Sorta like I move my arm without really knowing *how* I move my arm. I don't really have much conscious control over which muscles do what when I think, "Pick up sandwich and take a bite" (why yes, I am eat lunch at the moment), but some more primitive part of my brain translates that high level thought into a series of muscular movements that result in my eating a sandwich (good thing too, I was hungry). On the other hand when the higher level aspects of my brain think "Man that jogger is hot", it doesn't cause my arms to immediately turn the wheel towards her. The trick would be to tap into that part of my brain that causes muscles to move or things to happen, rather than that part which is constantly distracted by shiny objects.
I definitely think Microsoft is the driving partner here. All Microsoft really did was shop their OS to a major hardware partner, that's been their plan all along, and doing this deal with Nokia is exactly how they'd want it to be. They provide software and large, respected hardware partner integrates and produces. Nokia on the other hand has completely changed their game plan in order to accommodate. If you had asked people two weeks ago what Nokia road map for the next 3 years looked like, then asked them today, it would be utterly different.
I'm not saying Microsoft isn't happy to get Nokia, they're a great name and partnering with them will help WP7; but Nokia clearly "needed it more". At least, Nokia thought they needed it more.
PS: M$? really? I thought we were over that as a culture.
You can root an iPhone too, that's not the point. Regular people don't do stuff like that, and hackers will find a way to root almost anything no matter how open or closed it is at "base". For regular day to day users of an Android phone there is very little difference in the "openness" vs. and iPhone or WP7 phone. Some of them (not all) allow you to install non-app store apps without rooting, and a very small number allow root access by default (I think, I'm even sure about this), so it's accurate to say that *some* Android phones are more open than iPhones. The majority however, are not. Yet these faux-open Android phones sell. iPhones sell. People don't, in general, care.
To be fair, and I'm no more an MS fan than anyone, the GPL puts an onus on Microsoft to do things that they don't want to be arsed to do. As the owner of the "store" Microsoft becomes the "distributor" of GPL software. That means if you, AC, put a piece of GPLed software on the store, you are effectively obligating MS to host the source code and GPL somewhere as the distributor. You can say, "Well, I'll handle that, they don't have to worry about it.", but they do have to worry about it. If you decided next month to stop "handling that" and the software is still on the store, MS is left holding the bag. By forbidding GPL code they are covering their asses.
This will become a problem as time goes on and more of these online "stores" pop up. As "distributors" these stores take on certain obligations that they may not want to deal with. Free software is easy enough to deal with when every computer has a compiler (or can easily get one). With the limited space and processing power on mobile devices "app stoes" make a lot of sense, but the GPL is decidedly unfriendly to the way most of them are setup. Maybe if the GPL put the onus on the developer to redistribute the code and license rather than the distributor? I dunno, I don't see Stallman changing the GPL to accommodate app stores, since he hates most of the companies that own them. It'll be interesting to see how it play out.
I'm not saying that either position is right or wrong, just that there are some intractable issues that may make them unable to work together.
Well they had no formal legal relationship with him. They never actually contracted him to do this work, and he wasn't an employee. Essentially he was just some random guy who had admin access to their network. I think any kind of formal audit would have gone nuts, but they were too small to get audited and they were happy with the situation.
I didn't say, "Nokia is going bankrupt". I said: "Had they followed the plan laid out in "Plan B", given the currently reality of contracts signed and changes already in the works, they probably would have wound up bankrupt (or seriously weakened)". Making a ship the size of Nokia do a 180 is expensive. Making it do a 180, then immediately saying "Oops", and making it do another 180 is *really* expensive. The ideas expressed in "Plan B" might have been a good move, if they weren't already executing "Plan A". At this point changing direction drastically *again* would bankrupt almost any company.
That kinda thing is always expensive. They're laying a lot of people off, that saves money in the long run but has huge upfront costs. Especially in a labor friendly jurisdiction like Finland. Figure every person they layoff gets a month of two of severance pay. Probably more in a place like Finland, but at least that. Gotta pay out everyone's accrued vacation (in a country where 6 weeks vacation a year is the norm). With large scale layoffs like this they probably provide a lot of job search assistance and such. In the US, layoffs for a reasonably experienced worker often cost around 3 to 4 months worth of that person's typical monthly cost. I wouldn't be surprised if in Finland it's more like 6 months.
They're probably breaking a lot of contracts with dev shops that were working on MeeGo for them, that costs penalties. They're going to have to replace infrastructure. Ripping out your Linux dev environment and replacing it with a Windows dev environment isn't cheap, even if MS eats most of the software costs. The people they aren't laying off they're going to have retrain. They may have to scrap some hardware designs and start over depending on how similar MeeGo and WP7 are in UI, and hardware support.
Turning it around now, they'd have to undo all the changes they made (incurring all the same costs again), break a contract with Microsoft (sure to be expensive), plus pay a whole new set of realignment costs, becasue "Plan B" didn't call for just backing out of the MS deal but a completely different set of changes.
Lat place I worked (may it rot in Hell) I hired a junior admin (whom I like, and now feel really bad for accidentally screwing that way) whose previous company did that. It was a small organization and they'd only had him and another guy in IT. Every so often they'd pass him a few bills to login and fix something. Worked out well all around, he made a few extra bucks and they didn't have to do a panicked job search to replace him instantly. Definitely a terrible idea from a strict IA perspective, but it was a family owned company and they liked and trusted him (with good reason, he was a likable, trust-able guy).
I really don't think it was a better plan. Rather more to the point, it might have been a better plan with a lot more flesh on its bones, and had Nokia not already inked the deals that would drive "Plan A" forward. As it was it was a lot of vague hand waving and spending a fortune "re-reinventing" the wheel. I don't want to know how much money Nokia has spent re-aligning itself for the MS deal, but tossing that out that window and going with an entirely new plan would probably cost that much again (or even more).
I understand that people who like Symbian would consider the "Plan B" superior from their own personal "I finally get a MeeGo phone" point of view, but it was fairly unrealistic given the current state of Nokia. The likely result would have been a Nokia bankrupt or dramatically weakened and unable to produce the kind of phones you want anyway. For good or ill, Nokia's path forward was determined when the ink on the MS deal was dry.
I seriously doubt Amazon is paying $150 per GB in 3G charges, or anything close to it. AT&T currently charges $30 a month for a regular old, low volume of sales, consumer to use 5GB a month (Unlimited if you're grandfathered in), I don't they exponentially increase that for a huge, high volume partner. I see several cost centers involved in what Amazon is doing: The 3G on the device, the Internet pipe for their servers, the storage, the maintenance and coding... I'd be shocked if all of that added up to even $20 a gigabyte. I do think this all costs Amazon a bit more than some people are thinking, but nothing like $150 a gig.
More than one word, but the article pretty much, I think, nails it: If you *have* to have support becasue of IT rules or something, OO.o is the only choice. Feature-wise they're all but I identical; but since most of the developers went to Libre, the smart money is on it improving more and faster as time goes on.
Let's assume you're right. Let's assume that Elop pulled out of a bunch of contracts related to MeeGo when he signed up with MS (there is no guarantee he did, like I said, there are ways to avoid that). So he spent, I dunno, $500 million breaking all those contracts and then signed new ones with a bunch of WP7 dev shops. We'll also assume that Nokia ate all of that, and didn't get MS to pay for part of it as part of their new contract. Now when these guys take over you'll have to eat *another* $500 million breaking all the *new* contracts. Just becasue the last guy did something stupid that cost the company a fortune, doesn't mean you want your first action to be doing the same thing and costing the company another fortune. Especially if you're also paying contract termination fees to Microsoft, and eating the costs of the huge number of offshore layoffs these guys are talking about, and offering big cushy new salaries to all this talent you want to recruit, and paying out the golden parachutes on the executives they want to get rid of, and... Well you get the idea. I don't know how much money Nokia has in the bank, but this plan looks like it could stress Microsoft or Apple's cash reserves.
They're talking internationally, not "top Finnish talents". Indeed the very line I quoted says "Top talents from around the world". Since one assumes that the majority of those talents are not coming from Finland (or they would have "top talents from around the country"), I don't see how that's much of a advantage. Finland is a nice enough place I'm sure (I've never been there), but it's hardly a location that will make or break a job choice for most top talent.
Not necessarily anything. Maybe they switched those contractors to developing WP7 stuff, maybe they timed the switch for when they knew contracts were coming up (Which is easy to do when you're on the inside with inside information, rather harder when you're on the outside and don't know what those dates are, etc), or maybe they ate penalties, which just means that canceling more contracts means eating another set of penalties. I'm not on the inside at Nokia, so I don't have a lot of the information I'd need to make a strategic plan for them (Assuming I had either the inclination or the ability to do so in the first place), but that's kind of my point. From the looks of things these guys are in the same boat I am. They don't appear to have the kind of inside information they need to make a realistic plan (again, assuming they have ability, which seems questionable also).
These guys appear to be the rough equivalent of me and some buddies sitting around drinking some beers and figuring out how we'd run the Saints so they win a championship every year. Despite our obvious genius and very reasonable rates, Tom Benson has yet to extend us a job offer. I think he's trying to sabotage the team, personally; it's the only reason for choosing that slack Sean Payton over me.
I read the strategy, I see several potentially large holes in it. Off the top of my head:
Restructure alliance with Microsoft as a tactical exercise focused primarily at the North American market.
It's easy to say that, but how is the agreement written? *Can* they even do that without opening themselves to a breach of contract? IANAL, but I don't think these guys are either. Microsoft has lots of them though.
Revamp hiring strategy to target the top young software talent from around the world.
You and everybody else in the world. Why are the "Top Talents" going to go to Nokia instead of Google or Apple? It's easy to hand wave this in a bullet point, but it need *a lot* more concrete planning to even be a reasonable idea, let alone successful.
End of R&D outsourcing. Bring all core software and hardware development in-house. Immediate end to outsourcing structures where there are multiple layers of Nokia project managers and subcontractor project managers between product managers and the software developers (in some cases up to 90% of the team is management overhead).
Again, what are the contractual obligations here? The very word "subcontractor" implies a "contract" and few subcontractors are dumb enough to allow a "Nokia can end this relationship at any time, becasue they feel like it, with no penalty" clause.
That's just off the top of my head and I'm not even a business or law type guy. It's easy to make a list of bullet points and call it a plan. The Underpants Gnomes had a plan too, there was just one hole in it. Frankly it seems like most of what they want to do will cost a lot of money in the short term, which Nokia may or may not have to invest, and the ROI seems suspect at best.
Again, how are the colors "getting in your way"? Ignore them. Turn them off if you want (it's trivial), but even then I don't see why. It's not like they hurt anything, and if you could learn what the "/" and "@" mean you can just as easily learn what the four colors mean. It's not like it occupies a huge amount of cranial space. Most of these posts are starting to smack of "it's different, and therefore bad". Even if it'll save you a little time and effort int he long run, the 30 seconds to learn it is too much to be arsed with.
I gotta wonder this too. I can see not *needing* it, I don't, but I don't turn it off either. When it's available it's helpful and I use it. When it's not I do without. I can't see how it ever hurts. If nothing else the huge blocks of pink "String colored" text tell me where I forgot to close that quote:-)
Also, the real "Unix Admin" who works in my shop better get used to using sudo. Only one guy in IA has the root password, the rest of us just have full sudo privs. From a pure security standpoint it's pointless of course, with "sudo su -" you can still become root (we often do) or mess with the audit trail (we don't), but the idea is just to keep a record of when we logged in and when we used root privs. It's a somewhat silly exercise that assumes we're all honest, but it rarely causes any issues and keeps IA happy.
I didn't say it was Islam. Indeed, I go out of my way to point out an Islamic country that doesn't have the problem. None the less it is cloaked in the kind of Islam practiced in some Islamic countries. You can't, at this point, separate the two any more that you can separate the deep anti-feminism of the Assemblies of God from the type Christianity that they believe in. There's nothing inherently anti-feminist in Christianity either, though the various churches have been complicit in keeping women down for centuries. Jesus treated Mary Magdalene as an equal in every story we have of the two of them. A good argument could be made that she should have been the twelfth Apostle. None the less the various Christian churches have only come out of the Bronze Age on this matter in the last 100 years or so, and many are still hanging out back there. It's not the religion that's the problem, it's the way the religion is taught and practice in certain societies.
I dunno, I've found it mostly works. Don't get me wrong, I've worked in toxic environments where everyone is out to get everyone else. It sucked and very little ever actually got done. I've also worked in places that made to effort to include input from everyone. It wasn't pixie dust and unicorns (This is me blatantly stealing imagery from a reply to another post), but we were generally able to work out ways to get most of what everyone needed and some of what everyone wanted. Ironically I actually experienced both types of situation in one job, when we hired a new CIO who thought setting his team against itself was a good way to increase productivity or something. It was interesting, if not fun, to see a relatively functional system collapse. Found out recently that he was let go, so very sad. I did a little dance:-)
Management is a big piece of this pie for sure. A good or bad manager can set the whole tone. None the less what you do matters. I posted farther down about my policy of never saying "no" unless I've tried to find an alternative I can say "yes" to. It doesn't always work. Some requests are impossible or impossible given resource restraints or just stupid, but people respect that even when I tell them they can't have what they want I can often suggest something that will work. Given that I do systems admin and security in a DoD environment, I have pretty broad leeway to say "no"... I just think there's more to it than that.
I think the conflict here is between reasonable people and assholes. You sound like a reasonable person, Lumpy sounds like a bit of an asshole, but that may be the fault of working with assholes. It's quite possible that if you were Lumpy's security guy, and he knew he *could* come to you and open a reasonable dialog that would result in a mutually acceptable solution, he would. Since he works with obstructionist asshats, he bypasses them whenever possible. It's also possible he's just an asshole who always wants to get his way. Hard to tell under the circumstances. Personally my policy is to never say "no" without at least trying to come up with an alternative.
No offense (I'm an ops/security guy and I was nodding the whole time till I thought about it), but this is exactly what the article is talking about. Of course Marketing wants it shiny and iPhone enabled. It's marketing, it's supposed to catch the eye and cause people to pay attention. Of course management wants to save money.. Money saved here is money that can used elsewhere or go into someone's pocket (often management's of course, but in theory anyone's). Of course Dev wants to have access to the live servers, there's info they want/need on there and very rarely it actually is useful to make changes on the fly when the situation is serious enough (It shouldn't ever be, but we don't live in a perfect world). Of course you want reliable, stable secure code that changes as little as possible.
The solution isn't "Make all these other guys understand that I'm right". It's to try to minimize the siloing so that everyone has a say in process from the ground up. So the dev guy can tell the marketing guy, "Hey you can't have iPhone *and* Flash. Do we want to find a shiny that doesn't use Flash, or accept that iPhones don't see our shiny?" Marketing can say to Ops "Ok that shiny I wanted was insecure, I get that, is there a secure way to do something similar?" Ops can say to Dev "I set you up a limited access account on the live servers to collect the usage data you need, please don't let it stack up." And Management can say to everyone "This is how much we really have to spend and the results if we break budget."
That way everyone can be an adult. There'll still be conflicts of course, but if everyone knows that each group is legitimately trying to facilitate everyone else, they can become points of discussion and resolution instead of small scale wars that every side is trying to "win".
Bah, lack of editing sucks sometimes. I meant "Pentecostal" not "Methodist". Methodists may have strict dress codes too, but I know little about the sect and couldn't say one way or the other.
I don't think he's "attacking" anyone. He's pointing the fact that while no current version of Christianity requires the Burqa, per se, the impulse that drives the Burqa is definitely present in Christianity. Witness the many forms of Methodist and AoG denominations that require women to wear exclusively floor length dresses or skirts and arm covering shirts, many of which entirely forbid make-up. Most of these also stress submission of women to men, and men to only God. In the last hundred years Christianity in general has loosened up on the whole "Men before women, God before men" attitude, but it was more or less the norm until the last century and still persists in more conservative denominations.
Similarly, few Muslims take the hard line on women's submission that the Taliban or the Saudi's take. When I was in Iraq it was perfectly common to see women in everything from a full Burqa to jeans and a t-shirt, with various levels of "modesty" in between. The most common was regular comfortable clothes (jeans most often) with some sort of head covering as a nod to their faith. Reports I've seen out of Tunisia indicate that women have parity or near parity with men there, and many were leaders in the the recent revolution.
GP's entirely valid point is that attacking "Muslims" for how they treat women is no more valid than attacking "Christians" for how they treat women. Both groups have extremely conservative wings that treat women very badly. Both groups have more liberal wings that treat women and men as equal (though obviously occasionally different) people. Islam is, in general, not as far along the transition that Christianity began a hundred or so years ago; but there are forward looking groups that have completed it. Similarly, there are backward looking Christian groups that have hardly begun.
I am by the way, neither Christian nor Muslim, and make these comments as an "outside" observer.
It's completely reasonable that women might want to self-segregate under some circumstances. I can totally see why they might want to form a second, subgroup for the main Saudi's in America page to discuss how the issues are relevant to them specifically. On the other hand, segregating the main page is clearly a religiously influenced decision (whether it was driven by the women themselves or not). OP was trolling, but it's true that the type of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia is *extremely* conservative and anti-female, and it's not parroting Fox News to say so. Like Christians, Muslim have a range of practice that are considered "Orthodox"; and just as some versions of Christianity are very sexist, so to are some versions of Islam. Tunisia, for instance, is completely different and very liberal in regard to relations between the sexes.
In short, choice to form a self-segregated group to discuss women's issues is a perfectly reasonable idea. A forced split of all men and women on the main page into separate groups is a symptom of what's wrong with Saudi Arabia from a human rights perspective. Even if the drive to segregate was from the women, you can see how this is a problem based on the reason.
There are a significant number of girls who do not yet feel confident enough to share their points of view and opinions in the same domain as men. In my opinion they need some time to adjust
In other words, these women have been beat down enough that they literally can't respond to a man in a disagreeable manner. So they want to segregate, as "training wheels". However since th whole site is segregated, I fail to see what they can do after they've "adjusted" to practice their new found confidence.
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Sorta like I move my arm without really knowing *how* I move my arm. I don't really have much conscious control over which muscles do what when I think, "Pick up sandwich and take a bite" (why yes, I am eat lunch at the moment), but some more primitive part of my brain translates that high level thought into a series of muscular movements that result in my eating a sandwich (good thing too, I was hungry). On the other hand when the higher level aspects of my brain think "Man that jogger is hot", it doesn't cause my arms to immediately turn the wheel towards her. The trick would be to tap into that part of my brain that causes muscles to move or things to happen, rather than that part which is constantly distracted by shiny objects.
I definitely think Microsoft is the driving partner here. All Microsoft really did was shop their OS to a major hardware partner, that's been their plan all along, and doing this deal with Nokia is exactly how they'd want it to be. They provide software and large, respected hardware partner integrates and produces. Nokia on the other hand has completely changed their game plan in order to accommodate. If you had asked people two weeks ago what Nokia road map for the next 3 years looked like, then asked them today, it would be utterly different.
I'm not saying Microsoft isn't happy to get Nokia, they're a great name and partnering with them will help WP7; but Nokia clearly "needed it more". At least, Nokia thought they needed it more.
PS: M$? really? I thought we were over that as a culture.
You can root an iPhone too, that's not the point. Regular people don't do stuff like that, and hackers will find a way to root almost anything no matter how open or closed it is at "base". For regular day to day users of an Android phone there is very little difference in the "openness" vs. and iPhone or WP7 phone. Some of them (not all) allow you to install non-app store apps without rooting, and a very small number allow root access by default (I think, I'm even sure about this), so it's accurate to say that *some* Android phones are more open than iPhones. The majority however, are not. Yet these faux-open Android phones sell. iPhones sell. People don't, in general, care.
To be fair, and I'm no more an MS fan than anyone, the GPL puts an onus on Microsoft to do things that they don't want to be arsed to do. As the owner of the "store" Microsoft becomes the "distributor" of GPL software. That means if you, AC, put a piece of GPLed software on the store, you are effectively obligating MS to host the source code and GPL somewhere as the distributor. You can say, "Well, I'll handle that, they don't have to worry about it.", but they do have to worry about it. If you decided next month to stop "handling that" and the software is still on the store, MS is left holding the bag. By forbidding GPL code they are covering their asses.
This will become a problem as time goes on and more of these online "stores" pop up. As "distributors" these stores take on certain obligations that they may not want to deal with. Free software is easy enough to deal with when every computer has a compiler (or can easily get one). With the limited space and processing power on mobile devices "app stoes" make a lot of sense, but the GPL is decidedly unfriendly to the way most of them are setup. Maybe if the GPL put the onus on the developer to redistribute the code and license rather than the distributor? I dunno, I don't see Stallman changing the GPL to accommodate app stores, since he hates most of the companies that own them. It'll be interesting to see how it play out.
I'm not saying that either position is right or wrong, just that there are some intractable issues that may make them unable to work together.
Well they had no formal legal relationship with him. They never actually contracted him to do this work, and he wasn't an employee. Essentially he was just some random guy who had admin access to their network. I think any kind of formal audit would have gone nuts, but they were too small to get audited and they were happy with the situation.
I didn't say, "Nokia is going bankrupt". I said: "Had they followed the plan laid out in "Plan B", given the currently reality of contracts signed and changes already in the works, they probably would have wound up bankrupt (or seriously weakened)". Making a ship the size of Nokia do a 180 is expensive. Making it do a 180, then immediately saying "Oops", and making it do another 180 is *really* expensive. The ideas expressed in "Plan B" might have been a good move, if they weren't already executing "Plan A". At this point changing direction drastically *again* would bankrupt almost any company.
That kinda thing is always expensive. They're laying a lot of people off, that saves money in the long run but has huge upfront costs. Especially in a labor friendly jurisdiction like Finland. Figure every person they layoff gets a month of two of severance pay. Probably more in a place like Finland, but at least that. Gotta pay out everyone's accrued vacation (in a country where 6 weeks vacation a year is the norm). With large scale layoffs like this they probably provide a lot of job search assistance and such. In the US, layoffs for a reasonably experienced worker often cost around 3 to 4 months worth of that person's typical monthly cost. I wouldn't be surprised if in Finland it's more like 6 months.
They're probably breaking a lot of contracts with dev shops that were working on MeeGo for them, that costs penalties. They're going to have to replace infrastructure. Ripping out your Linux dev environment and replacing it with a Windows dev environment isn't cheap, even if MS eats most of the software costs. The people they aren't laying off they're going to have retrain. They may have to scrap some hardware designs and start over depending on how similar MeeGo and WP7 are in UI, and hardware support.
Turning it around now, they'd have to undo all the changes they made (incurring all the same costs again), break a contract with Microsoft (sure to be expensive), plus pay a whole new set of realignment costs, becasue "Plan B" didn't call for just backing out of the MS deal but a completely different set of changes.
Lat place I worked (may it rot in Hell) I hired a junior admin (whom I like, and now feel really bad for accidentally screwing that way) whose previous company did that. It was a small organization and they'd only had him and another guy in IT. Every so often they'd pass him a few bills to login and fix something. Worked out well all around, he made a few extra bucks and they didn't have to do a panicked job search to replace him instantly. Definitely a terrible idea from a strict IA perspective, but it was a family owned company and they liked and trusted him (with good reason, he was a likable, trust-able guy).
I really don't think it was a better plan. Rather more to the point, it might have been a better plan with a lot more flesh on its bones, and had Nokia not already inked the deals that would drive "Plan A" forward. As it was it was a lot of vague hand waving and spending a fortune "re-reinventing" the wheel. I don't want to know how much money Nokia has spent re-aligning itself for the MS deal, but tossing that out that window and going with an entirely new plan would probably cost that much again (or even more).
I understand that people who like Symbian would consider the "Plan B" superior from their own personal "I finally get a MeeGo phone" point of view, but it was fairly unrealistic given the current state of Nokia. The likely result would have been a Nokia bankrupt or dramatically weakened and unable to produce the kind of phones you want anyway. For good or ill, Nokia's path forward was determined when the ink on the MS deal was dry.
I seriously doubt Amazon is paying $150 per GB in 3G charges, or anything close to it. AT&T currently charges $30 a month for a regular old, low volume of sales, consumer to use 5GB a month (Unlimited if you're grandfathered in), I don't they exponentially increase that for a huge, high volume partner. I see several cost centers involved in what Amazon is doing: The 3G on the device, the Internet pipe for their servers, the storage, the maintenance and coding... I'd be shocked if all of that added up to even $20 a gigabyte. I do think this all costs Amazon a bit more than some people are thinking, but nothing like $150 a gig.
More than one word, but the article pretty much, I think, nails it: If you *have* to have support becasue of IT rules or something, OO.o is the only choice. Feature-wise they're all but I identical; but since most of the developers went to Libre, the smart money is on it improving more and faster as time goes on.
Let's assume you're right. Let's assume that Elop pulled out of a bunch of contracts related to MeeGo when he signed up with MS (there is no guarantee he did, like I said, there are ways to avoid that). So he spent, I dunno, $500 million breaking all those contracts and then signed new ones with a bunch of WP7 dev shops. We'll also assume that Nokia ate all of that, and didn't get MS to pay for part of it as part of their new contract. Now when these guys take over you'll have to eat *another* $500 million breaking all the *new* contracts. Just becasue the last guy did something stupid that cost the company a fortune, doesn't mean you want your first action to be doing the same thing and costing the company another fortune. Especially if you're also paying contract termination fees to Microsoft, and eating the costs of the huge number of offshore layoffs these guys are talking about, and offering big cushy new salaries to all this talent you want to recruit, and paying out the golden parachutes on the executives they want to get rid of, and... Well you get the idea. I don't know how much money Nokia has in the bank, but this plan looks like it could stress Microsoft or Apple's cash reserves.
They're talking internationally, not "top Finnish talents". Indeed the very line I quoted says "Top talents from around the world". Since one assumes that the majority of those talents are not coming from Finland (or they would have "top talents from around the country"), I don't see how that's much of a advantage. Finland is a nice enough place I'm sure (I've never been there), but it's hardly a location that will make or break a job choice for most top talent.
Not necessarily anything. Maybe they switched those contractors to developing WP7 stuff, maybe they timed the switch for when they knew contracts were coming up (Which is easy to do when you're on the inside with inside information, rather harder when you're on the outside and don't know what those dates are, etc), or maybe they ate penalties, which just means that canceling more contracts means eating another set of penalties. I'm not on the inside at Nokia, so I don't have a lot of the information I'd need to make a strategic plan for them (Assuming I had either the inclination or the ability to do so in the first place), but that's kind of my point. From the looks of things these guys are in the same boat I am. They don't appear to have the kind of inside information they need to make a realistic plan (again, assuming they have ability, which seems questionable also).
These guys appear to be the rough equivalent of me and some buddies sitting around drinking some beers and figuring out how we'd run the Saints so they win a championship every year. Despite our obvious genius and very reasonable rates, Tom Benson has yet to extend us a job offer. I think he's trying to sabotage the team, personally; it's the only reason for choosing that slack Sean Payton over me.
I read the strategy, I see several potentially large holes in it. Off the top of my head:
Restructure alliance with Microsoft as a tactical exercise focused primarily at the North American market.
It's easy to say that, but how is the agreement written? *Can* they even do that without opening themselves to a breach of contract? IANAL, but I don't think these guys are either. Microsoft has lots of them though.
Revamp hiring strategy to target the top young software talent from around the world.
You and everybody else in the world. Why are the "Top Talents" going to go to Nokia instead of Google or Apple? It's easy to hand wave this in a bullet point, but it need *a lot* more concrete planning to even be a reasonable idea, let alone successful.
End of R&D outsourcing. Bring all core software and hardware development in-house. Immediate end to outsourcing structures where there are multiple layers of Nokia project managers and subcontractor project managers between product managers and the software developers (in some cases up to 90% of the team is management overhead).
Again, what are the contractual obligations here? The very word "subcontractor" implies a "contract" and few subcontractors are dumb enough to allow a "Nokia can end this relationship at any time, becasue they feel like it, with no penalty" clause.
That's just off the top of my head and I'm not even a business or law type guy. It's easy to make a list of bullet points and call it a plan. The Underpants Gnomes had a plan too, there was just one hole in it. Frankly it seems like most of what they want to do will cost a lot of money in the short term, which Nokia may or may not have to invest, and the ROI seems suspect at best.
Again, how are the colors "getting in your way"? Ignore them. Turn them off if you want (it's trivial), but even then I don't see why. It's not like they hurt anything, and if you could learn what the "/" and "@" mean you can just as easily learn what the four colors mean. It's not like it occupies a huge amount of cranial space. Most of these posts are starting to smack of "it's different, and therefore bad". Even if it'll save you a little time and effort int he long run, the 30 seconds to learn it is too much to be arsed with.
I gotta wonder this too. I can see not *needing* it, I don't, but I don't turn it off either. When it's available it's helpful and I use it. When it's not I do without. I can't see how it ever hurts. If nothing else the huge blocks of pink "String colored" text tell me where I forgot to close that quote :-)
Also, the real "Unix Admin" who works in my shop better get used to using sudo. Only one guy in IA has the root password, the rest of us just have full sudo privs. From a pure security standpoint it's pointless of course, with "sudo su -" you can still become root (we often do) or mess with the audit trail (we don't), but the idea is just to keep a record of when we logged in and when we used root privs. It's a somewhat silly exercise that assumes we're all honest, but it rarely causes any issues and keeps IA happy.
I didn't say it was Islam. Indeed, I go out of my way to point out an Islamic country that doesn't have the problem. None the less it is cloaked in the kind of Islam practiced in some Islamic countries. You can't, at this point, separate the two any more that you can separate the deep anti-feminism of the Assemblies of God from the type Christianity that they believe in. There's nothing inherently anti-feminist in Christianity either, though the various churches have been complicit in keeping women down for centuries. Jesus treated Mary Magdalene as an equal in every story we have of the two of them. A good argument could be made that she should have been the twelfth Apostle. None the less the various Christian churches have only come out of the Bronze Age on this matter in the last 100 years or so, and many are still hanging out back there. It's not the religion that's the problem, it's the way the religion is taught and practice in certain societies.
I dunno, I've found it mostly works. Don't get me wrong, I've worked in toxic environments where everyone is out to get everyone else. It sucked and very little ever actually got done. I've also worked in places that made to effort to include input from everyone. It wasn't pixie dust and unicorns (This is me blatantly stealing imagery from a reply to another post), but we were generally able to work out ways to get most of what everyone needed and some of what everyone wanted. Ironically I actually experienced both types of situation in one job, when we hired a new CIO who thought setting his team against itself was a good way to increase productivity or something. It was interesting, if not fun, to see a relatively functional system collapse. Found out recently that he was let go, so very sad. I did a little dance :-)
Management is a big piece of this pie for sure. A good or bad manager can set the whole tone. None the less what you do matters. I posted farther down about my policy of never saying "no" unless I've tried to find an alternative I can say "yes" to. It doesn't always work. Some requests are impossible or impossible given resource restraints or just stupid, but people respect that even when I tell them they can't have what they want I can often suggest something that will work. Given that I do systems admin and security in a DoD environment, I have pretty broad leeway to say "no"... I just think there's more to it than that.
I think the conflict here is between reasonable people and assholes. You sound like a reasonable person, Lumpy sounds like a bit of an asshole, but that may be the fault of working with assholes. It's quite possible that if you were Lumpy's security guy, and he knew he *could* come to you and open a reasonable dialog that would result in a mutually acceptable solution, he would. Since he works with obstructionist asshats, he bypasses them whenever possible. It's also possible he's just an asshole who always wants to get his way. Hard to tell under the circumstances. Personally my policy is to never say "no" without at least trying to come up with an alternative.
No offense (I'm an ops/security guy and I was nodding the whole time till I thought about it), but this is exactly what the article is talking about. Of course Marketing wants it shiny and iPhone enabled. It's marketing, it's supposed to catch the eye and cause people to pay attention. Of course management wants to save money.. Money saved here is money that can used elsewhere or go into someone's pocket (often management's of course, but in theory anyone's). Of course Dev wants to have access to the live servers, there's info they want/need on there and very rarely it actually is useful to make changes on the fly when the situation is serious enough (It shouldn't ever be, but we don't live in a perfect world). Of course you want reliable, stable secure code that changes as little as possible.
The solution isn't "Make all these other guys understand that I'm right". It's to try to minimize the siloing so that everyone has a say in process from the ground up. So the dev guy can tell the marketing guy, "Hey you can't have iPhone *and* Flash. Do we want to find a shiny that doesn't use Flash, or accept that iPhones don't see our shiny?" Marketing can say to Ops "Ok that shiny I wanted was insecure, I get that, is there a secure way to do something similar?" Ops can say to Dev "I set you up a limited access account on the live servers to collect the usage data you need, please don't let it stack up." And Management can say to everyone "This is how much we really have to spend and the results if we break budget."
That way everyone can be an adult. There'll still be conflicts of course, but if everyone knows that each group is legitimately trying to facilitate everyone else, they can become points of discussion and resolution instead of small scale wars that every side is trying to "win".
Bah, lack of editing sucks sometimes. I meant "Pentecostal" not "Methodist". Methodists may have strict dress codes too, but I know little about the sect and couldn't say one way or the other.
I don't think he's "attacking" anyone. He's pointing the fact that while no current version of Christianity requires the Burqa, per se, the impulse that drives the Burqa is definitely present in Christianity. Witness the many forms of Methodist and AoG denominations that require women to wear exclusively floor length dresses or skirts and arm covering shirts, many of which entirely forbid make-up. Most of these also stress submission of women to men, and men to only God. In the last hundred years Christianity in general has loosened up on the whole "Men before women, God before men" attitude, but it was more or less the norm until the last century and still persists in more conservative denominations.
Similarly, few Muslims take the hard line on women's submission that the Taliban or the Saudi's take. When I was in Iraq it was perfectly common to see women in everything from a full Burqa to jeans and a t-shirt, with various levels of "modesty" in between. The most common was regular comfortable clothes (jeans most often) with some sort of head covering as a nod to their faith. Reports I've seen out of Tunisia indicate that women have parity or near parity with men there, and many were leaders in the the recent revolution.
GP's entirely valid point is that attacking "Muslims" for how they treat women is no more valid than attacking "Christians" for how they treat women. Both groups have extremely conservative wings that treat women very badly. Both groups have more liberal wings that treat women and men as equal (though obviously occasionally different) people. Islam is, in general, not as far along the transition that Christianity began a hundred or so years ago; but there are forward looking groups that have completed it. Similarly, there are backward looking Christian groups that have hardly begun.
I am by the way, neither Christian nor Muslim, and make these comments as an "outside" observer.
It's completely reasonable that women might want to self-segregate under some circumstances. I can totally see why they might want to form a second, subgroup for the main Saudi's in America page to discuss how the issues are relevant to them specifically. On the other hand, segregating the main page is clearly a religiously influenced decision (whether it was driven by the women themselves or not). OP was trolling, but it's true that the type of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia is *extremely* conservative and anti-female, and it's not parroting Fox News to say so. Like Christians, Muslim have a range of practice that are considered "Orthodox"; and just as some versions of Christianity are very sexist, so to are some versions of Islam. Tunisia, for instance, is completely different and very liberal in regard to relations between the sexes.
In short, choice to form a self-segregated group to discuss women's issues is a perfectly reasonable idea. A forced split of all men and women on the main page into separate groups is a symptom of what's wrong with Saudi Arabia from a human rights perspective. Even if the drive to segregate was from the women, you can see how this is a problem based on the reason.
There are a significant number of girls who do not yet feel confident enough to share their points of view and opinions in the same domain as men. In my opinion they need some time to adjust
In other words, these women have been beat down enough that they literally can't respond to a man in a disagreeable manner. So they want to segregate, as "training wheels". However since th whole site is segregated, I fail to see what they can do after they've "adjusted" to practice their new found confidence.