Then you'd miss the SwiftKey prediction options, which allow me to tap out common sentences in a breeze, and the multiple active languages, a huge plus in countries with multiple languages. :)
You should know the basics to know why you're ignoring them. When you start writing, you have to use proper grammar, spelling, etc. Once you have that down, you can choose to ignore rules or making them work for another purpose. That is what really pushes the boundary in the arts, but having the basics is useful in and of themselves.
- Backups are your responsibility. Not the hosts, not the government. Not anyone else. You. Period.
- Cannot pay with Paypal? Paypal HQ spontaneously explodes into a huge ball of fiery death? Find another way to pay. It's your responsibility to hold your side of the contract.
And when they only accept Paypal? What do yo do then?
I don't care if I have backups. Such a termination of services and further purging of data is a big no-no in my books.
From the looks of it, the company offers no other payment options other than PayPal and didn't provide any information otherwise (I.E. "We need this now, please wire us the money, here's our account details")
Why is that surprising? People complaining about the lack of features obviously need something more capable. For the rest of us, the lightweight, cheap option is good enough. :)
I'd be happy if only I had the opportunity to buy apps, period. I can only access apps that are free AND not US-only (so no Amazon Kindle for Android app). While I understand that there may be some considerations I'm not aware of, my iphone-owning friends seem perfectly happy and content to buy iphone apps. So if Apple can do it, why can't Google? (I'm in Panama, by the way).
It's hard to get excited about a promotion that brings down the price to about what Amazon already sells their books. I'm not trying to diss the PragProgs. I like their books as they're very useful to me. I do own a couple. But from the customer's perspective, it's not a big deal.
Now the screencasts is another matter. 40% off is a pretty good deal.
The sale is exciting to those of us who want to buy the ebooks, which are not available from Amazon. (I'm thinking about now buying Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages on Friday.)
Well.. Depends really. The benefits you receive is not limited to that one company (people you meet, network, advice, etc)... Those transfer with you if you later start another company, and another. It could turn out to be really cheap in the long run.
It seems to me that their wording pushes their anti Facebook data locking agenda, intimidating novice users. To me, this goes against their "don't be evil" company motto.
That Facebook is evil or not is irrelevant, I think. (I happen to think that their interests and the privacy interests of their users are not aligned at all). Google is fighting the good cause, ok, I agree. But the method they used in this instance is not the best. They could've simply said: "Hey look man. Facebook wants us to give them your contact data. These are the possible consequences: 1., 2., 3. Are you sure?" Their current wording implies (to me) that a user's data is all going to be imported and kept inside of FB and nowhere else (which is a key point), which is not true as Google holds the user's data as well. There will be divergence afterwards as the user begins to use Google and FB in different ways. But yeah, I do see that FB is not an easy place to get your data out of, but Google is using users' data as a pressure point to force FB's hand. What would be interesting to find out is if they are defending privacy because it's a noble thing to do, or if they are just defending privacy because it happens to benefit them in some other way.
edit: added "and nowhere else (which is a key point)"
