Petri Launiainen's Blog: A Brief History of Everything Wireless, page 7
July 2, 2019
Nine dollars per hour...
Let's face it: creating run-off-the-mill software is a commodity these days. Whether it is the operational software for a Bluetooth headset or visualization engine for pre-crunched business intelligence data, you can hire developers for basement-bargain prices from those parts of the world that have much lower standard of living than ...
June 27, 2019
MAX turbulence continues
During the Paris Air Show, IAG, the parent of BA, Iberia and several other European operators, announced a surprise Letter of Intent with Boeing, offering to purchase 200 planes. Although the word MAX was apparently deliberately left out of the announcement, there was no doubt that the deal was just ...
June 20, 2019
The mathematics of the Solstice
[ Celebrating Solstice with an excerpt from FlatOutWrong.com ] The fact that the Earth is a globe is by no means a new thing: the circumference of the Earth was calculated already in 200 B.C., and therefore the newly famed notion of flat Earth would mean ignoring common ...
June 14, 2019
Chernobyl - the ode to human hubris
The weekend of April 26th in 1986 had nice, crisp, sunny weather in Finland. I was out pushing my daughter in a cart, enjoying the rare, warm spring Sunday in Tampere, blissfully unaware of the potential threat of minuscule radioactive particles, “hot dust”, that had started emanating from Chernobyl and ...
June 4, 2019
The first casualty in the New Space Race
The maiden flight of the world's largest airplane by wingspan, Stratolauncher, was widely reported in media with great enthusiasm: the aim of the company Stratolaunch, which was behind this endeavor, was to carry a rocket high up into the stratosphere before launching it, therefore reducing the amount mechanical stress that ...
May 30, 2019
Sony hangs on to smartphones
Despite making yet another annual loss of almost a billion dollars in its smartphone division, Sony shows no signs of giving up this business area. Sony's CEO Kenichiro Yoshida's reasoning is simple: “We see smartphones as hardware for entertainment and a component necessary to make our hardware brand sustainable. Younger ...
May 23, 2019
Signals from the sky
Setting up a radio network that utilizes channels from Very High Frequency (VHF) upwards has always been geographically limited by two inherent facts: First of all, frequencies in this range propagate in a straight line from the antenna, with only minimal and often sporadic bending caused by very specific atmospheric ...
May 16, 2019
Fingerpointing has started
As the grounding of Boeing's former star performer, 737 MAX, seems to keep dragging on, the new mode of operation appears to be straight from the current White House's playbook: blame others. Apparently it does not matter that even AMERICAN pilots had raised serious concerns about 737 MAX's safety months ...
May 9, 2019
Internet is moving to space. Why?
As I wrote in my book, Elon Musk's SpaceX has been working on their Starlink initiative, aiming to put almost 12,000 satellites on Low Earth Orbit (LEO). These satellites will then provide gigabit dataspeeds with a global coverage through the resulting “Space Internet”. In addition to this, Jeff Bezos, "Mr. ...
May 2, 2019
Another silly conspiracy theory
My new home region of Barcelona must be the tin hat wearers' nightmare location: with the almost constantly clear skies and the atmospheric conditions that keep jet trails of planes visible almost as regularly, combined with the fact that the Barcelona VOR beacon is a key navigation point for air ...
