 56 per cent of respondents saying that discounting is on the rise.

The technology shift caused by USB 2.0 and gigahertz PCs, Visual Basic and C++ 6.0 coupled with super fast 80C32 SOCs is doing to do bad things to powerful peripheral microcontrollers where Java is one software solution. So it will be interesting to see is Java is going to do about as far as its underlying technology, Forth.

Look what Mentor graphics is doing with USB 2.0 and 8051s!

The Java platform was introduced by Sun in 1995 as a way for programs to run on all computers regardless of the operating system.

But Java, which has been criticized for being slow, faces stiff competition not only from Microsoft but also Macromedia Inc.'s Flash, which is less robust but considerably easier to program than Java.

The weak economy isn't just putting the squeeze on people on the unemployment line - it's also hurting recruiters and consultants who used to command big salaries to fill jobs that have dried up.

Analysts say the stalled economy has sapped the recruiting industry, replacing double-digit revenues its enjoyed through much of the 1990s with double-digit losses, layoffs and lost firms. Overall, analysts estimate the industry has lost $3 billion in revenue and as many as one out of three firms in the past two years.

Friday January 3, 2003 15:36

The bankruptcy business is booming in Chicago, even as the city's hometown airlines struggles to emerge from the biggest such filing in aviation history.

Partly due to increased attorneys fees and new rules reducing days in court, Chicago has been picking up major cases that formerly might have gone to Delaware or New York. ...

Delaware long has been considered a prime spot to file, partly because many companies are incorporated there and because attorneys say judges there were easy to work with.

However, ``Delaware as a venue became unfavorable because of its backlog,'' said David Newby, a Chicago attorney for property owners leasing to Kmart. ``Ironically, it became too popular.''

Thursday January 2, 2003 11:41

Others point out that many companies whose share prices plunged have reported lower profits, and that their stocks still trade at higher multiples of earnings than in pre-bubble years. That is particularly true of large technology stocks

Respondents to the Goldman poll now see 2003 IT spending falling 1% instead of the 2%-3% average gain they previously saw. As a result, Goldman argued that current multiples among technology companies remain "lofty" on a relative basis, particularly with no obvious buying catalysts on the horizon.

Two-thirds of the managers surveyed think reduced IT spending is more likely, while 56% expect discounting to rise and 15% expect spending to pick up in the second half of 2003, the survey found.

Bill is not an analog engineer. But he worked with analog engineers at Sandia lab.

One of his job assignments was to evaluate a/d converters for Sandia labs' seismic program.

Reason was that he could get the software written in Forth for a 8051 microcontroller controlling both the a/d and d/a converters at a fraction of the time using other technologies!

So will pass along information gleaned from a/d experts on how to get the right, or at least consistent, answers and avoid random number components contaminating sensor values.

With the 80C32 USB and mixed signal SOCs coming to market we are entering a very exciting time in collection and processing, on gigahertz PCs of course - not weird software-starved peripheral microcontrollers, of sensor data.

Pricing power is possible with a technically superior product.

Wednesday January 1, 2003 20:51

The anticipated peripheral micrcontroller core shake-out this year could worsen the outlook for high tech.

After years of being the epicenter of hot initial public stock offerings, Silicon Valley was an IPO ghost town in 2002.

With investors shunning new stocks amid a third year of painful market losses, only six companies headquartered in Silicon Valley went public in 2002, raising $1.19 billion. That's a fraction of the $8.5 billion raised by 78 local companies in 2000, when the IPO frenzy peaked.

ARC could be a victim. However, ARC is apparently selling USB 2.0 IP!

Synopsys is apparently also selling USB 2.0 IP!

IBM is just one of many companies whose pension funds grew with the stock market's climb in the 1990s but that are now facing severe shortfalls because of subsequent declines. One government pension fund agency official said earlier this month that U.S. pension fund plans are underfunded by $300 billion.

Ford Motor Corp. (NYSE:F - News), for instance, said in early December that it expects its pension fund to be underfunded by about $6.2 billion at the end of 2002.

At least nine times out of ten, the prediction du jour is growth, growth, rapid growth of some new-fangled technology, bullish predictions built on five year timelines....

Key scepticism rules

Five year growth projections are bunk – If it didn't work for the Commies in the '50s and '60s, why should it work for capitalists today? ...

Challenge the herd. Too many pundits and analysts end up following a single lead. Why? Because everyone else is at the same place. It's nice and warm to be in a crowd of like-thinkers. The dot.com boom to bust has numerous examples of one allegedly credible voice staking out a position, followed by a stampede of others. Don't be intimidated by an alphabet soup of letters. Some of the most wrong statements I've heard emerged out of the mouth of a Harvard MBAs

"Workers have less leverage at a point where the unemployment numbers are growing and the economy is weak," but health care cost disputes may still lead to strikes, said Harley Shaiken, a professor specializing in labor issues at the University of California at Berkeley. "From the point of view of many unions, what they see is an unraveling of what it has taken many decades to put together, which is the employer paying most of the costs of benefits."

Companies across the board are facing double-digit inflation in health care costs. The cost of health insurance rose 12.7 percent between the spring of 2001 and the spring of 2002, a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust found. That was the highest rate of growth since 1990, according to the survey, which predicted that the increases would continue.

In his 2002 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary, Rehnquist said no new bankruptcy judgeships had been created since 1992 although the number of cases filed has increased by more than 570,000 since then.

He said each bankruptcy judge now handles an average of 4,777 cases, compared to an average of 2,998 in 1992.

Federal courts experienced record levels of activity in 2001, and U.S. bankruptcy courts were significantly affected.

Rehnquist said the number of filings in bankruptcy courts grew 8 percent in the year to an all-time high of 1,547,669 cases filed. He said bankruptcy filings have risen 72.5 percent since 1993.

Tuesday December 31, 2002 15:18

For the year, the blue-chip Dow fell 16.7 percent, while the Nasdaq plunged 31 percent - the biggest loser out of all the major averages. The S&P 500 sank 23.3 percent, while the broader Wilshire 5000 tumbled around 22 percent. The Russell 2000 of small-cap stocks lost 21 percent.

Donald Selkin, director of equity research at Joseph Stevens, called 2002 an unmitigated disaster. "By all statistical accounts, it was a historically awful year," he said, noting that this was worst decline for the S&P since 1974 and the Dow since 1977.

The Morris Township, New Jersey-headquartered company has contributed $800 million in cash and stock to its pension plans in 2002 to improve the funded status of those plans, said Honeywell in a statement. Honeywell said in a November filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that its employee pension plans would end 2002 with a $1.7 billion deficit without new funds.

Many pension plans that have defined benefits to be paid to retirees have developed deficits in recent years as the value of equities fell since 2000. Federal law requires companies to protect the solvency of pension plans, which prompted many companies to increase funding to cover future retiree benefits.

We're going to try to reduce the size of this page and at the end of 2002 and try to kill, one way or the other, improper digitization.

We're thinking how to do this the most succinct way!

Various people had their various methods for destroying vampires as well. In some Slavic nations a spike made of ash wood, if driven through the chest, was believed to kill a vampire -- this is everyone's favorite method, a stake through the heart. In different lands, however, the wood used sometimes needed to be from a certain tree. For example, oak wood did the job in Silesia, while hawthorn wood was required in Serbia.

The federal agency responsible for failed pension plans is discontinuing a supplemental monthly benefit for many retirees of GST Steel Co., which closed last year.

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., which took over GST's pension plans in August, informed several hundred GST retirees that the agency does not guarantee supplemental benefits payments and thus will be discontinuing them as of January. Normal monthly payments will not be reduced, according to a letter the agency sent to one GST retiree.

An official with the United Steelworkers of America said he was still trying to get some clarification and additional information from the agency on what benefits are being terminated. "Our retirees received letters saying their pension supplements will be stopped in part or in whole for some people," said John Wiseman, international staff representative for the Steelworkers union. "It's my understanding that some of our people are over the guaranteed maximum (from the agency) because they retired at an earlier age."

After the unbridled gusto of the dot-com era, the ensuing downturn has been a throbbing headache. Workers in high-tech went from hoping to be millionaires to running out of unemployment benefits.

Monday December 30, 2002 20:30

U.S. public companies shattered bankruptcy records for a second straight year in 2002 as accounting fraud and the previous decade's spending spree felled a number of corporate heavyweights -- and experts are bracing for more filings in the coming years.

A total of 186 public companies with a staggering $368 billion in assets filed for bankruptcy in 2002, according to tracking service BankruptcyData.com. That is the largest asset total ever, sweeping past last year's record $259 billion.

The wreckage included five of the 10 largest bankruptcies ever, led by phone company WorldCom Inc., with $104 billion in assets. Filings by Conseco Inc., Global Crossing Ltd., Adelphia Communications Corp. and UAL Corp. also were among the top 10. Accounting scandals figured in the failure of all of those but UAL, which was hurt by the Sept. 11 attacks.

Bankruptcy experts are bracing for a new crop of failures by companies that depended on companies that went bust.

Just The Beginning
-- December 30, 2002

We have been issuing warnings about the looming bankruptcy crisis for months now. Years of exaggerated earnings and ever-increasing piles of debt are beginning to take their toll -- crushing companies and forcing them into bankruptcy. But it's just the beginning. We expect several large companies and hundreds of smaller ones to declare bankruptcy in the coming months.

And it's not just the failed companies and their shareholders who take the hit when bankruptcy is declared. The ripple effects are vast and devastating, reaching the companies' creditors and suppliers.

As this bankruptcy avalanche continues into 2003, it will continue to strike the earnings of good and bad companies alike. Bottom line: Nothing can kill earnings more than the aftershocks of large and multiple bankruptcies.

Secondly, I'm afraid that deflation is going to be the big story coming up. Deflation in the face of the massive amounts of debt that has been built into this country can be an horrendous problem. Remember, high levels of debt are difficult enough to deal with during slightly inflationary times. But in deflationary times, high levels of debt = bankruptcies.

All told, 186 public companies with a staggering $368 billion in debt filed for bankruptcy in 2002, according to tracking service BankruptcyData.com. That is the largest asset total ever, sweeping past last year's record $259 billion.

The wreckage included five of the 10 largest bankruptcies ever, led by phone company WorldCom Inc., with $104 billion in assets. Filings by Conseco Inc., Global Crossing Ltd., Adelphia Communications Corp. and UAL Corp. also were among the top 10. Accounting scandals figured in the failure of all of those but UAL.

Bankruptcy experts are bracing for a new crop of failures by companies that depended on companies that went bust.

"I don't think we're going to see any dip in bankruptcy filings," said Alan Feld, a bankruptcy attorney with Manatt, Phelps & Phillips in Los Angeles. "I think it's going to get worse before it gets better."

Deflation?

Austin American Statesman Friday December 27, 2002

DEFLATION VIGILANTES
By James Grant

Bulls believe, as we do not, that the page has been turned on the Age of Inflation. They interpret the persistence of deflationary symptoms - 99-cent Whoppers, free cell phones and $500 PCs - as evidence of a new phase of our price history. According to the historian David Hackett Fischer, grand cycles of inflation and deflation carry everything before them. They are more powerful even than central banks.

Stocks are still preposterously high...with the S&P trading at near 30 times earnings. The late, great bull market was the biggest ever...shouldn't the following bear market be equally impressive?

Profit margins are the thinnest since the Great Depression. And debts are the fattest they've been in many decades...perhaps ever. In the manufacturing sector, interest expense has risen from just 23% of profits in 1997 to almost 100% today. ....

"2002 was an amazing year and 2003 promises to be even more exciting!" Geech!

It is quite provocative to compare the NASDAQ bust to the Dow 30 bust that commenced in 1929 and the Japanese Nikkei 225 bubble that topped in late 1989. While the NASDAQ has already far exceeded the immediate carnage of the relatively milder Nikkei bust, it continues to track the horrific stock market massacre of the early 1930s in the United States remarkably well.

At this stage of the game in the 145th week of its devastating Great Bear bust the NASDAQ is down about 73% since its bubble top, sickening by any standard. At the same week 145 the Nikkei was ‘only’ down 56% but the infamous Dow 30 of 1929 had plunged by a catastrophic 88%. The raw magnitude of these enormous losses almost defies belief. If investors haven’t done their homework and happen to get trapped in one of these supercycle busts, their capital doesn’t recover for decades after, if ever. ...

But, if you are one of the tens of millions who has already painfully rode the kamikaze NASDAQ down 73% in the past 145 weeks since its March 2000 top, you have an unenviable Herculean task ahead of you. To recover your capital, just to get back to square one, from a 73% loss requires a monumental 270% gain. 270% gains don’t just grow on trees and are extremely challenging to track down and bag. ....

A supercycle Great Bear bust has a single mission in life. It exists solely to destroy the manic euphoria rampant in general stock valuations during a bubble and maul stocks back down towards undervalued levels so the whole great cycle can begin anew like a phoenix from the ashes. While equity valuations on average run about 14x earnings over decades and centuries, they are bid up ridiculously high in a bubble when everyone lusts for stocks and they plunge to silly lows at a supercycle bear bottom when virtually everyone hates stocks with a passion.

Venture capitalists who were optimistic last year about an improving landscape in 2002 have long since recanted and are singing a much darker tune as they look ahead to the coming year. Paul Ferri of Matrix Partners sums up the current mood with his characteristic frankness: ''This is not going to be a great period for anybody in our business.'' ...

Look for some high-profile tech infrastructure crashes in 2003, Beach says.

According to its annual report released in March 2002, Verizon Communications Inc., the largest U.S. local phone company, had a strong year in 2001. In the opening pages of the report, the company announced an annual profit of $389 million.

Only those investors who dug into the small print at the back of the document learned that Verizon's reported earnings included $2.7 billion in gains from its pension fund investments -- profit that didn't really exist.

The company pension fund actually lost $3.1 billion in 2001, a footnote on page 58 of the 68-page report revealed.

In reporting gains it hadn't made, Verizon didn't violate any rules. Like other U.S. companies, Verizon was following accounting practices as written in 1985 by the Financial Accounting Standards Board, which sets U.S. accounting standards.

The FASB rules say that in preparing income statements, companies should include estimated gains -- not actual gains or losses -- from pension fund investments. ....

As the stock market plunged during the past three years, the pension funds of companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index lost more than $200 billion in value, according to studies by actuaries and several investment banks, including Credit Suisse First Boston and UBS Warburg LLC.

Losses Weren't Reported

Because of FASB accounting rules, many of those losses weren't reported on balance sheets.

If pension liabilities had been counted in financial statements, aggregate earnings for the S&P 500 would have been 69 percent lower than the companies reported for 2001, or $68.7 billion rather than $219 billion, the CSFB study found.

"We expect a big, quick shift to cash-balance pension plans when that happens. There's enormous pent-up demand among employers who have been holding back because of a lack of clarity."

While pension advocacy groups continue to study the new regulations, many say they've already concluded that the proposals fall short of offering adequate protection to older workers.

Sunday December 29, 2002 20:21

Waco, Texas -- President Bush and the opposition Democrats each vowed Saturday to renew unemployment benefits as nearly 800,000 jobless Americans were cut off from federal assistance.

The cutoff Saturday came because Congress failed last month to reconcile differences between a Democratic plan for a $5 billion extension of benefits and a Republican plan for a $900 million extension. Bush declined to take a position on an extension of benefits until two weeks ago, when it was announced that November's unemployment rate had reached 6 percent, the highest in more than eight years

"Even in such a time of madness as the late twenties, a great many man in Wall Street remained quite sane But they also remained very quiet. The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil. Perhaps this is inherent. In a community where the primary concern is making money, one of the necessary rules is to live and let live. To speak out against madness may be to ruin those who have succumbed to it. So the wise in Wall Street are nearly always silent. The foolish thus have the field to themselves. None rebukes them." ...

As noted, all this might logically be expected. It may not come to pass. This is not because the instinct for self-preservation in Wall Street is poorly developed. On the contrary, it is probably normally and may be above. But now, as throughout history, financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated. Long-run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present. So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future. Here, at least equally with communism, lies the threat to capitalism. It is what causes men who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound."

Let's hope men of reason arise to the occasion.

Here are some ideas to guide you through 2003.

1) Be pragmatic like you've never been pragmatic before -- This is no time to hope things will take care of themselves. Determine that you will actively work on your career.

Do what you need to stay employable. Fight hard to make your work maximally relevant to your company and customers. Attack problems and avoid complaining.

Be prudent with your expenditures, and teach your children the same habits. Contribute, don't complain.

I just got my hands on this year's version. Here's a choice piece: "[Associate Editor Marcia] Vickers predicts that the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index will end 2003 with a percentage increase in the mid to high single digits."

She's an editor at a renowned business publication, so she must have some insight, right? Well, on a lark, I went back a few years to see what BusinessWeek said in past issues.

December 1999:
"... the 51 analysts we polled this year expect limited gains in 2000. The average prediction: an 8.3% gain, to 12,154, for the Dow; a 10% rise, to 1559, for the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index; a 5.1% increase, to 3805, for the Nasdaq;"

My review: The Dow closed 2000 at 10,788; the S&P 500 at 1320; the Nasdaq at 2470 -- losses of 6%, 10%, and 40%, respectively.

December 2000:
"According to BusinessWeek's survey of 40 investment strategists, 2001 will be a year of controlled growth. The average prediction: a 12% rise, to 12,015, for the Dow Jones industrial average; a 14% rise, to 1,558, for the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, and a 23% jump for the Nasdaq Composite Index."

My Review: The Dow closed 2001 at 10,021; the S&P 500 at 1148; the Nasdaq at 1950 -- losses of 7%, 13%, and 21%, respectively.

December 2001:
"Indeed, the seers' predictions for 2002 are downright moderate. They are, on average, looking for a 13% rise, to 11,090, for the Dow Jones industrial average; a 15% increase, to 1292, for the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index; and a 14.5% jump, to 2236, for the Nasdaq Composite Index."

My review: As of the close on Dec. 26, 2002, the Dow closed at 8432; the S&P 500 at 889; the Nasdaq at 1367 -- losses of 15%, 22%, and 30%, respectively.

There's no reason to take the assumptions of BusinessWeek's experts as anything but wild guesses, and not particularly good ones. I won't fault BW for being optimistic -- to a point. The long-term trend of the stock market is up, and at some point, the market will get better. It's the fact that they still have the temerity to think they can predict when this will happen that I find galling.

A lot of companies were able to generate better earnings by cutting prices to attract customers while offsetting the negative drag from lower sales prices by firing workers. How long can they pull it off? The answer is probably not much longer before their strategies come back to bite them on their bottom lines.

In a recent note to clients, Paul McCulley, managing director at the bond mutual fund company Pimco and one of the nation's most savvy Fed watchers, wrote that the central bank's new focus on deflation amounts to nothing less than a regime change.

Sunday December 22, 2002 07:09

Economists at leading investment banks believe growth in the euro area slowed to a standstill during the final three months of 2002, and will contract early next year, the Business newspaper reported. ...

"The euro area is experiencing a mini-recession this cold winter, with no growth at all in the last quarter of 2002 and a dip in to negative territory in the first quarter of 2003," Morgan Stanley economist Eric Chaney told the Business.

"We cannot even exclude an outright recession, two or three consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth."

Saturday December 21, 2002 20:39

Alan Greenspan's speeches are economic poetry. Each word is carefully chosen.

So it was exceedingly interesting that the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board used the first section of his speech to the Economic Club of New York Thursday night to declare "the United States is nowhere close to sliding into a pernicious deflation."

That he even mentioned deflation is telling. The possibility of a generalized price decrease is beginning to concern many economists, so the Fed chairman had to talk about the subject.

His pooh-poohing of deflation was the equivalent of a president saying he is 1,000% behind a politically compromised appointee. In both cases, the need to make such a statement betrays a certain uncertainty in the speaker.

But parse the words of poet Greenspan. What he said is that deflation may show up, but if it does it will not be "pernicious," that is, it will not be fatal or deadly.

Later, Greenspan reassured his audience, "If deflation were to develop, options for an aggressive monetary policy response are available." In other words, don't worry, if deflation comes, we can handle it.

Pierre Belec strikes again!

But so do we at pro se fights.

Don't hold your breath waiting for the stock market to hand you a pot of gold next year. Deflation -- an earnings-eating monster that robs companies of the chance to raise prices -- may hold a gun to corporate America's head. ...

In today's intensely competitive environment, chief executives have lost their pricing power. The pricing issue has meant earnings problems for a slew of companies. And, if profits can't grow, how can the stock market recover? ...

Companies have found that work force cuts have always been the quickest way to rebuild their balance sheets. The harsh truth is businesses can only fire the same workers once. They will need to be more creative in the second go-round. ..

"There is historical precedent that the economy exhibits a lack of pricing flexibility following those once-in-a-generational changes in the economy," Engelke said, referring to the boom of the late 1990s that was followed by the bursting of the speculative bubble in 2000. ...

The economy is still not out of the woods yet, and at this stage of the game business spending will decide the direction of the economy. The problem is businesses have become much more dependent on the stock market to finance their growth. ...

So the prospect for 2003 doesn't appear to be good. Investors who have been anticipating a return of the good times, may be in for a rude awakening if their rosy outlook does not materialize. We're talking stock portfolio survival after three straight years of awesome losses.

So here we are, 160,000 unhappy Direct TV DSL customers left hanging. Other than being told we have thirty days the company has said nothing else or provided any guidance to its soon to be former customers. Considering that Direct TV is going to continue operating, at least that is what they have told us. You would think that they would have planed a less painful transition as not to sour relations with current and potential satellite TV customers. I know that if I had satellite TV with them I would have canceled it because of the shoddy way they are handling this.

I understand that companies can't keep operating money-losing operations, but I think they should have the decency of letting customers know they are going to discontinue them so they have time to find adequate replacements instead of just shutting the doors out of the blue like Direct TV has done.

High-tech manufacturing jobs have been leaving the United States for years in search of lower-cost labor abroad. Computer companies can no longer compete on price without relying on inexpensive labor offered by countries like China.

As Silicon Valley endures a protracted economic slowdown and waits for the ``next big thing'' to propel it forward, intellectual work may now be following manufacturing jobs in search of low-wage workers. ...

Whether it is software development, chip design or technical support, the lure of countries like India, Russia and China is the availability of large numbers of well-educated knowledge workers at extremely low cost. Good engineers can usually be hired in these countries for about $1,000 a month. These wages are just a fraction of what similar engineers would earn in Silicon Valley. The potential for cost savings is enormous, and we may well be in the early stages of a substantial movement of high-tech jobs out of the valley.

It's likely that Silicon Valley will continue to be an expensive place over the next several years, prompting businesses to continue to move jobs and expand overseas. Will young engineers, visionaries and entrepreneurs come here, as the last generation routinely did in the '80s and '90s? Or will they find that they can adopt the valley's essential values and culture without being physically present here? Will technology and an open global economy allow future entrepreneurs to create virtual global companies that have no particular stake in Silicon Valley?

In other words, will Silicon Valley continue to be relevant as a place?

Bill got a letter from Social Security today.

1 Your Social Security benefits will increase by 1.3% in 2003.

Debt and pension funds may do bad things to corporate profits in 2003. On the other hand, some senior citizens might be in big trouble!

Lawyers may target their pension funds. But we're working on the lawyer industry problem!

Mr Greenspan, speaking to the Economic Club of New York, said growth could accelerate next year with little risk of inflation, provided global tensions ease and corporate profits improve. However, he said the US economy was still working through a soft patch.

consumer debt at record levels, and savings rates low, consumers are no longer well positioned to drive the economy—and no replacement is on the horizon.

All in all, we believe that the rally off the October low has gone about as far as it can go and is showing clear signs of petering out. In our view the next significant move will be down.

Computers, fortunately, are leading in deflation. We buy computers with our pension checks!

Chairman Greenspan went on to say "Moreover, a major objective of the recent heightened level of scrutiny is to ensure that any latent deflationary pressures are appropriately addressed well before they become a problem." This statement confirms the statements of Governor Bernanke that the Federal Reserve intends to use the tools at hand that have historically (1930 - 1934) been used to stimulate economic activity when decreasing interest rates fail to push business activity forward as is possible, if not probable, now.

Now the Chairman says, " Although the US economy has largely escaped any deflation since World War II, there are some well-founded reasons to presume that deflation is more of a threat to economic growth than is inflation." This confirms to me that the Federal Reserve and the Bush administration will move to whatever is required to whatever degree is required in order to stave off the political implications of deflation. I have said before that deflation would not be entertained. The Federal Reserve and the Bush administration will burn the barn down before accepting the political implications of deflation. I have defined the barn as the dollar. I am now more than ever convinced that I was and am correct in this assumption. The US dollar on the USDX is headed, IMO, to between .73 and .80 as I see it.

The raging bull market and booming economy of the late 1990s removed the word "risk" from lenders' vocabularies. Since they had already saturated creditworthy borrowers with loans, they ascended to what they thought would be lending heaven. Instead, they descended to subprime hell. ...

Credit cards are the most obvious weak point. Hell-bent on growth, issuers pumped up solicitations from 1 billion in 1991 to 5 billion last year. With 37% of credit card loans now subprime, defaults have doubled since 1991.

Greenspan last night did make the comment, “Cash borrowed in the process of mortgage refinancing…is bound to contract at some point.” Well, we will add that the degree of extreme Credit excess we are experiencing currently in mortgage finance is indeed bound to contract one day. Wild inflationary (speculative) Bubbles invariable do collapse. And as Greenspan stated correctly, “History indicates that bubbles tend to deflate not gradually and linearly but suddenly, unpredictably, and often violently.” One of these days there will be a dramatic shift in the financial and economic landscape. In this regard, think in terms of what Governor Davis faces now that inflated state receipts have collapsed along with the tech Bubble. That the economy and financial system are today struggling in the face of unprecedented mortgage Bubble excess and extreme Credit market speculation does not bode well for the day when the Next Shoe Drops.

Friday December 20, 2002 07:14

What we were's going to see soon is a single chip [an 80C32!!!] on a board surrounded by some capacitors with a USB connector and a second connector going to custom hardware.

Most of the work will be done in software. But in PC not in the 80C32.

The peripheral microcontroller companies have not solved their software problem. And didn't anticipate the damage that USB 2.0 will do to them.

USB 2.0, super fast USB 2.0 80C32s, other mixed signal 80C32s, Visual Basic and C++ 6.0, and Microsoft office is simply going to drive most peripheral microcontroller companies out of business - likely in 2003.

Internet is helping to bring to investors attention the high tech peripheral microcontroller scam.

So it is probable that investors will not invest in harebrained peripheral microcontroller companies thus speeding their demise.

Prior to Internet, trade magazine controlled technical opinion and advice. And could promote bad advice and technology for business reasons. Advertising.

No longer!

“…Speculative manias typically commence with a displacement which excites speculative interest. The displacement may come either from an entirely new object of investment or from an increased profitability of established investments. It is followed by positive feedback as rising share prices induce inexperienced investors to enter the stock market, and results in euphoria—a sign that investors’ rationality is weakened. During the course of the manias, speculation becomes more diffuse and spreads to different classes of assets. New companies are floated to take advantage of the euphoria, investors leverage their gains using either financial derivatives or stock loans, credit becomes overextended, scandal and fraud proliferate, and the economy enters a period of financial distress which is the prelude to the onset of a crisis…although no two speculative manias are identical they develop along similar lines…It is often said that speculation never changes because human nature remains the same…the early stock markets were moved by hopes and fears as much as their later counterparts. These emotions are released during moments of speculative euphoria. They follow the path of least resistance, molding each mania, regardless of its historical context into common form. This explains why all great speculative events seem top repeat themselves…”

• Digitize at the sensor
• Gigahertz PCs
• Microsoft's Visual Basic 6.0 integrated into Microsoft Office, Visual C/C++ with exquisite in-line assembler
• USB 2.0
• Super fast 80C32 USB 2.0 SOCs running BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth operating systems, of course!
• Internet software distribution and maintenance.
• Interactive hardware and software problem diagnosis over Internet with Netmeeting ... using BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth operating systems, of course! on the peripheral end.

to avoid being shaken out.

“Many who, for a brief season, had emerged from the humbler walks of life, were cast back to their original obscurity. Substantial merchants were reduced almost to beggary, and many a representative of a noble line saw the fortunes of his house ruined beyond redemption.” - Charles Mackay

And get some neat products ready for 2004.

"We don't see the economic environment for material earnings growth having developed yet," said the portfolio manager and chief investment officer of the Signature Funds at Toronto-based C.I. Fund Management Inc. "As we get closer to 2003, we have had further negative . . . GDP growth revisions and further layoffs and this generally supports our view that we are not going to see the earnings recovery that is widely anticipated."

He expects that the global economy will remain in a relatively slow economic growth, low interest rate environment for probably another 18 months or so, as companies focus on free cash flow generation, debt reduction and balance sheet repair, rather than expansion.

With an estimated $10-billion in net outflows through November, stock funds are poised to suffer the first negative flow year since 1988, when skittish investors cashed out following the October '87 crash, fund tracker Lipper said Thursday.

Lipper estimates investors pumped $10 billion into stock funds in November, snapping a five-month streak of outflows. And it's not likely December will reverse the decline.

"December is typically slow seasonally for fund buying, and stocks have declined a bit since Dec. 2," Lipper senior analyst Donald Cassidy said. "It seems unlikely the net inflow this month can make up ... the year-to-date shortfall."

Should flows be negative or modestly positive this month, outflows will certainly eclipse the $6 billion exodus in 1988, Cassidy said.

The key factor to remember in assessing the economic and stock market outlook is that this is not a typical post-war bear market, but the unwinding of the mania that occurred in the late 1990s. The bursting bubble has left the economy with a number of structural imbalances that can be corrected only with further severe damage to the market, which remains excessively overvalued. The repeated occurrence of manias and their consequences is well recognized in economic history, and a number of economists have studied them in great depth. In his book, “Manias, Panics and Crashes”, Charles P. Kindleberger, discusses the Fisher-Minsky model, which “attached great importance to the role of debt structures in causing financial difficulties, and especially debt contracted to leverage the acquisition of speculative assets subject to resale”. Edward Chancellor, in his book, “The Devil Take the Hindmost”, summarizes the Minsky model as follows.

With war looming perhaps just a few weeks away ... soaring oil prices (over $30 a barrel and headed higher) ... and the soaring mountain of personal debt -- at a record $1.8 TRILLION now -- you can easily see the U.S. economy is in a heap of trouble.

"The Great Crash: 1929" by John Kenneth Galbraith is simply fantastic.

In a speech to the Economic Club of New York, Mr. Greenspan repeated past assertions that the United States was "nowhere near" falling into deflation. But he dwelt on the subject at considerable length in a somber speech that made it clear he is worried about the possibility. ...

"Although the U.S. economy has largely escaped any deflation since World War II, there are some well-founded reasons to presume that deflation is more of a threat to economic growth than inflation," he continued.

A record 257 public companies last year filed for bankruptcy protection under the code. Three of the biggest Chapter 11 filings - WorldCom, Enron and, this week, Conseco - have taken place in the last 12 months alone.

Thursday December 19, 2002 11:54

The "semiconductor recovery" has to be one of the most enduring myths on Wall Street. About once a year, the myth emerges from hibernation, mauls a few investors and then returns to its den until the following year.

Back in the early fall, many Wall Street analysts predicted a recovery in the semiconductor sector. But, as usual, no recovery has materialized. Quite the contrary, as Apogee Research recently observed: "Novellus Systems Inc. (NVLS) is hearing increasingly glum news from the semiconductor industry, but you'd hardly know it from watching NVLS shares trade. Last week, the Semiconductor Equipment and Materials trade group (SEMI) said that total equipment sales this year will plummet 32.4% below last year's level of $28 billion.

The group forecasts a 'recovery' in demand during 2003, but the so-called recovery is for industry sales of $21.8 billion, which would still be 22% below the 2001 level. In fact, expectations for $26.4 billion of sales in 2004 and $27.5 billion in 2005 still wouldn't match the 2001 level. Yet NVLS trades at over five times trailing 12-month sales and at 3.3 times its peak fiscal-year 2001 sales. How can that be, we wonder, when the industry is not expected to revisit such levels for at least three more years?

The money did not evaporate. The money was stolen using high tech as the bait.

Rarely has one small company touched so many and left such a wake of ashes.

Two more once-promising Arizona companies have dot.bombed.

DevelopOnline Corp., the first Arizona spin-off from Intel Corp., sold its technology last month to a Massachusetts competitor and closed down. And Opnix, a start-up that raised $8 million, is soliciting offers for its software that speeds Internet traffic.

Both companies were founded in mid-2000 when the fervor for new Internet technologies was high.

India will introduce in two months a super computer capable of 1 trillion calculations a second at about half the price of such machines made by companies in the U.S. and Japan.

The super computer, Param Padma, has been developed at a cost of about 500 million rupees ($10 million), R.K. Arora, executive director, Center for Development of Advanced Computing, said in an interview. It plans to sell the new computer at about $5 million each.

``We are clearly cost-competitive, and we can sell these machines at the half the price of a similar machine available in the market,'' Arora said.

India's engineers are turning their lower salaries into a cost advantage in areas such as computing and aerospace. Indian software companies are winning business from customers such as General Motors Corp. because of their lower costs as code writers are paid less than their counterparts overseas.

And for those who think this is simply an extremely pessimistic and baseless viewpoint, consider this sobering thought offered to me this past week by my friend Dr. John Whitney. Wall Street may be happy enough to see companies it bankrolls move to a low cost environment like China, but from where will a lasting recovery come from when core manufacturing jobs – jobs which actually produce wealth for a nation – no longer exist in America? Wall Street has loved the strong dollar because it was a major factor in pumping up the bubble. But now we face the destructive aftermath. With aggregate demand plummeting, it is my contention that the forces of deflation will overwhelm the forces of inflation. Thus I remain a deflationist.

Conseco's bankruptcy filing on Tuesday reinforces what we've been telling you for quite some time now: The Bankruptcy Avalanche is underway. Enron, Kmart, Global Crossing, Adelphia, WorldCom, US Airways, United Airlines, and hundreds of other public companies have filed for bankruptcy in the past two years, according to BankruptcyData.com. In fact, 11 of the 20 largest bankruptcies of U.S. companies occurred during the last two years -- that's $395.9 BILLION in assets affected, based on court documents and corporate filings.

But the Bankruptcy Avalanche isn't over yet. We expect several more major companies -- and hundreds more small companies that you may not have even heard of -- to declare bankruptcy in 2003. We are currently monitoring these companies closely because it's only a matter of time before many of them go belly up. When they do, their shareholders will be the big losers. Plus, it will only add to investor concerns about the health of the economy and the safety of their own holdings. And when investors are uncertain, they invariably sell everything they can. The stock market sell-off we've been telling you about is already underway. Still, there's much further to go before we hit bottom.

Wednesday December 18, 2002 21:19

The stock market is headed for a serious wreck and only those with the knowledge to see the light for what it is will get off the track before it’s too late. Let’s look at several issues we are facing. Wall Streeters (including brokers, money managers, analysts and commentators), will never mention these facts to you the investor. Many don’t know themselves, because the spin-doctors feed them what they want them to know and then, most won’t read additional information to educate the customer.

First, S&P announced on October 24, 2002 their study of earnings for the S&P 500 for the year ending June 2002. S&P calculated the reported earnings, instead of the operating earnings we are given. Instead of the operating earnings of $44.93 per share that Thompson First Call reported, the reported earnings were $26.74 a share. That is until the new accounting standards, which include the expense of options and pension liabilities. These new standards will be enacted next year by the accounting industry. Subtracting the option and pension liability expenses reduces the reported earnings to $18.48 a share. This is a Price to Earnings (P/E) ratio of 48.6 based on a close of 897.65 on the S&P 500. This is real important. I repeat this is real important. The 50-year average P/E ratio is 15.9. No bull market has ever started from such high valuation levels. Also, the market is trending back towards the mean. Imagine the drop in the market valuation that will occur to get to 15.9. That is a 67% drop in the market from where we are now. Imagine that train wreck! ...

Let’s look at pension liabilities. There are over 350 companies in the S&P 500 with defined benefit pension plans. (If you don’t have a 401K, but have a pension plan, it is a defined benefit plan.) These companies have guaranteed their retired employees a defined income during their retirement years (hopefully).

Goldman, Sachs & Co. estimates that contributions are grossly under funded. They estimate that companies need to add $80 billion to these funds this year. Credit Suisse First Boston estimates the under funding to be $243 billion this year. Morgan Stanley estimates it at $300 billion. Whichever, estimate you use, the numbers are staggering. Federal regulations require corporate pension plans to be at least 90% funded. If a plan meets this requirement, the additional payments can be spread over a 30-year period. But if the funding drops below 90% of what the actuaries say is needed, companies may be required to make the additional payments within three to five years. These additional payments will be expenses against income in that year. How will earnings grow enough to absorb this expense and still net a 6%-12% increase? So why hasn’t the Securities and Exchange Commission required

Last year, companies reported a gain of $104 billion from their pension funds, when the funds actually lost $90 billion. Makes you wonder how do they turn a lost into a gain. The secret is a company will hire a pension fund consultant to estimate its earnings in the future years, and if the estimated earnings are more than the estimated pension liabilities in the future, that positive difference is added as earnings. If you want more earnings, you get a higher estimate. Do you see the train coming?

Senior citizens become very concerned with the economy. Pension checks might stop coming. Or inflation might set in.

There are definitely reasons to worry!

The scent of deflation continues to waft through the economy along with still-meek signs of recovery. ...

The nation's manufacturing is using just 75.6 percent of its capacity, about 6 percentage points below its average for the past three decades, said economist Andy Kish of Economy.com. ...

While the economy overall seems nowhere near deflation --- a broad decrease in prices --- the measure of core goods prices has slid for 11 consecutive months. And results have been mixed, according to Mark Vitner, senior economist for Wachovia Securities. ...

"For many goods producers, the current economic environment is already devastating profit margins," he said. "Businesses have not been able to pass on their higher costs to consumers for nearly three years now."

And because the service side of the economy is not deflating, businesses must also find ways to swallow --- or avoid --- added costs of health care and insurance, Vitner said.

See what happens with good products which cost a reasonable amount.

Honda Motor, Japan's second-largest vehicle manufacturer, has said it expects record sales in 2003, up 10% to 3.1 million from this year.

On Tuesday rival Toyota Motor also predicted it would have a record year in 2003, with a 5% rise to 6.5 million vehicles.

Then there are the other cases.

Looking for a robust global economic recovery? You may need to look past 2003 - and think 2004.

After a year in which U.S. corporate scandals, talk of a war in Iraq and a global plunge in stock prices torpedoed hopes for a strong rebound from recession, pundits are pessimistic about the coming year.

The global economy will speed up only slightly from the current becalmed levels. Growth rates may not return to the average levels of the last half-century until at least 2004.

"Economists are always predicting a recovery. We are condemned to expect a recovery," said Eric Chaney, an economist at Morgan Stanley in London. "But the coming year could still be difficult."

A recovery of any sort, of course, would be better than the alternative: a renewed slump into recession that would heighten fears of deflation. That condition - a sustained drop in prices that depresses business and consumer activity alike - is something Japan has lived with for more than a decade. Economists speak about the possibility of it spreading in guarded tones, for fear of turning it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Though global deflation still seems to be an unlikely, worst-case scenario, economic growth remains persistently sluggish in all of the world's biggest economies.

The Dollar's bear market is probably going to extend for many years, but as is always the case during any long-term trend there will, from time to time, be substantial counter-trend moves. In other words, if we are right that the US$ has embarked on a long-term bear market there will still be periods, possibly quite lengthy periods (6-12 months or longer), during which the Dollar will trend higher and those investments that benefit from a weaker Dollar will trend lower.

Here's what O'Neill wrote on the Treasury Department Web site: "Accrual based financial reporting is critical to gaining a comprehensive understanding of the U.S. Government's operations. For fiscal 2001, our results were an accrual-based deficit of $515 billion in contrast to a $127 billion surplus reported last Fall."

Let me put it more simply. If the government kept its books the same way companies are supposed to account for profits and losses, the U.S. would be in the hole last year for more than half a trillion dollars.

I'll say it again. That's a one-year deficit of more than half a trillion dollars.

Tuesday December 17, 2002 19:44

Guys, we have to keep system software costs low. And have some fun too using the ideas of others!

NIH is a disaster!

Conseco Inc. may file for bankruptcy protection as early as tonight to stem mounting losses and restructure more than $6 billion of debt incurred while the insurance and finance holding company acquired smaller rivals, people familiar with the matter said.

Tokyo's Nikkei hits one-month low on Micron's loss

Brokerage houses including Nikko Cordial Corp (Tokyo:8603.T - News) were also hit by selling as the benchmark Nikkei average (^N225 - News), down 1.63 percent or 139.01 points at a one-month low of 8,371.72, was poised to finish lower after having just snapped a nine-day skid.

Micron knocked U.S. tech stocks back in after-hours trade. Traders are betting the Nasdaq will take a tumble later today," said Ken Masuda, senior dealer at Shinko Securities.

Guys, others are saying this too.

With the advent of the World-Wide Web, software can be distributed at a minuscule fraction of the cost of packaged software in the 1980's,

But as important for USB 2.0 80C32 SOCs running BASIC-52 and Forth, hardware and software maintenance is possible over Internet using Netmeeting!

'Wage Collapse', reads a headline in Newsday.com. The articles details the stories of three people in the New York area, who've joined the growing ranks educated workers, formerly employed in well-heeled positions, "filling salt shakers, selling sweaters or cell phones, making telemarketing calls, imputing medical billing information - even passing out fliers on street corners."

"People who have jobs had better be glad they have jobs," says Charlene Ruiz, a former consultant with US Trust Co. now working for $7.25 as a cashier in Manhattan cafe. "If I continue to work at this wage," says Ruiz, "I'll never get out of debt." She owes, says the article, $20,000 to credit card companies...and another $4,000 to the IRS. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that country the number of people working part-time jobs who would ordinarily be in high-paying salary positions has lept up to 18.3% of all part-time workers - or...4.2 million Americans.

"This is just fall out from the boom," says our own Dan Denning, editor of Strategic Investment. It’s the beginning of the ‘long bust,’ where some Americans will see their standards of living fall, their incomes stagnate, and their prospects for anything like retirement dwindle. The labor market is telling us something: America is just beginning to pay for it’s over-consumptive sins. Americans might not like it. And who knows what they might do about it...

Patty's father was born in 1912 and, too, has some wild stories of the Great Depression.

He was in the CCC fighting forest fires in Idaho.

He told bill last March if a depression were to occur today he thinks there would be major riots!

Kay said the danger is that PC prices always drop. ``If people know there is cheaper stuff coming, they might just wait,'' he said.

"...resources have been misallocated because of the cheapness of credit in both stock and credit markets. So, you're not going to solve the problem by making money cheaper again." - Al Friedberg, March 23, 2001

The net loss increased to $315.9 million, or 52 cents a share, in the quarter ended Nov. 28, from $265.9 million, or 44 cents, a year earlier, the company said in a statement. Sales rose 62 percent to $685.1 million from $423.9 million. Last quarter's loss was the company's eighth in a row.

Micron's selling price last quarter fell an average of 12 percent from the fourth period, mainly because of sagging prices for dynamic random-access memory chips, the company said. Competition from rivals such as Samsung Electronics Co. and slowing growth in sales of PCs using DRAM are creating a glut for the chip, an analyst said.

The spot price for a benchmark 256-megabit double data rate memory chip was $8.30 in March, fell to $4.78 in June and is now about $6.45. Micron bases sales on the average price per megabit, or million bits of capacity in a chip.

Tracking the high tech economic meltdown, while reading Axelson and Hyde USB books, is nearly as interesting as litigation!

The ability of companies to make too much has grown into a problem with potentially profound and unpredictable effects on the world economy. The glut of world production is challenging old assumptions about trade relationships and raising questions about whether the United States can continue to be the economic powerhouse it has been for generations while so much of its manufacturing capacity, especially high-tech production, is increasingly shifted overseas.

I know there are millions of others in my leaky boat: Last year alone, the average 401(k) account balance slumped from almost $41,000 to $36,390, according to one research firm. Wilshire Associates, an investment advisory firm based in New York, says stocks have lost about $8 trillion in value since peaking in March 2000 -- an amount equal to the annual economic output of Japan, Germany and Canada combined.

We have to try to keep those 80C32 SOC systems software costs down.

Credit ratings agency Standard & Poor's said on Tuesday that the dollar amount of debt defaulting will vault to a record $157.3 billion this year. But the agency said default rates are declining globally after peeking this summer. Telecoms and European companies have been hit hardest during 2002, but prospects look better for 2003 as default rates are expected to decline gradually throughout next year. "The U.S. and EU switched places this year compared with 2001. During 2001, 6.92 percent of speculatively (or "junk") rated companies defaulted in the EU compared with 9.72 percent in the U.S.," said Brooks Brady, Associate Director for Standard & Poor's Risk Solutions

Robert Half Technology's 2003 Salary Guide (www.roberthalftechnology.com) predicts that information technology salaries will decline 1.3 percent on average in 2003.

Next year's U.S. gross domestic product growth in this so-far jobless recovery will be roughly the same as this year's 2.5%. But deflation tops the list of his concerns -- "If you don't see deflation risks, my advice is to go see an optometrist."

That's not his only worry. The strong housing market that has propped up the U.S. consumer's spending is showing signs of fatigue and the U.S. dollar, which has stayed relatively strong, could come under greater pressure that would be felt in stock and bond markets.

But not now. Schembry, 58, joined hundreds of other Lucent workers this year in taking a buyout at the company, one of many telecommunications companies to face a sudden slowdown after extensive overbuilding in the industry in the 1990s

The future looks daunting. Her husband, 61, is disabled. The $58,000 buyout package won't go far without a job. Her 401(k), once valued at $30,000, has dwindled to $3,000 because of a plunging stock market.

"At my age, where am I going to find a job?" she asked.

Workers age 50 and over are putting early retirement plans on hold because of the losses they've suffered on Wall Street, according to a new poll by AARP, the lobbyist organization for retired persons

Seventy-seven percent of those surveyed said they had lost money in the stock market since 2000. While 54 percent said they had losses of less than 25 percent of the money in their accounts, 9 percent said their investments had fallen by more than 50 percent.

The survey of 1,013 households with individual retirement accounts, 401(k), pension and stock investments also found that 77 percent had lost money in the stock market over the past two years. Thirty-four percent said they would take fewer vacations and 30 percent had postponed a major purchase in the past year. The survey, released today, also found that one-third of those who retired before 2000 had returned to full or part-time jobs to compensate for their stock losses. Among workers 50 to 70 years old who said they lost money in the stock market in the last two years, about one in five said they had postponed retirement because of the losses, according to a survey released today.

Monday December 16, 2002 20:17

We have a good practical problem to solve in 2003.

USB 2.0 80C32 SOCs running BASIC-52 and Forth connected to Visual Basic and C++ 6.0, Microsoft Office apps!

And lots of fun too! A positive contribution to computing.

A landmark trial of a teen-ager in Norway over Hollywood charges of video piracy ended today with prosecutors urging a suspended 90-day jail term.

Jon Johansen, known in Norway as "DVD Jon," is charged with having unlocked a code and distributed a computer program enabling unauthorized copying of DVD movies, angering Hollywood studios who fear mass piracy and loss of vast revenues.

The crypto problem was solved in 1917. But that didn't stop the retards.

The one-time pad is a series of random numers/letters that can be used once to encode a message. It was first described by Mauborne and Vernam in 1917. Each new message requires a new pad, otherwise it will be possible to break the code. Also, each one-time pad must be truly random series of digits/letters (a computer generated random series is only pseudo random and can be decrypted eventually). Given now a one time pad (where, say, the symbols are digits 0-9) and an encoded message (also using symbols 0-9), a simple table that links every message symbol and one-time pad symbol to a cypthertext symbol can be used to encrypt the message (this table is a more sophisticated alternative to the binary XOR operation that is normally used for bit-stream data and one-time pads):

Swiss banks which accept electronic payment orders use a similar mechanism to verify the identity of the issuer of an order. When a client authorises the bank to accept electronic orders, the bank delivers, by registered mail, a list of individual session passwords (usually numbers of 4 to 6 digits). The customer agrees to keep the list of passwords physically secure, and to not hold the bank liable if the customer allows the list to fall into unauthorised hands. Each time an order is given, in addition to the regular user identity and password, the next key from the list must be entered, and then crossed off by the user. The bank verifies the key against a copy of the list stored in their own secure computer, and only if the key matches is the order accepted. Multiple incorrect entries block electronic access to the customer's account until re-enabled by the customer providing suitable verification that an unauthorised access attempt did not, in fact, occur.

Patty in the Hauptbahnhof in Zurich.

Bill gave a talk in Zurich on the dangers of high tech espionage. Like getting caught! 1 2

ATLAST (Autodesk Threaded Language Application System Toolkit) is a (very) FORTH-like language kernel designed to be embedded into applications, rendering them extensible to a degree far beyond normal macro languages. Indeed, using ATLAST, it is often possible, in the spirit of FORTH, to "factor out" much of the control structure from an application, reducing it to a set of data-driven services whose interaction can be modified by the user with ATLAST. ATLAST is written entirely in portable C, and has been tested on MS-DOS, Windows, a variety of Unix machines, and the Macintosh. Complete documentation is included in PostScript, Microsoft Word (PC/Mac RTF format), and LaTeX source code form. ATLAST has been placed in the public domain and may be used without restriction or compensation.

Postcript is a variation of Forth.

Think USB 2.0 80C32 SOCs running BASIC-52 and Forth connected to Visual Basic and C++ 6.0, Microsoft Office apps!

There appears to be shake-out of unparalleled proportions underway in high tech in 2003.

USB 2.0 80C32 SOCs running BASIC-52 and Forth connected to Visual Basic and C++ 6.0, Microsoft Office apps!

As if a lousy business climate wasn't bad enough, semiconductor makers have more to worry about.

"The simple fact is that we won't be needing so many chip vendors in the future," Dataquest analyst Jim Tully said last week. "Many firms that are now fabless chip houses should seriously consider becoming IP [intellectual-property] vendors instead."

As for that next "killer app" for which the industry is holding its breath, Tully says forget about it.

"We are always asking, 'What will be the next killer application?' "he said. "The truth is there will be no more killer apps. There will just be a growing network of hardware resources onto which increasingly compelling software applications can be loaded."

We have to watch the system software bucks.

Atlanta gained possibly more high-tech jobs than any other city in the nation.

Across the South, the economic landscape has turned upside down. Atlanta, where all arrows once pointed up, is hurting most: 61,800 jobs were lost in the 12 months that ended in October — more than in any other city in the country, according to the federal Department of Labor. And the job losses are continuing.

Even North Carolina's powerhouse area, Raleigh-Durham, which is normally all but immune to hard times thanks to a largely tenured work force of university and state government employees, has seen its unemployment rate double this year. In Hickory, N.C., and the surrounding area, entire fiber-optic cable factories have been mothballed in recent weeks, and 3,200 jobs have been cut since spring 2001.

But plummeting corporate profits — one of the hallmarks of the national slowdown — resulted in an average shortfall of 14 percent in corporate income tax collections, the study found.

Still, the most poignant illustrations of the downturn are the roughly 20,000 highly skilled but suddenly unemployed workers who were laid off from telecom and technology companies with headquarters or major operations in Atlanta. The companies include Cingular Wireless, WorldCom and Internet Security Systems, and even national consulting concerns like Accenture.

EEPROMs and Flash may get serious competition this year.

ferroelectric memory was chosen over EEPROM because it can offer high-speed rewriting.

Get rid of the old ideas and adopt the new good ones, of course.

USB 2.0 80C32 SOCs running BASIC-52 and Forth connected to Visual Basic and C++ 6.0, Microsoft Office apps!

After spending some $80 billion since 1996 to upgrade its systems, the U.S. cable television industry is just about finished with an overhaul designed to offer high-speed, digital broadband services to nearly every U.S. customer. The good news is that a range of new offerings — from video-on-demand to telephone service — will now become more widely available. The bad news is that basic cable television rates have been rising much faster than prices for other consumer goods and services — and they’re going up again next year....

Meanwhile, despite the heavy investment, new subscriber growth has stalled — largely due to an onslaught by the direct broadcast satellite industry. Some 76.5 million U.S. households now get basic cable service, compared to some 19.7 million satellite subscribers. But the satellite universe is expected to grow to 21.8 million subscribers next year, according to Kagan World Media, while the cable industry is forecasting little or no growth. Some cable companies, including AT&T Broadband (which was recently bought by Comcast) and Charter Communications, have even seen their subscriber bases shrink.

Is cable going to become an obsolete technology?

At a time when Americans are living longer, more than half the paid workers ages 25 to 64 don't own retirement savings accounts of any kind. About a third work for employers who don't offer retirement benefits, a recent study shows. ...

"Our savings rates here are a disaster, and the study continues to beat home the crisis in savings overall," said Derrick Max, executive director of the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security, which represents business groups and favors overhauling Social Security to add personal retirement accounts. ...

Max said the report bolsters support for Social Security private accounts, which President Bush supports but Democrats oppose. Social Security is projected to start paying out more in benefits than it takes in from payroll taxes by 2016 because the large baby boom generation begins retiring. The workforce size will be smaller, and demand for benefits will grow.

A Web Of Fallacies About Consumption And Investment

"...A central bank should have no concern with the level of stock valuations, but it ought to have an indirect concern when rising stock values disturb the equilibrium between investment and saving. In the U.S. case, the decline of saving after 1997 was so dramatic and so spectacular that it ought to have alerted Mr. Greenspan and American policymakers in general. And net investment is close to historical lows..."

What the U.S. economy truly experienced in the past few years was the wildest and most reckless consumption boom ever in history, associated with collapsing saving and an extremely low level of net investment. But we think that low net investment is only part of the problem. Another part is a grossly unbalanced investment structure. Protracted, gross underinvestment in manufacturing has contrasted with protracted, heavy overinvestment in the new information technology, retail trade and finance. ...

The truth, rather, is that post-bubble adjustment has not even started.

Sunday December 15, 2002 21:23

Imports from Hynix Semiconductor Inc. and other South Korean chipmakers threaten to hurt Micron Technology Inc, the US International Trade Commission said in a ruling that may lead to import tariffs.

Micron, the world's second-largest maker of computer memory chips and the last one based in the US, complained that its Korean rivals were illegally subsidized by the Korean government.

A final ruling isn't due until the middle of next year. "[Saturday's] decision sends a strong message that the US will not tolerate unfair trade practices," said Sean Mahoney, a spokesman for the Boise, Idaho, company.

2The Nikkei <.N225> was down 0.81 percent or 69.27 points at 8,446.80, poised to post a nine-day losing streak for the first time since 1991.

The broader TOPIX index <.TOPX> of all first section issues fell 0.90 percent to 828.27.

Crash of 2003?

In this new role, Mr. Desmond, 44-years old, will oversee the transfer of much of Time Inc.'s magazine Web content to America Online, part of a broader revamp of the online service announced earlier this month. Mr. Desmond previously was president of Business 2.0, a Time Inc. business and technology magazine. An announcement is expected as early as today.

Google may help all of us in this legal fight!

Pro se fights is number 3

Results 1 - 10 of about 4,860. Search took 0.34 seconds.
< Pro Se Fights ... Antonin Scalia Associate Justice United States Supreme Court One First Street, NE ... state lawsuit and that my rights to resprent myself pro se have violated ... www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Congress/8327/ - 101k - Cached - Similar pages

Preserving our rights guaranteed under the constitution for right by trial by jury, especially for two prima facie cases, and to represent ourselves pro se against crooked incompetent lawyers is perhaps one of the most important fights of our lives.

And we are up to this.

But you may have guessed this. 2

Dee Vance Benson may be an honest judge? We'll see.

And maybe even Scalia too?

Dig this

The Political Graveyard main page.

Benson, Dee Vance (b. 1948) Born in Sandy, Salt Lake County, Utah, August 25, 1948. Lawyer; U.S. District Attorney for Utah, 1989-91; Judge of U.S. District Court for Utah, 1991-. Still living as of 2000. See also: federal judicial profile.

What we are doing with gigahertz PCs, super fast 80C32 SOCs, and USB 2.0, Visual Basic and C++ 6.0, Microsoft Office, ... hopefully 80C32 SOCs running BASIC-52 and Forth is much more important than

5 T. G. Lewis , W. H. Payne, Generalized Feedback Shift Register Pseudorandom Number Algorithm, Journal of the ACM (JACM), v.20 n.3, p.456-468, July 1973

And what happened here and its resolution is more imporant than about anything.

Get this settled!

Atmel builds an 80C52. So we looked at the financials. Geech!

We are into a technology shift.

gigahertz PCs, super fast 80C32 SOCs, and USB 2.0.

Most important, software! Visual Basic and C++ 6.0, Microsoft Office, ... and hopefully 80C32 SOCs running BASIC-52 and Forth!

Hey, the peripheral microcontroller vendors know they don't have the software. Smell a hardware vendor scam? The pension funds again!

And, of course, Keil is handingly the software problem, they will say. TI, Cygnal, Cypress, ....

Those who get to market with 80C32 USB 2.0 SOCS, like TI, will do just fine when we come out of this high tech mess - maybe in 2004.

Then there are the others. Old high tech goes goodbye quick. Into the ewaste heap.

Keep in mind when USB connects to a perihperal 80C32 SOC, then RAM is The Way, not eeprom, flash, OTP ROM ....

Cypress saw this! No ROM with their design!

"Today's economy was probably experiencing a once-in-a-century acceleration in innovation, but people may well conclude that a good deal of what we are currently experiencing was just one of the many euphoric speculative bubbles that have dotted human history." - Alan Greenspan, January 2000

As a result of the re-ranking, the companies' stocks to be removed are Abgenix Inc. (NasdaqNM:ABGX - News) , Andrx Group (NasdaqNM:ADRX - News) , Applied Micro Circuits Corp. (NasdaqNM:AMCC - News) , Atmel Corp. (NasdaqNM:ATML - News) , Charter Communications Inc. (NasdaqNM:CHTR - News) , Conexant Corp. (CNXT), Cytyc Corp. (NasdaqNM:CYTC - News) , Integrated Device Technology Inc. (NasdaqNM:IDTI - News) , ImClone Systems Inc. (NasdaqNM:IMCL - News) , i2 Technologies Inc. (ITWO), Protein Design Labs Inc. (NasdaqNM:PDLI - News) , PMC-Sierra Inc. (NasdaqNM:PMCS - News) , Rational Software Corp. (NasdaqNM:RATL - News) , Sepracor Inc. (NasdaqNM:SEPR - News) and Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. (NasdaqNM:VTSS - News) .

Bill has been defamed too. Fortunately in writing! This is libel!

The libel broke both federal and New Mexico state criminal laws in writing!

The decision was another timely reminder that cyberspace gave no special immunity when it came to defamation.

Collecting for a prima facie case of libel is a bit more complicated in practice than in theory.

But we're working on this!

But this involves lawyers who make money, our taxpayer dollars, attempting to protect the crooks.

Pension fund money will, of course, be used to pay lawyers to protect the crooks who stole it!

The real world again.

PMC-Sierra?

It's a sign of bearish times: As the Nasdaq Stock Market did its annual reshuffling of the Nasdaq-100 Index Friday, analysts expected more than a dozen technology issues to be booted in favor of safer consumer and industrial companies. ...

"Literally, in the index, the weight of technology has declined," said Nicholas Gulden, an analyst with Salomon Smith Barney.

The Nasdaq-100 closed Wednesday at 1,039.95, down more than 75 percent from its 2000 high, largely due to the protracted slide in tech. ...

Gulden predicted chipmakers PMC-Sierra Inc. and Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. would be removed from the Nasdaq-100. He also expected troubled biotech ImClone Systems Inc. to be deleted.

2003 may prove to be a very interesting year, unfortunately.

COULD THIS DECADE BE THE NEXT 1930S?
A REVIEW OF WORLD STOCK MARKETS IN THE 1920S

But are looking good!

"The length and severity of depressions depend partly on the magnitude of the 'real' maladjustments, which developed during the preceding boom and partly on the aggravating monetary and credit conditions." - Gottfried Haberler, Prosperity and Depression, 1937 1

The credit bubble and pension fund woes may do bad things in 2003. Along with China and those neat Harbor Freight sales too!

So we must be conservative and not blow our money on expensive antiquated 80C32 development systems! Which aren't fun either!

Bill's father bought stock during the depression. He had some money. The army was paying him. By 1957 he was doing well in retirement. But not before that!

Bill's father in law said the economy really didn't get good until the 1960s.

Bill is scanning Axelson's second edition book. It is outstanding!

Saturday December 14, 2002 18:06

Here's some more economic BS.

Pension Woes Spell Opportunity

Companies will, or should - which is not certain, send checks to their pensioners.

Investing in more speculative ventures should not, but may be, in the future.

Beijing, Dec. 14 (Bloomberg) -- China sold a record $106 billion of government bonds this year to pay for roads, dams and other projects that fueled the fastest growth of any major economy.

Bond sales to domestic investors such as banks, insurers and individuals by the Finance Ministry and the state-owned China Development Bank and Export-Import Bank of China rose 16 percent to 877.4 billion yuan from 758.8 billion yuan last year.

China is boosting spending on railroads, airports and other projects, helping the economy to grow 7.9 percent in the first three quarters of this year from a year earlier. The government needs growth of more than 7 percent to absorb 8 million new urban job-seekers each year. With debt levels a fraction of those in Japan and the U.S., China can afford to borrow, analysts said.

Dig the underline.

Some are going to eat the Big Budungee Bird this year, aka bankruptcy.

Those who have too much debt. And didn't limit their software costs!

And, of couse, we're not going to have to spend too much bucks on 80C32 system software if all works out as planned.

Then there is the fun too. Over Internet!

Who is funding most of the Chinese student education in America?

Their parents.

Their parents will give up about everything to make sure their children do better than they do.

Mr Lam is a bill ms student. And hopefully doing well!

WASHINGTON -- In naming Stephen Friedman to a key post Thursday, President Bush finished a clean sweep of his bumbling economic team. The question now is: Will it matter?

The early signals are unpromising, and that's bad for the administration, the economy and the country.

Conservative activists gloat that they exacted a pound of flesh for Friedman's appointment, as well as for Bush's choice of rail executive John W. Snow to replace Paul H. O'Neill as Treasury secretary.

They say such administration heavies as political advisor Karl Rove were forced to assure them that both men, but especially Friedman, will put aside past worries about budget deficits and fiscal probity in favor of the White House's tax-cutting, "pro-growth, pro-jobs" agenda.

"They told us [Friedman] will be a solid salesman for supply-side policies," said Stephen Moore, who heads the conservative political action committee Club for Growth and spearheaded an anti-Friedman drive.

Bill's father was born in 1888.

He had some very interesting stories of the Great Depression. About bank failures in North Dakota.

He was in the Army during the depression supervising CCC workers.

Patty's father was born in 1912 and, too, has some wild stories of the Great Depression. He was in the CCC fightin g forest fires in Idaho.

He told bill last March if a depression were to occur today he thinks there would be major riots!

We may see about this!

Patty's father, is going to be 90 on December, lives in Florida, of course,

He is buying a laptop!

There are old people, then there are the really old people in Florida. Bill feels like a teeny bopper when he visits Florida!

Then, ensuring that I wouldn’t get invited to any Wall Street Christmas parties in 2001, I wrote a controversial essay published May 11th, 2001 called “Equity Bulls in Denial” with the audacity to brazenly claim that “the bear market in the US is just beginning, NOT ending as most bulls and bullish-bears assert today. This current NASDAQ, DJIA, and S&P action looks and smells like a bear market rally, as there is no fundamental foundation for the spectacular gains since early April.”

U.S. corporations have been struggling against a slumping economy and the bear market for about three years. But NOW, they're about to face an even tougher opponent -- deflation. In November, producer prices plunged 0.4% overall, and 0.3% if you exclude food and energy. Specifically, the wholesale prices of items such as cars, sporting goods, and computers fell sharply. And falling prices destroy pricing pressure -- businesses aren't able to raise the price of goods -- which then annihilates profit margins.

US satellite TV operator Hughes Electronics is to shut down its high-speed internet service. The loss-making internet service, DirecTV Broadband, has 160,000 subscribers and is linked to the DirecTV satellite broadcaster.

Friday December 13, 2002 21:35

China's economy has the highest rate of growth of productivity in tradables of any economy in the world today. At a constant remnimbi-dollar exchange rate, Chinese competitiveness has also improved by leaps and bounds. That means that the swing that we are now witnessing in Asian trade balances toward greater and greater surpluses will largely come at the expense of U.S. trade. For all of the current discussion about deflation, and China's alleged role in exporting it, a longer-term perspective would see such deflationary pressures as a direct consequence of an ill-conceived effort to sustain a dollar exchange rate well above what long-term fundamentals would have otherwise justified. In perversely pursuing this strong dollar policy since the days of Robert Rubin's tenure as Treasury Secretary, the U.S. has unwittingly catalyzed its own economic demise and hastened the rise of Asia's ascendancy, notably China. ...

Above all, China has proved resistant to Western ways. Its relatively closed borders to volatile Western leveraged capital (notwithstanding the pleas of Wall Street) enabled it to emerge from the regional crisis of 1997/98 relatively unscathed. As the recent data suggests, it is now well prepared for growth on its own terms (which is why one should not expect imminent capital account liberalization and a corresponding revaluation of the currency). It will be the economic leader in the global recovery. Asian development strategies will continue to deepen further as China's regional economic dominance expands. China is not the source of the world's current problems; it is not, as is commonly argued, "exporting deflation." Rather, it has been the persistent refusal of the American government to conduct economic policy with an eye toward preventing a loss of U.S. competitiveness, and a corresponding rise in huge external imbalances, that has caused the relative shift in economic fortunes in regard to America and Asia. The source of potential U.S. deflation, and today's quandary for American monetary and financial officials, is very much home-grown.

Bill wrote

Payne. W. H., Graduate Education: The Ph.D. Glut, Communications of the ACM, 16 (March, 1973).

when he was a member of the graduate studies committee at Washington State University.

Bill looked at Douglas L Jones graduate student lists.

Jones is only one of hundreds or thousands of college profs turning out MS and PhD degrees in computing.

There is a reckoning for this overproduction coming!

Graduate educating mainland China may have a downside. But we sure get great deals at Harbor Frieght!

Hyde shows lots of hardware test equipment.

Some of us can't afford all of that expense. And don't need to!

The stock market was in double-digit rally mode for more than a third of the calendar days in question. Any one of those rally days could have been called "the low." Some probably were. The overall period was the Dow Industrials from April 1930 to July 1932, and it devastated investors. The Dow lost 86% of its value, rally days notwithstanding.

These rallies were the moments when the bear was catching his breath.

Required reading!

"The Great Crash: 1929" by John Kenneth Galbraith is simply fantastic.

Csd is taking a fast tour through the Hyde book and accompanying cd.

Hyde documentation is in html with web links.

Csd usually develops software on a machine off line and with lots of disks since we occasionally have some horrible windows crashes.

Dig this warning from a Hyde 8051 software example.

In 80C32 Forth assembler and high level Forth source code is assembled and compiled on the 8051 so binaries are usually not distributed!

Only source code is usually distributed. But you can metacompile in forth assembler which would be in binary form.

Loading binaries on any machine is very dangerous.

So let's try to get Hyde thinking about what to do. john.hyde@intel.com

The Hyde book, other than using backward [Keil] 8051 software tools, looks to be real valuable!

We're tracking a technology shift bought on by gighertz PCs and USB 2.0. And the accompanying economic havoc!

Here's a very interesting comparison of RISC and CISC processors which shows how DSP functions have been implemented in a PC with MMX 1, SSE, SSE2, 3DNow extensions.

The computer industry is leading in deflation.

Washington, Dec. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve policy makers raised a warning about deflation at their Nov. 6 meeting and said the economy was at risk of further weakness rather than strength, minutes of the gathering show. ....

The minutes show the Fed sounding the alarm for the first time this year over deflationary risks to the U.S. economy. ...

Deflation is a general fall in the prices of goods and services in an economy. Profits collapse because the prices of finished goods can drop faster than the costs to make them; debt levels become more burdensome as interest rates rise in inflation- adjusted terms. The U.S. economy isn't experiencing deflation currently. It is passing through a period of disinflation, which means that inflation is accelerating at a slower rate than previously. ...

Before the November meeting, Fed officials learned that the economy lost 5,000 jobs in October and that the unemployment rate rose to 5.7 percent, following a decline of 13,000 jobs in September. Both numbers were subsequently revised by the Labor Department, which now says the economy gained 2,000 jobs over the two months. The economy lost 40,000 jobs in November, and the unemployment rate now matches April's eight-year high of 6 percent.

Initial scanning of both the Hyde and Axelson second editions indicate that both books should be very helpful.

The Hyde book comes with a cd. The Axelson book does not. This is no doubt attributed to Internet. Why include cds when you can download software?

Csd recently bough a copy of Nero cd rom burning software. Version 5.5 of the cd did not work. But when the v. 5.5.9.17 was downloaded over Internet, it worked more or less okay.

Shift left click would not select multiple files to drag and drop.

Nero express, supplied with a cd rom burner, appears to do about everything Nero does but is simpler.

In addition, for those who are exhibiting a high degree of impatience waiting for the market to decline, let’s remember that at the October low, the S&P 500 was down 51% from its March 2000 peak, making this the steepest bear market since 1929 to 1932, and one of the steepest in U.S. history. In the past 33 months the S&P 500 has spent only about four weeks above its 200-day moving average, and is still below that today. Moreover the 200-day average is still declining as well.

Other major technical indicators are negative as well. The percentage of bears in the Investor’s Intelligence Survey has dropped to 24%, a level more associated with market peaks than bottoms. At every other major market trough the percentage of bears has amounted to 60% or higher. Strangely enough, new bull markets begin in an atmosphere of deep pessimism, not the excessive bullishness characteristic of bear rally tops. In addition, equity mutual fund cash is at only 5.1% of assets, compared to 10-to-12% at previous bottoms.

In sum, we believe that the technical indicators fully support our negative fundamental views of the market. In our view the rally is in a topping process with a renewed downleg likely in the period ahead.

Patty and bill had dinner with John Gilmore and his girl friend in Albuquerque several years ago.

Gilmore was one of the founders of Sun computers.

Gilmore told patty and bill the story of how Forth 1 got started at Sun.

Owner of Firmworks , mitch bradly, orignally wrote the Sun boot software in Forth.

But as we know, Forthians do very poorly in the business world.

Most old Forthians are now Javans.

Gigahertz PCs coupled with USB 2.0 and super fast 80C32 SOCs may cause a shakeout in the peripheral microcontroller industry in 2003.

So the Javans [old forthians] lose again.

But this is why we want to use BASIC-52 and Forth technology for 80C32 SOCs and USB produccts!

The BASIC-52 and Forth technology is inexpensive and is more reliable than other system software technologies!

Besides most of the work has already been done and is in the open literature!

Thursday December 12, 2002 15:46

Hunker down in 2003! And prepare for 2004 with some neat USB 80C32 SOC products.

T-Online International, Europe's biggest Internet service provider, expects 2003 to be "a lot harder than 2002," its chief executive said in remarks published Wednesday, sparking a sell-off in the company's shares just nine days after the stock went public.

"I do not see light at the end of the tunnel before mid-2004," Thomas Holtrop was quoted as saying in an interview with the German edition of the Financial Times daily

But is this new vision alone going to save AOL and allow it to remain the powerhouse of the online world? Probably not. To the degree that its existing customers switch from narrowband to the new broadband option, AOL's revenues will decline-by about $9 per customer each month. AOL will have to grow its membership base aggressively and also find ways to sell more services to its existing members just to keep revenues from shrinking. ...

I suspect not. Consumers will gravitate to online services that give them superior ways of working, socializing, manipulating media, and organizing their lives online. I don't hear nearly enough talk about that from AOL. Those are software challenges, and they take money and commitment to develop. AOL TW spends a negligible amount on R&D, especially in software, in contrast to competitor Microsoft which spends $5 billion a year. AOL TW executives say there's just no money for it. That's a tragedy, because there are many ways that the service could be pioneering new functionality for its members.

Bill once counted 11 Chinese restaurants in the Pullman, WA - Moscow, ID area. All are very good.

Graduate schools are compelled to give graduate degrees - even if they don't have qualified graduate students. Or faculty for that matter.

But this doesn't stop any of them from giving, or perhaps counterfeiting, graduate degrees.

No graduate students, no money from the state.

Graduate schools were running out of students in science and engineering.

But then they discovered a source of lots of students. China.

Foreign graduate students comprised more than 94% of computer science and electrical engineering at Oregon State University, Lewis told Payne more than 10 years ago.

The gap fell from a revised record $127.6 billion in the previous three months, the Commerce Department said. It was the first improvement in a year.

The U.S. needs to attract almost $1.4 billion a day in foreign investment to fund the shortfall and keep the value of the dollar stable. While foreign investors still have faith in the world's biggest economy, some say that may not be the case indefinitely.

``You can sustain a deficit for quite some time, but long term, it's definitely a problem,'' said Lara Rhame, an economist at Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. in New York, before the report. ``The minute foreign investors perceive U.S. assets as risky, we are vulnerable to a sharp deterioration of the dollar.''

``Gold has rallied due to dollar weakness. With continued risks of Iraqi and terrorist tension, we believe that a short position in gold is too risky for most players and this prevents the gold market from coming under too much pressure,'' said John Reade, analyst at UBS Warburg.

The dollar fell to its lowest for a month against the euro, sliding in thin trade ahead of U.S. retail sales and other data expected to paint an anemic picture of U.S. economic recovery.

Traders said the U.S. currency was also under pressure after a U.S. newspaper said Washington had a credible report that Islamic groups linked to al Qaeda received a chemical weapon in Iraq last month or late October. A weaker dollar makes bullion more attractive to holders of non-dollar currencies.

Economists had expected a third-quarter deficit of $132 billion after a previously reported shortfall of $130 billion from April to June.

Over the past 12 months, the deficit equaled 4.5 percent of gross domestic product, up from 3.9 percent in 2001.

An imbalance between the goods and services the U.S. imports and those it exports accounts for about 85 percent of the gap in the current account. The nation imported $110.9 billion more than it exported in the third quarter compared with a $109.3 billion trade gap the prior three months.

The trade portion of the deficit is likely to worsen in coming months as imports continue to grow faster than exports and U.S. economic growth outpaces growth abroad.

And look at what some of these likely US-educated students are doing now!

Csd spends lots of money at Harbor Frieght! And gets great deals!

Digital calipers used to cost on the order of $79!

Csd purchased an exquisite auto-range digital multimeter which measures, the addition to voltage, resistance, amps, diode test, hFE, capacitance and frequency!

In a yellow rubberized case!

For about $28!

Csd waits for sales!

It works great!

Economists, like lawyers, are BS artists.

Dig this paragraph as another example of muddled thinking.

Members commented that the potential costs of a policy easing action that later proved not to have been needed were quite limited in that there was little risk that such a move would foster inflationary pressures under likely economic conditions over the next several quarters. Moreover, the policy easing could readily be unwound without significant effects on financial markets if the reversal appeared to be warranted by growing pressures on resources in a strengthening economy. In contrast, a failure to take an action that was needed because of a faltering economic performance would increase the odds of a cumulatively weakening economy and possibly even attendant deflation. An effort to offset such a development, should it appear to be materializing, would present difficult policy implementation problems.

Today Hyde's second edition arrive from Amazon.

Two days ago Axelson's second edition arrived from Softpro.

Here's a just taken jpg. There is the Cypress EZ-USB-FX both Princeton and Harvard architecture 80C32 development board on top of the email from Russia and CAVE algorithm description.

Csd keep its driver development disks outside the pc for easy access.

Now that the legal project is well in control, we're switching focus to USB and THE FUTURE.

We have to keep 80C32 USB system software costs down in a possibly deflating economy.

Greenberg's outstanding article on the Lucent pension funds has been spiffied up.

Bill has never been interested in administrative jobs. You quickly become technically obsolete in those jobs.

And when the pension checks possibly stop coming you are deep kim chee!

And we are project oriented. Both technical and legal.

Debt, Deflation, Default, Deficits, Demographics...

For example, the "deciduous dollar declined" yesterday against the yen in anticipation of a report, due out today, which is expected to show that the U.S. current account deficit widened to a whopping $132 billion in the third quarter.

At that rate, the U.S. must lure in $1.3 billion a day in unsuspecting foreign capital just to keep the consumer binge alive. The dollar has dropped 1.3% since Treasury man O'Neill, the administration's formerly vocal proponent of a strong dollar policy, was shown the door on Friday. Is there more where that came from? Probably, we suspect.

The surplus countries Kohn must have in mind are countries like Japan and China," says Denning, attempting to unpack the Fed governor's comments. "China alone accounts for 21% of the U.S. trade deficit, even more than Japan. And that's after China raised its U.S. dollar reserves $62.4 billion in the first 10 months of the year. Japanese dollar reserves are up by over $60 billion in the same time. What does this mean?"

Second edition of Axelson's USB book arrived yesterday. So maybe csd can get back on to tech stuff now we have met a deadline in our legal project.

From Silicon Valley to Boston's Route 128, technology companies are waiting for a rebound in business spending to pull them out of their slump. But when the Bay Area and other regional hotbeds emerge from the deep hole left by the technology crash, they'll find that the landscape looks a lot different. Many of the jobs lost will not be back.

The global tech bust has forced a dramatic restructuring of the industry as firms struggle to return to profitability. Companies have shed thousands of jobs in the United States and Europe while shifting production to lower-cost countries, mostly in Asia.

Answer—We share your concerns and believe that you are correct in highlighting these problems. Unfortunately, however, mainstream economists are ignoring the credit bubble, and think that the banking system is in good shape. In fact, their solution to the economic malaise is for consumers and corporations to go into more debt so that they can spend the economy out of the doldrums. We don’t see any of the items you mentioned being discussed as a problem within the Administration or Congress. As you probably know from his speeches and testimony, Greenspan has repeatedly praised derivatives as having reduced risk throughout the economy. As is true throughout financial history, the problems won’t be addressed until they reach crisis proportions. We might add that the problems now being addressed—Enron, WorldCom, corporate governance, Wall Street research, investment banking, and the anemic economy—only became key issues after they began making headlines in the media. The attitude of the government and the media is that if a problem has not become apparent to all, then it’s just not a problem.

The ever-growing federal deficit will weigh on interest rates even more than investors realize. That's because the deficit is already even BIGGER than what the government reports. The government is projecting a deficit of more than $200 billion in fiscal 2003. But if you strip out all of the smoke and mirrors and look at what the government actually owes, the government is running a deficit at the annual rate of more than $940 billion -- and that's according to the Federal Reserve's own numbers. If the U.S. needs to pay for a war or implements tax cuts to try to stimulate the economy, the deficit will grow even more!

Result: The government will likely flood the bond market with more long-term bonds -- and will need to increase interest rates in order to bring in investors. That's bad news if you're hanging onto long-term bonds right now. When reams of long-term bonds are dumped on the market in the months ahead, prices will plunge.

Csd is anxious to spend more time on the USB project and less time on the legal project. But lots of thinking on the technical project has been done while doing legal work.

Wednesday December 11, 2002 19:54

What is going to happen when senior citizens don't receive their monthly pension checks in the mail?

And their medical benefits stop.

They may go to a lawyer.

But we have bad news.

The lawyers will steal their remaining money.

There is a reason for this website and what what Morales and Payne are trying to do at pro se fights.

Wednesday December 11, 2002 10:44

Grove also addressed the diminished likelihood of an upturn in the chip industry in the near future. "Over the course of the past year (the industry) has been bounding along on the bottom," he said, but he warned that the threat of a "war" on Iraq doesn’t bode well for the future employment rate in the US and a may spark a consequent "meltdown" in some South American economies.

The industry "was operating, in retrospect, way ahead of the underlying demand," he said in his keynote speech to the conference. "The excess of the latter 1990s was so much bigger than previous excesses," he confessed.

Grove also later warned that the trend of migrating chip manufacturing to far eastern fabs could shift the balance eastwards. "It is easy to project," he said, "that the interdependence becomes more one-sided, with an adverse impact on our educational system because so much of the university funding comes from industry. There is a spiral there in the wrong direction."

The CPU upgrade rat race is over. The commodities war is on

WHILE INTEL AND a select number of other companies bet tens of billions of dollars on the next generation of chip fabrication technology, a good chunk of the industrialized world is happy with the machines they bought last year or two years ago. Today, accountants to video heads have enough horsepower at their fingertips to keep themselves sated. Why shell out $1500 in next year's technology for a measly 3-5% performance bump on the most bleeding-edge applications? It is buy and keep for consumers and businesses alike, not buy and dump every other year in the climb from the 8088 to the Pentium.

Is Carpenter trying to tell us that 53% of companies selling stock have a P/E = 0? Or maybe even negative? Like Palm!

Where's The Mean?
by Lynn Carpenter

Is the market too high? Wall Street says it's cheap. But many of the folks on Main Street think it's still too expensive. Which street is right? The short answer is, "both."If the market really is too high, then we have no business buying stocks at all.

The average P/E ratio for the Dow Industrials is 20 these days, not too bad. But that's a pretty stodgy group of stocks. For the S&P 500, the average P/E is 33... and to us value investors, 33 is generally too high. By the way, the S&P Industrial Index sports a P/E of 48, pretty stiff for a box of 15 industrial stocks chosen for their high dividends. Worse, the yield on the S&P Industrials is now just 1.5% compared to the Dow Industrials at 2.2%! ...

In fact, even if we stretch the average a bit, allowing for a range of 14–16, the P/E ratio has been at its historic average for only moments in time. It happened more frequently from 1880 to 1912. The S&P P/E ratio hit the average nine times in those 32 years. One of those times it stayed there for nearly two years. Every other time it landed briefly, for six months or less.

The next time the P/E ratio was "average" on a regular basis was... oh boy, you don't want to hear this... 1928 to 1941 – roughly bracketing the Great Crash, Great Depression and Second Great War. If that's average, I am sincerely hoping we never see average again. ...

The U.S. stock market has 9,175 stocks including those with very small caps and infrequent trading. So let's talk about those 9,000 stocks. Of those stocks with earnings, only 16% (1,444) are currently selling for P/E ratios over 20. However, an awesome 53% of the available stocks have no P/E ratio at all. (Yikes! That's not good.) They might as well have a P/E of 300, which some of them would if they had a quarter-penny's earnings.

LYNN CARPENTER EXPOSES WALL STREET 'S FRIGHTENING NEW "DARK SIDE!"
"Back When The Stock Market Went Mad, I Warned You,' STAY AWAY' From Enron...

"I Begged You, 'DON'T TOUCH' Tyco or Global Crossing...

"Some of my readers even took my advice and bought puts on Enron early... on THREE separate occasions... and one investor wrote me recently to say my warning helped him pocket over 200%!

"But please don't think the worst of the Wall Street crisis is isolated to a few companies or corrupt financial firms. FAR FROM IT...

"These recent wipeouts are nothing compared to the TIDAL WAVE OF BANKRUPTCIES ahead. Disney, Ford and General Electric have already sent up emergency flares. And they're not alone. Not at all...

"If you do anything in the next 5 minutes, make sure you check out my shocking 'WALL STREET BLACKLIST' where I name 26 stocks you shouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole! You'll find the list inside, please read on..."

We have to hold down software costs while producing reliable easy to maintain apps. And have fun too, of course.

How close is the US to deflation? Fed chairman Alan Greenspan told anxious members of Congress in October that "we are not close to the deflationary cliff". But how good are his forecasting skills? The Fed, by its own admission, utterly failed to foresee Japan's slide into deflation seven years ago.

And a solid core of serious analysts now believes it to be a very real risk. The Fed's own behaviour betrays a distinct unease. A month ago it cut the key official interest rate by an aggressively large increment - from 1.75 per cent, already the lowest in over 40 years, to 1.25 per cent.

Consider the evidence of deflation so far.

The broadest measure of price pressures in the US economy - the gross domestic product deflator - is barely above zero. In the year to the end of September, it was up by 0.83 per cent, its feeblest in half a century.

"The essence of deflation is that business leaders know they do not have pricing power," the ability to raise the price of their products, points out Wayne Angell, a former governor of the Fed and chief economist for the Wall Street investment bank Bear Stearns.

And the prices received by US firms overall have declined in each of the past five quarters, the longest run in more than 50 years. For the latest quarter, they were down 1.3 per cent.

"They expect that pricing power will return with recovery." With deflation, it doesn't. "This is precisely what is happening in the US economy today.""They expect that pricing power will return with recovery." With deflation, it doesn't. "This is precisely what is happening in the US economy today."

"There's a compelling case for deflation," says Morgan Stanley's Roach. "We are in a rarefied and highly dangerous period."

Software is a breeze on the PC side with Visual Basic, C++ 6.0, exquisite in-line assembler, and Microsoft Office.

Software development is easy too on the 80C32 side with BASIC-52 and Forth ... with a bit of interactive incremental assembler too!

Both software and hardware maintenance is easy on the 80C32 peripheral side using Internet. The Brazilians in Santa Caterina are on to this!

Let's look at bit more carefully where the Brazilians are that are doing the really neat BASIC-52 and Forth work. Here's a map of Santa Caterina. Look at Florianopolis on the island and Blumenau.

Then let's look at the German influence.

Germans migrated, or escaped, to south America at the end of the second world war.

Picture of the kubelwagen might bring tears to the eyes of some of the FURB and Federal University of Santa Catarina students' grandfathers.

The practical constraints are that we don't want to spend lots of money of system software.

The U.S. economy got into this mess largely though the issuance of excessive debt, and this policy, even if it worked temporarily, would lead to even higher amounts of debt. It would also do little or nothing to reverse the severe structural imbalances built up during the late 1990s bubble.Total credit market debt as a percent of GDP has soared from 158% in 1982 to 295% now.

Consumers are maxed out. Personal bankruptcies surged 15% from 2001 to 2002, credit card write-offs recently rose by more than 35% to their highest level in decades, and mortgage foreclosures have hit their highest level in history. On top of that, the unemployment rate just jumped to 6% in November, and 40,000 net jobs disappeared from the economy. Millions of consumers are buried under mountains of debt and are worried about the prospect of long-term unemployment if this economy doesn't turn around quickly.

And you're thinking about sending several K$ to Keil?

Think 80C32 USB SOCs hopefully running BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth, instead!

The high growth experience of the 1990s has unfortunately trained people to expect to be able to achieve high levels of growth under any circumstances. This is a fallacy. The three years of the new century have seen but three years of declines. The speculative Nasdaq has fallen over 75% from its ultimate Y2K peak to its low so far. The broader S&P 500 fell 7% in 2000, 15% in 2001 and approximately 22% year to date in 2002. ...

Nystrom states

What many people thought of as "money" in their brokerage accounts has simply evaporated with those declines.

Some people got the money. The money did not evaporate. Much of the pension fund money ended up in silicon valley!

And look what the tech creeps are doing now!

According to Thomson Financial, insider selling skyrocketed 125 percent in November to $2,6 billion from $1.2 billion in October. Tech insiders were especially busy as the level of selling increased to $861 million from $244 million, a whopping 250 percent rise. And insider buying? That was up just 5 percent, to $193 million from $184 million. ...

Insiders at semiconductor company Maxim Integrated Products also sold a sizable amount of shares last month. The stock is up more than 65 percent in the past two months. Nine Maxim insiders, including CEO John Gifford, sold more than 440,000 shares for about $14.8 million. This was the largest group sale by Maxim insiders since March, according to Thomson.

Investors are wising-up to high tech.

The year's biggest technology initial public offering got off to a bumpy start on Tuesday, raising nearly $230m less than its more optimistic backers had been expecting.

Shares in Seagate, the world's biggest maker of computer hard disc drives, were priced late on Tuesday at $12, below a range of $13-$15 that some of the deal's promoters had thought might even have been exceeded.

The transaction raised $870m, rather than the $1.1bn that would have come from the more optimistic pricing - still almost as much as all the other tech IPOs this year combined. ...

"It is hard for buyers to feel good about a deal where the sellers are going to make a ton of money," said Ben Holmes, president of Morningnotes.com. "There is not a lot of upside for buyers. That's why there is no expectation that this deal will trade up."

Tuesday December 10, 2002 18:30

Try this video link if you want some deadly high tech stuff

http://www.nata2.info/pictures/Incoming/gunship_video.mpg

We are fed information by organized media to try to make us do things. Like buy or sell stock. Or change our opinion. Or tell us about new microcontroller hardware without the complete hardware software picture.

Media suppresses things the paying establishment doesn't want us to know about.

But with internet things have changed.

Organized media and those who pay them don't have as much control over what we are told.

Also the establishment has no advantage in the technology over others. And it costs the establishment lots of money to use this new technology!

Without personal computers, lots of disk space, scanners, ink jet printers and, of course, internet Morales and Payne would be in real trouble. But this time the establishment may be in some real trouble.

We need to switch to USB.

Bill hasn't done USB before. But we all must arise to the occassion.

Bill hasn't done this

Judges
Dee Vance Benson
Antonin Scalia

before either!

Let's hope!

After an 8 percent decline for the Nasdaq in the past five trading days -- and a near four-percent rout on Monday -- here's some more bad news for tech: Earnings estimates may be way too high. ...

The S&P 500 is now trading at about 17.3 times 2003 earnings estimates. That's not overly expensive by historical measures. But considering that the index was trading at 15.6 times 2003 earnings estimates on Oct. 1, when the earnings outlook was brighter, it's a cause for concern. Even if fourth-quarter earnings for this year are better than expected, stocks might not head higher on the news.

"There is a huge disconnect between the magnitude of what is likely to happen with earnings and what stocks have already discounted," says Richard Williams, strategist for Summit Analytic Partners, an independent research firm.

Valuations for technology companies in particular have climbed to lofty heights. Cisco Systems, for example, has a P/E of 25 times calendar 2003 earnings estimates. And multiples for smaller technology companies are even higher. Cisco competitors Extreme Networks and Foundry Networks trade at 34 times and 37 times 2003 earnings estimates, respectively.

So even though there are still many concerns about overcapacity in the technology sector, most tech stocks have soared since the market's early October lows. Sound familiar? "This is a problem," says Hill. "This seems to indicate we haven't shaken out a lot of speculation that was present in the market in the late 1990s."

This charts shows how much money 50 insiders reaped since from selling stock in companies that ultimately saw their stock values plunge.

The main page got too big again.

So Belec and other fraud articles are archived at Hi tech fraud.

Beginning in 1942, however, U.S. stocks finally shook off the lingering effects of the Great Depression and began the longest secular bull market in history. The advance started with four consecutive up years, pushing the S&P index higher by 100% over that period. In fact, the S&P closed lower over a calendar year only five times between 1942 and 1961. ...

While history may suggest that stocks are due for a meaningful surge, investors shouldn't expect anything close to the bull run that erupted after the attack on Pearl Harbor 61 years ago today.

Back then, equity valuations had fallen to extremely attractive levels amid deflation, unemployment, economic stagnation and the complete absence of Main Street participation in the stock market.

Today, valuations are reasonable at best, and borderline ludicrous at worst. The difference in interpretation stems from the fact that creative accounting practices have obfuscated the true worth of many U.S. businesses, even as the economic outlook remains unusually murky. ...

Since 1896, the S&P 500 has fallen for four consecutive years on only one occasion. That period was between 1929 and 1932, when the index dropped by 70% on a calendar-year basis, but by almost 90% when measured from top to bottom. ...

Of course, the similarities to the current environment are at least a little scary.

Most of the microcontroller hardware or IP vendors have obscured system software costs. Perhaps this is part of another scam? To steal pension fund money.

And we know there is a technology shift under way. Gigahertz PCs running Microsoft Windows, USB 2.0, and super fast 80C32 SOCs which may simply clobber peripheral side microcontrollers in the marketplace.

Consider clockspeed, a measure of how fast computer chips process data. While many PC users now work on computers with clockspeeds of around 400 to 600 megahertz, Kay expects hardware makers to introduce chips that are 10 times as fast within the next year or so, at about 4 gigahertz. Intel recently rolled out a 3-GHz processor.

Three new Athlons--the 2600+, 2700+ and 2800+--were announced in November and run at speeds between 2.13GHz and 2.25GHz, according to PC makers. The model rating system compares the new Athlons' relative performance to a previous version of the chip. But it also serves as a rough comparison to Intel's Pentium 4. The Athlon XP 2800+, AMD contends, performs the same or possibly better than a 2.8GHz Pentium 4.

ARM, ARC, MIPS, Tensilica, PMC-Sierra, UBICOM, ... and lots of other microcontrollers even manufactured by big semiconductor companies such as TI and Motorola may flop.

Fred Hickey, who writes the monthly “High-Tech Strategist”, has been dead right on the group for the past three years, and titles his latest report, “Another Return to Stupidville”. He points out that any sub-sector strength we see sporadically is based on inventory filling, and that virtually all the end markets are dead in the water. Most companies are reporting disappointing results and are continuing to slash capital expenditures and layoff their employees. Demand for PCs, wireless phones and telecom equipment is still very weak and this is feeding back into the semiconductor manufacturers and the equipment companies.

TI, of course, sees this and looks to be giving the big push toward 80C32 USB SOCs!

Csd's business interests are in wdm drivers and 80C32 USB SOCs hopefully running BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth, of course! And having fun too!

Monday December 9, 2002 20:50

Consider all expenses. Especially 80C32 operating system expenses, of course!

Carrie Wolford never sat down and did the math to see how the cost of her commute from Paulding County to Buckhead compared with her mortgage.

"I didn't even think about," said Wolford, 34. "We just didn't care. We wanted to be able to get a nice house, and we just couldn't do it intown."

Wolford and her husband, David, moved a long way from Atlanta for a bigger, less-expensive home.

They found --- and love --- their four-bedroom, two-story traditional at the Menlow Station subdivision near Hiram. They carpool together and drive nearly 30 miles each way to work.

But when they add up their expenses, the slice of the pie in their household budget for transportation is bigger than housing.

Csd bought 3 books last week as an investment for the future.

Csd doesn't plan to buy a Keil 8051 development system, however!

Which 80C32 hardware looks good? Csd has a Cypress board EZ USB FX.

But this is not SOC. In fact, there are about 11 chips on the development board.

Csd expects too see in 2003 a single chip 80C32 USB 1 or 2 on a board with only external capacitors, on USB connector and possibly one more connector!

This will dramatically change board manufacturing. And shift emphasis toward minimal peripheral software. The majority of computation will be done inside a PC.

Will Cypress be a winner?

What about Warren Buffett, probably the most lauded investor still trading today? He doesn't look at PE, or O'Neil's PEG, or price-to-sales or yield, other measures you'd expect a traditional value investor to use. Instead, Buffett really scours a company's debts, and buys shares only in firms that can pay off their long-term debt with two years of net earnings... last year's earnings. His ratio? Long-term debt must be less than twice last year's earnings.

Cypress's stock is down. And the Cypress debt to earning ratio is marginal according to Buffett.

Dig the Cypress interest payments.

TI is poised to come on very strong in the 80C32 USB 2.0 SOC marketplace. And with TI's acquisition of Burr-Brown, also using 80C32 SOCs with it mixed signal products, TI will be in a position to furnish a several chip solution connected to a PC over USB 2.0.

Csd believes that a USB 80C32 will nearly alway communicate with a non USB 80C32 mixed signal chip. Serial port communications with a PC, used in Cygnal and Cypress, was not a good idea. The 80C32 serial ports should be used for a serial expansion bus or 8051 networking communications.

Besides, a USB 80C32 can be viewed as merely a replacement for a rs-232 line driver chip!

Csd has made a revokable decision on how to build the windows wdm rs-232 driver to replaced the DOS Forth driver! The easiest way of course.

Java makes sense on high powered peripheral microcontrollers. And so does a Forth operating system. But these may not sell.

USB 2.0, GIGHERTZ PCs, Microsoft Visual Basic and C++ 6.0 and 80C32 USB SOCs hopefully running BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth, of course, may do the above in.

But in the long run, his contribution may be greater. Browsers and servers may come and go, but successful new languages are extremely rare. Java, or something like it, is the key to a truly interactive Internet and a fully hollowed-out computer.

But we could be wrong too! Here's what csd is doing to prepare for 2003.

Csd is doing successful old languages and operating systems. BASIC and it's weird associate, Forth. Most of the work has already been done and we are building on the ideas of other software superstars.

Weird is correct for Forth. But very powerful running on a 80C32 and a real money-maker. For the app seller. Not for the system programmer. Damn.

Csd was given the below Oney flier this morning.

Csd ordered the second edition of Hyde's book from Amazon. It apparently is least expensive source from those given on Hyde's web site.

Csd has Oney's driver book and accompanying cd disk.

Oney's software coupled with Cypress's EZ-USB-FX software caused one of the worst Windows 2000 crashes csd has ever experienced!

The Oney approach is one way write wdm drivers.

Numega Driverworks is another.

Competition is good!

Numega has a very interesting USB tutorial.

Csd wants to see what Hyde wrote and how he handles software on the peripheral side.

We, of course, want to go the 80C32 USB SOCs hopefully running BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth.

But there is a general agreement that Windows and USB is where one wants to be!

The Java and C++ people seem to have a hatred of each other.

Java is a variation on Forth. Sun computers boot in Forth.

Microsoft Visual Basics prior to 6.0 compiled into Forth-like threaded code. Now, of course, 6.0 compiles into C++.

Csd is not going the Java route on PCs. There are lots more advantages to Visual Basic and C++ 6.0 on a PC.

Java is slow!

True compilers like Visual Basic and C++ 6.0 produce code which runs much faster than a Java program.

One reason is both Forth and Java are slow is all of the pushing and popping of arguments from the data stack. But 90% of the work in all programs is done in about 10% of the code. So you recode the 10% in assembler.

For an 80C32 real-time operating system Forth and BASIC-52 are very attractive choices. For sound financial reasons.

Controlling software costs with 80C32 USB SOCs hopefully running BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth is a csd business goal.

Above is serial port driver for Windows 98se. A vxd, not a wdm, driver.

Csd was hoping to have a common solution for 98se and 2000.

Sunday December 1, 2002 09:44

Csd saw an error message in the dump regarding the path. All worked okay though since system path included a path to link.

Depending on the path setting in Windows 2000 you might have to add an explicit path to link.

Here's a slightly modified dump.bat with an explicit path

To find Windows 2000 path, open a DOS window and type path.

This sure beats typing a long dumpbin or link line interactively ... and usually making a mistake.

80C32 USB SOCs hopefully running BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth, of course! Connected to gigaHertz PC with one or more gigabytes of main memory. Gobs of disk space too.

Running Windows 2000 or 98SE, Visual Basic 6.0, Visual C++ 6.0, and Microsoft Office.

Saturday November 30, 2002 18:35

About the disassembler in link -dump.

When csd first tried this option it didn't work. A missing module.

Our son installed the program Deer Hunter on our Internet machine.

Then the disassembler worked!

The real world again.

About the money.

If we get our wages paid for doing this work plus some consulting in the future, then is this all we can hope for.

We are dealing with the ideas and work of others. Who will hopefully use our work in their consulting businesses to make money too.

Numega DriverWorks and VtoolsD, which is obsolete except for some outstanding examples and should not be lost, like 8051 Forth and BASIC-52 is all source code.

Megabytes in the case of DriverWorks.

Several hundred screens in the case of 8051 Forth. And lot of assember listings in the case of BASIC-52.

So let's try to get our wages to do this systems work paid for then move on to some profitable app work!

And have fun too!

If anyone is stupid enough to think they are going to take this code and make millions of dollars, then think again.

For such a stupid person would have violated Mushashi's first rule.

Do not think dishonestly

We are dealing with the works of others which we hope to add to.

Csd must post some info on the classical Japanese company.

One which all of us would like to work for.

But may have been lost in the tech rush to economic disaster.

Stay tuned.

Guys, we're getting serious about the best way to replace a DOS Forth interface through the serial port to a windows serial port interface.

There are lot of way to do this. But we're looking to for best.

8051 Forth multiplexes Terminal Input Buffer and disk buffer data going from a PC to the 8051 using one of the control lines as a flag.

Screen display data and returning disk buffer data are also multiplexed using one of the control lines as a flag.

Can serial.sys be easily used for the conversion from a DOS window to a windows window?

We don't know yet.

But if not, the Microsoft serial.sys serial port driver profile can be disabled.

Numega DriverWorks can be used to generate the skeleton for a custom serial port driver.

The serial port will only be used to get usb working. At that time serial port communications will be discarded.

All you seen the panel below is being done on Windows 2000.

We keep our software tool costs in line with what we can expect to make from them.

Seniors, the pension funds have been ripped off.

High tech is largely to blame.

Shakeout in micrcontollers, and hopefully obsolete 80C32 developement tools too, is likely.

BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth will win!

Some of the articles will be archived. Some will not.

Csd is thinkinig about the strategy.

Java is a variation on Forth. And may eventually go just about as far a Forth went.

BASIC, on the other hand, is compatible with what people already know. This makes BASICs a lot easier to sell.

We must keep in mind that many BASICs work similar to Forth.

Microsoft's BASICs compiled into Forth-like code until the advent of Visual Basic 6.0 which complies into C and C++!

Thursday November 28, 2002 10:46

Keil has of course attracted attention for wanting to sell us a very expensive and antiquated non-operating system software for 80C32 hardware/software development.

There are better solutions. BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth.

Wednesday November 27, 2002 19:07

Csd is generating both ISA bus for RS-232 and USB skeletons. And we see what we're doing wrong!

We think. But we, of course, live in the real world where things work a bit different.

Windows continues to get more picky making you do it Microsoft's way!

Neither of the DriverWorks 2.0 skeletons run with the console app test programs. But it's fun to try to find the problems. Eventually things work after study and experimentation.

Software is expensive and, of course, the most insidious part is that only about 20-25% of the eventual cost measured over the software's useful lifetime has been invested once one thinks the software is working!

But Internet software maintenance should help improve this.

Monitor Masters in Albuquerque replies

Csd just retired a slot 1 Pentium 333 MHz.

And an Acer ScanPrisa scanner - which did a great job, after one warranty replacement.

Two Acer cd/rw drives, which also were replaced under warranty, and one cd rom reader.

They are in a plastic bag in the garage.

Throw these in the garbage?

No.

Environmental pollution is not a good idea. We have to think toward the future.

That's why they are in plastic bag in the garage.

But what about the ever-increasing dead batteries for the digital camera?

How do we properly dispose of these?

We're increasingly concerned about this.

Hey, getting rid of obsolete software is easy and non-polluting.

Uninstall and the recycle bin.

We have problems which must be solved. In a non-environmental polluting way.

Fewer micrcontroller types [the shake-out], most of may end up at the dump polluting.

Old 80C32s should be properly recycled into newer and faster parts.

Better PC side software. Visual Basic 6.0, C/C++, in-line assembler.

Less power consumption. The 80C32 power saving modeS, of course.

Fewer batteries. Solar recharging.

Csd and others have the ticket.

Power efficient 80C32 SOCs, running BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth, of course!

System software should never assume vast proportions. Especially if it was built on the ideas of others. Like 80C32 Forth or BASIC-52.

We can't afford this and users can't make money with this concept. We have to be economically efficient bulding our apps.

All users should have system software source code available which is complied by a metacompiler. We need this to understand what's happening on the system end.

Business travel should be mostly unnecessary. We can do this work over internet.

An absolutely brilliant solution means building on the ideas of the super bright. And spending the time to figure-out what they did.

Mushashi again

Do not think dishonestly
The Way is in training
Become acquainted with every art
Know the ways of all professions
Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters
Develop intuitive judgment and understanding for everything

Miyamoto Musashi

So onward to get the PC side of Embedded Controller Forth for the 8051 family fixed.

And have some fun too learning what the Microsoft VB 6.0, C/C++, and Numega DriverWorks 2.0, not 2.6 unfortunately, programmers have given us.

Monday November 25, 2002 08:43

Csd is in the process of replacing the DOS Window Forth PC side of Embedded Controller Forth for the 8051 family software with a Microsoft Windows MDI Visual Basic 6.0, C/C++, in-line assembler wdm driver.

Productivity increase using these tools, compared to using Forth nearly 20 years ago, is on order of magnitudes!

Forth usually not an appropriate tool to be used on a PC.

However, you can still do IN and OUT in a DOS window on Windows 2000!

Doing IN and OUT from Windows 2000 ring 3 app, causes the app to be immediately terminated ... with no error message.

Sunday November 24, 2002 20:09

Google has likely made more contribution on acquisition of knowledge than anything before in history.

All of us should be concerned about debt load and how to avoid it.

Like using BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth instead of paying big bucks to Keil for an antiquated technology.

We need to get some intelligent SOC hardware vendors to pay for porting of existing BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth operating systems so that we can all move on to development of peripheral and PC side apps quickly, inexpensively, with super reliability.

Intel paid for BASIC-52. Absolutely brilliant decision on Intel's part.

Oh, hardware vendors are counting on entrepreneurial software vendors spending money on hopes of making big bucks supplying software for their hardware.

The entrepreneurial software vendors will lose. They have to invest too much money to get their products to market.

Reasons is that they don't use the ideas of others. Like BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth.

And this software and documentation must, of course, be posted on Internet!

Join the program. It's fun. And you meet some really neat and super-intelligent people through their written works.

Writing apps is lots more profitable than trying to sell system software!

We figured this out. But you may have to learn some new and weird, but fun, stuff.

And adopt a personal code of conduct you must believe in and follow.

Do not think dishonestly
The Way is in training
Become acquainted with every art
Know the ways of all professions
Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters
Develop intuitive judgment and understanding for everything

Miyamoto Musashi

Because we are using the ideas of others who gave them to us in source code.

We attempt to stand on the shoulders of giants. Hey, these are Newton's words.

That's what we were up to when we distributed all of our system software on BBSs and Internet.

Csd is tracking a possible microcontoller shake-out brought on by

• GigaHertz PCs
• Microsoft's Visual Basic 6.0 integrated into Microsoft Office, Visual C/C++ with exquisite in-line assembler
• USB 2.0
• Super fast 80C32 USB 2.0 SOCs running BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth operating systems, of course!
• Internet software distribution, maintenance.
• Interactive hardware and software problem diagnosis over Internet ... using BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth operating systems, of course!

Friday November 22, 2002 12:47

Technology has changed to favor gigahertz PCs, Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0, C/C++, USB 2.0 and the fast 80C32 USB microcontrollers.

Shake-out time.

Thursday November 21, 2002 10:46

Standard Microsystems Corporation has a series of three ads in the November 18, 2002 Electronic Engineering Times.

One is on its Fast 8051 USB 2.0 product. SMCS states

Provisions for external Flash Memory up to 64K bytes for program storage is provided.

12K bytes of scratchpad SRAM and 768 Bytes of program SRAM are also provided.

So it looks like some external memory may be required.

It appears from SMCS development literature that no interactive operating systems hosting incremental compilers and assembler are available for their "development" boards.

SMCS too could use BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth working on its part.

TI looks to give Cypress and Cygnal some real competition in the 80C32 SOC marketplace.

Let's hope TI sees the merits of getting BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth working on it's 80C32 parts.

From the ROM and RAM sizes mentioned below, this does not appear to be a problem.

There is some very interesting and fun work to be done here. And not too much of it.

Face it. No one is going to make a fortune off this software.

But some can make big bucks getting a super reliable app out the door quickly. Which can be easily maintained and enhanced using Internet!

Look at what the boys from Brazil did. And what Hanson and bill did using Netmeeting.

Lowest noise, precision data-acquisition system-on-a-chip MSC121O Achieves New Level of High Performance The MSC121O family allows the user to optimize the memory size to the application. The MSC121O is a new, low-power (4 mW) family of mixed-signal devices incorporating a 24-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC), enhanced 8051 core with Flash memory and a variety of on-chip peripherals including a 32-bit accumulator and precision voltage reference. The M8C1210's microcontroller core is an enhanced 8051 core which executes up to three times faster than the standard 8051 core, given the same clock source. This makes it possible to run the device at a lower external clock frequency and achieve the same performance at lower power consumption than the standard 8051 core. Available with four different sizes of Flash memory, the MSC121O family allows the user to optimize the memory size to the appbcation. In addition, it provides an easy migration path to large memory sizes without having to add the external memory often required hy other devices. The Flash memory has an endurance of lOOK E/W cycles and is programmable over the entire operating range of the device: 2.7 V to 5.25 V. The MSC121O family offers superior performance throughout. Linearity error is less than ±0.0015 percent of FS. Effective resolution is 22 bits at low data rates for PGA = 1. For PGA = 128, noise is as low as 75 nV, which makes it the lowest-noise ADC integrated with a microcontroller on the market. Also, the on-chip VREF offers excellent accuracy of 0.2 percent and drift of5ppmP C. Digital features of the MSC121O family include 1.2 Khytes of on-chip SRAM, four I/O ports, external memory capability, a 32-bit accumalator! shifter, dual UARTs, three timers/counters, SPI interface with direct memory access and a watchdog timer. Versatile MSC1 210 Family Res. Sampling No. of Input Program SRAM Price Device (Bits) Rate (kSPS) Channels Memory (kB) (kB) 1K MSC1210Y2 24 0.78 8 Diff/8 SE 4 1.2 $8.95 MSC121OY3 24 0.78 8 Diff/8 SE 8 1.2 $9.50 MSC1210Y4 24 0.78 8 Diff/8 SE 16 1.2 $10.75 MSC121OY5 24 0.78 8 Diff/8 SE 32 1.2 $12.25 Product Features o 24-bit ADC with no missing codes o Eight difterentia I/single-ended analog inputs o 8051-compatible with over 8-MIPS operation o Up to 32-kB on-chip Flash program memory o 32-bit accumulator o Packaging: 64-lead TQFP Typical Applications o Industrial process control o Medical instrumentation o Liquid/gas chromatography o Intelligent sensors o Weigh scales Upgrade legacy serial peripherals to USB with a single chip Avoid redesign by adding TI's TUSB341O to bridge an RS232 communication stream to USB. The TUSB34JO controller bridges between a USB port and an enhanced UART serial port using all the necessary logic to communicate with the host computer through the USB bus. The device is ideal for building a communication port between a legacy serial peripheral device and a PC with USB ports. All device functions including USB command decoding and UART setup and error reporting, are managed by internal microcontroller firmware under the auspices of the PC host. This USB-to-serial port controller contains an industry-standard 8052 MCU with 16 Kbytes of RAM. The default code in the chip's 10 Kbytes of ROM contalns an 12C boot loader with the option to load TI's UART bridging code or application-specdic code from an onboard EEPROM or directly from the PC over USB. USB-to-Serial Single-Channel Controller The TUSB341O can support a total of three input and three output interrupt, bulk) endpoints. Product Features Enhanced UART with programmable speeds: 58 baud to 921.6 Kbaud Full speed USB: 12Mbps Power-down mode Operates on 3.3 V with integrated voltage regulation to a 1.8-V core Four general-purpose I/Os (GPIO) Can operate as a 16-KB RAM general-purpose USB MCU 32-pin LQFP Typical Applications Legacy RS232-to-USB converter cables RS232 data links and instrumentation Bar-code scanners USB interface cables for PDAs Application-specific protocol transfer over GPIO USB 2.0, high-speed ATA/ATAPI bridge solution PREVIEW* The TUSB625O programmable USB 2 0-to-ATA/ATAPI bridge features a unique architecture that offers the designer superior throughput performance - 33-percent improvement in sustained throughput over competitive bridge devices. This higher rate of throughput can enhance the read/write performance of peripheral hard disk drives. Programming flexibility allows developers to use a wider variety of off-the- shelf ATA/ATAPI devices than would be possible using alternative bridge chips. The TUSB625O is designed to use both the high performance of a state machine and the programmability and flexibility of an embedded microcontroller and firmware. With its embedded 30-MIPS microcontroller, eight configurable endpoints, and up to 40 Kbytes of configurable code and data buffer SRAM, the TUSB6250 provides the best bridge solution to meet both the performance and flexibility requirements of next-generation external storage devices. Contact TI for samples. * Available by end of November '02 USB to ATAPI Bridge TUSB6250 can support a total of 4 input and 4 output endpoints configurable as bulk (double-buffered), interrupt or control. USB Product Features o Fully compliant with the USB 2.0 mass storage specification, including the host/device data transfer matrix subset (the 13 cases) o 13-case compliance assures essential bridge and drive interoperability, meaning: o No hang conditions o No data loss o No data corruption o Tolerant of ATAPI drive operational abnormalities, including random data request lengths and random pause/terminate/requests o Low-power architecture makes bus-powered products achievable o ATA master- and slave-capable o ATA-OS-compliant ATA-100-compatible Typical Applications o Hard disk drives o ZIP™ drives o CD-RW o DVDs o Magneto-optical drives o Digital audio players More speed, lower power!

The d word.

Think BASIC-52 and Forth.

And making some money with some fun!

Sunday November 17, 2002 19:00

System software costs have to be kept low. Otherwise the app costs skyrocket.

And source code provided over Internet for application developers. For the same reason.

It takes app code implementers too long to figure out what the systems programmer have done.

Source code for wmd drivers, C dlls, and VB apps need to be provided for the same reason. Productivity.

Expensive development of new operating systems is not the answer.

And finally, good peripheral operating systems on the 80C32 end must be provided. This is where the greatest need is.

Answer is to use software technologies already developed. BASIC-52 and Forth.

Productivity increases from the Microsoft software development platform, USB 2.0, and intelligent super fast 80C32 SOCs coupled with interactive operating systems with incremental assemblers and compilers, like BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth, and, of course, Internet is and will cause major financial perturbations in high tech.

There are some very good articles contained on these pages about the market for high end peripheral microcontroller.

Csd is mainly into interface software between the 80C32 microcontroller and Windows. Csd simply doesn't see how the high end peripheral microcontroller companies can spend the bucks or con software companies to produce the required peripheral system software. This is too expensive considering the return on investment.

So we advocate going with super fast 80C32s SOC running BASIC-52++™ and 80C32 Forth where the bucks have already been spent on development and doing the computations in a gigahertz PC connected to a 80C32s SOC over UBS 1/2.

Csd exercises the Cypress EZ-USB-FX machine by running memtest for long periods.

You can click on hold which stops the program.

Clicking on Run starts it running again. Some of the time. Other times it crashes and has to be reloaded. The real world again.

Why?

Vectoring into a BASIC-52 or Forth warm start might allow discovering the source of the problem.

Skeleton USB drivers and test code generated from DriverStudio 2.0 don't work. But, alas, this is the real world.

Numega DriverStudio is at about version 2.6 so this is not surprising.

But it's interesting and sort of fun to try to figure out what's going wrong.

Csd has to do both rs 232 and USB. At first! Then good bye rs 232.

This means modifying a ISA bus driver by adding USB code.

Csd experienced the worst Windows 2000 crash ever while experimenting with the software supplied on cd with Walter Oney's wdm driver book.

Some of the Oney software completely clobbered Cypress's EZ-USB-FX system.

But on Friday the Cypress system is working again.

Here's a jpg just taken.

Note the stupid Keil required rs 232 connector next to the usb connector.

We've got to get 80C32 BASIC-52++™ and Forth running in a Windows Window coded in Visual Basic 6.0, C/C++ and inline assembler!

Think productivity and fun too!

Thursday November 14, 2002 20:24

Look for good deals in software where others have spent to develop. BASIC-52 and Forth, of course.

Recessions result when there is a shift in technology.

Visual Basic 6.0, Microsoft Office, USB 2.0, and super fast USB 80C32s hopefully running BASIC-52++™ [tee hee, damn lawyers] or Forth are the new wave.

Magazines like Embedded Systems Programming catered to technologies which placed ads.

Not to technologies like Forth and BASIC-52 which did not or really cannot afford advertising.

But with the shift to Internet technology, you can now learn the true story of micrcontroller operating systems. This is the way it should be.

The contemplation of things as they are,
without error or confusion,
without substitution or imposture,
is in itself a nobler thing
than a whole harvest of invention.

Francis Bacon

The 80C32 Forth and BASIC-52 projects are very little invested, lots of people benefit, some companies who are asking lots of bucks for antiquated software get clobbered, and we all have lots of fun on Internet!

And you get to learn some weird Forth and BASIC-52 internals.

So let's get software working inexpensively and well. Over Internet, of course.

Silicon Valley got blindsided not only by Windows 2000 reliability but probably even more by Visual Basic 6.0.

This is particularly true when coupled with USB 2.0 and super fast 80C32 SOCs.

Who wants to spend money programming some archane microcontroller at the peripheral side with antiquated software? When you can do the job easier in Visual Basic 6.0 or C/C++.

Programmer productivity using Visual Basic 6.0 is an order of magnitude more than C/C++.

Sheriff's book not only explains in writing how VB 6.0 is integrated into Microsoft Office but Sheriff has a web site with code examples.

Csd wants to integrate the Microsoft software environment into peripheral Forth and BASIC-52++™ [If you want to write lawyer letters for about 8 years. Or, even worse, pay a shyster to try to do it for you] through Windows.

We did the DOS interface about twenty years ago.

Wednesday November 13, 2002 10:27

Oops, csd mistakenly used PC/ASSEMBLER™ when PC/ASSEMBLER® is appropriate ... after 8 years with about one lawyer letter a year.

Here is PC/ASSEMBLER® at the patent and tradmark website.

Word Mark PC/ASSEMBLER

Goods and Services IC 016. US 002 005 022 023 029 037 038 050. G & S: computer programs and program manuals packaged as a unit for use in incremental interactive assembler programming on personal computers. FIRST USE: 19850101. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 19850401

Mark Drawing Code (1) TYPED DRAWING

Serial Number 73619885

Filing Date September 15, 1986

Supplemental Register Date August 7, 1987 Registration Number 2183073

Registration Date August 18, 1998

Owner (REGISTRANT) PAYNE, PATRICIA DBA COMPUTER SYSTEMS DOCUMENTATION INDIVIDUAL UNITED STATES P.O. BOX 5478 ALBUQUERQUE NEW MEXICO 87115

Type of Mark TRADEMARK

Register SUPPLEMENTAL
Live/Dead Indicator LIVE

Now to try to make some money with this. And have some fun too!

An Israeli was also tying to trademark PC/ASSEMBLER for a printed circuit board assembler.

So we had to defend our claim while the trademark office slowly over 8 years thought about our arguments.

Perhaps we should post the letter to see how frustrating dealing with Patents and Trademarks is?

You use ™ while you are writing lawyer letters and hopefully waiting for ®.

Containing software development costs is very important, especially in a possibly deflating economy.

Visual Basic 6.0, Visual C/C++ are real bargains along with 80C32 Forth and BASIC-52 too, of course.

So getting Forth and BASIC-52++[tm, tee hee] is a top priority task for the success of selling 80C32 SOCs.

It took csd 8 years to get the official government trademark PC/ASSEMBLER® with a fair number of lawyer letters!

Users can't afford antiquated non-operating system development environments. You know, Keil.

Users need to get a small amount of software running quickly in high level and some assembler on their 80C32 SOC.

Users need an interactive development environment supporting incremental assembler and compiler which runs on the 80C32 SOC.

Users need a interactive operating system on a SOC so they can troubleshoot problems interactively over Internet rather than have to make service calls.

SOC, other than 80C32s, have a huge, and potentially ruinous, software problem.

The expense of development of operating systems and compilers, other than Forth of course, will be great.

Besides with USB 2.0 who wants or needs to write lots of software on a peripheral microcontroller when it can be done easily inside a gigahertz PC?

Tuesday November 12, 2002 07:43

Jim Turley writes The Death of ASICs in the 64 page Embedded Systems Programming magazine

It's a good time to be a programmer. Writing software is cheaper than creating hard-wired logic, it's easier and quicker to correct mistakes, and, best of all, microprocessors are getting faster than other silicon chips.

This may be true, however, the question of where a programmer wants to write code currently is in question.

On a peripheral microcontroller or in a PC.

USB 2.0 should shift the 'where' to inside the PC because of the software rich environment compared to the software poor environment at the peripheral end.

Embedded Systems Programming continue to get thinner likely because of reduced advertisers. The 'where?'

Monday November 11, 2002 17:17

High tech is at the focus of a deflation.

The Gigahertz AMD XP chips we buy at less than $100.

1/2 gig of PC133 ram is selling for less than $50 in Albuquerque this weekend.

But there is good news too. Get the job done without spending lots of bucks and have fun!

Forth, BASIC-52 [++, course] and 80C32 USB SOCS still look attractive for advantages enumerated on this page.

MBIA

Who's going to pay off that debt? Likely few.

Who's going to lose their investments. Likely us.

So csd better get some interesting, somewhat profitable, and, fun projects going just in case retirement checks get smaller.

Forth is relatively easy to port to a SOC because most of the work has been previous done.

BASIC-52 is a bit more complicated. One reason is that BASIC-52 isn't disk based.

BASIC-52 compiled program like

100 a = 2
200 b = 3
300 print a+b

is loaded into the BASIC-52 chip as a fast typest would do. No file disk buffers.

Forth on the other hand Forth has both terminal and disk buffer as seen in the memory map below.

BASIC-52 works in both the compile and interpret states.

For example,

here's a BASIC-52 line entered in 80C32 USB system terminal emulator.

When Enter is keyed 5 appears on the line below the a.

So BASIC-52 needs a bit of spiffing up to be presentable with a 80C32 USB SOC.

Floating point arithmetic, of course, should be done on the PC side of the USB interface. And maybe some other work too?

Csd's first task is to get 8051 Forth working on all Windows operating system in a Windows window coded in Visual Basic 6.0, Visual C/C++, and inline assembler from its previous DOS version which was coded in Forth.

Sunday November 10, 2002 19:52

When technology changes old players have no advantage over new players.

USB 2.0 and super-fast 80C32 [not the others!] SOCs are new technology.

Psst! You want to do the computations inside a gigahertz PC using Microsoft Visual C/C++ and Visual Basic 6.0 communicating with an 80C32 intelligent sensor running either BASIC-52++ [TM, of course,] or Forth over USB 2.0. Not in a software-poor obscure microcontroller.

TM?

Come on. No one makes, or should make, money selling the ideas of others!

We will do this for the consulting bucks! And cheap book fees, now in HTML, course. Along with all source code.

The peripheral microcontroller people can't afford to develop the required software.

They didn't think of the total solution. Or perhaps concealed their problem to venture capitalists? For business reasons, of course.

And, of course, they will suffer the penalty. Chapter 7 or 11. The real world, again.

Then distribute this over Internet to customers.

And provide the PC side VB USB app and wdm driver skeletons.

Just think what these 80C32 SOC/BASIC-52++[ TM, of course]/Forth application customers are going to do in the marketplace.

Simply clobber unintelligent competition who went with no or unestablished 80C32 operating systems.

This isn't much work provided you use the absolute genius [brighter than absolutely brilliant] software ideas of Charles Moore [a software Newton].

But Moore has some pretty weird ideas [only one file, the screen file]. But this has to be considered historically.

So you have to watch Moore's ideas in real world situations. And the Forthians too.

Companies have gone bankrupt using Moore's ideas.

Likewise the Forthians have chapter 7ed, not 11, a number of companies.

Forthians, in general, are most interested in messing with Forth than getting the job done.

The absolutely brilliant ideas of Intel [Tom Kautausky, sp?], Numega Driverworks, and 80C32 SOC vendor peripheral hardware ideas should be used.

But you have to acknowledge that Moore, Kautausky, the ladies at Numega, and some of the hardware SOC builders probably have done better than you can do it. They did, trust us.

Getting an interactive incremental compiling and assembling operating system working on a peripheral microcontroller, especially an 80C32, is totally fun!

When the operating system is working, the 80C32 becomes totally friendly. Your buddy which will do anything you tell it to do, even compile and assembler code from a disk file on a PC, and will let you interactively look inside of it.

We learned this at Sandia National Laboratories. The fun way.

Now we can about access these intelligent 80C32 running BASIC-52++[TM, of course] over Internet to reduce the cost of hardware maintenance and software distribution in source code, of course. For those who wish to participate, of course.

So let's the vendors who spent lots of money on Keil antiquated, expensive, and non-established operating system software go bankrupt in this likely deflationary economic cycle.

And their customers, too, who did not see the merit of using an established operating system on an 80C32. And went the C route, or even stupider yet, assembler route.

While we make money and have a fun time!

We, the participants, of course.

Csd generated a wdm driver skeleton with 2 bulk input and output endpoints, 1 each of an interrupt and control endpoints. And no isochronous endpoints. The weather was rotten yesterday.

But before usb communications the DOS Forth interface to the 8051 must be converted to a C++ wdm windows interface.

Next weekend quail season opens in New Mexico. This may slow down progress a bit.

The BASIC-52++[tm], Forth, Windows, Internet project looks to be shaping up to be a fun, worthwhile, and even profitable project for those, of course, who participate.

Look at someother neat, creative, and positive New Mexico projects. Kubelwagen shop tour and Aschwanden!

Friday November 8, 2002 06:46

Csd begins writing the C interface code to and the C++ wdm driver now that the terminal emulator is successfully capturing and displaying a line from the keyboard.

Here's the emulator with a Forth ok sequence.

Look at QUIT below very carefully. There is a leading blank on the first ok. In this way you can how Forth got where it is.

Csd types a Forth line.

Both BASIC-52 and Forth are two state operating systems. Interpret or compile. : starts a subroutine compile, ; stops a subroutine compile.

add adds the top two 16 bit numbers from the data stack and returns the sum. 2 3, now forth is back in the interpret state are pushed on the stack. add is then executed and 5 is at the top of the stack. . prints the value 5 the line below the :.

Csd hopes you can see where we are going.

1 Forth operates on an 80C32 system, like Cypress's EZ-USB-FX or maybe even some other intellegent SOC vendor's 80C32.

2 USB support is developed [ported?] to Forth and Forth assembler.

From software standpoint Cypress did about everything wrong on the 80C32 side.

Keil, assembler, and no operating system on the 80C32.

3 RS-232 communications are replaced by USB.

The most important!!!

4 Working Forth assembler USB code is ported to BASIC-52++ [tm].

++, of course, since we have usb support floating point math can be done on the PC side and we don't have to waste 80C32 ROM or RAM with unnecessary floating point extension code.

Develop assembler code on a 80C32 Forth machine, then port it to a BASIC-52 machine is an old trick.

Since you develop it on the target machine with an interactive incremental assembler, the developer can get the code working in short order with no development system.

Forth is okay in some settings. Forth is totally incompatible with anything you have ever learned before. Therefore the numbers of adopters will be small.

BASIC-52 is lots better from the standpoint of adopters.

BASIC-52 is compatible with what engineers and lots of Visual Basic 6.0 programmers already know. Therefore, BASIC-52 will win in the marketplace.

Jameco sells the 80C52-BASIC for $19.95. An 80C32 sells for $4.49.

The cost of software development for an BASIC part is on orders of magnitude less than for an 80C32.

Experienced people discovered BASIC-52 and Forth apps are lots more reliable than software produced with other technologies. Namely C.

The 80C32 SOC vendors have an opportunity to have their parts become 80C52-BASIC++ [tm] parts by merely flashing the software. What an opportunity!

Give csd a call if you want to participate in this project.

Thursday November 7, 2002 15:34

Using the single step and debug window of Visual Basic 6.0, the problem with 'l' was located and a work-around included.

For some currently unknown reason "l" increments ListIndex after the subroutine updating the keyboard string has been exited.

In this project PC Forth code is being ported from a DOS app to Visual C++ at ring 0 and Visual Basic at ring 3.

The really important point is that nothing is being reinvented.

The ultimate enhancement for this project is switching from rs 232 communications to USB.

The PC side will be made to work directly in Windows rather than out of a DOS window.

The correct jpg for interpret has been fixed.

Csd is working on the terminal input for both Forth and BASIC-52. There was almost an absolutely brilliant solution ... in about a half dozen lines of code.

But, alas, a problem has arisen.

Two jpgs show testing the keyboard input for the maximum number of lines and characters per line.

When focus is on the terminal screen, the user begins to type then the typed characters appears one the line down from the last response of Forth or BASIC-52.

An "ok"

Notice that the text is highlighted in dark blue. We can tolerate that.

However, when an "l" [EL not ONE] is entered the dark blue highlight scrolls down [circular]. No other characters cause this!

The plan for all software is that one should try to do the job in the highest level language first, then drop down to lower levels as needed ... which may include building some hardware.

Csd will fiddle with Visual Basic 6.0 to try to eliminate both the blue background and l-scroll. But not too much time will be spent since this is not an essential material problem [legal parlance].

The keyboard entry works, so the next task is to pass the line from the ring 0 VB app to a wdm driver at ring 0.

Csd has a plan to migrate from rs 232 to USB which includes using rs 232 historical Forth and BASIC-52 to debug the USB code.

Csd, of course, has a Cypress EZ-USB-FX board. Included is a largely useless, expensive, and antiquated incomplete Keil C and assembler development software system. You need to pay over $2k to get a fully functional version of this antiquated system! And, if memory serves correctly, you need to pay an annual maintenance fee.

But we're going to try to do something about this! And have fun while doing it too.

Keep in mind that one ultimate goal is to be able to log on to a 80C32 SOC over Internet for interactive troubleshooting. And also source code software maintenance and upgrades!

Both BASIC-52 and Forth running on an 80C32 have incremental compilers and destructor capability.

Plus Forth has an incremental interactive or batch assembler!

Wednesday November 6, 2002 06:32

Csd is using part of the cover of Embedded Controller Forth for its icon.

See!

Windows 2000, which you can see some of, is being used.

Visual C/C++ works lots better on 2000 than on 98! Tuesday November 5, 2002 12:59

We have at least on 80C32 operating system running. The USB 80C32 SOC.

However, we can have one or more non-USB SOC operating systems running communicating first with the USB SOC either parallel or serial. The USB SOC passes terminal and disk data to the PC of the additional non-USB SOCs over USB using additional endpoints.

Therefore there can be more than one 80C32 operating system windows running at the same time. For this reason all operating system sub windows will all be MDI childs with the main operating system window.

Today is the start of the Remote 80C32 intelligent sensor/Windows project. You know, actual coding! The design has been worked out mentally after lots of study and planning.

Goal is to be able to log on to an 80C32 intelligent sensor running either a Forth or BASIC52 operating system [C is not an operating system. It's an American disease!] over Internet. This is to be used for remote hardware diagnostics and source code software maintenance of intelligent sensors.

We are going to do this with the least amount of work possible [absolute brilliance requires total laziness] using Visual Basic 6.0, C/C++ 6.0, in-line assembler, MFC, and Microsoft Office.

We aspire to absolute brilliance. And not having an unteathered creative psychotic design episode at the keyboard.

Absolute brilliance means that you use the good ideas [opposed to bad ideas like the Keil expensive and antiquated development system] of others. In this case the ideas of Moore and Katausky at the 80C32 end and gigahertz PCs running Microsoft Windows at the PC ends.

Automobiles dealers learned that when the located their dealerships close together they all did lots better financially.

The same logic likely applies to 80C32 SOC vendors.

This software should be made to run on as many different 80C32 SOC vendor's machines as possible.

But communications with the PC is through USB. So those vendors who didn't implement USB will be required to have a USB equipped 80C32 between their part and a PC. Look at it this way, the 80C32 USB SOC simply replaces a rs-232 line driver/receiver chip.

The legal project has halted.

The lawyers have to figure out what they are going to do. If they don't do the right thing, like settle, its criminal complaint affidavit writing time again on November 14, 2002.

Read more about the adventures of white ford and grey rabbit.

He who get up with the bright.
His kite will fly right.
Benjamin Franklin?

This is senior citizen stuff!

The last time bill did an 8051/PC project, bill did the 8051 side of the software.

Joseph Flores did the PC side.

This time bill is doing the PC side using the most modern tools.

At the time of 8086 PCs were used. Forth was okay on a PC then. But not now. We're using Microsoft's outstanding tool.

BASIC-52 and Forth on the 80C32 side is still the ticket today as it was then.

Monday November 4, 2002 15:17

When picking anything one needs to have in mind a set of criteria that one is trying to satisfy. You know, the requirements.

In our search here, we a looking for the best solution for an operating system on an 80C32 SOC.

There are other real time operating systems for an 80C32 but when you start to match their capabilities, advantages and disadvantages with that of BASIC-52 and Forth they come out very poorly.

Body of knowledge of both BASIC-52 and Forth has been established over 10-20 years which is going to be hard to overcome by anyone who thinks they can do better.

And those likely self proclaimed geniuses who embark to design a new 80C32 operating system, rather than enhance BASIC-52 or Forth are likely to create a mukinfuss. And go broke in the process too.

A mad scientist crossed an abalone with a crocodile hoping to produce and abodile.
But, alas, things did go quite a planned.
What resulted was a crockabaloney.

Here's a fun Laissez Faire Electronic Times Internet article on cryptographic algorithm criteria which also tells the etymology [et's be intellectural] the word mukinfuss. Sandia National Labs again.

Csd is going to start designing and writing code to connect both BASIC-52 and Forth machines to Windows so that 80C32 SOC intelligent sensors can be interactively logged on to over Internet.

This will be written in Microsoft C/C++ 6.0, in line assembler, and Visual Basic 6.0.

Not Forth!!! We made a mistake here a long time ago. Now is the time to correct that mistake.

The Forth metacompiler should have been written in GW BASIC! Gee whiz.

Just think how easy that would have been to port of Visual Basic 6.0! Sunday November 3, 2002 09:11

The other project is progressing. We all have, or should, do different things. Ligation was forced on us by lawyers. And we are responding as best we can.

Look at all the interesting stuff happening in the south of Brazil. But we're doing some real interesting stuff here too.

High tech is real interesting and real scary too. Too much for the marketplace?

Let's look at bit more carefully where the Brazilians are that are doing the really neat BASIC-52 and Forth work. Here's a map of Santa Caterina. Look at Florianopolis on the island and Blumenau.

Then let's look at the German influence.

Germans migrated, or escaped, to south America at the end of the second world war.

Picture of the kubelwagen might bring tears to the eyes of some of the FURB and Federal University of Santa Catarina students' grandfathers.

This internet stuff is getting more and more fun!

And Morales and Payne caught two New Mexico supreme court employees in a Title 18 criminal violation of federal law. So we'll take some time to post here for a SOC vendor.

Dr Richard Hanson and and bill experimented with Microsoft Netmeeting. It is possible to log on to an 8051 Forth development system on Internet using Netmeeting. This must be characterized as absolutely brilliant because we didn't do any work. Others did the work.

Those 80C32 SOC vendors who use the ideas of other to make their product very useful quickly and inexpensively will be a financial success. Think BASIC-52 and 80C32 Forth. Keil C cross development system is a bad idea.

Csd received some email from a SOC vendor asking details of Forth memory layout. So to be absolutely brilliant we have good news.

Mitch Derick and Linda Baker have a great layout for you to look at. Their book contains 8085 code.

Sandia labs had Henry Neugass redo the Derick and Baker book for our 8051 Forth. This is posted at this website.

Now for the bad news. The Brazilians may have wasted their time if they didn't use Netmeeting to solve the problem.

But any group who uses BASIC-52 and Forth are, of course, brilliant. But not absolute brilliant.

Absolute brilliance requires total lazyness so you have time to enjoy the finer things in life. One of which is not sitting in front of a computer!

And those who use Keil C cross development system are, of course, absoletely stupid.

This website is about making money and not going broke before this happens by wasting lots of money on a C cross development system.

You may wish to read some of the business articles at the Prudent Bear. Tice and company have used their absolute brilliance directing you to the works of others.

Depressions, not recessions, are usually proceeded by a high tech shakeout. Bill was told by an engineer on the Alaska ferry Kennicott.

Improved steel production methods in 1896; Electric motors in 1929.

The engineer told bill his ship was also stopped and boarded by Iranians during the Iraq-Iran war. The Iranian boarding officer got his BS at Mississippi state, the engineer said!

Csd predicts that USB 2.0, fast 80C32 SOCs, gigahertz PCs, Microsoft exquisite Visual C/C++ and Visual BASIC are going to do the number on many peripheral hardware and software [Java] companies. Friday November 1, 2002 17:17

The BOOT-UP LITERALS and metacompiled nucleus and app part of the dictionary are in ROM on a ROMed system. The remainder of 8051 Forth is in RAM. Of course, its best to immediate copy the ROM portion of Forth to RAM and execute entirely out of RAM.

Readers

Lot's of the hype about C is IT people trying to enter the embedded controller business. C has lots of disadvantages. Not an operating system. Memory hungry. Rotten memory management until fixed with constructors and destructors in C++ [Forth uses forget and BASIC-52 uses CLEAR for destructors].

C is an established business trying to establish itself in embedded controller software.

Time, we hope, to open your mind to others ideas. BASIC-52 and Forth. And make some money with your apps instead of spending it on Keil antiquated software.

And, of course, have fun while doing the software easily and interactively.

Others have done the work to allow us to do this! Thursday October 31, 2002 19:04

Bill sadly must return to his other project today. But this is a very important project too. The US legal system needs some fixing!

Hopefully this will give the 80C32 SOC vendors time to come up with the right decisions.

BASIC-52, Forth, USB 2.0, remote BASIC-52 and Forth

Zeitgeist again. And you thought you were first? Scooped again!

Look at what the Brazilians are doing. Remote Forth too. Scroll to the bottom of the left frame.

Absolute brilliance. We didn't have to do it. Thank goodness. They did it.

And, thanks to internet, we're in touch with some of the brilliant Brazilians!

Sent: Wednesday, October 30, 2002 7:03 PM
Subject: Re: Re: REXPIC

Very good this documentation!
Thanks!
How to get more about it?
How did you find me?
Miguel

Miguel, Google found you with a search on BASICON.

NIH - not invented here.

NIH is the mark of the truly uneducated and stupid person.

See that the Brazilians are funded by ATMEL who build an 80C52.

ATMEL also builds an ARM!

But as we know, USB 2.0 and super fast 80C32 SOCs running both BASIC-52 and Forth are going to do the number on ARM, MIPS, ARC, TENSILICA, ... etc.

The Sandia seismic data authenticator, seen below, used ATMEL eeproms.

Note the dates of 1997 and 1999. It always takes a lot longer than you think! But this is the real world.

So let's study what the brilliant Brazilians did. Carefully, slowly, and with great thought.

Think fewer maintenance trips! Wednesday October 30, 2002 20:11

BASICON bit the dust!

Csd's 8051 forth assembler was ported to BASICON and derivative boards running BASIC-52.

All readers please note these words carefully.

When we started with Forth at Sandia labs we did this so that we didn't have to purchase a development system. We had an onboard interactive incremental compiler and assembler operating system. We had source code.

And we could do most of the work in high level Forth as opposed to assembler.

Sandia labs had disasters with large assembler codes ... with US nuclear bomb projects!

What we did not realize is how much more reliable a Forth [or BASIC-52 too] operating system is.

Ray Duncan was the first, Bill remembers, to comment that when you work with Forth day in and day out you realize how reliable the technology is.

This has absolutely been csd's experience. And others who make money off from these super reliable systems. Even if they didn't realize it then. But they may now after trying alternate technology.

And we had a simply fun time doing the Forth work! And, of course, bill wrote a book about how we had all of this fun!

And bill thinks he knows one reason why both Forth and BASIC-52 are more reliable. Reason is in the forth source code.

Bill is running Forth in a DOS window under 98SE on machine while he is composing this web page.

Forth spends its time in an infinite loop BEGIN ... AGAIN. See

Notice the RP! This intitalizes the return stack pointer. The return stack starts out fresh every time through the loop.

A Microsoft employee said that if you start Windows and let it run, it will eventually crash. Microsoft does not know why?

One likely cause might be a stack problem.

There are only two stacks in a Forth operating system the data stack and the return stack.

Everyone must keep in mind

• C is a compiler not an operating system.
• Forth is a real time interactive operating system.
• BASIC-52 is a real time interactive operating system.
• C is another "Oh hum" compiler. Fortran ported to a PDP 11.
• C is an American disease!
• Charles Moore is lots brigher than Dennis Richie, if computer ideas are weighed!
  
  

  Dennis M. Ritchie Ritchie came to Bell Labs in 1967 from Harvard University, where he had completed undergraduate work in physics and a doctorate in applied mathematics. Soon, he began helping Ken Thompson create Unix for minicomputers. He later transported Unix to the Interdata 8/32. The foundation for this portability mas a general-purpose language created in 1972 by Ritchie, who added data types and new syntax to Thompson's B language and renamed it C. In 1978, Ritchie co-authored The C Programming Language with Brian Kernighan, introducing this highly efficient language to the world. Since then, C has become the most widely used language in computers ot all sizes. The American National Standards Institute eventually established an ANSI standard for C. ELECTRONIC design, October 21,2002 Electronic design has in the Hall of Fame 2002 Inductees John Backus for FORTAN, Grace Hopper for COBOL Gary Kildall for CMP, and John L von Nuemann for the Princeton architecture ... as opposed to the Harvard architecture. No Charles Moore. No Kemeny and Kurtz for BASIC. No Bill Gates for BASIC. You can send an email to David Bursky Editor in Chief of Electronic design if you want.

  
  
• Memory vendors simply love C.

Below is a flow chart of interpret. Here's interpret

And where is this code coming from?

Out of the Sandia labs 8051 Forth operating system.

Who owns this code? You do taxpayer. You sent money to the feds with income tax, the fed sent some of your money to the National Security Agency, NSA sent some of that money to Sandia labs. And we spent your taxpayer money developing 8051 Forth. And had a simply great and fun time doing this.

But now it is time to put the code, wdm drivers, USB 2.0, pci code to work to make money for some of the 80C32 SOC vendors. And us, too, of course!

We are following Palm which ported its operating system from the Motorola dragonball to an ARM. The project looks like it is done.

But looks what's happened to Palm financially. A financial disaster.

80C32 SOCs need either a BASIC-52 variant or Forth operating system connected to a PC through USB 2.0. This is very inexpensive to do since the technology is known and source codes are available.

There is a problem with the SOC designers, however. They add too much FLASH code memory and not enough RAM.

BASIC-52 fits in 8k of code. But required external [additional chip] RAM.

Here's an excellent site on BASIC-52.

One goal of this proposed work is already in place. Zeitgeist again.

Try out the 8052-Basic chip on the web. This is an actual system that you can control remotely. Enter commands and enter and run your own programs. From the Remote Experiment Lab at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Brazil. (In Portuguese and English).

The goal is to troubleshoot an intelligent sensor having problems over internet! Fewer maintenance trips!!!

Sandia labs 8051 Forth which includes an ROMed interactive incremental 80C32 assembler and full screen text editor [Flores and Payne got a bit carried away] fits in about 18K bytes of memory.

So let's try to clue the 80C32 hardware SOC designers on what should be done with 80C32 memory architecture. They did an overkill on FLASH and underkill on RAM.

FLASH, csd was told is very expensive to put on a chip. Thursday October 31, 2002 09:57

Here's ideal 80C32 memory model A full 64k bytes of code and ram memory minus 2. 4. 8. 16. 32. 64. 128, or 256 bytes which decodes to external parallel i/o. In Embedded controller Forth for the 8051 family decoding was for the 256 bytes of i/o space. Also essential is that both the Harvard [separate code and data spaces] and Princeton [overlapped code and data spaces] architectures should be software selectable. This is implemented by anding -rd and -psen. At Sandia labs we started with 8kx8 byte rams and eproms. But at the end used 32kx8 eproms and rams. The Sandia seismic data authenticator used on 32kx8 eeprom and one 32kx8 ram. HOWEVER, if we had a 64kx8 ram available then we would of used it. Now listen up hardware engineers. The first then we would have done is to copy the 32kx8 [0 to 7fff, 0 32,767] eeprom into ram. This is done by copying code into the high 32kx8 memory to execute. Then we would have deselect eeprom and run entirely out of ram. But we had real estate problems and a power budget so we couldn't do this. Hardware engineers, the interrupt vector addresses are in low memory. Setting these into FLASH is a bad idea! Now if USB is connected software can be dowloaded from a PC, compiled, assembled, linked and loaded by either a BASIC-52 or Forth operating system. All of this is cheap to do some a software standpoint. Let's all hope that one or more of the 80C32 SOC builder see the merit of this proposal. Venture Investment in a Dive Rising Risk Scares Off the Capitalists BY MICHAEL LIEDTKE The Associated Press SAN FRANCISCO - With Losses from their high-rolling days still piling up, shell- shocked venture capitalists continued to shun new risks in this year's third quarter, dropping the industry's investment activity to a 41/2-year low, according to a report released Tuesday. Venture capitalists invested $4.48 billion in startups during the period ending Sept. 30, the weakest quarter since the first three months of 1998, according to a survey compiled by PricewaterhouseCoopers, Venture Economics and the National Venture Capital Association. This year's third quarter represented a 48 percent decrease from the same time last year, when venture capitalists poured $8.68 billion into startups, the report said. It also marked the ninth consecutive quarter in which venture capitalists curtailed their investments from the preceding three-month period. The reasons for the downturn have remained largely unchanged since the Internet gold rush turned into a financial bloodbath during the spring of 2000. As the stock market began to turn a cold shoulder to dot-coms and other high-tech businesses, venture capitalists found themselves stuck with unprofitable startups that no one else wanted. Meanwhile, even promising startups are finding it increasingly difficult to find customers interested in spending heavily on technology, further reducing their chances of survival and saddling venture capitalists with the worst losses in the industry's history. "We all have had a very cold shower," said Bob Grady, a venture capitalist with the Carlyle Group. Most venture capitalists and analysts believe the industry's investments will dwindle even more in the next few quarters. "We haven't seen the end of the decline," said Robert "Robin" Bellas, a general partner with Morganthaler Ventures. "My gut feeling is that this won't stop until we get down to $2.5 billion to $3 billion per quarter." Venture capitalists have responded to the adversity by shoveling more money into the best startups in their existing portfolios and investing less in new opportunities. The number of startups that received their first infusion of venture capital during the third quarter totaled 159, the lowest number in nearly eight years, according to the report. Back in the heyday of dot-coms in late 1999 and early 2000, nearly 1,000 startups per quarter were getting their first dose of venture capital. Albuquerque Journal Wednesday October 30, 2002

Csd has a Cypress EZ-USB-FX development board.

Cypress's design ideas for USB are very good, in csd's opinion. Both Harvard and Princeton architectures, no ALE, great manuals, ... But there may be several problems. Cypress's part is NOT [keep looking as we fix screw ups! But this is the real world] a SOC.

Before devoting lots of time to a chip, one should make fairly certain that the chip will be around for a while. There is some doubt of that in Cypress's case.

Messages report that Cypress will be forced to file for bankruptcy within several years.

TI continues to look better! And let's all hope that Cygnal is able to pull it off!

We must all keep in mind that we are in this for the money! And a good time while we make it.

Csd really needs to post some stuff on the classical Japanese company. For this is the way business should be. Not the messes in business we are currently into.

Csd has a box where this is stored too! In the garage. This was found while searching for the BASIC-52 material. Tuesday October 29, 2002 18:20

Csd speculates that USB 2.0 and 80C32 SOCs may be a next high tech wave. There are lots of sound reasons to go this way.

Csd found its BASIC-52 box on Sunday.

The last BASIC-52 projects were done about 10 years ago. In one project 8051 Forth was used to write and debug assembler code which was later ported into BASIC-52.

The need for an efficient and inexpensive way to do interactive 80C32 peripheral side software coupled with Windows,USB 1/2, Visual C/C++ and Basic 6.0, and wdm drivers prompts a careful look at how all of these technologies can be used together to solve the problem.

A possibly fun retirement project!

The MSC BASIC-52 manual was given to Bill by Intel employee Mark Thompson along with the source code for BASIC52 on the date on the cover.

Thompson is dead.

Boutelle is dead. His ashes tossed into the sea at Half Moon bay.

But the ideas which both helped to develop and perpetuate are alive. Both Boutelle and Thompson live after death with their ideas.

Think 80C32 SOCs! And USB 2.0!

The rules have changed.

And we are about ready to take advantage of the new rules!

And, of course, have some real fun! Without too much work.

Other very brilliant people have done most of the work. I one cares to take the time to study what they did.

NIH [not invented here] is the kiss of financial death. Never reinvent.

Original meritiorous invention is fine. But this rarely happens.

Highly intelligent, especially in their minds, hyperactive, undereducated, unpublished and perhaps psychotic designers should be avoided. This is a recipe for disaster! For these purple designers do worse than merely create messes. They create mukinfusses!

Undereducated does not mean lack of formal education.

Jerry Boutelle only had a high school education and an honorable discharge from the Coast Guard. But Boutelle was extensively read, knew about all microcomputers in detail, knew C, assemblers, and wrote the absolutely brilliant Nautilus Forth metacompilerS.

What were are doing here is very un-university oriented.

Forth and BASIC knowledge is not pushed at Universities or maybe even understood, other than maybe at Dartmouth and University of Rochester.

We must keep in mind

College professors teach what they know. They don't teach what they don't know.

bill payne

What you are looking for in a designer is an absolutely brilliant, highly educated, published, rational, and totally lazy designer.

Absolutely brilliant people realize

1 there are a lot of really smart people out there
2 and they aren't going to do it all themselves.

So absolutely brilliant people study the works of others long and hard, evaulate the merits of the works of others in light of problems to be solved, then try to enhance and extend previous work.

Zeitgeist! Others too, are doing this, 1 2 3 4 5. There must be an alternative to Keil. Tuesday October 29, 2002 16:12

We are on the move.. And aspire to become absolutely brilliant! by getting BASIC-52, with some enhancements [this is MORE THAN SECRET, NSI, NOFORN, ORCON, ... since we don't want others like the mechanic to know what we are going to do] working on one or more of the 80C32 SOCs. Why do absolutely brilliant people need to write about the importance of porting a variation of BASIC-52 to an 80C32 SOC? They don't. Intel has done this for us!!! CHAPTER 1 Introduction 1.1 INTRODUCTION TO MCS BASIC-52 Welcome to MCS® BASIC-52. This program functions as a BASIC interpreter occupying 8K of ROM in INTEL's 8052AH microcontroller. MCS BASIC-52 provides most of the features of "standard" BASICS, plus many additional features that apply to control environments and to the architecture of the 8052AH. The design goal of MCS BASIC-52 was to develop a software program that would make it easy for a hardware/software designer to interact with the 8052 device; but, at the same time not limit the designer to the slow and sometimes awkward constructs of BASIC. This program is not a "toy" like many of the so called TINY BASICS. It is a powerful software tool that can significantly reduce the design time of many projects. MCS BASIC-52 is ideal for so called embedded systems, where terminals are not attached to system, but the system controls and manipulates equipment and data. MCS BASIC-52 offers many unique hardware and software features, including the ability to store and execute the user program out of an EPROM, the ability to process interrupts within the constructs of a BASIC program, plus an accurate real time clock. In addition, the arithmetic routines and I/O routines contained in MCS BASIC-52 can be accessed with assembly language CALL routines. This feature can be used to eliminate the need for the user to write these sometimes difficult and tedious programs. All of the above are covered in this document. This is NOT a "How to Write Basic Programs" manual. Many excellent texts on this subject have been produced. Your local computer store can recommend many such texts. The descriptions of many of the statements in this manual involve rather detailed discussions that relate to interfacing MCS BASIC-52 to assembly language programs. If the user is not interested in using assembly language with MCS BASIC-52 these discussions may be ignored. If you are only interested in programming the MCS BASIC-52 device in BASIC, you can treat all statements the same way they would be in any standard BASIC interpreter. In reading this manual, you will find that some information may be repeated two or three times. This is not an accident. Years of experience have proven that one of the most frustrating experiences one encounters with manuals is trying to find a particular piece of information that the reader knows is in the manual, but can't remember where. So here's the stuff that has to be ported to a 80C32 flash based SOC. Intel MCS BASIC-52 1.5 INSTRUCTION SET SUMMARY COMMANDS RUN CONT LIST LIST# LIST@ (Vl.l) NEW NULL RAM ROM XFER PROG PROG1 PROG2 PROG3 (Vl.l) PROG4 (Vl.l) PROG5 (Vl.l) PROG6 (Vl.l) FPROG FPROG1 FPROG2 FPROG3 (Vl.1) FPROG4 (Vl.1) FPROG5 (V1.1) FPROG6 (Vi .1) STATEMENTS BAUD CALL CLEAR CLEAR(S&I) CLOCK(1&0) DATA READ RESTORE DIM DO-WHILE DO-UNTIL END FOR-TO-STEP NEXT GOSUB RETURN GOTO ON-GOTO ON-GOSUB IF-THEN-ELSE INPUT LET ONERR ONEXi ONTIME PRINT PRINT# PRINT@ (V1.1) PH0. PH0.# PH0.@ (V1.1) Ph1 PH1.# PH1.@ (V1.1) PGM (V1.1) PUSH POP PWM REM RETI STOP STRING U1(1&0) U0(1&0) LD@ (V1.1) ST@ (V1.1) IDLE (V1.1) RROM (V1.1) OPERATORS ADD (+) DIVIDE (/) EXPONENTIATION (**) MULTIPLY (*) SUBTRACT (-) LOGICAL AND (.AND.) LOGICAL OR (.OR.) LOGICAL X-OR (.XOR.) LOGICAL NOT (.OR.) ABS() INT() SGN() SQR() RND LOG() EXP() SIN() COS() TAN() ATN() >, >=, <,<=, <> ASC() CHR() CBY() DBY() XBY() GET IE IP PORT1 PCON RCAP2 T2CON TCON TMOD TIME TIMER0 TIMER1 TIMER2 XTAL MTOP LEN FREE PI BASIC-52 required a terminal emulator. Csd used the terminal emulator MIRROR for two BASIC-52 projects. This must run out of a DOS window now. And possibly won't run at all. This need to be converted to a windows application.

What TI is saying in its MSC1210 ad is so important, and hard to read below, that it is scanned in for all of us.

One must digitize at the sensor to avoid some really nasty real world problems.

Digital noise fouls low level analog signals. And what can be equally bad is that really high level analog noise can upset digital circuits which causes skipped Mux channels or even microcontroller software crashes.

TI/Burr-Brown likely knows this.

Let's hope TI is smart enough, like Intel, to get Forth and BASIC-52 working on their 80C32 parts. And to get their parts USB powered and connected to a PC via USB 2.0.

Cygnal, of course, is messing with the 500 pound gorilla in the market place.

TI/Burr-Brown advertises

24-bit ADC with no missing codes

We wonder if Cygnal can make the same claim?

Yesteday at about 16:00 csd got a phone call to participate in a survey.

The lady asked if we did microcontroller work. Then proceed to ask 8 bit?, 16 bit? 32 bit? 64 bit?

Csd undiplomatically explained to the lady that because of USB 2.0 and gigahertz PCs that those involved in 16, 32, and 64 bit microcontrollers are very likely to go bankrupt.

Because the intelligent decision is to use a super fast 80C32 to collect the data, then ship the data over USB 2.0 to a gigahertz PC, and do the computation in C/C++ or Visual Basic 6.0.

This, of course, will drag the Javans down the tubes with the unintelligent hardware vendors. But Forth software vendors have an unparalleled history of going broke!

Tuesday October 29, 2002 07:20

TI is the 500 pound gorilla. It sleeps where ever it wants.

Intel charted the correct course in software for its 8052 part with MCS® BASIC-52.

80C52 Forth is also good. But, hey, we realize Forth is not as popular as BASIC.

And we have some SECRET INFORMATION to make BASIC52 every bit as powerful, if not more, than Forth!

We can make BASIC52 a lot more friendly to engineers ... with an interactive incremental integral 80C32 assembler! Which closely resembles Microsoft's exquisite C/C++ inline assembler. Which Microsoft appeared to copy from a Forth assembler!!!

What Intel did with the Katausky [sp? - Mark Thompson only prounced the name when he gave bill the book and source code] BASIC-52 operating system is simply brilliant!

Now the question is what is TI or Dallas going to do? Follow Intel's lead?

Or do something simply stupid in software like Cygnal or Cypress? Monday October 28, 2002 20:32

Those 80C32s SOCs without USB support maybe in fairly good shape if Cygnal does the right thing with its upcoming USB part with on-board 5v to 3.3 regulation.

Cygnal is going to on-board regulation to drop the USB 5 volts [100 to 500 ma] to 3.3 volts.

Let's all hope Cygnal has a 3.3v output pin on their USB part which can be used to power a second 80C32 SOC!

There are a number of ways, both parallel and serial, that one 80C32 can talk to another.

This way a non-usb 80C32 SOC can use the USB connected 80C32 to communicate over usb. There, of course, is somewhat of a speed penalty.

Q Can an 80C32 SOC do real time floating point digital filtering?
A Yes, provided its connected to a gigHertz PC through USB 2. And you do the filtering in an app running in ring 0.

Real time peripheral computing looks to become real fun! Friday October 25, 2002 10:23

The original cygnal development system has two Cygnal parts. One 80C32 is U1, the fly speck chip, seen in the jpg. This communicates with a second 80C32 in a separate adapter box. Both are powered from a transformer which, of course, and communicating with an the antiquated Keil C development system over rs 232. These were disastrous blunders. The upcoming USB part development board hopefully will have 3.3v out of the Cygnal part and 5v available from the USB cable on a single development board. The prototype area can then contain a second 80C32 SOC connected either parallel or serial to the Cygnal USB part, if necessary for an application. This will provide a two, one fly speck sized, chip solution to many real-world problems. Having Forth and/or a modified BASIC52, each with an interactive incremental compiler and and assembler, working on both parts would be very helpful. Helpful because 1 Cost of the software development system is neglible. 2 Speed at which the 80C32 application can be written and debugged is on orders of magnitude faster than on a cross development system. 3 Forth and BASIC52 apps are super reliable in the field. 4 Most of the app development can be done in high level Forth or BASIC. 5 If additional speed is required, then Forth or BASIC subroutine are replace by assembler equivalents. A separate Window for the USB and non-USB 80C32 would be used to interact with each of the parts. The Windows 2000 8051 forth seen below at 1 and 2 is running in a DOS window running as a virtual 86 machine over rs 232. This needs to be changed to a Windows ring 3 app window communicating over USB 1/2.0. USB communications will solve the problem of a very fast PC communicating with an 8051 family microcontroller which has haunted the Sandia 8051 development system since it inception in the early 1980s. .

Realization with USB 2.0 running at 480 Mbits/sec is that it is unnecessary to have an ARM, MIPS, or DSP expense at the periphiperal end when computations, can be done faster in a gigahertz PC.

And look at all of the mixed signal hardware in some of the 80C32 SOCs!

Psst ... it's fairly easy to place a 80C32 usb 1/2 processor back-to-back with another without usb support and have Forth run on both of them. Each in its own Window.

Maximum cost is two endpoints for the usb part and 2 endpoints for the non-usb part.

The gigahertz PCs can apparently outperform DSPs with its exquisite NDP [numeric data processor] floating point hardware! This is not lost on those companies, like TI, who are into DSPs.

The software may be done as a ring 0 app or perhaps a ring 3 dll or Windows app.

But if you still see the merit of using an ARM, csd alerts to to ARM Forth.

When we decided to use 8085 Forth at Sandia labs, we required a ROMed 8085 incremental assembler. The 8085 assembled used <BUILDS DOES>.

Jerry Boutelle's Nautilus 1 metacompiler did not do <BUILDS DOES>. But the Natuilus 2 metacompiler does!

Bill, Joseph Flores and Konrad Roeder [hardware technician and mensa member] visited Ray Duncan in Maria del Ray to pick up the software.

While Duncan was editing-in <BUILDS DOES> add-on software into Nautilus 1 metacompiler software Duncan just received from Microprocessor Engineering, we went swimming in the Pacific Ocean.

When done right, Forth and BASICs are fun!

Csd speculates that the superfast 80C32s with USB 2.0 are simply going to clobber the ARMS, MIPS, and other MPUs in the marketplace.

Reason is that peripheral hardware costs go way down, while the software is cheaper to develop in the PC using Microsoft's Visual C/C++ with its exquisite Forth like assembler with Forth like local labels, and Visual Basic apps.

But we have to get Forth and BASIC52 running intelligently on one or more 80C32 SOCs.

Current leader in USB 80C32 is Cypress

as Keil discovered.

Cypress got rid of ale, has usb 1/2 support, a dma engine, and, VERY IMPORTANT, supports both the Harvard and Princeton architectures.

But the Cypress parts aren't a SOC. Alas.

But watch out for Texas Instrument once it gets moving with its TI/Burr Brown 80C32 SOCs.

TI has the resources to roll over about any other semiconductor company if it chooses.

And TI has rightly chosen to go with the 80C32. But also does ARM for the Palm ... where the OS still doesn't seem to be working yet. Thursday October 24, 2002 13:01

The goal of the 80C32 USB SOCs, Forth, and BASIC52 is provide a useful product at a reasonable cost.

Holding down software costs is essential. Buying a $99 Cygnal development system, then having to pay about $2,000 to Keil is simply unreasonable.

Stock prices of Texas Instruments TXN plummeted. Cypress's stock prices are also in the tank CY.

So maybe it's time to curtail unnecessary 80C32 SOC development software costs? And make some money!

We, indeed, live in interesting times.

Csd has identified many 80C32 SOC players.

A USB SOC [The Cypress EZ-USB-FX/2 is not a SOC] should be a major player soon.

Who is going to solve both the hardware and software problems? We'll see.

Csd is using an Epson Perfection 1250 USB scanner using a AMD 1.6 gigaHz XP running Windows 98SE.

Scanner using software occasionally announces that someone else is using the scanner USB port. The system must be rebooted to make things work. But there's apparently a driver fix at the Epsons website.

USB still is not without problems but the advantages are so numerous [built in multiplexing, power through the cable, hardware flow control, ...] that csd believes this is the wave of the future! Especially if the peripheral host in an 80C32 SOC running a super reliable operating system like Forth or BASIC52! Wednesday October 23, 2002 14:30

Let's think about How BASICs Work and porting BASIC52 or a variant to a 80C32 SOC equipped with a USB and DMA engines.

BASIC52 has floating point extension software.

No one in their right mind [retirement checks are simply great for freedom of expression] would install a floating point extension on a USB equipped 80C32 SOC.

Reason is that the Basic implementer would take two floating point numbers, package them in a USB packet, then send them to a gigahertz PC for processing. The PC would then return the answer.

On the PC side there are three places the floating point computations could be done.

1 In ring 0 wdm driver using either C or assembler. C would likely be best. At least at first.

2 In a ring 3 dll written in either C or Visual Basic.

But the two numbers and the floating point operation code would have to be transferred, presumably though DeviceIoControl to ring 3 and the answer sent back from ring 3 to ring 0, then over USB to the 80C32 SOC.

3 The ring 3 dll could pass the two numbers and floating point operating code to a ring 3 Visual Basic 6.0 application which would do the floating point operation, then pass the result to the dll, which in turn would, pass the result to the ring 0 wdm driver, which would send the result to the 80C32 SOC via USB.

You might think that no one would be stupid enough to select option 3 when 1 is the obvious choice.

Wrong! But this is another sad story.

Csd preaches the importance of digitizing at the sensor. This was learned from magnetometer and seismometer builder experts.

Google, csd is convinced knows all.

Google picked up the Fun Stuff page which identified another screw up which likely resulted from not digitizing at the sensor.

About Dynamometer Numbers

The dynamometer (chassis or engine) can ... Friday August 30, 2002 08:25. Thanks for the wheel lecture yesterday. You saved me money and grief. You can do a headliner and rear panels yourself. ... www.geocities.com/computersystemsdocumentation/don/don1.htm - 88k - Cached -Similar pages

Cygnal is moving ahead with a 80C32 USB 1.1 SOC ... and hopefully not another development system blunder [No USB and expensive and antiquated Keil C cross development system].

But there is another Austin company working on a USB 2.0 SOC!!!

But this company might not have the good sense, as Cygnal did, to use a 80C32 SOC. But, on the other hand, they might, if alerted.

Let's hope that some of these companies sees the merits of intelligently porting FORTH or BASIC52 to their parts.

And if you want to see 80C32 FORTH run super fast, it's simple with USB.

Do -FIND and several other words on the PC instead of the 80C32!

Same is true for BASIC52. Wednesday October 23, 2002 07:39

Getting Forth and BASICs working on some of the 80C32 SOCs is becoming a top priority project.

Communication between the 80C32 and PC must be USB 1/2, of course, through a C++ wdm driver, connected to a C dll, which communicates with a Visual Basic 6.0 app! Tuesday October 22, 2002 12:58

Hey, we all make mistakes, but hopefully not essential material mistakes.

So learn, enjoy, and have fun doing operating systems ... which others have done much better in the past than any of us can likely do in the future.

So let's borrow and port the brilliant ideas of others. Monday October 21, 2002 20:19

The object is to not reinvent operating systems but to study existing ones with the thought of porting on or more to 80C32 USB SOCs.

Sandia National Labs paid to port FORTH from the 8085 to the 8051. The National Security Agency largely paid for that port.

At Sandia labs we studied operating systems before deciding on one for the 8085 family. FORTH won.

If any aspiring 8051 operating system designer and implementer thinks he or she can do a better job than Charles Moore of designing an interactive, memory efficient, super reliable, disk based operating system which hosts its own interactive incremental compiler and assembler, then they should think again.

The object at Sandia labs was get crypto hardware and software applications working fast and have fun while we were doing it.

Flores and Payne did only as much systems work as required to get Forth working quickly. And we hired FORTH experts Gary Fierbach, Ray Duncan and Jerry Boutelle to help us.

So perhaps it's best to port 8051 FORTH to one or more SOCs and get on to the job of writing super reliable apps without a hardware development system or the Keil C cross development system?

So appreciate what Loring Wirbel wrote in 1996 since it does relate to FORTH and Bill's other project. And to what's happening about Iraq.