Anecdotally, RIM has been making significant inroads amongst the smartphone-buying youth in South Africa by heavily advertising BBN and offering discounted models. Whether this will prove sticky enough in the end and whether it's applicable elsewhere are open questions, but every single one of the sub-25 year olds I know who had the choice of getting a premium phone opted for a Blackberry instead of an iPhone or Android device, and they did it purely because of BBN.
I agree. As an outsider it seems odd to think that their best two markets are CEOs and teens. Kind of like the game "which one of these is not like the other". I think the common link is that both of these groups have a heavy emphasis on what I'll call "high availability communicating".
I can offer some more anecdotal evidence about the outrageous prices of SMS driving market behaviour... I was in NZ for a while when Vodafone (?) had a free text to other Vodafones in the weekend deal. _Nobody_ I knew had a Telecom (the main competitor) phone unless they actually worked for Telecom.
So we might say "okay, just specialise in texting"... but I think the other trend driving smartphones is convergence. I went looking to buy an iPhone the other day, but they are all sold out in my area. So instead, I bought an iPod Touch and am using a beat up old Nokia - but it annoys me that I need to carry two devices.
What the iPhone bought to the table (or rather, massively accelerated - since apps were available before but not in great demand) is convergence of things that we never would have actually carried around before - like a compass, barometer (weather forecast), pocket games etc.
Another example that comes to mind: when in London I used to carry a "Pocket A to Z" guide, which is basically a book that is a high level map of the city. It was my top priority purchase on arriving in the UK. Now though I would simply use an iPhone or Android phone instead.
And it is in this area of convergence that I think RIM is falling behind and their lack of vision and bad products (storm etc) are most telling.
Sasol, the world's largest coal-to-liquids (CTL) and gas-to-liquids (GTL) producer, has stated that GTL becomes financially viable at $10-$20 a barrel while CTL reaches the same level at $50-$60 a barrel. So with the current price of oil at over $70, it's reasonable to assume that CTL, supplemented by GTL, could maintain prices at close to current levels.
I must admit I don't understand what this means? So Sasol could provide a replacement for oil that only costs 10-20$ per barrel? Why isn't everybody using their stuff now, instead of the 70$ "real" oil?
Also, in my mind "peak oil" was actually just "peak fossile fuels" - how much more coal and gas is there than oil?
"So Sasol could provide a replacement for oil that only costs 10-20$ per barrel?"
With sufficient natural gas feed stocks, yes.
As to why it's not being used now, until the very recent fracking revolution the supply of gas had been pretty tight, at least at where it's needed for consumption. See e.g. Russia's regular fights with the Ukraine.
Probably the only places where it might make sense to build GTL plants are in relatively unstable oil producing nations that are currently flaring off their gas instead of doing anything else.
There's also the issue of your confidence in predicting the future. These are expensive plants, and if e.g. a world-wide recession eventually leads to a crash in demand then you may not be able to service your debt on what you're able to sell your product at (there are plenty of people who suspect oil might crash to $10 a barrel, e.g. what if the PRC's demand sharply drops?).
It just means that it's profitable for them as a company to make it at that price, but their volumes are still relatively tiny compared to the overall fuel market. Presumably were we all to switch to gas-to-liquids to increased demand on liquid natural gas supplies would push the price up quite significantly. So it's not likely that we could replace oil with a $20 a barrel substitute, but it's plausible that coal-to-liquids and gas-to-liquids could serve as relatively affordable substitutes even on massive scales.
And I'm not sure how much gas there is, but there's enough coal to last for 50-140 years, depending on demand.
This may be true for basic equipment like assault rifles, but I haven't seen any indication that more complex equipment like fighter aircraft are cheaper to maintain or more reliable in Soviet/Russian guise.
As a case in point, I've spoken to some people involved in a project to re-engine the South African Air Force's Mirage F1AZ fighter aircraft with the Russian Klimov RD-33 engine as used in the MiG-29. Technically, the project was a success as all the technical obstacles were overcome and aircraft's performance figures improved significantly, but the project was scuppered in the end by Klimov's apparent inability to get the engine's reliability and ease of maintenance to anywhere close to that of the aging Snecma Atar 09K50s originally fitted to the aircraft. The conclusion in the end was that if the SA Air Force wanted to go ahead with the project it would need to stockpile a large quantity of spare engines and other parts and swap them out frequently, something that introduced enough cost and difficulty to negate the performance gains that would've been achieved, so the project was shelved.
The SA Air Force has remained wary of Russian military equipment ever since. When the time came to order a new fighter it decided on the cheap to maintain JAS-39C/D Gripen from Saab in Sweden despite having received an attractive price on new MiG-29s.
I think more interesting than the fact that one guy wrote the entire application is that Apple gave one guy the time and space to create the application on his own.
Most are privately owned or with historical flights, but some do remain in military service. For instance, the Salvadoran Air Force operates 2 near-original C-47Ds and a few Basler BT-67s and the South African Air Force has 10 C-47TPs (converted to turboprop power with PT-6A engines) which are used in the maritime patrol, light transport and EW roles.
Any carrier unlocked iPhone will work with all the carriers in South Africa. The frequencies available are GSM 900/1800 and UMTS/HSDPA 2100 and all the carriers offer micro-SIMs if asked.
In fact, that's true for the rest of Africa too, where you're pretty much guaranteed to find at least one GSM 900/1800 network wherever you go and in many cases a UMTS/HSDPA 2100 3G network as well, though the coverage might not be as comprehensive as it is in South Africa.
The Anza range of MANPADs is based on Chinese MANPAD designs, themselves clones of Soviet/Russian MANPADs, and not on the Stinger. If you view photos of the Anza system the resemblance to Eastern Bloc weapons like the SA-7 Strela are quite clear, whereas it seems to share very little if anything with the Stinger.
Neither the Anza nor the Stinger (with the exception of the unordered Block II variant) could be regarded as superior to all other foreign MANPADs as both are handily outranged and otherwise bettered by newer fourth-generation MANPAD systems.
People need to get over the idea that any mention of a surface-to-air missile in Afghanistan must mean it's a Stinger. It's unlikely any of those ancient Stingers still work and the Soviet/Russian MANPAD variants were distributed so widely around the world that pretty much every two-bit terrorist has one these days.
Sort of off-topic (it's highly doubtful the Taliban have the latest generation...), but which MANPADS would you consider top for the anti-blackhawk mission? The Starstreak?
Hard to say really, as it's been a while since I dove into this subject. But yes, considering the missile approach warning systems, directed infrared countermeasures and countermeasure dispensers available for use on helicopters today, it's probably fair to say that a beam-riding SACLOS missile like the Starstreak is likely to be amongst the most effective against helicopters.
Their low-end consumer phones, maybe. In my experience their smartphones have been as poorly-built as everybody else's. My Nokia smartphones were the only phones I've owned that didn't still look good after two years, with discoloured plastic and loose parts.
My last Nokia ran Symbian. Lasted for years and years. Sure the case was pretty scratched up, but I didn't have to replace it every time I dropped it on the ground.
I've been working at a large Finnish company for a year or so, and there's a lot of people with creaky old E90's. Discoloured and floppy, but they still work great.
I think it is part of the deal with moving-chassis phones (hinges and slides) - it's very hard to make them durable and still light.
