Personally if there wasn't some other major reason, I would choose.Net over Java for any project simply based on how well it handles dates, as well as the existence of the decimal data type. Simply having a base 10 decimal variable type solves so many problems. Java users will say, just multiply everything by 100 and store in an integer, or use BigDecimal. But those are just kludges that fall apart when you all of a sudden need to store 3 decimal places, or are cumbersome to use because Java doesn't have operator overloading, so you have to use function calls to do stuff like add two BigDecimal objects together.
I'm actually surprised that you found Windows Phone to be such a bad OS. I recently switched to it from Android, and I couldn't be happier. What was it that you found so bad about Windows Phone? They've made some updates to it in the past while in usability. If you still have that old phone, I would boot it up to install the updates to see how you like it.
My biggest problem with the phone is lack of apps. There's some apps that I used to use an Android that aren't available on Windows phone like Strava. Fortunately I've been able to find third party alternatives that works just fine. I can still do everything I want, but it's just kind of an annoyance that some of the major players ignore the OS. For instance, the Facebook app is actually produced by Microsoft, and the only app Facebook has for Windows Phone is Messenger.
I spent $200 on a better phone rather than $59. Also, if you watch for sales, you can now get the Lumia 520 for around $20, but it's locked to a specific carrier (no contract). That is the most insane part. Some people are just buying them as media players. Or even as a second phone for when they don't want to take their phone somewhere it might get broken.
Exactly. When there's plenty of $200 or cheaper Android and Windows Phone devices that do a very good job, it's not going to be long before people refuse to pay $700 for and iPhone. I'm surprised they've lasted as long as they have. There is no reason to pay such a high price for a phone. I don't see any with really compelling features. Perhaps the Lumia 1020 with it's 41 megapixel camera has a feature that no other phone does, but other than that, there doesn't seem to be a single phone out there that can do something that a $200 phone can't do. They're really doing to have to start offering real hardware differences like perhaps a real SSD inside the phone, or a phone that can run desktop software (even if it only works when you plug it in) if they want to continue asking $700 for a phone.
Yeah, it's most likely just do to improper assembly/maintentance rather than owning the bike too long. The bike that I had a problem with had only had the stem inserted for about 2 years before I unsuccessfully tried to remove it. Both were used, but in very reasonable condition when I assembled the bike. It's possible to find new parts even for relatively old frames, and an old steel frame can last quite a while if it's taken care of.
At $25 for an official 3 foot Apple Lightning cable, there's no way I'd buy one. I got mine at MonoPrice, for around $9. They seem to work well enough. Even $9 sounds a little pricy if you ask me, but I'm not about to risk my expensive devices on something cheaper. The real problem is that the official Apple cables are so prone to breaking. The Monoprice ones are built much better and have lasted me way longer than the original Apple ones did.
Yeah the big problem in bicycles is steel frames with aluminum seat posts or stems (where the handlebars attach to the frame). Those things are often assembled without any kind of anti seize or grease and are known to basically get "welded" together from corrosion. I've seen a few that were impossible to remove.
Re:Excellent. Now how about High Fructose Corn Syr
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FDA Bans Trans Fat
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· Score: 1
Vegetable oil (canola oil, soybean oil, and extra virgin olive oil), water, balsamic vinegar (water, wine vinegar, grape juice), contains less than 2% of sugar, salt, dried garlic, dijon mustard (distilled vinegar, mustard seed, water, salt, white wine, citric acid, tartaric acid, spice), spice, xanthan gum, vitamin e, dried parsley, natural flavor.
Oil and vinegar are pretty much natural preservatives. So there's no need to add in artificial ones. Perhaps a little high on the salt at 350 mg per serving, but it's really not that bad. Also, studies have actually shown that sodium is not that bad for you
It's easy to block them. You just simply don't install them at all. If people weren't so apt to just click on "yes" for everything then we wouldn't have a problem with apps like this. There's a million card games out there . You don't have to install the ones that ask for permissions they have no business asking for. Even if you were allowed to block certain permissions for certain apps, most users would probably be coaxed into allowing those permissions if it meant they got a few virtual game dollars in exchange for giving up their privacy.
Re:Excellent. Now how about High Fructose Corn Syr
on
FDA Bans Trans Fat
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· Score: 2
Not sure where you shop, but where I shop, HFCS isn't really that abundant. There's none on the lettuce/tomatoes/cucumber I had in the salad that I had for my lunch today. There wasn't any in the salad dressing. There wasn't any in the pasta I had along side the salad. There wasn't any in the home made muffins I had for a snack. There wasn't any in the Cheerios I had for breakfast. It's really not that hard to stay away from. Just read the labels of the food you buy.
Re:Excellent. Now how about High Fructose Corn Syr
on
FDA Bans Trans Fat
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· Score: 1
especially in the quantities we consume them.
That's the heart of the problem right there HFCS would probably not be too bad if you had the equivalent of 1 or 2 cans of pop a week. You most likely shouldn't be having 6 cans of pop a day. When everything you eat has it, then you're going to run into problems. I don't think it's right to ban these food additives outright, because they do have their uses, and they aren't terribly bad for you in moderation. However, I wish there was some way to get it into people's heads that they shouldn't be eating so much of this stuff, and should eat more unprocessed real foods.
The biggest problem is the lack of updates for devices. This happens across all phones, regardless of how much you pay for them. The other thing to mention is that there are some really decent phones for $100 - $200. Stuff like the Moto G and E are actually quite good devices. They lack a few features of the higher end phones, You shouldn't need to spend $700 on a phone to get a decent experience. There are phones out there that prove you don't have to. There are phones like the Lumia 635 that are $30 when it goes on sale that people find perfectly adequate. Why spend $700 on a phone when there are devices out there that will get the job done.
A 1% market share of a huge global cell phone market still means they sell a lot of phones. They sold 8 million phones in 2014. That's nothing to laugh at. There are companies who are very profitable who wish they could sell 1/10 as many units. What BlackBerry did wrong was to simply hire too many people. They had over 19000 employees when they were popular. They are now around 4000 employees. That is still too many people. It should not take that many people to do what they do. They could remain profitable and still put out a good product if they just learned to focus on what they do best, and get rid of all the employees they don't need.
Exactly. If websites hosted their own advertisements, they would make sure they didn't hog all the bandwidth. I don't object to all ads, but the vast majority of them are downright terrible. A simple non-moving banner can get the point across and not detract too much from my experience on the page. I think that companies placing the advertisements would actually pay more if there was some kind of standard for advertisement quality. Nobody wants to pay a lot of money to have their product pushed along get rich quick schemes and pay-to-win games. The state of advertising is in such a mess that most of the big players who care about their brand just simply stay away from advertising on the internet. Too bad there's not an ad network that cares about quality of ads. Most TV networks (as bad as their ads are) wouldn't even think about putting ads on their network that are commonly found on the internet.
PHP is a truly terrible language, with a truly terrible API. Just look at functions like implode, which can accept parameters in either order. Also (according to one commenter), imploding an array of booleans results in the "true" values being converted to 1, and the "false" values being converted to empty string. That's just a single function. Don't even get me started on mysql_escape_string vs. mysql_real_escape_string
The only reason it's so popular is that for such a long time it was the only choice for server side languages on a shared hosting environment. Even now there aren't really any good alternatives. Shared hosts still don't allow things like Java,.Net, or Node.JS on the server side unless you are prepared to pay a premium. Many hosts don't even offer Ruby, or Python, even though they don't require a constantly running process.
PHP started off as a toy project, and although a lot of work has been done to add functionality to make it useful, it still shows that it was lacking a lot of design considerations. Object Oriented capabilities and namespaces were tacked on later, and it really does feel tacked on, because only a very small part of the available libraries use object oriented features.
Or you could not have that CD anymore. It could get lost, broken, stolen, or lent out and never returned. Generally, that doesn't happen if you take care of your stuff, but it's still a possibility. The CDs will wear out eventually. Nothing is forever. And sometimes you'll buy a CD that just doesn't hold up as well as you thought it would, and you won't listen to it more than a few times. You could sell it, but albums like that you generally won't get more than a few dollars for.
Still has the sounds of the crowd that interfere with listening to the music. Perhaps going to hear a rendition of a symphony in a concert hall would be nice, because people going to those things don't generally let out hoots, hollers, and whistles throughout the performance. Nirvana's Unplugged in New York which is generally considered by many to be a great album, I find, is ruined by the guy asking "what song is it" at the end of two tracks in a row, when he's talking about how he's going to screw up the song, which in itself is pretty bad, admitting that you didn't really practice enough for your own performance so you don't screw up your own songs.
I personally do not enjoy listening to live music. I do enjoy going to concerts, but when I go, it's not really about the music. You are not in the same acoustical environment as the musician when you are in the middle of the floor, or 300 feet away in the nose bleed section. The musician is on stage, with ear pieces, so they can actually hear what they are playing. It's hard to really appreciate the music in a building filled with fans singing along to the music and bad arena acoustics. Doubly bad is recordings of live music, where you still get all the crowd noise, making it hard to really hear the music, without any of the fun of actually being there.
There's already solutions like Xamarin that get C# working on quite a few platforms, and Microsoft is pushing to make it work on all platforms as well. I hope they guan get visual studio working on other platforms and make something that allows me to write code once and have it run anywhere, even if I have to tweak the UI for different platforms. C#, Visual Studio, and the.Net runtime is one of the best programming environments there is. Windows app development is so much less painful than Android. If they can make C# easy to run across all devices, they'll attract a lot of developers and (as I'm sure is their plan), bring a lot more apps to the Windows desktop and phone app stores.
Exactly. At $10 a month, you could buy 1 CD a month. Probably less, but let's just make the numbers round. For teenagers or anybody else who hasn't amassed a huge collection of music, it would take them a while before they had a decent amount of music. They'd be listening to the same albums over and over again for the first couple years. $10 a month is pretty enticing, because you get access to a huge library of music right away. instead of trying to decide which new album, or other 10 tracks you want this month, you just have access to everything. Sure, something might happen and the streaming service might shut down, but then you can just join another. Or, you might come upon hard times, and not have money to pay for the subscription. But then you can just scrounge for free streaming services, listen to the radio, and listen to music videos on Youtube. And if you can't afford the $10 a month, then you might have bigger things to worry about than listening to your favorite music.
I would say it really depends on the job. When the post says "When someone lands their first JavaScript job", I envision the job as being possibly a website done in Node.JS with a lot of Javascript on the client side as well. I that kind of job, you'd better have a pretty good understanding of how javascript works, or you're going to have a hard time being productive. However, if you're "javascript job" is at a place where they use.Net, J2EE or some other language on the back end, and do most of their stuff in HTML, with a few javascript functions thrown in on the browser side for basic input validation, then you probably don't need to do a whole lot.
Also, there are all kinds of "entry level" jobs, because there are all kinds of people getting their first job. Coming out of university for instance, there are those who did nothing more than the required assignments, and have very little actual, real world, programming knowledge. These people don't know any language well enough, and they certainly don't know how to go about creating a large project that is organized and runs well. You will have to teach them basics like how to use a debugger, and how to use source control. The proficiency in the language will be the least of your worries.
There are also students who did a fair amount of work outside class, and may have actually done some actual "released to the public software" (such as app store apps) independently. They are quite fluent in a couple programming languages and are very well versed in using common tools like debuggers and source control. I would say that some people going for their first real job, aren't even looking for "entry level", as entry level is more what I described in the previous paragraph. Even if these people haven't had a formal job with a paycheck, they have surpassed the qualifications for "entry level", and are ready to move on to the next stage. Ideally, everybody would get this out of the way before graduating either through self learning or co-op/internship positions. But such is not reality.
The problem is getting the apps I already paid for on the phone without signing up for Google Play Services. I'll have to sign up, download all the apps I want, including something like Titanium backup. Then I have to backup the applications I want to use. Then I'll have to factory reset the phone again, to remove google play services. Then I'll have to re-install the apps using ADB, because there isn't even a file manager that comes default on the device that will allow apps to be installed directly from the phone. Amazing complicated process just to get a phone that doesn't die after 12 hours.
Even in Metric countries like Canada, many people still use imperial units for a lot of things. Go to the lumber store and you can get a 2x4, and they are sold in 6, 8, 10, and 12 foot lengths. Plywood is sold in 4x4 foot sheets. Just about everybody I know refers to their weight in pounds and their height in feet and inches. Almost nobody can tell you the metric equivalent without a calculator. We order a pint of beer at the pub, and most people still refer to a block of butter as a "pound of butter". . British people still use "stone" to express their body weight, and they are supposed to be metric as well.
You can standardize all you want, and print whatever you want on the packaging, but people are still going to use whatever they are used to. You could have the US go metric tomorrow, but people will still use Imperial measurements for another century
No kidding. I recently replaced my old Android 2.3 phone. Part of the reason I replaced it was because it wouldn't make it past 2:00 PM most days if I didn't charge it. After getting my new phone I did a factory reset on the old one. I charged it up, unplugged it, and left it on the night table. Came back 2 days later to be pleasantly surprised that it still had over 50% battery life. Because it didn't have anything to do, the battery lasted quite long. Then I decided I wanted to use it for a few simple games. I registered the device with my Google account and installed Minecraft. And that is all I installed. Now it only lasts about 12 hours for a charge. Somehow, simply having the thing connected to my Google account means that the battery life goes down from 3+ days to 12 hours. The device is pretty much completely useless as a "smart phone" but acting as dumb phone it works pretty well. I assume If I only loaded programs on it that didn't run in the background so much, that battery life would be fine, and I'd still be able to use it as a feature phone. I'll have to disconnect my Google account to see if that clears it up. Hopefully the installed programs will still work after I've disconnected my account.
I believe Quebec has very good insulation regulations.
I'm not sure where you read that, but I don't believe it. I know a guy who bought a brand new house in Quebec about 3-4 years back. The windows were all single pane and there was very little insulation in that house. Perhaps the builder didn't follow code, and hoped nobody would notice, but I didn't give me a very good impression on new homes. Often they are built worse than the old ones, or at least old ones that were reasonably maintained. It should be illegal to even sell single pane windows in a northern climate, let alone install them on new houses.
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Personally if there wasn't some other major reason, I would choose .Net over Java for any project simply based on how well it handles dates, as well as the existence of the decimal data type. Simply having a base 10 decimal variable type solves so many problems. Java users will say, just multiply everything by 100 and store in an integer, or use BigDecimal. But those are just kludges that fall apart when you all of a sudden need to store 3 decimal places, or are cumbersome to use because Java doesn't have operator overloading, so you have to use function calls to do stuff like add two BigDecimal objects together.
I'm actually surprised that you found Windows Phone to be such a bad OS. I recently switched to it from Android, and I couldn't be happier. What was it that you found so bad about Windows Phone? They've made some updates to it in the past while in usability. If you still have that old phone, I would boot it up to install the updates to see how you like it.
My biggest problem with the phone is lack of apps. There's some apps that I used to use an Android that aren't available on Windows phone like Strava. Fortunately I've been able to find third party alternatives that works just fine. I can still do everything I want, but it's just kind of an annoyance that some of the major players ignore the OS. For instance, the Facebook app is actually produced by Microsoft, and the only app Facebook has for Windows Phone is Messenger.
I spent $200 on a better phone rather than $59. Also, if you watch for sales, you can now get the Lumia 520 for around $20, but it's locked to a specific carrier (no contract). That is the most insane part. Some people are just buying them as media players. Or even as a second phone for when they don't want to take their phone somewhere it might get broken.
Exactly. When there's plenty of $200 or cheaper Android and Windows Phone devices that do a very good job, it's not going to be long before people refuse to pay $700 for and iPhone. I'm surprised they've lasted as long as they have. There is no reason to pay such a high price for a phone. I don't see any with really compelling features. Perhaps the Lumia 1020 with it's 41 megapixel camera has a feature that no other phone does, but other than that, there doesn't seem to be a single phone out there that can do something that a $200 phone can't do. They're really doing to have to start offering real hardware differences like perhaps a real SSD inside the phone, or a phone that can run desktop software (even if it only works when you plug it in) if they want to continue asking $700 for a phone.
Yeah, it's most likely just do to improper assembly/maintentance rather than owning the bike too long. The bike that I had a problem with had only had the stem inserted for about 2 years before I unsuccessfully tried to remove it. Both were used, but in very reasonable condition when I assembled the bike. It's possible to find new parts even for relatively old frames, and an old steel frame can last quite a while if it's taken care of.
At $25 for an official 3 foot Apple Lightning cable, there's no way I'd buy one. I got mine at MonoPrice, for around $9. They seem to work well enough. Even $9 sounds a little pricy if you ask me, but I'm not about to risk my expensive devices on something cheaper. The real problem is that the official Apple cables are so prone to breaking. The Monoprice ones are built much better and have lasted me way longer than the original Apple ones did.
Yeah the big problem in bicycles is steel frames with aluminum seat posts or stems (where the handlebars attach to the frame). Those things are often assembled without any kind of anti seize or grease and are known to basically get "welded" together from corrosion. I've seen a few that were impossible to remove.
Just looked up the ingredients.
Oil and vinegar are pretty much natural preservatives. So there's no need to add in artificial ones. Perhaps a little high on the salt at 350 mg per serving, but it's really not that bad. Also, studies have actually shown that sodium is not that bad for you
It's easy to block them. You just simply don't install them at all. If people weren't so apt to just click on "yes" for everything then we wouldn't have a problem with apps like this. There's a million card games out there . You don't have to install the ones that ask for permissions they have no business asking for. Even if you were allowed to block certain permissions for certain apps, most users would probably be coaxed into allowing those permissions if it meant they got a few virtual game dollars in exchange for giving up their privacy.
Not sure where you shop, but where I shop, HFCS isn't really that abundant. There's none on the lettuce/tomatoes/cucumber I had in the salad that I had for my lunch today. There wasn't any in the salad dressing. There wasn't any in the pasta I had along side the salad. There wasn't any in the home made muffins I had for a snack. There wasn't any in the Cheerios I had for breakfast. It's really not that hard to stay away from. Just read the labels of the food you buy.
That's the heart of the problem right there HFCS would probably not be too bad if you had the equivalent of 1 or 2 cans of pop a week. You most likely shouldn't be having 6 cans of pop a day. When everything you eat has it, then you're going to run into problems. I don't think it's right to ban these food additives outright, because they do have their uses, and they aren't terribly bad for you in moderation. However, I wish there was some way to get it into people's heads that they shouldn't be eating so much of this stuff, and should eat more unprocessed real foods.
The biggest problem is the lack of updates for devices. This happens across all phones, regardless of how much you pay for them. The other thing to mention is that there are some really decent phones for $100 - $200. Stuff like the Moto G and E are actually quite good devices. They lack a few features of the higher end phones, You shouldn't need to spend $700 on a phone to get a decent experience. There are phones out there that prove you don't have to. There are phones like the Lumia 635 that are $30 when it goes on sale that people find perfectly adequate. Why spend $700 on a phone when there are devices out there that will get the job done.
A 1% market share of a huge global cell phone market still means they sell a lot of phones. They sold 8 million phones in 2014. That's nothing to laugh at. There are companies who are very profitable who wish they could sell 1/10 as many units. What BlackBerry did wrong was to simply hire too many people. They had over 19000 employees when they were popular. They are now around 4000 employees. That is still too many people. It should not take that many people to do what they do. They could remain profitable and still put out a good product if they just learned to focus on what they do best, and get rid of all the employees they don't need.
Oh, you mean this Blackphone? Just because somebody is marketing it as secure doesn't mean that it's actually a secure product.
Exactly. If websites hosted their own advertisements, they would make sure they didn't hog all the bandwidth. I don't object to all ads, but the vast majority of them are downright terrible. A simple non-moving banner can get the point across and not detract too much from my experience on the page. I think that companies placing the advertisements would actually pay more if there was some kind of standard for advertisement quality. Nobody wants to pay a lot of money to have their product pushed along get rich quick schemes and pay-to-win games. The state of advertising is in such a mess that most of the big players who care about their brand just simply stay away from advertising on the internet. Too bad there's not an ad network that cares about quality of ads. Most TV networks (as bad as their ads are) wouldn't even think about putting ads on their network that are commonly found on the internet.
PHP is a truly terrible language, with a truly terrible API. Just look at functions like implode, which can accept parameters in either order. Also (according to one commenter), imploding an array of booleans results in the "true" values being converted to 1, and the "false" values being converted to empty string. That's just a single function. Don't even get me started on mysql_escape_string vs. mysql_real_escape_string
The only reason it's so popular is that for such a long time it was the only choice for server side languages on a shared hosting environment. Even now there aren't really any good alternatives. Shared hosts still don't allow things like Java,.Net, or Node.JS on the server side unless you are prepared to pay a premium. Many hosts don't even offer Ruby, or Python, even though they don't require a constantly running process.
PHP started off as a toy project, and although a lot of work has been done to add functionality to make it useful, it still shows that it was lacking a lot of design considerations. Object Oriented capabilities and namespaces were tacked on later, and it really does feel tacked on, because only a very small part of the available libraries use object oriented features.
Or you could not have that CD anymore. It could get lost, broken, stolen, or lent out and never returned. Generally, that doesn't happen if you take care of your stuff, but it's still a possibility. The CDs will wear out eventually. Nothing is forever. And sometimes you'll buy a CD that just doesn't hold up as well as you thought it would, and you won't listen to it more than a few times. You could sell it, but albums like that you generally won't get more than a few dollars for.
Still has the sounds of the crowd that interfere with listening to the music. Perhaps going to hear a rendition of a symphony in a concert hall would be nice, because people going to those things don't generally let out hoots, hollers, and whistles throughout the performance. Nirvana's Unplugged in New York which is generally considered by many to be a great album, I find, is ruined by the guy asking "what song is it" at the end of two tracks in a row, when he's talking about how he's going to screw up the song, which in itself is pretty bad, admitting that you didn't really practice enough for your own performance so you don't screw up your own songs.
I personally do not enjoy listening to live music. I do enjoy going to concerts, but when I go, it's not really about the music. You are not in the same acoustical environment as the musician when you are in the middle of the floor, or 300 feet away in the nose bleed section. The musician is on stage, with ear pieces, so they can actually hear what they are playing. It's hard to really appreciate the music in a building filled with fans singing along to the music and bad arena acoustics. Doubly bad is recordings of live music, where you still get all the crowd noise, making it hard to really hear the music, without any of the fun of actually being there.
There's already solutions like Xamarin that get C# working on quite a few platforms, and Microsoft is pushing to make it work on all platforms as well. I hope they guan get visual studio working on other platforms and make something that allows me to write code once and have it run anywhere, even if I have to tweak the UI for different platforms. C#, Visual Studio, and the .Net runtime is one of the best programming environments there is. Windows app development is so much less painful than Android. If they can make C# easy to run across all devices, they'll attract a lot of developers and (as I'm sure is their plan), bring a lot more apps to the Windows desktop and phone app stores.
Exactly. At $10 a month, you could buy 1 CD a month. Probably less, but let's just make the numbers round. For teenagers or anybody else who hasn't amassed a huge collection of music, it would take them a while before they had a decent amount of music. They'd be listening to the same albums over and over again for the first couple years. $10 a month is pretty enticing, because you get access to a huge library of music right away. instead of trying to decide which new album, or other 10 tracks you want this month, you just have access to everything. Sure, something might happen and the streaming service might shut down, but then you can just join another. Or, you might come upon hard times, and not have money to pay for the subscription. But then you can just scrounge for free streaming services, listen to the radio, and listen to music videos on Youtube. And if you can't afford the $10 a month, then you might have bigger things to worry about than listening to your favorite music.
I would say it really depends on the job. When the post says "When someone lands their first JavaScript job", I envision the job as being possibly a website done in Node.JS with a lot of Javascript on the client side as well. I that kind of job, you'd better have a pretty good understanding of how javascript works, or you're going to have a hard time being productive. However, if you're "javascript job" is at a place where they use .Net, J2EE or some other language on the back end, and do most of their stuff in HTML, with a few javascript functions thrown in on the browser side for basic input validation, then you probably don't need to do a whole lot.
Also, there are all kinds of "entry level" jobs, because there are all kinds of people getting their first job. Coming out of university for instance, there are those who did nothing more than the required assignments, and have very little actual, real world, programming knowledge. These people don't know any language well enough, and they certainly don't know how to go about creating a large project that is organized and runs well. You will have to teach them basics like how to use a debugger, and how to use source control. The proficiency in the language will be the least of your worries.
There are also students who did a fair amount of work outside class, and may have actually done some actual "released to the public software" (such as app store apps) independently. They are quite fluent in a couple programming languages and are very well versed in using common tools like debuggers and source control. I would say that some people going for their first real job, aren't even looking for "entry level", as entry level is more what I described in the previous paragraph. Even if these people haven't had a formal job with a paycheck, they have surpassed the qualifications for "entry level", and are ready to move on to the next stage. Ideally, everybody would get this out of the way before graduating either through self learning or co-op/internship positions. But such is not reality.
The problem is getting the apps I already paid for on the phone without signing up for Google Play Services. I'll have to sign up, download all the apps I want, including something like Titanium backup. Then I have to backup the applications I want to use. Then I'll have to factory reset the phone again, to remove google play services. Then I'll have to re-install the apps using ADB, because there isn't even a file manager that comes default on the device that will allow apps to be installed directly from the phone. Amazing complicated process just to get a phone that doesn't die after 12 hours.
Even in Metric countries like Canada, many people still use imperial units for a lot of things. Go to the lumber store and you can get a 2x4, and they are sold in 6, 8, 10, and 12 foot lengths. Plywood is sold in 4x4 foot sheets. Just about everybody I know refers to their weight in pounds and their height in feet and inches. Almost nobody can tell you the metric equivalent without a calculator. We order a pint of beer at the pub, and most people still refer to a block of butter as a "pound of butter". . British people still use "stone" to express their body weight, and they are supposed to be metric as well.
You can standardize all you want, and print whatever you want on the packaging, but people are still going to use whatever they are used to. You could have the US go metric tomorrow, but people will still use Imperial measurements for another century
No kidding. I recently replaced my old Android 2.3 phone. Part of the reason I replaced it was because it wouldn't make it past 2:00 PM most days if I didn't charge it. After getting my new phone I did a factory reset on the old one. I charged it up, unplugged it, and left it on the night table. Came back 2 days later to be pleasantly surprised that it still had over 50% battery life. Because it didn't have anything to do, the battery lasted quite long. Then I decided I wanted to use it for a few simple games. I registered the device with my Google account and installed Minecraft. And that is all I installed. Now it only lasts about 12 hours for a charge. Somehow, simply having the thing connected to my Google account means that the battery life goes down from 3+ days to 12 hours. The device is pretty much completely useless as a "smart phone" but acting as dumb phone it works pretty well. I assume If I only loaded programs on it that didn't run in the background so much, that battery life would be fine, and I'd still be able to use it as a feature phone. I'll have to disconnect my Google account to see if that clears it up. Hopefully the installed programs will still work after I've disconnected my account.
I'm not sure where you read that, but I don't believe it. I know a guy who bought a brand new house in Quebec about 3-4 years back. The windows were all single pane and there was very little insulation in that house. Perhaps the builder didn't follow code, and hoped nobody would notice, but I didn't give me a very good impression on new homes. Often they are built worse than the old ones, or at least old ones that were reasonably maintained. It should be illegal to even sell single pane windows in a northern climate, let alone install them on new houses.