Petri Launiainen's Blog: A Brief History of Everything Wireless, page 5

The (operator) Empire Strikes Back

Remember pagers? Those pocketable thingies that were used to send you short text messages? They were the first to go the way of the Dodos when SMS was introduced. SMS quickly became a world-wide success, with true world-wide coverage: the cross-operator functionality worked well enough that SMS could be used ...

"Did I say one billion? I meant to say two..."

In my earlier blog entry, I wrote about the dramatic reduction of orbital injection costs brought in by the reusability of SpaceX’s rockets. NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) was projecting a cost of almost billion dollars per launch, which did not compare well with SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, that ...

“An inexplicable black dot crossed the Sun”

Let’s lay down the facts: Mercury and Venus orbit the Sun closer than our observation point, the Earth. And as the orbits of the planets in our Solar System are almost completely aligned on the same plane, it is inevitable that sometimes the inner planets will end up exactly between ...

Why Is Science Important for Society?

My summary on "Why Is Science Important for Society?" was included in the collection of essays on the subject at UpJourney. Those of you who have read my book may notice that the overall message is unsurprisingly not too far off from the storyline written in the Epilogue. ...

The new challenges of AI

The IT world has gone through several transformations that have significantly cut down the cost of operations and improved profitability over the years. We used to spend a ton of money for our data processing capacity while maintaining and updating both the hardware and the software on our computers. Now ...

Stratolauncher is back in business

As I wrote here, the dream of launching satellites to space from a huge carrier airplane specially built for this purpose appeared to die along with Paul Allen, the ex-Microsoft billionaire who put his money on various good and often groundbreaking causes during his lifetime. But the latest ...

Another security hole is about to be blocked...

...but not everyone is happy. Why? DNS stands for Domain Name System. It is the invisible glue that is applied behind the scenes every time you refer to an address on the Internet by name. As the Internet does not work with names but uses numbers for addressing the servers, ...

Shedding light on Dark Data

Here's a little introduction to the concept of Dark Data, this time written for my employer's blog.

Microsoft: "Me too!"

Recently I commented on Apple’s new drive trying to establish a new reason for their high prices: privacy. While Google has fully embraced the low road in this matter, compensating their “free” applications with 360-degree spying of users, Apple has increasingly expressed the view that they can afford ...

What? No 5G?

You must have been living in a cave for the past couple of years if you claim that you have not heard of this latest “incredible” upgrade of our wireless systems: 5G. As I wrote already here, although 5G gives you phenomenal speeds and the lowest latencies ever, ...