Petri Launiainen's Blog: A Brief History of Everything Wireless, page 10

Another mobile behemoth is fading away fast

Sony, in my opinion, has always made decent and stylish devices, with a reputation of producing solid products. However, their product line has not reached top reviews recently, apart from the very latest Xperia XZ3, which was seen as a great attempt to help to revive this notorious consumer electronics ...

Sidereal Day

We have gotten used to the fact that our days are divided into 24 hours. This, however, is called the Solar Day, and it is not the time it takes the Earth to rotate around its axis, although probably most of us would say “24 hours” if asked “how long ...

“You can't make money from Open Source”

A few years back, Peter Levine, who is general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, said that "Tell me a single company other than Red Hat that makes more than a billion dollars from Linux." The first question to ask, of course, is “you mean three billion is ...

Goodbye geeky-talk, hello simple numbers...

Engineers love having cryptic shorthand references for things: the more numbers and letters, the better. One good example of this is the naming of different Wi-Fi versions. As I explain in the book, the base standard is 802.11, and it has evolved over the years multiple times. This has been ...

Another recycled brand: Palm

Just like Nokia no longer makes “Nokia Phones”, Palm is being resurrected by the Chinese manufacturer TCL. But their newest device is kind of a mixed bag. The new Palm really lives up to its name: it is about the same size as your palm. Basically, it is a tiny ...

Game over for SLS?

NASA lost manned access to space when the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011. This was a major embarrassment for a space-faring nation with a history of glorious achievements: to get people up to the International Space Station, NASA has had to rely on 1960's Soviet era technology and hitch ...

Install a "free" app. Pay with your privacy.

Every shopping center, airport and corner diner offers a “free app” these days. On top of these, you have a plentiful selection of free, auxiliary apps like compass or flashlight, which seem to offer convenience in exchange for nothing. The reality is often different: when a flashlight app containing just ...

Hayabusa-2 is making history

In 2005, the attempt by the Japanese Hayabusa space probe to land a “rover” on an asteroid failed: while the rover deployment command was on the way, Hayabusa started an autonomous altitude correction, causing the deployed rover have enough speed to escape the minuscule gravitational pull of the asteroid Itokawa: ...

Unexpected side effects of modernizing old things

Locks are age-old technology: you create a clever mechanical system and a matching key, and depending on the quality of the lock, breaking in by brute force is often more successful than trying to pick the lock. Some such solutions from 100+ years back are still going strong. With the ...

Germany prepares for 5G auction

When Germany auctioned the 3G spectrum in 2000, they made an absolute killing: the auction brought well over 40 billion euros to the government coffers, including a hefty slice from a Finnish, then primarily state-owned operator Sonera, which eventually had to write down the whole investment. As a result, every ...