Nokia's strategy should have been to migrate their dumb phone customers to feature phones and then to smart phones like the feature phones but that use more data.
but there was nothing to keep them on a Nokia platform. Nokia smartphones were inferior, and the sooner customers made the switch the better.
They should focus on beating the $250 Android phone.
That's a low return business. You can move volume, but you make next to nothing on it. And that's why they went with Windows phone, the Lumia 710 is their answer to the 250 dollar android. Unfortunately they didn't have a platform other than MeeGo, and I get the feeling they figured it was going to fail without a backing of developers.
Depends on the oversight. That's why these things *don't* happen. The US likes the oversight it has, and doesn't want to hand that over to anyone else. Everyone else doesn't like the US oversight, and wants their own, and they can't agree on a neutral lack of oversight.
The UN actually can force compliance though. Believe it or not. They did this with the postal union to libya eventually. Don't pay your bills, don't get mail. It's a slow, laboured process, but it does have its advantages. You can't meaningfully threaten china. You can however threaten the north african, arab and middle eastern countries with being cut off from everyone else, and have them care. The same goes for europe and south america (although those places are much less likely to do things that would warrant being cut off). Africa, the US, india, china, Russia, they care a lot less, all for different reasons.
Put another way, what should be done to preserve internet freedom in Hungary and Romania right now? Can the current US centric structure do anything for them? (No, it can't), could a UN centric one? Yes, it could, because it can put layers of pressure on them, and it could threaten to disconnect them from the rest of europe (and all of their money) for not behaving if it was well constructed, but neither case could do much to big countries.
Nokia at least saw the writing on the wall and realized they needed an OS to compete with the iPhone. I think they guessed wrong.
Nokia had a cheap dumbphone market but they had a huge smartphone business, just not in north america, they even had premium phones in the 20k/year range. With software winning out over diamond encrusted the 20k phone business imploded and everyone else ate the smartphone market out from under them. I don't think dumbphones ever got them much money.
It's not just the number of lies though, it's the scale and scope. If you say "my plan will create 350 000 jobs at no cost to the taxpayers" and some independent analysis says "more like 300 000 jobs at a cost of 10 million dollars" versus "will cost 150 000 jobs, and cost taxpayers 100 million dollars".
have a look at, for example: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/aug/01/bill-clinton/its-typical-presidential-candidates-release-10-or-/
Which is rated as half true by politifact. Bill clinton claimed that it's typical to release 10 or 11 years of tax returns when running for president. Now here's the problem, lets take one datapoint. Barrack obama releasing only 7 years of tax returns (from 2000-2007 I think). But he didn't release more than that, because almost certainly the ones *before* 2000 are mind numbingly boring. He was a lecturer, then a senior lecturer, with no other appreciable income. So what are his tax returns going to have? A list of math mistakes he made that was corrected by the IRS and generic pointless stuff about earning a lecturer salary. So they kind of mindlessly ignore why he didn't release tax returns (- as in they weren't relevant-) and just count him as 7 years. Then they add up all of these numbers of tax returns listed out of context, and spit out an average saying bill clinton is exaggerating. Well sure, he's exaggerating, but the fact check itself is based on shitty data analysis that doesn't consider the quality of any of its data points. (other example, John Kerry's returns were only for the period he was with his current wife).
Lets take a trivial example. True. Sarah Palin, 1 in 7 families are on food stamps (http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2012/aug/02/sarah-palin/sarah-palin-says-1-7-american-families-food-stamps/ ). Ok... there's some trivial calculations to do there, but basically this is a single discreet fact that can actually be measured. So sure, she is telling the truth, but does it matter if the fact she is working from is true if her suggested solution isn't testable?
On the broad spectrum of minor spoken errors to complete disregards for the existence of reality politicians will have different degrees of lies on different topics, and you can always count on them to lie about each other. But lying about each other isn't actually policy, policy is what matters and trying to gauge the accuracy of proposed policy predictions is still well beyond the realm of most people, or even beyond all but the most specialized of bloggers (and then trying to figure out which specialized blog is correct and which isn't is beyond most people). To me, this gap, in trying to accurately assess credibility is the role the media should have, in finding experts who work with testable models that have track records and giving their assessments to the public. But that's not what happens. And as you say, you want to know how much truthiness these clowns emit, but in practice that's really freaking hard and no one with the capability to do it properly is rising to the challenge. Including, unfortunately, the long respected BBC, who have started to buy into the equal time for competing views even if one is discredited problem.
DirectX is a lot easier to get everything set up and is generally easier for games, and worse for any other 3D application than OpenGl. Directx is usually quicker out of the gate to support new features, which means it's 'easier' to just use directx if you want to support those things. OpenGl is perfectly viable, if it wasn't the PS3 would have long died. But there's a reason most of us use DirectX for games: it's actually pretty good for games. Documentation, guides, sample code, ease of understanding and so on.
Governments have that power. They've always had that power and always will. The US has its standards, that are, as I pointed out, not even all that good compared to lots of other countries. Without UN oversight each country will definitely start enforcing its own censorship on their own little corner of the Internet. With UN oversight they might actually not be able to do that, in exchange for being plugged into everyone else.
I mean switching to windows phone 8 would be a better plan than their current one, even though windows phone 8 doesn't seem all that likely to succeed. Blackberry 10 is dead before it arrives because it's the wrong strategy. Windows phone 8 will at least have microsoft flinging money around for a while. That was the joke.
I'm not too far from Waterloo, at a university and a few years ago RIM gave us a bunch of phones to do development on. At that time the iPhone 3g was about a year old in canada, and when we walked into the classroom and said 'this years project is on Blackberry' we got a giant groan from the class. Lots of kids still had blackberries. But they saw the winds of change.
This last year we were doing a project on one or both of iphone and android (or BB if they wanted). And in a class of 35 computer scientists and software engineers 1 was willing to do iphone, everyone else was android. We're an hour and a half from RIM and large chunk of our graduates could have made very good careers at RIM a few years ago. No none of them want to touch the business like they have the plague. It's sad.
You mean like people who buy or hold RIM stock? (https://www.google.ca/finance?q=TSE%3ARIM) that's down what, 75% in 12 months. The people who turfed out the founders and CEO?
The new CEO who's pleading for time with investors? Or the same CEO who realizing how much trouble they are in has had to come out and explain why they didn't go the most obvious route to try and make money? (I will point out that the RIM founders had a completely different plan, that would have moved RIM almost entirely into the infrastructure side of the business and exited the consumer products section).
gorwing cash horde.
I think you mean shrinking. As of their Q1 2013 filing (which was just over a month ago) their GAAP was a 520 million dollar loss. Momentum in spite of the iphone got them to 6 months ago. And suddenly they've started to hit a brick wall. Nokia is in essentially the same boat, they had momentum in the sales channel, but no one actually wanted the new product (BB9 or WP7) so when they ran out of stuff people did want they basically hit a fiscal cliff.
Importantly, the difference between RIM and Nokia is that Nokia *might* have a product people will want to buy 12 months from now, and can plead for cash from microsoft. RIM has nothing that people want, and no one to beg for money from.
This is the space left for where you admit your error and announce a switch to android. . . . . . . The content of this space is why you're going out of business. We all understand that it would be very very hard to be competitive against samsung and HTC and so on. But blackberry is now next to irrelevant in the marketplace. And RIM needs a rapid change in direction. Hell, jumping on windows phone 8 is a better plan than clinging to blackberry 10.
What if the US isn't doing the best job of defending free speech?
The UN charter states explicitly that "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers" From 1948, in it's non legally binding charter, and essentially the same thing in its legally binding agreements that only about 150 countries have signed on to.
Press Freedom from 2005 puts the US at 44th, and significantly lower than say, denmark, finland etc. So why shouldn't one of those countries get control of the internet then, since they are demonstrably more free than the US.
. The UN is over-stepping its bounds; it's supposed to be
The UN is supposed to be whatever the member states want it to be. That's how democracy works. If all of the member states agree that every tuesday everyone in the world has to wear a pink hat, then that can be made binding law. The UN has a collection of agencies of varying efficiency and effectiveness that are tasked with making sure people are fed, that there are international telecommunications standards, that Aircraft all conform to certain guidelines, that there are labour, education and human rights standards everywhere and so on. Now obviously if people don't want to do anything to uphold those rules then the UN doesn't have any capacity to act on its own. Just the same as if the south in the US tried to bring back Jim Crow laws the federal government would have to decide what, if anything, it was prepared to do about it.
Every country in the world has a representative to the UN general assembly. That's actually better than if you're in Syria, China, or a plethora of other places where you have no representation, and are obliged to pay taxes.
Technically by the way, that narrowly foolish talking point that 'no taxation without representation' doesn't even apply to the US, where if you live in D.C. for example you are subject to federal taxes but can't vote for federal representatives. Nor does it include people who are intentionally disenfranchised from being able to vote. The UN *does* have a mechanism to disenfranchise people by suspending their representation to the security council.
so it's up to them to decide whether it's okay for police to spray bullets around for fun? No
yes actually. It is.
International treaties (which are laws that everyone agrees to follow) would preclude randomly murdering your own population generally, but a country is under no obligation to sign on to those treaties.
No, it doesn't. That's the entirety of my reasoning. A BES isn't any more secure than any other product can be. And now you can no longer rely on RIM bouncing data through waterloo to keep it secure.
A BES, or ANY communications server hosted in india: has to turn over keys or just the data to the government if asked. A BES or any communications not hosted in india: Can make a legal fight out of it, might not have to turn data over. Any communications via RIM are insecure from within india.
Ya there are so many things that could have happened that wasn't his fault. Spam filter wrongly flagging accounts (for god knows what reasons) would be the most obviously. It could be someone reported his account as spamming when it wasn't and the automated tools blocked it. It could be someone accidentally deactivated the wrong account, and so on.
They might not be telling him why his account was deactivated because there wasn't a reason. Mistakes do happen.
which is still largely the desired place for college students to work
Relatively few graduates from outside of india want to go to india. When you're in india already then yes, governments jobs mean you can never show up and still get paid something, or you can use your position to try and enrich yourself with bribes.
Right, the company hosting the BES does. And has for a couple of years. For the moment if your BES is based outside of india you're 'safe', until the government figures out how to deal with that.
the playing field has not be leveled
It has. The situation is now no different from you running your own communications app on whatever platform(s) you want. If you're in india they can compel you to hand it over, if you base your servers outside india they can't do anything much to you, and you can't rely on RIM to provide you any inherent security.
Well now they don't have to call to waterloo, and argue over just what they need to get the data. Now they can do whatever they want.
Also, BES for indian companies is a separate issue, because companies already have to turn those keys over to the government because they're subject to indian law.
No, there is no legitimate need to wire tap without any kind of warrant
I didn't talk about the requirements. Because 'requiring a warrant' is stupid. It's not stupid in the US legal system, but that doesn't mean that's appropriate for india, or oman, or the emirates or whatever. India has it's own legal system, it's up to them to decide what is or is not a sufficient condition for wiretapping, and that's a separate discussion.
You're not being pedantic, you're living in a fantasy land. This isn't a legal treatise on just what should be the requisite standard for a wiretap, because that depends in large part on the details of the existing legal system. Wiretap rules in france and the US can be completely different but both reasonable. India has both the authority and a legitimate need to be able to wiretap communications in their own country. Suggesting they can't is wearing a tinfoil hat because you think they have satellites spying on you. Which sometimes they do.
Businesses in india will already be subject to indian laws though. RIM isn't subject to indian law, that's why they've been able to squabble over this as long as they have.
I wouldn't even trust my uncles and cousins who work in pharmaceuticals oversight. In india.
And yes, china is far worse because the theft is state sponsored. India it's not state sponsored, it's more at the level of corporate espionage, and there's bugger all you can do about it.
No, being within india they are already subject to indian laws, and already have to hand over any enterprise keys they have stored within india if they're 'asked'.
If you're running your BES from outside the country then you might have a temporary reprieve, until the indian government gets wind of that plan.
Slashdot Mirror
Nokia's strategy should have been to migrate their dumb phone customers to feature phones and then to smart phones like the feature phones but that use more data.
but there was nothing to keep them on a Nokia platform. Nokia smartphones were inferior, and the sooner customers made the switch the better.
They should focus on beating the $250 Android phone.
That's a low return business. You can move volume, but you make next to nothing on it. And that's why they went with Windows phone, the Lumia 710 is their answer to the 250 dollar android. Unfortunately they didn't have a platform other than MeeGo, and I get the feeling they figured it was going to fail without a backing of developers.
Depends on the oversight. That's why these things *don't* happen. The US likes the oversight it has, and doesn't want to hand that over to anyone else. Everyone else doesn't like the US oversight, and wants their own, and they can't agree on a neutral lack of oversight.
The UN actually can force compliance though. Believe it or not. They did this with the postal union to libya eventually. Don't pay your bills, don't get mail. It's a slow, laboured process, but it does have its advantages. You can't meaningfully threaten china. You can however threaten the north african, arab and middle eastern countries with being cut off from everyone else, and have them care. The same goes for europe and south america (although those places are much less likely to do things that would warrant being cut off). Africa, the US, india, china, Russia, they care a lot less, all for different reasons.
Put another way, what should be done to preserve internet freedom in Hungary and Romania right now? Can the current US centric structure do anything for them? (No, it can't), could a UN centric one? Yes, it could, because it can put layers of pressure on them, and it could threaten to disconnect them from the rest of europe (and all of their money) for not behaving if it was well constructed, but neither case could do much to big countries.
Nokia at least saw the writing on the wall and realized they needed an OS to compete with the iPhone. I think they guessed wrong.
Nokia had a cheap dumbphone market but they had a huge smartphone business, just not in north america, they even had premium phones in the 20k/year range. With software winning out over diamond encrusted the 20k phone business imploded and everyone else ate the smartphone market out from under them. I don't think dumbphones ever got them much money.
It's not just the number of lies though, it's the scale and scope. If you say "my plan will create 350 000 jobs at no cost to the taxpayers" and some independent analysis says "more like 300 000 jobs at a cost of 10 million dollars" versus "will cost 150 000 jobs, and cost taxpayers 100 million dollars".
have a look at, for example: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/aug/01/bill-clinton/its-typical-presidential-candidates-release-10-or-/
Which is rated as half true by politifact. Bill clinton claimed that it's typical to release 10 or 11 years of tax returns when running for president. Now here's the problem, lets take one datapoint. Barrack obama releasing only 7 years of tax returns (from 2000-2007 I think). But he didn't release more than that, because almost certainly the ones *before* 2000 are mind numbingly boring. He was a lecturer, then a senior lecturer, with no other appreciable income. So what are his tax returns going to have? A list of math mistakes he made that was corrected by the IRS and generic pointless stuff about earning a lecturer salary. So they kind of mindlessly ignore why he didn't release tax returns (- as in they weren't relevant-) and just count him as 7 years. Then they add up all of these numbers of tax returns listed out of context, and spit out an average saying bill clinton is exaggerating. Well sure, he's exaggerating, but the fact check itself is based on shitty data analysis that doesn't consider the quality of any of its data points. (other example, John Kerry's returns were only for the period he was with his current wife).
Lets take a trivial example. True. Sarah Palin, 1 in 7 families are on food stamps (http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2012/aug/02/sarah-palin/sarah-palin-says-1-7-american-families-food-stamps/ ). Ok... there's some trivial calculations to do there, but basically this is a single discreet fact that can actually be measured. So sure, she is telling the truth, but does it matter if the fact she is working from is true if her suggested solution isn't testable?
On the broad spectrum of minor spoken errors to complete disregards for the existence of reality politicians will have different degrees of lies on different topics, and you can always count on them to lie about each other. But lying about each other isn't actually policy, policy is what matters and trying to gauge the accuracy of proposed policy predictions is still well beyond the realm of most people, or even beyond all but the most specialized of bloggers (and then trying to figure out which specialized blog is correct and which isn't is beyond most people). To me, this gap, in trying to accurately assess credibility is the role the media should have, in finding experts who work with testable models that have track records and giving their assessments to the public. But that's not what happens. And as you say, you want to know how much truthiness these clowns emit, but in practice that's really freaking hard and no one with the capability to do it properly is rising to the challenge. Including, unfortunately, the long respected BBC, who have started to buy into the equal time for competing views even if one is discredited problem.
to quote myself
for your team
DirectX is a lot easier to get everything set up and is generally easier for games, and worse for any other 3D application than OpenGl. Directx is usually quicker out of the gate to support new features, which means it's 'easier' to just use directx if you want to support those things. OpenGl is perfectly viable, if it wasn't the PS3 would have long died. But there's a reason most of us use DirectX for games: it's actually pretty good for games. Documentation, guides, sample code, ease of understanding and so on.
Yes... And?
Governments have that power. They've always had that power and always will. The US has its standards, that are, as I pointed out, not even all that good compared to lots of other countries. Without UN oversight each country will definitely start enforcing its own censorship on their own little corner of the Internet. With UN oversight they might actually not be able to do that, in exchange for being plugged into everyone else.
I mean switching to windows phone 8 would be a better plan than their current one, even though windows phone 8 doesn't seem all that likely to succeed. Blackberry 10 is dead before it arrives because it's the wrong strategy. Windows phone 8 will at least have microsoft flinging money around for a while. That was the joke.
I'm not too far from Waterloo, at a university and a few years ago RIM gave us a bunch of phones to do development on. At that time the iPhone 3g was about a year old in canada, and when we walked into the classroom and said 'this years project is on Blackberry' we got a giant groan from the class. Lots of kids still had blackberries. But they saw the winds of change.
This last year we were doing a project on one or both of iphone and android (or BB if they wanted). And in a class of 35 computer scientists and software engineers 1 was willing to do iphone, everyone else was android. We're an hour and a half from RIM and large chunk of our graduates could have made very good careers at RIM a few years ago. No none of them want to touch the business like they have the plague. It's sad.
You mean like people who buy or hold RIM stock? (https://www.google.ca/finance?q=TSE%3ARIM) that's down what, 75% in 12 months. The people who turfed out the founders and CEO?
The new CEO who's pleading for time with investors? Or the same CEO who realizing how much trouble they are in has had to come out and explain why they didn't go the most obvious route to try and make money? (I will point out that the RIM founders had a completely different plan, that would have moved RIM almost entirely into the infrastructure side of the business and exited the consumer products section).
gorwing cash horde.
I think you mean shrinking. As of their Q1 2013 filing (which was just over a month ago) their GAAP was a 520 million dollar loss. Momentum in spite of the iphone got them to 6 months ago. And suddenly they've started to hit a brick wall. Nokia is in essentially the same boat, they had momentum in the sales channel, but no one actually wanted the new product (BB9 or WP7) so when they ran out of stuff people did want they basically hit a fiscal cliff.
Importantly, the difference between RIM and Nokia is that Nokia *might* have a product people will want to buy 12 months from now, and can plead for cash from microsoft. RIM has nothing that people want, and no one to beg for money from.
This is the space left for where you admit your error and announce a switch to android.
.
.
.
.
.
.
The content of this space is why you're going out of business. We all understand that it would be very very hard to be competitive against samsung and HTC and so on. But blackberry is now next to irrelevant in the marketplace. And RIM needs a rapid change in direction. Hell, jumping on windows phone 8 is a better plan than clinging to blackberry 10.
unlawful to hinder free speech is the best
What if the US isn't doing the best job of defending free speech?
The UN charter states explicitly that "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers" From 1948, in it's non legally binding charter, and essentially the same thing in its legally binding agreements that only about 150 countries have signed on to.
Press Freedom from 2005 puts the US at 44th, and significantly lower than say, denmark, finland etc. So why shouldn't one of those countries get control of the internet then, since they are demonstrably more free than the US.
. The UN is over-stepping its bounds; it's supposed to be
The UN is supposed to be whatever the member states want it to be. That's how democracy works. If all of the member states agree that every tuesday everyone in the world has to wear a pink hat, then that can be made binding law. The UN has a collection of agencies of varying efficiency and effectiveness that are tasked with making sure people are fed, that there are international telecommunications standards, that Aircraft all conform to certain guidelines, that there are labour, education and human rights standards everywhere and so on. Now obviously if people don't want to do anything to uphold those rules then the UN doesn't have any capacity to act on its own. Just the same as if the south in the US tried to bring back Jim Crow laws the federal government would have to decide what, if anything, it was prepared to do about it.
No taxation without representation
Every country in the world has a representative to the UN general assembly. That's actually better than if you're in Syria, China, or a plethora of other places where you have no representation, and are obliged to pay taxes.
Technically by the way, that narrowly foolish talking point that 'no taxation without representation' doesn't even apply to the US, where if you live in D.C. for example you are subject to federal taxes but can't vote for federal representatives. Nor does it include people who are intentionally disenfranchised from being able to vote. The UN *does* have a mechanism to disenfranchise people by suspending their representation to the security council.
or live in D.C.
so it's up to them to decide whether it's okay for police to spray bullets around for fun? No
yes actually. It is.
International treaties (which are laws that everyone agrees to follow) would preclude randomly murdering your own population generally, but a country is under no obligation to sign on to those treaties.
RIM still offers the only secure option
No, it doesn't. That's the entirety of my reasoning. A BES isn't any more secure than any other product can be. And now you can no longer rely on RIM bouncing data through waterloo to keep it secure.
A BES, or ANY communications server hosted in india: has to turn over keys or just the data to the government if asked.
A BES or any communications not hosted in india: Can make a legal fight out of it, might not have to turn data over.
Any communications via RIM are insecure from within india.
Ya there are so many things that could have happened that wasn't his fault. Spam filter wrongly flagging accounts (for god knows what reasons) would be the most obviously. It could be someone reported his account as spamming when it wasn't and the automated tools blocked it. It could be someone accidentally deactivated the wrong account, and so on.
They might not be telling him why his account was deactivated because there wasn't a reason. Mistakes do happen.
which is still largely the desired place for college students to work
Relatively few graduates from outside of india want to go to india. When you're in india already then yes, governments jobs mean you can never show up and still get paid something, or you can use your position to try and enrich yourself with bribes.
RIM doesn't have the keys to hand over
Right, the company hosting the BES does. And has for a couple of years. For the moment if your BES is based outside of india you're 'safe', until the government figures out how to deal with that.
the playing field has not be leveled
It has. The situation is now no different from you running your own communications app on whatever platform(s) you want. If you're in india they can compel you to hand it over, if you base your servers outside india they can't do anything much to you, and you can't rely on RIM to provide you any inherent security.
It doesn't scale linearly. Well some engines do. Depends very much on your game. Different resolutions will have different bottlenecks.
Well now they don't have to call to waterloo, and argue over just what they need to get the data. Now they can do whatever they want.
Also, BES for indian companies is a separate issue, because companies already have to turn those keys over to the government because they're subject to indian law.
No, there is no legitimate need to wire tap without any kind of warrant
I didn't talk about the requirements. Because 'requiring a warrant' is stupid. It's not stupid in the US legal system, but that doesn't mean that's appropriate for india, or oman, or the emirates or whatever. India has it's own legal system, it's up to them to decide what is or is not a sufficient condition for wiretapping, and that's a separate discussion.
Sorry to be pedantic
You're not being pedantic, you're living in a fantasy land. This isn't a legal treatise on just what should be the requisite standard for a wiretap, because that depends in large part on the details of the existing legal system. Wiretap rules in france and the US can be completely different but both reasonable. India has both the authority and a legitimate need to be able to wiretap communications in their own country. Suggesting they can't is wearing a tinfoil hat because you think they have satellites spying on you. Which sometimes they do.
Businesses in india will already be subject to indian laws though. RIM isn't subject to indian law, that's why they've been able to squabble over this as long as they have.
I wouldn't even trust my uncles and cousins who work in pharmaceuticals oversight. In india.
And yes, china is far worse because the theft is state sponsored. India it's not state sponsored, it's more at the level of corporate espionage, and there's bugger all you can do about it.
This Does Not Affect BES Users.
No, being within india they are already subject to indian laws, and already have to hand over any enterprise keys they have stored within india if they're 'asked'.
If you're running your BES from outside the country then you might have a temporary reprieve, until the indian government gets wind of that plan.