Pragmatism: There is a de facto monopoly, French have nearly no interests in that monopoly. They want to break it. very few people know the existence of alternative to Microsoft Office and all. Instead of pirating these applications, they should use free and legal one. Otherwise it could give them a very bad habits of breaking laws.
Free software exists for...20 years or even more? You claim that the City of Paris should get out of its way. But it looks to me that it had all the time it needed to penetrate the home PC market alone. it failed miserably so far. Because of marketing, because of technical choice, because of manpower, whatever. "It failed".
After 20 years you can safely assume that free software needs support to succeed, wherever it may come from. Governement included. A lot of young and promised kids would never discover their computing skills because of the outrageous price of the most famous commercial OS or the most famous office suite. you should welcome it.
The average Romanian salary is around $320/month if I remind well. You can't expect them to $250 for an OS. It would like paying $2500 for an OS in a more developped country.
The true issue about Romania is that there are very good engineers and they just join the European Union.
There are already a lot of IT European funded projects which are outsourced in Romania (mostly by Greek companies AFAIK).
It looks like the guy was a heavy flickr user before launching/joining zooomr.. He claimed to have written books on flickr and leading several groups/forums inside this web service.
Anyway...This is a new marketing strategy. If he did this intentionally , he is a genius.
All he had to do is : - To write an article on his blog. Just to say how these modifications piss him off. - To choose a catchy title - Post it on digg.com (yes, self digg) - Use RSS - And to mention that he is the CEO of a competitor.
So simple...
and the magic happens. Their six modest servers have been hit by a wave of new subscriptions. Now everybody know their name. Everybody know thy are the flickr competitor. They are the new "indies" in front of the Evil corporate Yahoo behemoth.
Well a friend of mine tried Scribus a couple of months ago. He is a professionnal infographist. His company was about to order several InDesign licenses (to replace Quark).
Concerning Scribus: The first missing feature he found was "bord perdu". (I don't know how to translate it in English, "lost margin"?). This is extremelyse useful for those working with printing office.
So the test ended there and they bought the InDesign suite for everybody.
Concerning GIMP: he tried it and it was useless for its lack of CMYK support (it looks that there is a plug-in now). Another problem was some features with layers but I don't remember.
I'm European. The big problem with subsidies is that they truly don't care if the movie will be seen or not. They are completly cut from the lambda spectator such as me. The result is European movies are only watched by a minority, that you may call an "elite".
There are noticeable exceptions but usually European movies are plain boring to me. I thank God that there are American movies such as "Usual suspects","Blade Runner" and countless of others.
I can't stand French movies anymore. I really miss all these classics from the sixties before this boring thing called "nouvelle vague" changed everything. It was so contagious that approximatly all european countries have adopted it.
European movies that I truly enjoyed were Amélie Poulain (Jean-Pierre Jeunet) or the Fifth element,Léon (Luc besson). They (as far as I know) received strictly no European subsidies (Luc Besson is one the most critized moviemaker in the French press). They needed US producers to be made.
Of course there are some subsidized gems such as C'est arrivé près de chez vous/Man Bites Dog or Billy Eliot but they remain exceptions to me.
Genius like Einstein or Planck were able to explain their thoughts with simple concepts. When Einstein (or a peer) talked about a passenger walking in a train and somebody watching him outside of it, you could at least understand the basic concept behind relativity.
All I know about String theory is that it is heavily based on "quantum physics" (so I guess probability and Energy). That's all I know.
If string theory supporters could come with a simple and effective way to explain their favorite theory (theories?), It could greatly help their cause IMHO.
So the experiment is simple: You found a girl, you are on your first date. she says:"What is your job" You say:"I'm a physician." She says:"Great, what do you study?". You say:"String theory." she say:"What is string theory?"
If you say "this is too complex for you. I cannot explain it." You are screwed. She will be offended (just like half of the slashdotters I've read so far). She(we) must understand it.
The Europeans want Apple to make its DRM more widely available. Who wants DRM? Not consumers. What consumer says "ohh, I love DRM, give me more of that"? Nobody. At best consumers tolerate DRM.
DRM is there because record labels want it. The Europeans want it to be easier for labels to use DRM. How is that pro-consumer?
Not really, not for the European commission at least. The primary european commission's mission is to protect free markets. They must break any monopolies and they must track and fine any unfair practices. So here it looks to me that the European commission may consider that the iTune/iPod Model is a danger for a fait free market (considering its market share) and force Apple to open it (just like Microsoft recently). As far as I know there isn't any single decision on the DRM model per se.
European Consumers associations have another agenda. It looks like they complain about the DRM contract (you don't own the song, you "rent" it for a number of selected device). It is case, IMHO the fight can just be done at the national level (France, Germany, etc) and not at European level.
Spammers bought stocks days/weeks before they sent their spam. The spammer will sell you these stocks. You will help them to "leave" the market.Even if you manage to make any profits (and I seriously doubt you could...Because you will be the "top"), it will be thinner than these 5.00% of return. Their pump & dump lifecycle is extremely short. You have to be the source to enjoy any profit.
There are plenty of other ways to make better e-investment. My name is Kikon Vizirmarabu. I'm an ex-minister of the Nigerian government. I've got US$1.572.000.053 (ONE FIVE HU...ERR...LOTS) and I need a trusted US partner for a special operation. If you are interested please leave me your email.
Well I live in Europe and I can guarantee that I had no problems whatsover to order goods from US merchants so far. And I use e-commerce for my job and privatly since 1997. There are few US companies which simply state on the order page they don't ship outside USA/Canada. And that's fair, I know plenty of companies in European countries doing the same because the product spec incompatible with foreign countries (voltage, etc.), suppliers refuse them the right to export the products, etc.
I have even ordered a couple of American micro-brewered beers Few years ago. I'm Belgian and I was curious to taste these "Belgian style beers":-).
I'm the only who is tired about this debate? If you are a true profesionnal you will use the right tool for the job, period. Your job is to know precisly when a system should be used and when an alternative should be studied. Most of you look like teenagers in need of a holy war.
Well if the European kindgoms were in the same mood. Nobody would have discovered America. We must explore. We are curious. Nature has a natural tendency to expand. We are part of it.
If the USA don't, somebody else will do it. Sooner or later you end up like Venitia.
The risk of having the whole humanity based on a single planet is too high.
If I may add. It can be traced back to the first wave of German invasion (4th century BC?).
In the 1th century AC, Tongeren and other cities were inhabited by Belgae tribes and under the rule of the Roman empire (since Caesar). So the Roman empire included the actual language frontier.
These northern Belgae tribes were already a mix of Celtic and Germanic culture. Eburon (the tribe who used to live in Limburg...Tongeren comes from Tungrorum which is a latin name) were celtic not German IMHO. Nervians (actual brabant) were Belgae tribes but with a Germanic/celtic culture. (At least that was my history teatcher told me).
In the south, Tribes were purely celtic: Volques (Walha in ancient german...It means stranger. It gave a name to the frenchseapking people of belgium: Walloon (wallonie has been invented in the XIXth century based on this). they have been wiped out by Frankish and other German tribes (Goth, Vandals, etc.)Some Volques later moved down to the south. But latin remained (and of course survivors of the previous celtic tribes) and century after century it became a dialect.
The linguistic border has also moved since then. For example there are lot of towns, villages and so on in the Frenchspeaking part (mainly brabant) which have "Romanised" German names (Wavre, La Hulpe, etc.)...And they were part of the Roman empire. It happenned also In the south (Arlon) where a german dialect is still spoken (or survived).
So as we see ethnicity isn't really the only red line that you should follow. Culture is also important. Some people who used be celtic became German, Celtic became Latin, German became latin, latin became German and so on. This is a big melting pot and the explanation that the actual language frontier date from the Roman Empire isn't totally accurate.
There are lot of words shared between these groups. for example I speak a bit of Dutch...And surprisingly it helps me to understand a basic text in German. Since I know Dutch and French (my native tongue), English is easier to learn because well...it is beautiful mix of Germanic & Latin words. You start to make links between these languages...You can almost feel the dead languages (Platte Deutsch-old saxon, Latin) that lie behind them.
Languages aren't so complex to learn (except the first one you plan to learn). The biggest difficulty is pronunciation & the other is to practice it (languages can be easily forgotten. I learnt Latin at school, of course I have never practiced it. I forgot everything).
It is always funny to remember that all these languages can be traced back to the Roman Empire and German invasions:-).
Re:Genuine question about perl vs ruby
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 1
Objects... I left Perl as my main tool few years ago because of the syntax for objects. It looks more like a hack than the proper way. I still can't fully understand the concept of "Bless". And also exception handling. I couldn't look at my code and think "Ok, It's clean and it looks rock solid. Let's move to a higher level now". I know it is totally biased probably because I had to work on C# and Java projects.
I still use Perl for quick and dirty script. But the true reason is CPAN (such a marvellous library. It already saved my professional life on several occasions:-)) not perl in itself.
If I understand you correctly, there is no way you can raise evidences against or for this theory? How can it be considered as a scientific theory without any experience at all? (Pardon me my ignorance, I'm a computer guy:-))
Because most of the time it is a default setting. Lambda users aren't aware of it. I think that's the case with Lotus notes (not sure, I have to check).
And a bigger factor, is that the customer asked it. All mailings I sent are double opt-in (Belgian laws). Some mailings are not and are purely internal (ex: for big corporations).
I know plenty of engineers who hate/dislike/avoid HTML emails. Frankly speaking it means less than 1% of the recipients for most projects. I've never received any complains from subscribers that they had to "pipe the text/html through lynx to get a plain text rendering". Lol;-). As i said earlier I would recommend to use plain text message for a Geek mailing. You never know how they read their emails (like through a SSH connection under console mode).
On the pie chart for most projects you will be classified as "others" with those who can't stand the banner picture:-).
I work for communication agencies. Here is how it works usually:
They tell me that they need to send an e-mailing for X (products, event, whatever). here is the content and the lay-out (a mockup). It should be sent before XX/XX/20XX at X O'clock (if it is a local business, at 9 in the morning because people are reading their emails).
So we make the lay-out, we place the content. We test it ith a series of webmails, Thunderbird, Lotus Notes (yes we still do...), Apple Mail, Outlook and so on. We send a test email to the communication agency.
They tell me to increasse the font size, align paragraph X with the picture...That's all.
But attached images or links is purely technical business. If it is linked it will appear as broken link for the communication agency (images are usually blocked by software because fake pictures can help spammers to know that an email account is active or not): They don't understand it.
Some of them who understands a bit of technique force us to send a pure HTML email (no multipart plain text) because some software are configured to render the plain text first.
All they want me to do is an email that works and an email that respects laws (link to unsubscription, etc.) and of course some stats such as the number of clicks on a link inside the HTML email (can be easily calcultated with a redirect script).
I have rarely use CSS anyway. Such a technique is already incompatible with a variety of applications (broken links to the CSS file or styles overriden by webmails for example).
For those who say that plain text email works better than HTML email: it depends of your target. I will certainly advice plain text for a geek mailing list but for lambda users they prefer shiny lay-out (stats prooves it).
For those who said that they can't read the email with Pine or with their telnet account. Nobody care about martians.
So 1,800 consumers have been surveyed and only 21 are ready to invest more than $400 in a cell phone. So it's 1.16% of the market.
IMHO (just remember figures I have heard few weeks ago). There were 2 billions mobile phones sold last year. (A large fraction are low cost mobile phones for 3rd world countries).
So the international market for expensive mobile phones should be an optimistic 320000 units per year.
If Jobs is serious about his 1% of the mobile phone market share... It represents 84% of the current expensive mobile phone market (268800 units? )
I can even accept that the market is bigger than that. High-end mobile phones are usually bought by companies for their employees. But with an MP3 player, a camera and other gadgets like that, the target audience doesn't seem to be professionnals.
Of course the market can expand, it will surely expand. People are spending more and more money into communication & IT stuff. And apple has a huge base of fans.
There are already several players like Blackberry, Palm, Qteck, HP, Nokia, Sony, etc. I do agree that UI's suck, especially on Windows based mobile phones.
I know that this rough calculation means nothing (for example the survey was done on Americans only not worldwide IMHO), but 1% of the market share seems "huge" too me, especially considering the price tag.
DVD will remain readable by Blue-Ray and HD-DVD reader so why should we slow down on our DVD purchases?
I still own an old television and I don't plan to buy a flat screen until it breaks. So even if I have a High definition DVD reader, I won't notice any change.
I still buy DVD from time to time 'especially discount on some old and difficult to find movies', but the interesting thing is that I download more and more from the Internet. I simply open a torrent early in the morning over my ADSL and once I'm back in the evening the download is complete. I use my laptop TV output, full screen mode and that's it. I guess it's seriously look like the media centre they are all talking about. The big difference is that it is free, no huge investment and it works already.
I suspect that this hardware war is a relic from the previous century. It will soon be irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
I really don't understand your ideology.
Pragmatism:
There is a de facto monopoly, French have nearly no interests in that monopoly. They want to break it. very few people know the existence of alternative to Microsoft Office and all. Instead of pirating these applications, they should use free and legal one. Otherwise it could give them a very bad habits of breaking laws.
Free software exists for...20 years or even more? You claim that the City of Paris should get out of its way. But it looks to me that it had all the time it needed to penetrate the home PC market alone. it failed miserably so far. Because of marketing, because of technical choice, because of manpower, whatever. "It failed".
After 20 years you can safely assume that free software needs support to succeed, wherever it may come from. Governement included. A lot of young and promised kids would never discover their computing skills because of the outrageous price of the most famous commercial OS or the most famous office suite. you should welcome it.
Or why not:
"Linux is like Windows...A bit different graphically but the great things is that it is free and approximatly all its applications to)".
Most people don't know what an OS is, so simply goes to the essential: free alternative and security issues.
The average Romanian salary is around $320/month if I remind well. You can't expect them to $250 for an OS. It would like paying $2500 for an OS in a more developped country.
The true issue about Romania is that there are very good engineers and they just join the European Union.
There are already a lot of IT European funded projects which are outsourced in Romania (mostly by Greek companies AFAIK).
It looks like the guy was a heavy flickr user before launching/joining zooomr.. He claimed to have written books on flickr and leading several groups/forums inside this web service.
:-)
Anyway...This is a new marketing strategy. If he did this intentionally , he is a genius.
All he had to do is :
- To write an article on his blog. Just to say how these modifications piss him off.
- To choose a catchy title
- Post it on digg.com (yes, self digg)
- Use RSS
- And to mention that he is the CEO of a competitor.
So simple...
and the magic happens. Their six modest servers have been hit by a wave of new subscriptions. Now everybody know their name. Everybody know thy are the flickr competitor. They are the new "indies" in front of the Evil corporate Yahoo behemoth.
I love Internet
gmail.de is a popular web service in Germany and in germanspeaking countries. I know this brand for years. The offer is ridiculous IMHO.
Well a friend of mine tried Scribus a couple of months ago. He is a professionnal infographist.
His company was about to order several InDesign licenses (to replace Quark).
Concerning Scribus: The first missing feature he found was "bord perdu". (I don't know how to translate it in English, "lost margin"?). This is extremelyse useful for those working with printing office.
So the test ended there and they bought the InDesign suite for everybody.
Concerning GIMP: he tried it and it was useless for its lack of CMYK support (it looks that there is a plug-in now). Another problem was some features with layers but I don't remember.
I'm European.
The big problem with subsidies is that they truly don't care if the movie will be seen or not. They are completly cut from the lambda spectator such as me. The result is European movies are only watched by a minority, that you may call an "elite".
There are noticeable exceptions but usually European movies are plain boring to me. I thank God that there are American movies such as "Usual suspects","Blade Runner" and countless of others.
I can't stand French movies anymore. I really miss all these classics from the sixties before this boring thing called "nouvelle vague" changed everything. It was so contagious that approximatly all european countries have adopted it.
European movies that I truly enjoyed were Amélie Poulain (Jean-Pierre Jeunet) or the Fifth element,Léon (Luc besson). They (as far as I know) received strictly no European subsidies (Luc Besson is one the most critized moviemaker in the French press). They needed US producers to be made.
Of course there are some subsidized gems such as C'est arrivé près de chez vous/Man Bites Dog or Billy Eliot but they remain exceptions to me.
As far as I know Zune is not yet available in European countries. You can't ask Norway to take stand on a product that isn't sold.
Well let's say your are a mathematician and this isn't your a girl. This is your mum.
I can't understand this theory.
:"What is your job"
Genius like Einstein or Planck were able to explain their thoughts with simple concepts. When Einstein (or a peer) talked about a passenger walking in a train and somebody watching him outside of it, you could at least understand the basic concept behind relativity.
All I know about String theory is that it is heavily based on "quantum physics" (so I guess probability and Energy). That's all I know.
If string theory supporters could come with a simple and effective way to explain their favorite theory (theories?), It could greatly help their cause IMHO.
So the experiment is simple:
You found a girl, you are on your first date.
she says
You say:"I'm a physician."
She says:"Great, what do you study?".
You say:"String theory."
she say:"What is string theory?"
If you say "this is too complex for you. I cannot explain it." You are screwed. She will be offended (just like half of the slashdotters I've read so far). She(we) must understand it.
The Europeans want Apple to make its DRM more widely available. Who wants DRM? Not consumers. What consumer says "ohh, I love DRM, give me more of that"? Nobody. At best consumers tolerate DRM.
DRM is there because record labels want it. The Europeans want it to be easier for labels to use DRM. How is that pro-consumer?
Not really, not for the European commission at least. The primary european commission's mission is to protect free markets. They must break any monopolies and they must track and fine any unfair practices. So here it looks to me that the European commission may consider that the iTune/iPod Model is a danger for a fait free market (considering its market share) and force Apple to open it (just like Microsoft recently). As far as I know there isn't any single decision on the DRM model per se.
European Consumers associations have another agenda. It looks like they complain about the DRM contract (you don't own the song, you "rent" it for a number of selected device). It is case, IMHO the fight can just be done at the national level (France, Germany, etc) and not at European level.
Well I live in Europe. You can have mine. Don't thank me.
Spammers bought stocks days/weeks before they sent their spam. The spammer will sell you these stocks. You will help them to "leave" the market.Even if you manage to make any profits (and I seriously doubt you could...Because you will be the "top"), it will be thinner than these 5.00% of return. Their pump & dump lifecycle is extremely short. You have to be the source to enjoy any profit.
There are plenty of other ways to make better e-investment.
My name is Kikon Vizirmarabu. I'm an ex-minister of the Nigerian government. I've got US$1.572.000.053 (ONE FIVE HU...ERR...LOTS) and I need a trusted US partner for a special operation. If you are interested please leave me your email.
Well I live in Europe and I can guarantee that I had no problems whatsover to order goods from US merchants so far. And I use e-commerce for my job and privatly since 1997. There are few US companies which simply state on the order page they don't ship outside USA/Canada. And that's fair, I know plenty of companies in European countries doing the same because the product spec incompatible with foreign countries (voltage, etc.), suppliers refuse them the right to export the products, etc.
:-).
I have even ordered a couple of American micro-brewered beers Few years ago. I'm Belgian and I was curious to taste these "Belgian style beers"
I'm the only who is tired about this debate? If you are a true profesionnal you will use the right tool for the job, period. Your job is to know precisly when a system should be used and when an alternative should be studied. Most of you look like teenagers in need of a holy war.
There are a lot of "price aggregators" out there.
So you could also add "--order" to your search request (banning it).
Well if the European kindgoms were in the same mood. Nobody would have discovered America.
We must explore. We are curious. Nature has a natural tendency to expand. We are part of it.
If the USA don't, somebody else will do it. Sooner or later you end up like Venitia.
The risk of having the whole humanity based on a single planet is too high.
If I may add. It can be traced back to the first wave of German invasion (4th century BC?).
In the 1th century AC, Tongeren and other cities were inhabited by Belgae tribes and under the rule of the Roman empire (since Caesar). So the Roman empire included the actual language frontier.
These northern Belgae tribes were already a mix of Celtic and Germanic culture. Eburon (the tribe who used to live in Limburg...Tongeren comes from Tungrorum which is a latin name) were celtic not German IMHO. Nervians (actual brabant) were Belgae tribes but with a Germanic/celtic culture. (At least that was my history teatcher told me).
In the south, Tribes were purely celtic: Volques (Walha in ancient german...It means stranger. It gave a name to the frenchseapking people of belgium: Walloon (wallonie has been invented in the XIXth century based on this). they have been wiped out by Frankish and other German tribes (Goth, Vandals, etc.)Some Volques later moved down to the south. But latin remained (and of course survivors of the previous celtic tribes) and century after century it became a dialect.
The linguistic border has also moved since then. For example there are lot of towns, villages and so on in the Frenchspeaking part (mainly brabant) which have "Romanised" German names (Wavre, La Hulpe, etc.)...And they were part of the Roman empire. It happenned also In the south (Arlon) where a german dialect is still spoken (or survived).
So as we see ethnicity isn't really the only red line that you should follow. Culture is also important. Some people who used be celtic became German, Celtic became Latin, German became latin, latin became German and so on. This is a big melting pot and the explanation that the actual language frontier date from the Roman Empire isn't totally accurate.
Well if you limit yourself to European languages:
:-).
There are lot of words shared between these groups. for example I speak a bit of Dutch...And surprisingly it helps me to understand a basic text in German. Since I know Dutch and French (my native tongue), English is easier to learn because well...it is beautiful mix of Germanic & Latin words. You start to make links between these languages...You can almost feel the dead languages (Platte Deutsch-old saxon, Latin) that lie behind them.
Languages aren't so complex to learn (except the first one you plan to learn). The biggest difficulty is pronunciation & the other is to practice it (languages can be easily forgotten. I learnt Latin at school, of course I have never practiced it. I forgot everything).
It is always funny to remember that all these languages can be traced back to the Roman Empire and German invasions
Objects...
:-)) not perl in itself.
I left Perl as my main tool few years ago because of the syntax for objects. It looks more like a hack than the proper way. I still can't fully understand the concept of "Bless". And also exception handling. I couldn't look at my code and think "Ok, It's clean and it looks rock solid. Let's move to a higher level now". I know it is totally biased probably because I had to work on C# and Java projects.
I still use Perl for quick and dirty script. But the true reason is CPAN (such a marvellous library. It already saved my professional life on several occasions
If I understand you correctly, there is no way you can raise evidences against or for this theory? :-))
How can it be considered as a scientific theory without any experience at all? (Pardon me my ignorance, I'm a computer guy
Because most of the time it is a default setting. Lambda users aren't aware of it.
;-). As i said earlier I would recommend to use plain text message for a Geek mailing. You never know how they read their emails (like through a SSH connection under console mode).
:-).
I think that's the case with Lotus notes (not sure, I have to check).
And a bigger factor, is that the customer asked it. All mailings I sent are double opt-in (Belgian laws). Some mailings are not and are purely internal (ex: for big corporations).
I know plenty of engineers who hate/dislike/avoid HTML emails. Frankly speaking it means less than 1% of the recipients for most projects. I've never received any complains from subscribers that they had to "pipe the text/html through lynx to get a plain text rendering". Lol
On the pie chart for most projects you will be classified as "others" with those who can't stand the banner picture
I attach them to e-mails.
I work for communication agencies. Here is how it works usually:
They tell me that they need to send an e-mailing for X (products, event, whatever). here is the content and the lay-out (a mockup). It should be sent before XX/XX/20XX at X O'clock (if it is a local business, at 9 in the morning because people are reading their emails).
So we make the lay-out, we place the content. We test it ith a series of webmails, Thunderbird, Lotus Notes (yes we still do...), Apple Mail, Outlook and so on. We send a test email to the communication agency.
They tell me to increasse the font size, align paragraph X with the picture...That's all.
But attached images or links is purely technical business. If it is linked it will appear as broken link for the communication agency (images are usually blocked by software because fake pictures can help spammers to know that an email account is active or not): They don't understand it.
Some of them who understands a bit of technique force us to send a pure HTML email (no multipart plain text) because some software are configured to render the plain text first.
All they want me to do is an email that works and an email that respects laws (link to unsubscription, etc.) and of course some stats such as the number of clicks on a link inside the HTML email (can be easily calcultated with a redirect script).
I have rarely use CSS anyway. Such a technique is already incompatible with a variety of applications (broken links to the CSS file or styles overriden by webmails for example).
For those who say that plain text email works better than HTML email: it depends of your target. I will certainly advice plain text for a geek mailing list but for lambda users they prefer shiny lay-out (stats prooves it).
For those who said that they can't read the email with Pine or with their telnet account. Nobody care about martians.
So 1,800 consumers have been surveyed and only 21 are ready to invest more than $400
in a cell phone. So it's 1.16% of the market.
IMHO (just remember figures I have heard few weeks ago).
There were 2 billions mobile phones sold last year.
(A large fraction are low cost mobile phones for 3rd world countries).
So the international market for expensive mobile phones should be an optimistic
320000 units per year.
If Jobs is serious about his 1% of the mobile phone market share...
It represents 84% of the current expensive mobile phone market (268800 units? )
I can even accept that the market is bigger than that. High-end mobile phones are
usually bought by companies for their employees. But with an MP3 player, a camera and other
gadgets like that, the target audience doesn't seem to be professionnals.
Of course the market can expand, it will surely expand. People are spending more and more money into communication & IT stuff. And apple has a huge base of fans.
There are already several players like Blackberry, Palm, Qteck, HP, Nokia, Sony, etc.
I do agree that UI's suck, especially on Windows based mobile phones.
I know that this rough calculation means nothing (for example the survey was done on Americans only not worldwide IMHO), but 1% of the market share seems "huge" too me, especially considering the price tag.
DVD will remain readable by Blue-Ray and HD-DVD reader so why should we slow down on our DVD purchases?
I still own an old television and I don't plan to buy a flat screen until it breaks.
So even if I have a High definition DVD reader, I won't notice any change.
I still buy DVD from time to time 'especially discount on some old and difficult to find movies', but the interesting thing is that I download more and more from the Internet. I simply open a torrent early in the morning over my ADSL and once I'm back in the evening the download is complete. I use my laptop TV output, full screen mode and that's it. I guess it's seriously look like the media centre they are all talking about. The big difference is that it is free, no huge investment and it works already.
I suspect that this hardware war is a relic from the previous century. It will soon be irrelevant.