Redundant redundancies
Well it's obvious what happened to RIM. The inmates must have taken over the asylum years ago.
RIM is to cut more than 2,000 jobs around the world as part of the cost-reduction strategy it announced last month. The layoffs will leave around 17,000 employed by the company. RIM explains the process is about "eliminating redundancies and reallocating resources" which requires "workforce reduction" to the tune of 2,000 …
"I've lost my job. They're dodecimating the workforce..."
"Surely, you mean octomating?"
"Put down the adverts for new jobs and pass me a calculator"
Literally lots of words change their meaning over time.
FYI http://www.economist.com/research/styleGuide/index.cfm?page=673903
decimate (v) - to select by lot and kill every tenth person of.
The earliest English sense of decimate is “to select by lot and execute every tenth soldier of (a unit).” The extended sense “destroy a great number or proportion of” developed in the 19th century: Cholera decimated the urban population. Because the etymological sense of one-tenth remains to some extent, decimate is not ordinarily used with exact fractions or percentages: Drought has destroyed (not decimated ) nearly 80 percent of the cattle.
(from dictionary.com)
—Usage note
The earliest English sense of decimate is “to select by lot and execute every tenth soldier of (a unit).” The extended sense “destroy a great number or proportion of” developed in the 19th century: Cholera decimated the urban population. Because the etymological sense of one-tenth remains to some extent, decimate is not ordinarily used with exact fractions or percentages: Drought has destroyed (not decimated) nearly 80 percent of the cattle.
A unit selected for punishment by decimation was divided into groups of ten; each group drew lots (Sortition), and the soldier on whom the lot fell was executed by his nine comrades, often by stoning or clubbing.[citation needed] The remaining soldiers were given rations of barley instead of wheat and forced to sleep outside the Roman encampment.
Because the punishment fell by lot, all soldiers in the group were eligible for execution, regardless of the individual degree of fault, or rank and distinction.
so Nick Rutland is right
In the book for the becoming a Canadian test - it lists the country's scientific endevours (on half a page) as; the canadarm (now retired), Alexendar Graham Bell (briefly lived in Canada before inventing the telephone), the snowmobile and RIM.
Looks like it's going to get cut back a bit now.
"Decimated means killing the biggest part. In military it means killing all but 10%."
No it doesn't. Whilst it is sometimes used that way, incorrectly, the correct definition is to kill/remove 10% of the total. The term originated in the Roman army way back when, where the punishment for mutiny or similar large scale crimes was for each 10 man squad to be force to kill 1 of their own squad-mates, selected by lot (as an alternative to executing the entire squad).
I'm not one of those unfortunate people losing their job, nor am I a Roman soldier, and even I don't give a fuck about the exact technical details of the word "decimate".
I suggest El Reg has a moratorium on the use of such pedant magnet terms.
Cue the arguments about what "moratorium" means...
The original meaning was indeed the killing of one out of every ten soldiers as a punishment, which is almost precisely what RIM have just announced; the change to refer to a reduction *to* 10% rather than *by* 10% is a later extension of the meaning.
Having had the misfortune to support one or two of their turkey handsets, I can't say I'm sorry or surprised to see them shrinking. Mis-steps, arrogant complacency and proprietary hacks instead of following standards - they echo the worst of Microsoft's reputation from the darkest days of IE v Netscape, except that Microsoft had huge entrenched cash cows from Windows and Office to sustain them through years of court battles while they forced IE on everyone - RIM haven't.
Fizzy stuff, as a dress rehearsal for the champagne when they finally get Darwinned out of the gene pool entirely.
So how firing 2K people is going to improve RIM's prospect? Here's how I see it: RIM is going down because they don't have product, now they fire a lot of people, those people cannot work on new product, the chances of getting good product is even lower, more people will be fired, and so on, in a spiral of death.
I am saying "good bye RIM", I used to like Blackberries.
I can recall one chap who was realy jerked about in that they sent him the other side of the World to do some work for them, failed to sort out a green card for him and then messed up his salary and expenses so his rent and council tax back home bounced causing him to have a nice financial mess upon his return home. They then announced that he was no longer working for RIM before he had even set foot back in the country and had a chance to say his said of why he comlained about his manager messing up his life.
So Andrew Osbourne - I hope your on your ass, coz your useless manager, even kostis does better than you and he's not that popular either amongst those that do the work.
Those two clowns at the top aren't going anywhere. It's usually the hard working lot at the bottom who goes. If they bounced those two jug heads and replaced them with one who has a clue, they'd save themselves more money. For these idiots to think that producing a RIM Tablet that doesn't even come with the application that made the Blackberry popular (e-mail) is a demonstration of cluelessness on a grand scale.
Until the bitter and, until they drive RIM to the ground?
Seriously: after so spectacularly missing all the market shifts a kid was able to predict and then failing at EVERY ATTEMPT to catch up with it, how long these bunglers are allowed to stay at the helm? Will the board finally bring in someone with a clue?
Look at this fool: http://www.businessinsider.com/rim-ceo-walks-out-2010-7
Once again, I pity the engineers...
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