Posts by Anonymous Coward 101 1018 publicly visible posts • joined 16 May 2011
"Maybe once there is an actual incentive to write fast, efficient code instead of the traditional "do whatever it takes, just deliver it by Monday" approach to software development, we'll have a renaissance in programming. If we're lucky, we may even find that once people start writing well-designed, reliable and efficient software that programmers start to win back some professional esteem and respect, too."
Whining cry baby.
As Shelley wrote:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
'It was just a matter of improving the execution.'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".
Such a complicated theory which makes no sense. Symbian was yesterdays news in 2010, and MeeGo only existed in theory. It would have been a waste of time and money for Microsoft to kill either when iOS and Android were clearly the future.
We can but wonder: if there was no 'burning platforms' speech and Nokia kept on doing it's own thing, where would Nokia be now? I suggest they would be dying on their arse without any viable plan to revive them. I draw your attention the recent interview of the former boss of the Symbian Foundation here:
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/nokias-windows-phone-bear-hug-is-choking-the-mighty-finn-50007750/
The important quote is "When I was at Nokia and we shipped a Symbian product and it was bad, in its worst incarnation we knew that if we just flipped the switch, we could move 2.5 to three million units -- overnight, no matter how bad the product," he tells me. "That was Nokia. That was Nokia's brand, we knew we could count on that."
When viable alternatives to Symbian came about, consumers switched on a sixpence.
Actually, yes. On average, criminals discount the future so much that they are only focussed on the short term and don't worry about the future. Thus, if the time gap between committing a crime and getting punished is large (never mind getting caught), they will be less worried about committing the crime in the first place.
In some cases, yes, I would contend that a lesser criminal act is perfectly valid if it reveals a greater criminal act. The world isn't simple.
I do not know the details, but the expenses scandal was only revealed due to criminal leaks to the Telegraph. I can't get my knickers in a twist about what Sky News did.
"You only have to look at those countries which have automatic death penalty for drug trafficking. People still do it and this is not a heat of the moment emotional thing like some murders"
They do it, but in much lower numbers. Anybody fancy trafficking drugs to Singapore?
I'm only saying...
Was anything real, lasting and worthwhile created in Ireland during it's boom? Because it seems to have been based on borrowing money from Germany to purchase magic beans which can then be sold to someone else at great profit. Aside from prudent network improvements, what did Eircom do with the borrowed money, for example?
Abandoning the N900 will go down as another example of first rate Nokia thinking in the wilderness years between the N95 and the 'burning platforms' memo.
Picture the scene: Nokia finally have a new operating system running on a new phone. It's buggy but users like it a lot, and it sells much better than expected. If you were a smart corporation, you would devote lots of resources in bringing out more phones with the same, speedily improving, operating system. If you were Nokia, you would abandon it, cutting loyal customers adrift, and forming a 'strategic partnership' with Intel to make a new super-duper operating system. They didn't work out that they needed to move a lot quicker in getting products on shelves.
Sales were utterly collapsing before the 'burning platforms' speech. The N8 was horribly late and, with the exception of the camera, uncompetitive with Android products in the same price range. Whether the Windows Phone strategy works or not isn't clear - but it was a better plan for Nokia than the one before.
"Tell you what, Maths is difficult and the adult numeracy figures show that it's not doing much good anyway, so lets scrap maths education whilst we're at it. After all, the opportunity cost isn't worth it."
Or, lets scrap relatively teaching advanced maths (or computer programming) for people who have not mastered simple maths, so that we can teach them simple maths instead?
Too true. I recall a programming assignment I did at Edinburgh Uni where only part of the mark was in successfully completing the task - the rest of the marks were given for planning the task, critiquing somebody else's work and so forth.
I think this assignment (and others like it) was marked the way it was because they knew some folk just couldn't do the programming task but they didn't want to fail them, so they tag bullshit on the side to give marks to the duffers.
"Banks want to be left alone to trade commodities, make profit, raise their share price and pay dividends."
Oh, but if only they did those things! You may have noticed that banks made mind blowing losses, their share prices have collapsed, and they won't pay dividends for years to come. Share holders in some banks have been all but wiped out.
I'm pretty sure there is more to the failure of AOL etc. than lack of investment. All of those companies were on a hiding to nothing against better competitors. I seem to recall Nokia investing rather a lot of money trying to make a new OS and bringing Symbian up to modern consumer expectations.
"Then they hire these chinese who appear to have lots of skills and only have CHINESE CERITIFICATION that maybe was also pirated. Certification software learning tools are pirated more so than microsoft software."
In the UK we have something similar, unfortunately. We call them "former polytechnics".
"Fact is they lost belief in Symbian and wasted resources developing a dozen other technologies."
I agree they dithered around and should have stuck with one or two new platforms, but you can't say they never gave Symbian a chance. The man hours spent trying to make it modern could have put a man on Mars.
"Symbian Belle is good and could have happened years earlier."
Why didn't it?
By 2010, high quality Android devices were coming out and the iPhone was all over the place. Nokia were nowhere to be seen. They fannied around and pissed away inordinate sums of cash on failed acquisitions when they should have been creating great phones. In 2007, Nokia were mega rich and had lots of engineers to create a modern phone OS. It has all turned to dust.
..."blah blah blah".
I am reminded of the complaint against parapsychologists: they never design simple experiments that will conclusively prove the existence of mind reading or whatever. It is always intentionally overcomplicated experiments that leave open other interpretations.
On the side of alien life on Mars, we have this waffle. On the other hand, we have the fact that there is no other evidence of life on Mars whatsoever.
I think the rational is to flood the shop with handsets so as to make everyone in the shop aware of the brand whilst keeping competing handsets out of the shop. I don't think the plan works very well when people start approximating HTC phones with grey sludge, even if the phones are outstanding. Think how Samsung kept it's highest end phone as the Galaxy S2 and is now the de-facto chief competitor to the iPhone 4S.
"Not quite - the VR programme was massively over-subscribed, but by people who the company didn't want to get rid of. Most of the people who they did want to get rid of didn't apply."
Par for the course for VR. Good staff know they can get a job elsewhere with relative ease, so want free money from a redundancy cheque and to escape to somewhere with prospects. Crap staff know they can't get another job so easily.
...is how many people here are simultaneously whining about jobs being moved to India and Capita being crap at doing stuff. I can vouch for Capita being crap after getting the run around by TV licensing. I have a question which some may feel is excessively cynical, but I believe is pertinent: maybe the UK staff were totally shite?
"Content is king, but if you can't watch a programme without the "puppy drowning in mud" soundtrack, would you watch?"
I remember that. When my mum phoned onDigital to ask how to fix it, she was told to switch the digibox off for a while to reduce 'static electricity'!
You will find things that are just as hate filled being sung on a football terrace, and certainly being said on football chat forums about hated rivals. This guy made a twat of himself and he knew it, but if he hadn't made the racial slurs and had merely kept recommending to others to 'rape their dogs' he would not be in prison now. This 'incitement to racial hatred' is a load of crap.
"I call both close friends and utter strangers muppets - without context the statement itself is meaningless."
Yes - it the statement was in the context of "let's screw these muppet's over for a fast buck because we can get away with it" then that would be damning. But if it was along the lines of "we are going to have to hold our clients hands through this - they're muppets" then the difference is clear.
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