Monday, October 30, 2006
Keep talented Finn in Finland
That is exteremely important. Keep talented finnish in Finland by providing him or her good working environment and everything. Always it is under discussion, how we have low salaries, high taxes, driving car is expensive and here is cold and companies are outsourcing and moving their work to low budged countries. So, of course it would be excellent to figure out, that in Finland, we all would get at least 6.000 EUR in month, tax rate would be 14.6% and cars would cost under 20.000 eur no matter if that is BMW, AUDI or KIA. Sun would shine all the time. Of course in that kind of environment I would like to work myself, but come on, that is not reality!
On the other hand, I would prefer paying higher taxes to keep our country clean and safe. I want to talk in the middle of Helsinki in pease with my laptop case without getting beated and robbed. I like to use subway during evening, I like to see, that our buildings are in good shape and I like to travel using public transportation. I like to keep my environment in good shape. So, keeping talented persons has nothing to do with salary and taxes. This is more or less challenges to job places and bosses to identify talents.... or actually identify every single person by recognize their talents, opportunities, listening to them and getting space to grow, take responsibilities and not communicate with negative. Money is not good motivator, but if you are lack of person management skills, that might be your only solution. For example I can say, that in current job, one of the most motivating thing is my boss, not because he pays my salary, but because what kind of environment he has managed to build for me to work. On the other hand, so simple.... so if you want to keep talented person where you want, the tax rate is pretty low level and cheap excuse in long term. Of course, that can be expected, if you dont have anything else to offer, right?
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Hacking - usefull source of testing
Hackers (no semantic lessons should it be hacker or cracker, yeah) are cool sources, which seems to be a problematic for some reason to companies and to public... I dont understand why? Why they are problematic? If I claim, that hackers do, what else cannot do, they are like Formula 1 drivers in Internet driving with speed, equipments and talent, which average Toyota Avensis owner, who follows rules and speed limits, cannot accept, I get beated.
Why I get beated. Who knows. I have discussed with persons, who don't understand hackers and the reason is that they are evil criminals. If I say, that they are average person whith good tools and understanding about what they want, I am making some kind of online criminal romantic thoughts. Well... from my point of view, that is bullshit. I am not trying to explain or romantice that. In some activities it is hobby, for some reasons it might have some grey areas of including.
Why I get beated. Who knows. I have discussed with persons, who don't understand hackers and the reason is that they are evil criminals. If I say, that they are average person whith good tools and understanding about what they want, I am making some kind of online criminal romantic thoughts. Well... from my point of view, that is bullshit. I am not trying to explain or romantice that. In some activities it is hobby, for some reasons it might have some grey areas of including.
Before Internet my father has a student, who was very talented with computers and ones he was visiting in our house, he show the new interesting thing called modem. that was analog-digital modulater, which was plugged to phoneline and computer started to discuss with some other computer somehwere.... you called using ATDT-command and got some kind of access to BBS. That was excellent. During that time for example Porin Puhelin had own BBS box. Well, he show me about basics how to use that (300 baud modem) and he said, that there are lot lot faster modems, like 1200 baud modems. That was exceptional. Then there was freenet and everything. I was attracted a lot for those. eventually the whole thing was pretty new also to BBS publishers and admins and with two those kind of "portals" there was username/password-list available in the system structure. In some sense some of the data was able to be deleted and I quess I did so a couple times also (sorry).
Well... in that sense now the firewalls and security aspects are better. There is VPN-tunnels and encryption issues. All kind of security holes are searched and fixed very fast. That is because there are these hackers. I know several of those.... they have competitions with friends. I have scanned, DDOS attacted and sniffered my friends computers as well as they have been doing same to me. During year 2002-2004 there was lots of local kids, who were using different kind of scanning tools for port scanning (pretty amateur, have to admit).... so I captured their IP address and hacked their computers and deleted OS for revenge. One spamming server, which I checked was one of the Finnish operators front end web-server from old program.... it was forgot as some old un-secure installation of Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Server and it was used mainly several persons for scanning and sniffing.... I get annoyed and called to operator (after figuring out who owns is) and said, that I get bored that your one computer tries to hack my systems all the time.... they first deny it...then after one day network admin called and said, that they even didnt know that this kind of server exists... so it was really some old server hacked like 100 times and used for all kind of purposes... Funny... Now they know and I got tested my system and once again testing was done.... and nobody was criminal :-)
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
[.mobile] way
Visit in APAC area is eyes opening experience, if eyes really are open. Compared to European way of working, I admire Asian style of working. From the individual way of working, there are not so much differences, so no matter if you are European, American or Asian person, you are probably capable to do long days, invent new things and boost up development, business finance or what ever you are doing.... but when you put lots of these individuals together, there are lots of changes after that:
Mostly European corporation are slow moving and decision making mechanisms are slow to react. On the otherhand, everyone understands and agrees, that more risk taking should be taken in place, when testing new mobile services and consepts, but but.... who is actually the organization or the person who could take that to concrete level. That is the difference in APAC and Europe.... in APAC, top management gives financial and schedule based framework easily than in Europe, then lower level management will execute. That is the thing how to learn from the success stories as well as mistakes. It seems that both seems to be taken as granted in APAC, but in Europe, is seems that old way of working is good enough, so why bother and why we should be the first ones, so let some competitor do it first and lets benefit from that. Then... eventually more or less everyone are expecting somebody else doing something ... and it means, that speed is slow as during rush hours in Beijing downtown.
So, what we can learn from here? I dont know..... if you want to try something as young startup company, don't stick to Europe, go out and go APAC and found your partners and customers from there. You can reach larger amount of end-users and start making significant business while your collagues and competitors are banging their head against to wall.... maybe....
