Archive for April 2013

How USB drives are made

Hackaday article Hand placing flash die to make USB drives tells how boards inside USB drives populated. The article points to Where USB Memory Sticks are Born article that tells that once the bare die FLASH chips are screened for functionality, they are placed by hand onto a PCB (using some sort of tool made

One Man Pinged the Whole Internet

What Happened When One Man Pinged the Whole Internet article tells about a home science experiment that probed billions of Internet devices reveals that thousands of industrial and business systems offer remote access to anyone. Moore’s census involved regularly sending simple, automated messages to each one of the 3.7 billion IP addresses assigned to devices

Why You Suck at Making Estimates

Software development effort estimation is the process of predicting the most realistic use of effort required to develop or maintain software based on incomplete, uncertain and/or noisy input. Effort estimates may be used (and are often used) as input to many other business processes (project plans, iteration plans, budgets, investment analyses, pricing processes and bidding

Who’s Winning, iOS or Android?

Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android clearly dominate the smart phone market. But who’s winning the mobile platform wars, Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android? It’s one of the blogosphere’s favorite tech topics, but many postings usually concentrate on only one or few sides of the whole story, and make quick conclusions based on them. To understand

How cheap can you make a cell phone?

How cheap can you make a phone? The $12 Gongkai Phone article tells about a very cheap quad-band GSM phone found from China. This article is a brilliant introduction of this $12 phone. Brilliant because there is a tear-down and technical details. This is a really amazing price point. It is amazing how the price

The Fastest-Growing Game Company Ever?

Finnish mobile game company Supercell has been on news lately with following kind of headlines: Supercell raises another round of funding at $130M on a valuation of $770M, sees revenues of $2.4M a day. The latest flow of news started when Forbes praises this Finnish game company in Is This The Fastest-Growing Game Company Ever?