RIM to lay off 2000 employees by June 1st

**EE's Note: Sorry this is a bit late. There was an error in the chronological scheduling human interface. Or I set the auto publish date wrong...

The Globe and Mail reported that RIM will be cutting almost 20% of it's 10,500 employees among dramatically declining shipments and market share. The cuts are said to happen across all branches of the Blackberry maker.

Their CEO, Thorstein Heins, has been saying recently that the company needs some drastic changes and it seems that these are the changes. I don't suspect they will be enough at this point. The product, as it stands now, is dead and cutting staff is not bringing it back. *sigh* I wasn't planning editorialising on his one but I guess I'm going to...

Ok, so if RIM wants to save the Blackberry, they need to focus on their strength. For them to do that we need to know what their strength is. Based on my professional knowledge (Read: what I hear people saying) there are two reasons to buy a Blackberry. One is for BBM and the other is the hardware. The BBM thing, while very cool, has been duplicated dozens of times so RIM shouldn't focus on this. The hardware though, no one can do that like Blackberry. They have made a  product that people love to hold in their hand. They obviously have the keyboard concept down pat and they continue to impress me with their touch-only phones. This means that that BBOS has to go and they need to adopt a new OS. The options are WP7 and Sndroid. I say, based on current numbers, go primarily Android with a couple of WP7 devices.

There are issues here though. Mainly in that Blackberry users have an expectation so I suggest that Blackberry build in the option to load Android with a Blackberry skin. That way people who love the blackberry interface can still have it. Sony does fine with their HEAVILY skinned version of Android and I think Blackberry can do.

I don't know if RIM will do this but I hope they do. Maybe they can figure it out before they have to do a third consecutive summer layoff in 2013. Only time will tell.

To All Of You Who Are Worried About The Fate Of The 360

It will be ok!  They will pull through and continue on in their US sales.

Or, you know, announce the NextBox and just say screw it!

Robert Moog Honoured in Google Doodle

Google has been really upping the ante with their Google Doodles as of late and from time to time I comment on them but this one I thought was really cool. If you go to Google right now you will be presented with that cool synthesizer. That is a Moog Synth, created by Robert Moog, who you really should read up on if you don't know who he is. I suggest consulting the book of knowledge!

What makes it really awesome is that it works. You can adjust all the knobs and dials the hit record and click out a tune on the keyboard. From there you can hit stop, play it back, share it to Google plus or get a link to it. Very cool.

If you are musically inclined, toss the link to your musical Google Doodle creation in the comments below.

Horribly Awesome: Robo Vampire

There are some martial arts films that are considered to be classics due to their technical expertise, gorgeous settings, and iconic characters. These films challenge audience expectations by delivering completely unique and satisfying experiences. Robo Vampire is not one of these films.

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First ever Ottawa Comiccon was a huge success!

After a very exciting and exhausting weekend, I am back home and here to bring you back a little taste of the Ottawa Comiccon. I wasn't really sure what to expect going into this. I have been to PAX East before, but that is a very large and established convention that is mainly centred around video games. It is quite different from an actual Comiccon. I have to say I loved every minute of it though, it was an amazing experience. As this Comiccon was a first for Ottawa, there were a few bumps along the way but overall I was very impressed at how everything was handled. I don't think the organizers of the event expected it to be such a huge success. They were originally estimating that they might have around 5000 people attend. I think they were sincerely surprised at the 12,000 attendees on just Saturday alone. It was fantastic to be surrounded by so many friendly like-minded people who were gathered to share and celebrate their love of sci-fi and general geekiness! With the first ever Ottawa Comiccon being such an immense success this paves the way to have this wonderful gathering become an annual event.

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Eastman Kodak Had a Nuclear Reactor for 30 years... Seriously...

 

All the news about Eastman Kodak lately has been about them filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection but something way more interesting came out recently. A former Kodak employee said that the camera company had a small nuclear reactor housed underneath Kodak Park in Rochester, New York.

The employee, Albert Filo, a research scientist who worked with the reactor at Kodak for 20 years, said that Kodak allowed a small group of people to use the reactor to test the purity of chemical and to run neutron radiography tests.

The reactor was a Californium Neutron Flux Multiplier (CFX) and was one of only two ever built, the other being owned by the U.S. Department of Energy. The reactor was about the size of a refrigerator and was housed in a room with 2 foot thick concrete walls. With the reactor, Kodak also received about 3.5lbs of highly enriched (93.5%), weapons grade uranium. Although Kodak never hid it's existence and did have it registered with the government, they never explicitly said it existed. It was decommissioned under government observation in 2008.

Seriously, how cool is that?!

Why Former Yahoo! CEO Scott Thompson's Firing Was Justified

Over the past week or so the now former CEO of Yahoo, Scott Thompson, has been under fire for a lie/mistake/gaff. Essentially what happened is that during an interview someone mentioned that Thompson had a Computer Science degree and Thompson, who has no such degree, didn't correct the error. Over time it came out that the information the interviewer had about the Computer Science degree came from Scott Thompson's own Bio/Resume. So after all this went on Scott Thompson "stepped down" due to "health reasons".

Now I want to preface the next part of this article by saying that Mr. Thompson having cancer is a serious issue and I'm not saying he is lying about cancer or any of that. Maybe he did step down due to health problems but I'm going on the assumption that he was asked to step down (read: was fired) due to the Computer Science degree debacle. Regardless of whether this is true, I'm going to use it in my example.

The reason that his firing was justified is that he lied. Plain and simple. He claimed that someone else was the one looking after his resume (we'll get to that in a minute) and that he had no idea that the Computer Science thing was on there. Ok, maybe that's true and if it is, well, I guess I'm ok with a CEO of a huge company not being able to vet his own resume. What I, if I were on the Yahoo! board, could not handle was the CEO doing a public interview and not correcting a blatant mistake by the interviewer. That alone justifies his being fired.

I mentioned earlier that he said he didn't know his resume contained that information because someone else was taking care of it. I have never been a CEO and I don't personally know any CEOs but it seems to me like they would be very concerned about their public image. I highly doubt that any CEO would not be acutely aware of the public information that is available about them. A CEO is a public figure and is going to be under scrutiny from every angle. News, investors, employees and many more are going to be looking at CEOs and for a CEO to not be in control of the information the public can easily access is the height of foolishness.

Regardless of whether Scott Thompson was fired, asked to step down or left of his own accord for heath or other reasons, he made some major mistakes. Maybe I'm being too harsh on him though. I'd like to hear what you think. Do you think Thompson should have been fired for his lies? Let me know in the comments!

Original 3DS Prototype Has Been Leaked (Fake)

Found this image while surfing the tubes this morning. I Thought it was funny enough to share.

It's almost as if I could reach out and touch the graphics.

What REAL People Think About Windows Phone 7

I talk about being in a tech bubble a lot. I watch tech shows, read tech websites, write tech articles and am pretty much tech focused most of the time. That tech bubble means that I only hear the opinion of tech people and I kind of lose track of what the "normal" people think. That being said, I was leaving work yesterday morning and I heard someone say "I checked out one of those new Windows phones yesterday. It's pretty cool!" So being a closeted Windows Phone 7 fan I immediately perked up and listened in for a bit. I left to go home then, when I came back in, I asked the person who had checked out the phone what he thought about it and I figured it might be a neat look into what regular consumers think.

The first thing he mentioned was the way the phone looked. He liked the design of it, I'm not 100% sure what device he was looking at but I think it was Nokia's Lumia 900 or Lumia 800. The biggest thing was that it is a unibody device with no seams. The downside he pointed out was not being able to replace the battery.

Next I asked about the OS. He said that it looked slick. Other than that he didn't have much comment on it. He did say that he was a little worried about how new the OS was and that the app support might be lagging behind.

In the discussion we also spoke about iPhone, Android and Blackberry. He isn't sure which phone he is going to get but he was 100% sure it wasn't going to be Blackberry. His reasoning didn't really have anything to do with the phone but more with his confidence with Blackberry maker RIM.

I don't really want to do a whole lot of analysis on this one except to make a couple of points:

• The entire time we almost never talked about specs. Resolution, RAM, processor, screen, nothing.
• Style and looks mattered more than almost anything.
• Convenience was the only thing that mattered more than style and looks.
• Trust in the companies involved in the phone mattered a lot.

Purchase the items mentioned in this article from Amazon:

• Lumia 800 Unlocked (Amazon Canada)
• Lumia 900 from AT&T
• Lumia 800 Unlocked (Amazon America)

30,000 Dominoes Nintendo Special

This is just plain cool!  I remember playing with dominoes before and not having the patience to set things up in any way, so this just genuinely amazes me on so many levels.  So neat!

Thanks for the share, Jeff!