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By "had the largest market share of any OS for mobile devices" you mean "smartphone/feature phone market", right?

Back in 2007 "smartphones" didn't exist as we know them today and you had to know someone that knew someone to find someone that had a Windows Mobile device. Nokia had a 60%+ market share followed by Motorolla, Siemens etc. etc. The smartphone/featurephone market was less than 20% in total and back then that type of devices weren't much more than a mobile windows where you used a pen on the screen because "touch screens" were ... well they weren't exactly what "touch screen" means today.

Here is a link to Nokia's market share from 2007 onwards http://www.statista.com/statistics/263438/market-share-held-by-nokia-smartphones-since-2007/

Here is a link to a market share analysis disproving your "42%" market share http://mobilezoo.biz/openos.php

As time marches on, more of the days will be like this until the point is reached where power becomes close to free. The US is falling behind with it's stubborn resistance to change and it will end up paying for that stubbornness as her remaining industry flees to the green pastures of cheap energy.

Funny how expensive US power is half the price of "free" German power. I bet that as time marches on and fossil fuels get obsoleted in the US, US power will remain cheaper than German power.

Yes, but cars are heavily regulated, computers are not... In addition, there is a time limit beyond which they no longer do recalls and the manufactures no longer have to pay for them.

After all, when is the last time you heard of a recall of a 1978 Chevy? There is a sunset period beyond which no one cares anymore.

That sunset period is ten years.

With the speed of computer development, that period is much shorter than cars.

The sunset period reflects the period in which the product may be in use, not the period in which the product is state of the art. Many servers are regularly in place for ten years. The average age of [a] personal computer was 4.5 years in 2006. The average age of a car in the US is now 11.4 years and the lifespan of an OTR truck is 4-5 years. It seems reasonable to have a 10 years sunset lifespan on computers to me, especially given that their useful lifespans are increasing, not decreasing. The rate at which processor, memory, and storage speed is increasing has slowed, so we're using our PCs longer — their lifespans are increasing. The support period should thus increase.

Exactly. The smart people will believe it's too expensive or not the right time to raise kids while the stupid people will fuck for fun and then have a bunch of kids. Soon there won't be any smart people left and the problem will be solved.

Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/603/

XKCD ridicules the notion that dumb people reproduce more than smart people, and claims that it is "wrong". But is it? I cannot find any reference for birth-rate-by-IQ, but here is a reference for birth-rate-by-income that shows that women in households with income below $10K have nearly twice the birthrate of women in households with income above $75K. Income is not IQ, but they are highly correlated.

It isn't clear if the birthrate-by-income is corrected for age, so it could be skewed because the poor women are younger, while more of the rich women are past childbearing age.

Sorry, forgot the link to the data, if anyone's actually even interested.
http://www.statista.com/statistics/221666/net-income-of-rim-since-2009/

The user wants to use a mobile, not mainly searching for apps. Found an interesting study about this:

http://www.statista.com/statistics/248343/distribution-of-time-spent-ios-and-android-apps-by-category/
also most small kids or older people don't care if it is iOs or android

WoW apparently peaked around 2010.

So yeah, it's dying. I imagine bliz's next incarnation of MMO will be even more mindless and repetitive, since it seems that's what people want.

90% of all Androids(!) are sold with screens of 4" or less.

Vs

Android Buyers Have an Appetite for Huge Screens

55 percent of Android smartphones sold in the United States in Q2 2013 were equipped with screens larger than 4.5 inches in diagonal.

http://www.statista.com/topics/840/smartphones/chart/1396/android-phone-sales-by-screen-size/

Who should I believe?

Isn't it obvious? The random guy on slashdot is always right.

90% of all Androids(!) are sold with screens of 4" or less.

Vs

Android Buyers Have an Appetite for Huge Screens

55 percent of Android smartphones sold in the United States in Q2 2013 were equipped with screens larger than 4.5 inches in diagonal.

http://www.statista.com/topics/840/smartphones/chart/1396/android-phone-sales-by-screen-size/

Who should I believe?

A link that compares several countries (in german, but the countries should be easy to read) prices in dollar cents: http://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/13020/umfrage/strompreise-in-ausgewaehlten-laendern/

Where on earth did they get their figures from? They say Australia pays 11.68c/kWh. I know I pay ~28c/kWh in AU... real figures here: http://www.originenergy.com.au/files/necf/NSW_Electricity_Residential_AusGrid_Standard%20Published%20Rate.PDF

Hm, american electricity prices: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_5_6_a obviously in $ cents.

A link that compares several countries (in german, but the countries should be easy to read) prices in dollar cents:
http://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/13020/umfrage/strompreise-in-ausgewaehlten-laendern/

German electricity prices according to wikipedia however are 25 EURO cent.

Pretty strange, as far as I recall I pay 17 EURO cent per kWh.

So you are right: you pay less per kWh in the USA: However you use between 4 to 10 times the electricity a German household or person does. So bottom line you pay far more than we do.

You know efficiency can be defined arbitrarily. You seem to define it on "cost per kWh" we define it on "consumed kWh".

A lot of people don't admit they eat at McDonalds and yet in 2010 the industry generated $184 Billion in sales. I think a lot of people who claim they don't eat at McDonalds are lying.

Maybe it's more of the definition. They 'consume' at McDonalds. To 'eat' implies the consumption of 'food.'

Most people don't eat out more than once a week, yet they're overweight.

Citation needed. The data I see indicates most americans eat out 4-5 times per week.

Some people don't EVER eat at McDonalds or similar fast-food places, and yet they're fat, too.

A lot of people don't admit they eat at McDonalds and yet in 2010 the industry generated $184 Billion in sales. I think a lot of people who claim they don't eat at McDonalds are lying.

Now look at how the death rate has changed over time - it dropped dramatically by 1990, and remained at that lower number even as the number of ascents soared. So talking about the death rate going back to the 1950s is quite misleading.

Facebook has some big problems:

• Facebook traffic peaked in mid-2012.
• Facebook profits peaked in 2011.
• Facebook is no longer "cool".

Social just isn't that big a business. Facebook made only $53 million in profit last year, on $5 billion in revenue. (Way down due to some dumb acquisitions. They did better in 2011.) Despite all the noise it makes, Facebook is small compared to Dell or Google or Microsoft or HP or Oracle. VMware and Adobe have revenue roughly comparable to Facebook.

Facebook hasn't had that revenue for long, either. Social networks have a short lifespan. AOL, Geocities, Orkut, Friendster, Myspace... the list of once-big social networks is long. It's hard to make money in "social". Blast out too many ads and users leave. That's what killed Myspace.

Facebook is desperately trying to develop something that will make them cool again, or some way to get people to swallow more ads. All-night hacking sessions probably won't help. They've been acquiring other companies, but that may not help either. Buying Instagram is where their 2012 profits went. Instagram is cool, but not profitable. This year, they bought Hot Studio, a San Francisco design house whose mantra is "build brand loyalty first and ask for payment later". That's so late-1990s first dot-com boom.

Well, Google certainly has the money... http://www.statista.com/topics/1001/google/chart/977/googles-amazing-growth/

Stuff like this just makes me panic, and even more so when I see this: http://www.statista.com/statistics/192740/global-data-requests-from-google-by-federal-agencies-and-governments/

Actually, we just want iPhones like everybody else.

Actually we want Android phones...its why Apple only have 0.4% of the Brazilian Market. http://www.statista.com/statistics/245189/market-share-of-mobile-operating-systems-for-smartphone-sales-in-brazil/ compared to Androids 56%

People coming from households making less than $30000 have 34% smartphone ownership. That seems pretty high to me.

http://www.statista.com/statistics/195006/percentage-of-us-smartphone-owners-by-household-income/

http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/smui/following_the_money_whos_profi.html

That means on average, 34% of what you paid or $1.22/gallon, goes to pad the bottom line of oil companies....

It goes on to say that 11% of the price is taxes. That's backed up here: http://www.statista.com/topics/839/gas-prices/
Also of interest for comparison:

In Germany for example, the price of gas is about twice as high as it is in the U.S. and taxes make up 63 percent of the retail gas price.

Some stats on the iphone sales since 2007 Draw your own conclusions

I'm surprised that many in the industry don't see tablets for what they generally are: a useless niche device surrounded by endless media hype.

Agreed, they have no user file-system, no world-class 4G wireless, and less space than a nomad, and that's why they're selling tens of millions a quarter....

http://www.statista.com/statistics/165489/global-sales-of-apple-ipad-by-quarter-since-2010/

Tablets are much like Ruby on Rails...In the case of the iPad, it's about owning devices with the right logo. In the case of Ruby on Rails, it's about buzzwords...They're a perfect match of hype, ignorance, and a false sense of superiority.

The only ignorance and false sense of superiority I've encountered about rails was from haters who have never used it. Have you? It's just a web framework, maybe one of the better ones, maybe not, but it has become the focus of ire perhaps because people are so insecure in their technological choices they feel the need to look down on a web framework (WTF?). Rails is useful for some sites (I have used it on some myself), and other languages like PHP or Java have their place as well depending on specific requirements and code available in libraries etc. Buzzwords don't come into it, nor do logos, at least in my case, and I've never met anyone who made their choices based on such things. If any widely used web language deserves to be panned, it's PHP for its awful, messy API, though they have cleaned up their act recently. Rails is pretty middle of the road, and it's just a web framework.

As to the iPad, it's a pretty good device, for what it is, and frankly it covers 100% of the computing usage pattern of most people I know (web, email, games) - yes it doesn't cover the needs of everyone, but that's ok, if it is popular it's not going to cause your computer to be confiscated or to spontaneously combust - you can continue to live in a world where the iPad is popular, and feel no pain, so long as you can manage to tolerate the thought that others might have different needs to you. Can't think why anyone would buy something purely because it has a logo on it - I bought an iPad because it is a good tablet, and I wanted a tablet to read the web and mail on, that's it, and it is has served admirably for that purpose.

In fact, it's doubtful that any other company or project can actually compete in such a situation.

Bullshit. Android has been doing pretty well, in spite of fragmentation and several mis-steps by Google like Google Play. The only people who think like a cult are those who feel they must oppose everything Apple or everything Rails without question or thought. If you want to criticise Apple, criticise their predatory business practices, their monopoly on the marketplace, their banning scripting from the store, their blatant ripping off of other developers, but don't try to criticise a device which is best of class, and really popular, as somehow doing well because it has a logo or people are enlisted in a cult! People are buying the iPad in their millions because it is good, and they find it useful. Deal.

You could as well say the other sources supplement solar and wind. What is the difference?

Every energy source is more or less on par, except gas is a bit behind and water is far behind.

http://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/75405/umfrage/stromerzeugung-in-deutschland-seit-2008/

Not sur eif hydro power is added in the renewables here or in the last part.

I'm not sure if 5% of the salary counts as "cheap" - here in Germany the average net income per household is 2700EUR [1] and DSL access is around 30EUR.

Also I'm not aware of a correlation between open source usage and piracy, do you have some kind of source for your opinion?

[1] according to http://de.statista.com/themen/293/durchschnittseinkommen/