I was wondering about that as well. I am pretty sure that almost all the time after the iPhone's launch to the after-effects of the burning platform memo, the actual smartphone world leader was Nokia. The E-series was the business phone of choice at least here in Europe, and I still have never seen a Blackberry in my life.

I never understood why BB was so popular in the US with their weird infrastructure choices. Nokia's phones integrated straight into your corporate networking infrastructure via VPNs and did proper email without there being any middleman servers. I guess the US phone network infrastructure was just simply so bad back in the day that special solutions were required?

Actually, looks like the Swedish economy is growing at quite a nice clip. Finland has a problem with the eurozone which causes issues with competitiveness due to too strong a currency; and there's a bit of a demographic challenge as well. But I wouldn't say that it's the fault of the Nordic welfare state.

Brilliant. A bit like Finland these days :-)

I really can't say I agree; if the application is accessed through the web, this introduces all kinds of particular technological issues to be handled. It's a bit like a having a GUI library that is quite opinionated about how you need to be architecting your application -- of course depending on what kind of a separation you want there to be between the layers. But if you're web-programming, you'll have to take these things into account. It really is not just HTML...

"Web programming" does not mean restricting yourself simply just creating HTML documents, which, I'd have to agree, is not programming.

The web part really is just what faces the user, and even that is these days often a small application. The stuff I "web-program" currently is 95% in the back-end though, and that stuff has its own challenges.

There will be no "vote on copyright law that is drafted by citizens". Some committee will just say that there are legal reasons why this can't happen and that's it. All this stuff does is stir up public discourse, which is IMO a good thing though.

Sometimes it seems difficult to tell the difference in these cases.

There's lots of talk in Linus' responses about "singing around campfires" and not offending feelings. It's not about being suffocatingly PC by playing carebears, it's just about removing the aggressive posturing whose communicative function is to put the other person on the defensive to begin with.

The common ground generally means that there's some shared standard of what goes and what doesn't, and it seems to me that here it's pretty much to be found on Linus' terms. I tend to be pretty thick-skinned myself in the sense that I bother parsing the actual (possible) point being made even from the midst of an obscuring shitstorm, but it doesn't mean it makes me reflect too well on the person generating such communications.

I read that and understood it. However, "working together despite differences" is not necessarily about pleasing each other in the strawman way Linus suggests. In any communication there has to be some shared ground as to what constitutes acceptable behaviour and this does NOT mean some kind of totalitarian mind control in order to make all feel happy about themselves. In situations like this I much prefer going for just making my point instead of peppering it with expletives for added effect.

Sure it was historically like that -- but it certainly is being used even today to very aggressively push a certain point of view and agenda. It's almost like a nice weapon to have at your disposal when talking about modern times. And of course in the end they see it as a matter of "the other people" not being quite as legitimate as they are.

Having followed related issues for a long, long time and having tried to reason with them to no avail about them (it's probably the most intellectually impossible and taboo political topic I have ever encountered), I might say that I do have a remarkably good picture of how the Fenno-Swedes expect to be seen and how they push this expectation. It is a very real phenonemon and a dislike of that has nothing to do with things like anti-Semitism. If you came across the rather jealous protection of these "particular qualities" and senseless ad hominem attacks against your person whenever you're "disrespectful" of them, you'd get it as well. Nobody is oppressing them, a lot of us would just like to be treated with some respect.

They might be my "fellow countrymen" but that matters much less to me than how I'm expected to live with them in this state of "fellowship" -- it is actually very difficult to live in the same society with an ideology like theirs that allows no consideration that maybe even other people are even ethical parties to the conversation to begin with (to allow that would be offensive to their world-view). The really funny part about this issue regarding Linus is that he rants against feel-good minority rhetoric -- my suspicion is that he'd be in agreement with me on this.

Also, to actually say something about the culture-dependency of communication:

When coordinating a large project with people from many cultures, I'd say that a safe bet would be to assume that there is some general set of standards that you use to communicate with these people from various cultures. Not to be abusive like that for the heck of it is probably a good starting point. If Linus feels that because he represents Finns culturally here and is entitled to that kind of behaviour, then he's essentially imposing his culture on others -- and if everyone is going to behave eccentrically according to their cultures, then we're almost by definition going to have bad communication, as we don't share cultures.

Personally, I think all that culture-wankery is just an excuse though. He's just being a dick :p

I am Finnish and as such I get his management by perkele-reference very well and should probably understand what he means by claiming his rages on the KML are somehow particularly Finnish if communication is culture-dependent ;-)

We do tend to value being to the point and no-nonsense, but I can't really see being too much of a raging hothead as being a very Finnish feature -- it would detract from actually getting stuff done, and you'd lose face by losing your cool. Mgmt by perkele is actually something Finnish corporate types are trying to get rid of and it hasn't been done since the 80s, as too authoritarian military-style structures do not serve a modern organization well.

As a funny cultural anecdote, I find it interesting that Linus would identify with cursing and these things. He is a Fenno-Swede after all, and their minority culture tends to stress to the point of hilarity their relative high level of civilized conduct as compared to us barbaric Finnish-speaking forest people... if the TV shows that push the "correct" view of our Swedish speakers are any guide, he should be exchanging pleasantries with his boyfriend on a boat in the archipelago while knitting Moomins and sipping champagne.

In his attempts to explain himself, I really dislike the way he creates straw men about minority victimization, political correctness and "getting along despite differences". Good communication is good communication and a shitstorm is rarely helpful in any way. I do enjoy a good argument, but even the best slap-downs I've ever seen are very economical in nature...

Probably third, actually.

For as much as I respect Linus for the work he's done, his outbursts are getting old and are not funny anymore. I dislike political correctness and bullshit as well, but if you really have a point to make in this regard, it can be made with less rhetorical aggression, even when being blunt about it.