Maktab

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.

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.

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.

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.

The DC-4 was also introduced in the 1930s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_DC-4

Two-finger tap.

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.

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.

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.

Which is why I referred to it as Nokia's implementation of Symbian, by which I meant S60. At the time the N70 was released Symbian was not controlled by any one company, with both Nokia and Sony Ericsson controlling the majority of shares in Symbian Ltd, although Nokia had strong control over S60.

Aside from a few half-hearted attempts from Samsung and LG, the only really ambitious attempt by a company other than Nokia to use S60 was Siemens with the SX1. Unfortunately it was not much of a success, due in no small part to the odd keypad layout. So for all intents and purposes, S60 equalled Nokia.

UIQ, similarly, was driven primarily by Sony Ericsson although it was owned (till 2007) by Symbian Ltd. Unlike S60, which was in some ways a scaling up of Nokia's dumb phone interface to a smart phone, UIQ was designed from the start for stylus-based touch input. But both co-existed, with the SE P800 and the Nokia 7650 having launched as far back as the second half of 2002. I always preferred UIQ, to be honest.

Both S60 and UIQ were abandoned when Nokia bought out the other Symbian Ltd partners in 2008.

FWIW, i-mate was never a phone manufacturer, it just resold phones made by others. For most of its existence, the company sold HTC phones under licence in some of the territories where HTC did not have a brand presence. This ended once HTC started selling phones under its own brand.

And a minor nitpick, but Symbian was limited to Nokia's smart phone range, their low-to-mid-end phones run either Series 30 or Series 40 which are far more basic yet far more responsive software platforms that are not based on Symbian, unlike Series 60. To be honest, I've never been impressed with Nokia's smart phones, as I've found their implementation of Symbian to be slow and buggy with a clumsy UI. This is in sharp contrast to their S30 and S40 phones, which quite justifiably have a reputation for performance and no-nonsense ease of use.

When it comes to apps, Apple is the publisher. They make all the rules and can do as they like.

For music and books Apple has to negotiate contracts with publishers who likely demand certain conditions in return for their content being made available on the various iTunes stores.

Considering Apple's consumer-friendly position on the repeated downloading of apps, it seems reasonable to guess that forcing consumers to pay to redownload books, music and videos is a requirement imposed on them by the content publishers.

Contracts with publishers.

It was a bit slow at first, but after a restart and a few minutes of usage it seemed to be back to its old speeds.

Yes and no. Cape Town does have a high violent crime rate compared to most Western cities, but the key thing to understand is that like the rest of SA the vast majority of that crime is concentrated in specific areas like the townships (slums) on the outskirts of the city. For the parts of the city and areas outside the city that a foreigner would likely stay Cape Town is quite safe and definitely safer than Johannesburg.

Opportunistic crime does exist, but provided you use the same kind of street smarts you would use in most big cities and don't do things like walk alone in unfamiliar areas after dark, don't make yourself an easy target and don't be oblivious to your surroundings, you should be able to avoid being the victim of opportunistic criminals.

Depending on when you're going to be able to take the time off, I can recommend Cape Town, South Africa. By avoiding the traditional tourist traps you should be able to find a place to stay for a reasonable price once the football world cup finishes in early July and there's a lot of choice when it comes to food. Language is not a problem, as pretty much everybody speaks English.

The broadband is decent these days, albeit quite a bit pricier than US or European broadband equivalents, but it should be suitable. Cape Town also has a fairly active start-up community, if thats important to you.

Others may have had a different experience, of course, but I've always found the area around Cape Town to be incredibly relaxing and conducive to good ideas.

Great point. For historical reasons, many African countries established better links between themselves and their former Colonial rulers than they did between themselves, with inter-country links being neglected.

Immediately after independence this made sense, as those links back to Europe were already well-established and they were to countries with far higher trading capacities than neighbouring African countries, but in the long-run it retarded the growth of African trading regions and the diversification of industry in many parts of the continent.

Africa's an awfully big place to make generalisations about. Some cities, Johannesburg and Cape Town for instance, are near first world in their sophistication and living standards and have well-established tech industries, quite different from the stereotypical villages without running water, electricity or any tech whatsoever.

Making blanket statements and offering one-size-fits-all solutions for the entire continent are as silly as pretending that the US and Western Europe share the same problems and need the same solutions as the poorest corner of Madagascar. The problems Johannesburg faces and the solutions it needs are closer to that of any major Western city and are light years removed from the problems and solutions of your average rural village.

South Africa more than 2 million Facebook users, its own Google search, YouTube, Maps, Street View (launching Tuesday) domains and services, its own Apple AppStore, its start-up industry is growing and has produced at various points the 3rd largest payment processing software supplier and 2nd largest Certificate Authority and Amazon's EC2 was developed mostly at its Development Centre in Cape Town. I recently did some work for a local team that wrote and maintains pretty much the entire software infrastructure for a large British retailer, a product they're now expanding to other international retailers. Not hugely impressive by most standards, I'll admit, but surely its evidence that Africans are definitely on the tech map. And that's not even taking into account the thriving tech communities in places like Kampala and Nairobi or other tech-related industries in Africa.

Point being, I think some of the people commenting missed the point of the article because of their misconception about what Africa is about.

Gruber never had an app rejected and he doesn't have any apps in the AppStore. Are you sure you're thinking of the same site?

There has actually been a case of an Ebola-carrier travelling by plane to Johannesburg, back during the Gabon outbreak in 1996. The only other person he infected was a nurse who had come into direct contact with some of his blood. She died a short while later, but infected nobody else.

Ebola is a frighteningly deadly virus, so this sort of research is very encouraging, but its lack of an aerosol delivery mechanism and its quick mortality cycle both mean that it will likely never cause an epidemic on the scale of Bubonic Plague.

It has been done before.

In the 1950s, both the US and USSR did some fairly extensive research into nuclear-powered aircraft, culminating in flight tests by a US NB-36H carrying an operational 3 MW air-cooled nuclear reactor and a Soviet Tu-119 with a reactor powering two of its engines. The US had progressed quite far in developing nuclear-powered engines, culminating in Heat Transfer Reactor Experiment-3 (HTRE-3), but the project was cancelled in 1961 before it could go much further, with the Soviet project being cancelled soon afterwards. [1]

The program didn't solve all the problems that nuclear-powered aircraft could case, such as escaped radiation after crashes, but it did prove that crew shielding could be done safely at a low-enough weight that the concept remained feasible.

Scientific American featured an article [2] a couple of years ago about some people's recent calls to resurrect the idea for commercial use. But the inherent safety risks remain a big issue.

It's probably an inevitable development at some point, once the core problems have been solved. And with a new generation of high-temperature reactors emerging, such as South Africa's Pebble Bed Modular Reactor, we may see reactors that are ideally suited to this sort of thing coming through.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_aircraft

[2]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=nuclear-pow...

Apple have already stated that iPhone OS 4 will be available for the iPod touch, though only the third-generation touch will get multitasking.

I'm not sure why you would have doubted it. How would it have made sense for Apple to exclude it from the new software release?

Probably not now, after the lines have been drawn this sharply. But what sort of argument would Apple have been able to present against Flash if a full mobile Flash port had been up to snuff two or even three years ago?

More like Adobe has finally poured some engineering investment into making Flash work decently on a mobile platform. By all indications 10.1 is a massive improvement over 10. It's still not quite as good as Adobe are saying, but it seems to be a lot better.

For what it's worth, this is exactly what Adobe should have done from the start instead of wasting their time trying to convince Apple to allow Flash on the iPhone. Getting Flash to run flawlessly on competing smartphones would have made it far harder to Jobs to claim that Flash wasn't technically up to it.

FNB in South Africa has a learning quick select feature for withdrawals like the one you describe. After I withdrew the same amount a couple of times it appeared on the main screen as a quick select option.

Same with language. I'm sure I was asked at some point what my language preference was, but since then I've never had to tell an FNB ATM my language choice. I still do for other banks, but that's probably because language preference isn't amongst the pieces of data which banks share between each other.

So it can be done. You don't need local storage on the ATM itself, just a few additional attributes requested and sent down when the ATM retrieves the customer account data from whichever central servers it's using.

But it does call into question their command of the facts and the small yet important details of the situation. In my opinion it was quite evident throughout the article that Malone had not studied the situation sufficiently and did not seem to be aware of the California penal code provisions which can make lost property stolen, the Wired story which implied that Hogan made no effort to return the phone and what level of actual power over day-to-day decisions Apple would enjoy on the REACT steering board. Are they even in a position to order a raid? Malone writes as though that's an uncontested fact, but that's hardly true.

The recent Wired story about Brad Hogan, the guy who found the phone, implies that Hogan did not actually make any of the attempts to find the phone that Gizmodo claimed. Whatever the justification of the police raid on Chen's house and all the other elements of this story, it seems clear that Hogan never had any intention of making a good faith attempt to return the phone to its rightful owner.