Maemo/MeeGo was destroyed by internal fighting and disagreements. ArsTechnica had an interesting article about that a few months ago.
Unfortunately, the N9 destroyed itself by being late and not being properly optimized. Poor developer support was the final straw.
Unfortunately, the N9 destroyed itself by being late and not being properly optimized. Poor developer support was the final straw.
As a guy who bought an N9, I'm not so convinced about the "poor developer support" thing. Sure, there were far fewer developers, but the stuff they have created it pretty fucking fantastic; gPodder for the N9 is better than any podcast app I've found for Android, for example, and had features at the N9's launch that I've heard iOS apps loudly advertise for since then---and those are features that were in gPodder for Maemo years and years before, even. Hell, I myself pulled out some python and quickly wrote a basic app for bus stops in my city, and I can't program for shit.
And of course, considering that before the N9 was even released Elop had publicly stated that Nokia wouldn't make a followup no matter what its sales were like (not to mention they chose not to sell it in nearly any major markets) it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Honestly it shows something about the loyalty Nokia's Linux division built up over the years and the friendliness of the platform to developers that as many people did (and still do) develop for a device that was disowned before launch by the management of the company producing it.
That being said, there's an argument to be made that it only was allowed to be released by the internal infighting stopping once the new direction was announced---the Symbian people were finally pissed enough, and had an external enemy to rail against, that they didn't hobble the Maemo/MeeGo folks like they had in the past (for example with the N8, originally meant to be an N900 successor...).
I was with you until the end. I think you're going a bit too conspiracy here, since the real 'conspiracy' is fairly prosaic and obvious. The Board hired Elop, the Microsoft veteran, to shape Nokia's phones and devices section into something Microsoft would want to buy . . . just another example in what you've enumerated about with upper management's misuse of Nokia as a personal piggy bank. They see the writing on the wall (of their own making, and they know they aren't going to change how they run it) and figure the best thing to do is hire Elop and aim for one last big payout.
Wrong, it didn't commit suicide it was just stubborn until it suffered unto its last.
There's a long recent history of Nokia management monkeying around with things, and infighting between the departments (for example, the Symbian folks successfully grabbed projects away from the Maemo folks and otherwise inhibited Nokia's attempts at developing any more future-proof alternatives). And it seems pretty obvious (was fairly obvious at the time, and is blindingly obvious now) that the Board hired Elop to prep for a Microsoft sale. At every level of management, it was just politics and a complete lack of faith in the engineering abilities down below.
I'm not guaranteeing that it would've all worked out fine without management interference, but both the scope and malignancy of the bureaucracy within Nokia is fairly well known at this point. And, in the rare cases when individual engineers would actually get a chance to directly contribute to something, it very often turned out quite well. Felipe Contreras, for example, a device adaptation engineer, thought that the N9 would benefit from a gesture where swiping down from the top would close an app. This fit really well with the N9/Harmattan swipe motif, but he couldn't convince the project management to assign it to be programmed in, so he just went and learned the language the UI/UX bits were written in, wrote it himself, and managed to get it silently included in the version that shipped with the N9. You had to know to add a config file in the right place with the right text in it. With the first update released, however, that gesture was enabled by default. With the UI/UX the way it is, swiping down to close something just makes intuitive sense and feels right, and it was just one engineer not even working directly on that part of the device that made it happen, and only really in that weird moment of Nokia's history when people found themselves working on a flagship device that management was now saying was no longer their flagship.
How many other ideas and features were strangled in their cribs by management? How many useless and misguided goals were set by that same management, monopolizing the time that entire departments had for things that any engineer on the ground could have told management was pointless? Certainly, I think, it was a primary reason for Nokia's inability to keep up.
I wonder if the developers promised that it was "basically impossible" to decompile the code. Or did the developers more honestly say, "this will buy us a bunch of time."
Management: Make sure people don't steal our stuff! Developers: Okay, uhhh . . . it's obsfucated now, is that good? Management: Don't give me any of your technical mumbo-jumbo, is our IP secure? We can't monetize it without keeping our secret sauce. Developers:...yeah, sure. Management: Good enough for me! I'm going on a business lunch, you folks get back to work.
Fundamental property rights have been acknowledged by courts for hundreds of years - the product of my labor is my property, and I have some fundamental ownership of the product of that labor. I am then free to enter into mutually-consensual trades with other people, whereby they trade some product of their labor that I want, in exchange for some product of my labor that they want, and we both are enriched by the trade.
Exactly, and so once you sell that code to me, just like if you sold me a horse or a cart or an axe, you have no right to tell me what I can and can not do with it, right?
So.. there would be no incentive for theft if no one was allowed to have property? While technically true, that really throws the baby out with the bathwater.
I'd argue it isn't a baby, it's a baby doll that your delusional wife is insisting is her kid.
Perhaps the distribution model is/was innovative but is the code really innovative? It seems that free software is dominated by creating copies/replacements of commercial software. Unix -> Linux. Photoshop -> Gimp. MS Office -> LibreOffice.
For example, I've been using tabbed file browsing for about a decade now; they've been the default in my desktop environments. I hear the latest version of OSX is going to finally add that. Who knows if/when Windows will. That's a fairly trivial feature, sure. But that actually proves another point about open source versus closed; all it takes is one person to want that feature and to code it, and it's there, and people can use it.
As well, it's hardly like Unix was the first OS, or Photoshop the first image editor, or MS Office the first office suite. Hell, MS Office itself was for many years vastly inferior feature-wise to many alternatives that had histories stretching earlier than it, it just won because of Microsoft's OS market share---the Network Effect is a fearsome and ravenous beast. Few blobs of software are the 'originals', they're copies of copies of copies, slowly iterating (hopefully; sometimes regressing instead, especially in unfree software).
I remember when I first ran Windows 8 and I saw that it had fancy graphs for the speed of file copies, and I had to laugh, since that's been in KDE since the rough early days of the 4.x series. Not to mention that the launcher can parse things I write like "1000 minutes in hours" and spit me out the answer to my question, while Windows 8.x still struggles to even find installed programs (8.1 is a bit better than 8 for the most part, albeit worse in a few ways, and still extremely inferior to KRunner). And there are programs pushing into newer paradigms that make old fogeys like me uncomfortable and wanting to tweet things that end in #lawns, like Tomahawk, and whose website reminds me of the ubiquity of the opensource Bootstrap framework at the moment.
I've observed that most researchers assume a utilitarian ethics, which makes some sense if maximizing performance is the overall imperative. However, I count myself among those who believe that future AIs must be able to reason about moral imperatives if we expect them to behave themselves appropriately as we live and work alongside each other.
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Now, you may raise some objections that a sufficiently advanced AI is going to realize certain implications about broader "harm" and when it may be impossible to prevent a human from harm without harm befalling another human etc etc, but to go into that too far is spoilers for the combined Robot and Foundation series', and I doubt AI research is going to get too far anytime soon anyways;)
Formal logic, in all its forms, is a product of mathematics, which is a tiny subset of all that is human thought.
Indeed, it contains only the well-founded universe.
But it isn't how humans think. If you throw enough computing horsepower at the task, sure, you can figure out everything, because fundamentally the universe runs on physics, but that's at a much lower level and these systems are extremely complex. So instead we use abstractions to describe and conceptualize human thought, and formal logic is just one way you could do so---but again, you're describing an abstraction, not the actual underlying processes and systems.
I suppose you might be saying that we should just mathematics to model all of it, but that's fairly unfeasible at this stage. It's like how every password is some sort of permutation of accepted characters, so you can eventually brute-force it. But if you have a wordlist then there's an entire domain of passwords that become orders of magnitude easier to crack. Just because you can in principle describe everything using mathematics doesn't mean it's entirely sensible to do so. If you were doing so for human thought, after all, you'd have to model every single atom in the brain (and every particle, be it matter or energy, which it came into contact with) to have a foolproof and exact model of a thought.
in a fucking heartbeat. But, Nokia had a long-suffering team creating wonderful Linux devices mostly ignored by the rest of the world (not to mention Nokia management). And a lot of those folks are now off at Jolla. Canonical, on the other hand, has no such history of actually shipping quality mobile devices, so it's a far riskier proposition.
Getting high speed internet in Alberta anywhere outside a larger population centre has been virtually impossible, so it's interesting to see rural towns take the problem by the horns on their own with success.
Considering this is only possible by them jacking into the (expensive, very slow to actually roll out, many years in the making) provincial government's Supernet project, I really don't think it's a case of "rural towns tak[ing] the problem by the horns on their own".
Some people learn from their mistakes, but others refuse to learn when things have changed. The "lessons" they've learned are no longer appropriate---or were bogus to begin with, re: racism, gender discrimination, homophobia---but they cling to them anyways.
So yeah, people can become less wise with age, certainly at least in a relative measure.
Getting to the point of usability is going to be hard (unlikely that 3D printers are going to be able to replicate anything within the ballpark of a chip fab anytime soon, for example) but the more of the stack that's independently reproducible and open to public inspection the better.
beating hearts. Misplaced comma and all. And by "their" I refer to anyone who ever supported any legislation involving "terrorism". Absolutely fucking disgusting.
Yeah, I'm not posting this AC. Because we shouldn't be scared of saying keywords or using goddamn sarcasm.
but if you want to actually understand some of what's going on
But the calculus they teach in intro calculus courses is no better; "here are formulas, memorize how to use them to get results that we'll accept". No math teacher I ever had in first-year math courses at university, nor ever heard about, bothered to explain anything but rote formula-use. No explanations of why, no explanations of what was being done, and the pace entirely dictated by best-case memorization of each rote step, not the relative complexity of concepts (which leads any student actually trying to conceptualize the mathematics in question alternating between bored and frantic).
Your objection to intro stats courses is just an objection to intro courses in general. And you're not wrong, but . ..
Same. It's not like solo artists can't make long-running webcomics (just look at Jeph Jacques' Questionable Content) but it's fairly inevitable when a comic starts as a decent balance between two creative individuals that it's going to lose something when one of them moves on---especially if it's because of overreach from the other partner.
And lose something it did; I own physical copies of the first two books, and it's already clear by the end of the second book that it's losing its way. I really, really enjoyed it until around then, however. Then I somewhat enjoyed it for a bit. Then one day I noticed I had long since stopped checking for updates.
Still rough in some respects, but entirely usable right now, and there's even an Android app. Hell, the dev behind the current quasi-official Android app (there's also a more-official one planned, and of course there's an open---albeit not yet stable---API) has even made it work on Android 2.1 devices, so my rooted Nook Touch works. Reading RSS on an e-ink screen? As the kids wouldn't say anymore, hells to the yes.
Okay, so I'm using EC2 for the server at the moment, thus relying on a third party again. But since it's ownCloud, I can back up and reimport my entire setup on any webserver I control anywhere, so if Amazon self-destructs or such I'm not left searching for another full solution stack. Never again. Plus, well, I'm a KDE user, and integration in Akregator is coming down the line in theory. So I'll be able to have discrete desktop and mobile apps for a web service that I can put up wherever I have hosting. That's not a solution for everyone per se (although if any of my friends want to use it I'll obviously give them accounts) but it's a pretty perfect replacement for my own needs.
I've long held that Canada is, at best, about 5 to 10 years lag behind the States in terms of these things. People started doubting my claims when the recent Bush Administration was elected. They ceased doubting me once the Harper Administration came into power.
I mean seriously, despite being the founder of the competing "big" desktop environment, he's complained that the Linux desktop is all fragmented and there isn't a standard desktop interface. I'm no fan of GNOME, but I don't think it's fair to use his words or stances as representative of the GNOME project or of anyone else.
(Other than maybe hypocrites, or earthly embodiments of cosmic irony.)
Debian is shipping GNOME 3.4, right? I know that the changes yanking out a bunch of the customization options in Gnome Terminal hadn't hit yet back then, and I don't think Nautilus was as gimped as it is now, either.
I haven't used GNOME extensively, but what's put me off has been less the desktop environment itself (not the biggest fan, but I can see how it's workable) and more the problems with the default applications and their steady loss of features, alongside the snotty and condescending attitude of many of the developers. Well, and the launcher still can't remotely compete with KRunner---I often run an Openbox+tint2+KRunner setup when I'm in a minimalist mood.
I found a hidden option that enabled workspaces on all monitors, but as of GNOME 3.0 it was thoroughly broken and caused a lot of crashes (which I was told by the GNOME developers they weren’t going to look at, since it wasn’t a supported configuration), so I was forced to revert.
In my experience, when trying to make KDE behave in some weird and idiosyncratic way I've been told "oh, cool, yeah we added an option that might help you do that a while back, wasn't sure anybody'd ever use it". Whereas with GNOME, trying to make it behave in a previously standard way will prompt criticism and ridicule for not being with the times and for being an unimportant minority interest.
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Maemo/MeeGo was destroyed by internal fighting and disagreements. ArsTechnica had an interesting article about that a few months ago. Unfortunately, the N9 destroyed itself by being late and not being properly optimized. Poor developer support was the final straw.
As a guy who bought an N9, I'm not so convinced about the "poor developer support" thing. Sure, there were far fewer developers, but the stuff they have created it pretty fucking fantastic; gPodder for the N9 is better than any podcast app I've found for Android, for example, and had features at the N9's launch that I've heard iOS apps loudly advertise for since then---and those are features that were in gPodder for Maemo years and years before, even. Hell, I myself pulled out some python and quickly wrote a basic app for bus stops in my city, and I can't program for shit.
And of course, considering that before the N9 was even released Elop had publicly stated that Nokia wouldn't make a followup no matter what its sales were like (not to mention they chose not to sell it in nearly any major markets) it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Honestly it shows something about the loyalty Nokia's Linux division built up over the years and the friendliness of the platform to developers that as many people did (and still do) develop for a device that was disowned before launch by the management of the company producing it.
That being said, there's an argument to be made that it only was allowed to be released by the internal infighting stopping once the new direction was announced---the Symbian people were finally pissed enough, and had an external enemy to rail against, that they didn't hobble the Maemo/MeeGo folks like they had in the past (for example with the N8, originally meant to be an N900 successor...).
I was with you until the end. I think you're going a bit too conspiracy here, since the real 'conspiracy' is fairly prosaic and obvious. The Board hired Elop, the Microsoft veteran, to shape Nokia's phones and devices section into something Microsoft would want to buy . . . just another example in what you've enumerated about with upper management's misuse of Nokia as a personal piggy bank. They see the writing on the wall (of their own making, and they know they aren't going to change how they run it) and figure the best thing to do is hire Elop and aim for one last big payout.
There's a long recent history of Nokia management monkeying around with things, and infighting between the departments (for example, the Symbian folks successfully grabbed projects away from the Maemo folks and otherwise inhibited Nokia's attempts at developing any more future-proof alternatives). And it seems pretty obvious (was fairly obvious at the time, and is blindingly obvious now) that the Board hired Elop to prep for a Microsoft sale. At every level of management, it was just politics and a complete lack of faith in the engineering abilities down below.
I'm not guaranteeing that it would've all worked out fine without management interference, but both the scope and malignancy of the bureaucracy within Nokia is fairly well known at this point. And, in the rare cases when individual engineers would actually get a chance to directly contribute to something, it very often turned out quite well. Felipe Contreras, for example, a device adaptation engineer, thought that the N9 would benefit from a gesture where swiping down from the top would close an app. This fit really well with the N9/Harmattan swipe motif, but he couldn't convince the project management to assign it to be programmed in, so he just went and learned the language the UI/UX bits were written in, wrote it himself, and managed to get it silently included in the version that shipped with the N9. You had to know to add a config file in the right place with the right text in it. With the first update released, however, that gesture was enabled by default. With the UI/UX the way it is, swiping down to close something just makes intuitive sense and feels right, and it was just one engineer not even working directly on that part of the device that made it happen, and only really in that weird moment of Nokia's history when people found themselves working on a flagship device that management was now saying was no longer their flagship.
How many other ideas and features were strangled in their cribs by management? How many useless and misguided goals were set by that same management, monopolizing the time that entire departments had for things that any engineer on the ground could have told management was pointless? Certainly, I think, it was a primary reason for Nokia's inability to keep up.
Management: Make sure people don't steal our stuff! ...yeah, sure.
Developers: Okay, uhhh . . . it's obsfucated now, is that good?
Management: Don't give me any of your technical mumbo-jumbo, is our IP secure? We can't monetize it without keeping our secret sauce.
Developers:
Management: Good enough for me! I'm going on a business lunch, you folks get back to work.
That seems unlikely, though. More likely the potential future revenue was merely 'destroyed' if anything, eh?
Exactly, and so once you sell that code to me, just like if you sold me a horse or a cart or an axe, you have no right to tell me what I can and can not do with it, right?
I'd argue it isn't a baby, it's a baby doll that your delusional wife is insisting is her kid.
For example, I've been using tabbed file browsing for about a decade now; they've been the default in my desktop environments. I hear the latest version of OSX is going to finally add that. Who knows if/when Windows will. That's a fairly trivial feature, sure. But that actually proves another point about open source versus closed; all it takes is one person to want that feature and to code it, and it's there, and people can use it.
As well, it's hardly like Unix was the first OS, or Photoshop the first image editor, or MS Office the first office suite. Hell, MS Office itself was for many years vastly inferior feature-wise to many alternatives that had histories stretching earlier than it, it just won because of Microsoft's OS market share---the Network Effect is a fearsome and ravenous beast. Few blobs of software are the 'originals', they're copies of copies of copies, slowly iterating (hopefully; sometimes regressing instead, especially in unfree software).
I remember when I first ran Windows 8 and I saw that it had fancy graphs for the speed of file copies, and I had to laugh, since that's been in KDE since the rough early days of the 4.x series. Not to mention that the launcher can parse things I write like "1000 minutes in hours" and spit me out the answer to my question, while Windows 8.x still struggles to even find installed programs (8.1 is a bit better than 8 for the most part, albeit worse in a few ways, and still extremely inferior to KRunner). And there are programs pushing into newer paradigms that make old fogeys like me uncomfortable and wanting to tweet things that end in #lawns, like Tomahawk, and whose website reminds me of the ubiquity of the opensource Bootstrap framework at the moment.
Now, you may raise some objections that a sufficiently advanced AI is going to realize certain implications about broader "harm" and when it may be impossible to prevent a human from harm without harm befalling another human etc etc, but to go into that too far is spoilers for the combined Robot and Foundation series', and I doubt AI research is going to get too far anytime soon anyways ;)
But it isn't how humans think. If you throw enough computing horsepower at the task, sure, you can figure out everything, because fundamentally the universe runs on physics, but that's at a much lower level and these systems are extremely complex. So instead we use abstractions to describe and conceptualize human thought, and formal logic is just one way you could do so---but again, you're describing an abstraction, not the actual underlying processes and systems.
I suppose you might be saying that we should just mathematics to model all of it, but that's fairly unfeasible at this stage. It's like how every password is some sort of permutation of accepted characters, so you can eventually brute-force it. But if you have a wordlist then there's an entire domain of passwords that become orders of magnitude easier to crack. Just because you can in principle describe everything using mathematics doesn't mean it's entirely sensible to do so. If you were doing so for human thought, after all, you'd have to model every single atom in the brain (and every particle, be it matter or energy, which it came into contact with) to have a foolproof and exact model of a thought.
in a fucking heartbeat. But, Nokia had a long-suffering team creating wonderful Linux devices mostly ignored by the rest of the world (not to mention Nokia management). And a lot of those folks are now off at Jolla. Canonical, on the other hand, has no such history of actually shipping quality mobile devices, so it's a far riskier proposition.
Considering this is only possible by them jacking into the (expensive, very slow to actually roll out, many years in the making) provincial government's Supernet project, I really don't think it's a case of "rural towns tak[ing] the problem by the horns on their own".
Some people learn from their mistakes, but others refuse to learn when things have changed. The "lessons" they've learned are no longer appropriate---or were bogus to begin with, re: racism, gender discrimination, homophobia---but they cling to them anyways.
So yeah, people can become less wise with age, certainly at least in a relative measure.
Getting to the point of usability is going to be hard (unlikely that 3D printers are going to be able to replicate anything within the ballpark of a chip fab anytime soon, for example) but the more of the stack that's independently reproducible and open to public inspection the better.
...I guess by "they" I mean our own government.
beating hearts. Misplaced comma and all. And by "their" I refer to anyone who ever supported any legislation involving "terrorism". Absolutely fucking disgusting.
/me looks over at the U.S. Government.
Yeah, I'm not posting this AC. Because we shouldn't be scared of saying keywords or using goddamn sarcasm.
As kids like this might say, COME AT ME BRO.
But the calculus they teach in intro calculus courses is no better; "here are formulas, memorize how to use them to get results that we'll accept". No math teacher I ever had in first-year math courses at university, nor ever heard about, bothered to explain anything but rote formula-use. No explanations of why, no explanations of what was being done, and the pace entirely dictated by best-case memorization of each rote step, not the relative complexity of concepts (which leads any student actually trying to conceptualize the mathematics in question alternating between bored and frantic).
Your objection to intro stats courses is just an objection to intro courses in general. And you're not wrong, but . . .
Same. It's not like solo artists can't make long-running webcomics (just look at Jeph Jacques' Questionable Content) but it's fairly inevitable when a comic starts as a decent balance between two creative individuals that it's going to lose something when one of them moves on---especially if it's because of overreach from the other partner.
And lose something it did; I own physical copies of the first two books, and it's already clear by the end of the second book that it's losing its way. I really, really enjoyed it until around then, however. Then I somewhat enjoyed it for a bit. Then one day I noticed I had long since stopped checking for updates.
...everything's pretty familiar, actually. No humorous inversions of American society to be found.
Still rough in some respects, but entirely usable right now, and there's even an Android app. Hell, the dev behind the current quasi-official Android app (there's also a more-official one planned, and of course there's an open---albeit not yet stable---API) has even made it work on Android 2.1 devices, so my rooted Nook Touch works. Reading RSS on an e-ink screen? As the kids wouldn't say anymore, hells to the yes.
Okay, so I'm using EC2 for the server at the moment, thus relying on a third party again. But since it's ownCloud, I can back up and reimport my entire setup on any webserver I control anywhere, so if Amazon self-destructs or such I'm not left searching for another full solution stack. Never again. Plus, well, I'm a KDE user, and integration in Akregator is coming down the line in theory. So I'll be able to have discrete desktop and mobile apps for a web service that I can put up wherever I have hosting. That's not a solution for everyone per se (although if any of my friends want to use it I'll obviously give them accounts) but it's a pretty perfect replacement for my own needs.
I've long held that Canada is, at best, about 5 to 10 years lag behind the States in terms of these things. People started doubting my claims when the recent Bush Administration was elected. They ceased doubting me once the Harper Administration came into power.
I mean seriously, despite being the founder of the competing "big" desktop environment, he's complained that the Linux desktop is all fragmented and there isn't a standard desktop interface. I'm no fan of GNOME, but I don't think it's fair to use his words or stances as representative of the GNOME project or of anyone else.
(Other than maybe hypocrites, or earthly embodiments of cosmic irony.)
Debian is shipping GNOME 3.4, right? I know that the changes yanking out a bunch of the customization options in Gnome Terminal hadn't hit yet back then, and I don't think Nautilus was as gimped as it is now, either.
I haven't used GNOME extensively, but what's put me off has been less the desktop environment itself (not the biggest fan, but I can see how it's workable) and more the problems with the default applications and their steady loss of features, alongside the snotty and condescending attitude of many of the developers. Well, and the launcher still can't remotely compete with KRunner---I often run an Openbox+tint2+KRunner setup when I'm in a minimalist mood.
Funny how the kids think the menus comes from windows 95 these days.
Ohhhh if I hadn't already commented I would mod you up like crazy, parent.
In my experience, when trying to make KDE behave in some weird and idiosyncratic way I've been told "oh, cool, yeah we added an option that might help you do that a while back, wasn't sure anybody'd ever use it". Whereas with GNOME, trying to make it behave in a previously standard way will prompt criticism and ridicule for not being with the times and for being an unimportant minority interest.