dalai

My feeling is that they are not selling because they are not pushing them much. I don't think Samsung ever made a serious, competitive Windows Phone. Also Lumia is not selling the volume it's selling just because of the OS (actually for some is a disadvantage because of the smaller marketplace). It would be interesting to see how a Lumia with Android would fare.

Anyway, three years ago Samsung had 5% of the market and Nokia over 35%. They had a good lead over everyone no matter what OS they decided to back. Admittedly going with Android would have meant that they would have more competition, but I believe that they had a good chance on brand recognition alone. Perhaps it would have been worse, no way to tell now.

Nokia essentially dropped Symbian two years ago.

I think they have outsourced Symbian support. I am not sure anyone is developing for it or updating it any more.

Exactly the same way Samsung, HTC are/were handling it.

Add to that, they need to sell Symbian for a few more years anyway.

Nokia essentially dropped Symbian two years ago.

Also, Samsung has gotten nowhere with their alternative OSes.

Funnily enough one of their alternative OSes that is getting them nowhere is Windows and they decided to focus on Android instead.

Nokia has become _the windows phone_.

I don't see how that is helping them. They had huge brand recognition. It used to be that 1 every 3 phones sold was made by them. Not saying that Elop was the source of all their misery, but the Windows Phone strategy doesn't seem to be helping them much.

As of now, Lumia accounts for 75% of windows phone sales.

The latter being around 3% of total smartphone sales, comparable to the marketshare of Bada OS two years ago.

    I would even go as far as to disable middle mouse 
    paste without exposing any GUI option for this [...] 
    A hardcore unix person will shout and scream if we 
    try to remove it, yet it is flawed. We should remove 
    it and use a one, predictable way of copy & pasting.

The question was if the technology they have is capable of decoding encrypted transmissions (e.g. SSH or PGP).

The reply was that in general yes, depending on the type and quality of the encryption.

What I would note is that neither the question nor the reply are about a particular encryption technology. I would not take it to mean that they can decrypt PGP in general.

Certainly, there is always room for improvement.

> And with no clear roadmap to guide priorities, that overhead won't provide any benefit

But that is one of the purported advantages of a flagship project. You do have a roadmap and a unifying goal that is provided by the project. Thus you can avoid different institutions performing the same research over and over without any concern to how this relates to previous results and other relevant areas. The difference is that the roadmap is provided by the project instead of the funding agency and as such there is more flexibility.

> building ambitious 'platforms'

To take one of the platforms as an example, the idea behind the brain simulation platform is to be able to aggregate scientific data collected one way or another (even outside the project) to build a simulation model. The more data collected the better the model. Then scientists can come and test their hypotheses or run scenarios. Based on the results the brain model may be adjusted. The way I see it, this will be an evolving tool that will facilitate basic research. I am not a neuroscientist so I can't really comment on whether this tool makes sense or not.

> Give the state of our knowledge, a massive publicly-funded project seems premature

One billion might sound like bucket loads of money, but it is not. There are close to 90 institutions involved and a huge percentage of the funding will need to go to the platforms that need to built. This is more about building the necessary infrastructure to do higher-impact research.

What they are trying to say is that we can put a lot more data into our simulations and run them at different abstraction levels, which will help us improve our understanding of the brain. This improved understanding can be used for innovation in computing, e.g. through neuromorphic processors, see http://www.kip.uni-heidelberg.de/cms/groups/vision/projects/... which is one of the project partners.

In this particular case most of the employees have been working exclusively on OpenOffice for the last 4-5 years. Switching them to MS Office will probably decrease their productivity on top of the cost of the license.

Anyway, they didn't even try to claim that it will save them money. What they claimed was that 20% of their word processing cannot be done with open source tools. I am really curious what kind of word processing they do.