I don't say they have "big hardware changes". Simply N810 8GB.

And I say they maybe thought N810 8GB was going to be out before christmas or maybe not or just after xmas, so they thought they could make us wait a litle bit longer so they had 500 users-developers with 8GB machines and not with underpowered 2GB ones.

I give a 95% of chances the problem is simply bureaucratic, but I like to dream about this 5% extra.

It's Nokia - of course it's bureaucratic!

As for the lack of announcements, everyone is on holiday - not a decision I agree with as it seems maemo.org for 2 weeks has been left a leaderless and mute organisation in a time of relative crisis. Lessons will hopefully be learned from this.

I expect a flood of communication before the end of this week (it may take a day or two for a post-mortem review of where it all went wrong) and the first thing I expect to see is a big fcking apology to the community.

So, the year is over.
We've been sitting on our discount codes for almost 2 months now! C'mon Nokia, we expect at least an explanation why it takes so long!

Not gonna happen, LOL.

BTW, didn't they just take a whole freakin' month off for vacation? As I remember they released an OS2007 update right before locking up the shop then too.

Seems like their MO... Release software, go away for awhile, sort it out later.

Yeah they did, and it does seem like this is their current MO which demonstrates appalling irresponsibility. If it's allowed to continue, they can all just take a hike and we'll all move on to another project run by people who take it a lot more seriously.

Sometimes I feel bad ranting at the maemo guys/gals who have no doubt slogged hard to get each release out the door, but then I remind myself that they're shooting themselves in the foot (in fact, they've blown both legs off this Christmas) by leaving the business - and let's not forget that maemo IS a business one way or another - with nobody home for over 2 weeks. Any credibility and goodwill they had has slowly been eroded during this period.

Maemo (and by association Nokia) need to treat this project seriously, and that means managing the infrastructure better and ensuring there are people available immediately following a release (or better, 365 days of the year) to deal with the problems when the sh1t hits the fan. It's the kind of basic cover most other businesses arrange as a matter of course and if Nokia want to be taken seriously with this Tablet project and associated products they need to do the same and stop dicking about while at the same time showing the world how incompetent and badly managed they are.

Ari in his blog has acknowledged the infrastructure is a problem, I only hope he acknowledges the poor management decisions that seem to have exacerbated the initial problem. I'm sure there will be promises to address the problems in the future, but then we've all heard those promises before.

Before I get to work on some speed improvements i just discovered, i feel like blathering a bit.

I wonder if maybe we (or just I) tend to weigh the community discussions and contributions too heavily. How many tablets have been sold? And how many of those are being used without any software upgrades or 3rd party apps installed at all?

If I were a Nokia exec deciding where to allocate resources, I might look at gross tablet sales (around 400k?) and then the numbers of those users installing 3rd party apps or grabbing OS upgrades (??k) and conclude that the vast majority of tablet purchasers are just using the devices as-is and write off the afficionado and developer community as a fringe group.

If the ratio of 'upgraders and installers' among tablet users were in fact very small, then as a maemo insider making a business case to Nokia about investing in support (maemo.org, developer program etc), I'd probably find myself fielding hard-to-quantify assertions about a 'robust community' against the 'so what, xx% are buying them as-is' argument.

As developers, porters and product-fans, we may be simply not seeing those users who buy the tablets as fixed 'gadgets'. I'd be curious if anyone reading this could provide some basic statistics or indicators of what percentage of purchasers never install or upgrade. What for e.g. are number of downloads of OS2007 and OS2008 images vs gross unit sales?

Please don't take that as flame-bait. Just curious.
Cheers,

Alternatively Arnim, you can consider standard software development common sense which states that you don't publish a major new software release then disappear from the face of the Earth for 2 weeks.

Even assuming this is acceptable, it's apparent from the mailing list and posting here that there are one or two people still working within maemo.org, and the lack of any communication from more senior management tells me that there is no effective escalation process in place for when major problems do occur.

From the outside, maemo.org appears to be a noddy operation and it doesn't come close to a professionally run software development outfit. Their process is a confused mess and multiple promises have been made for far longer than I can remember that the situation will improve, yet there is no sign of this happening - where's the changelog for each release? That should be easy to produce, assuming the defects were tracked properly.

I can see where you are coming from, but don't think the argumant can fully apply here.

Mainly, the standard product has a built in "App Manager" that stands out quite clearly on the main menu options.

If I was to act like a clueless novice (not hard for me), I could quite easily end up there and see a lovely list of juicy apps to install.

Fantastic !!!

Now I hit the install option and it fails miserably, no real (worthwhile) explanation.

Very bad. Particlarly for such a long time.

It's not like a normal software install, where I have to make a positive choice to seek out some software, go to the website, download it and try to install.

It's just there ready and waiting to be picked (which is a wonderful thing) but then you get nothing...

One thing worse than not giving someone something, is dangling it in front of them getting them do drool all over the floor and then saying NO, you can't have it

Zuber

Good points.

its like...

lol .... poor cat ...