My whole family got really fed up very quickly after walking into a dark room, hitting the switch and having to stand there for 5 seconds until the light actually came on
I find this really hard to believe. I've been using CFLs exclusively for over 10 years - mostly buying cheap ones - and I've never seen one that takes more than about half a second to come on. The time taken to get to full brightness I can almost agree with (this was actually why I started using them originally - having a bedside light that took a couple of minutes to get to full brightness was nice) but in recent ones (i.e. ones from the last 4-5 years) the warm-up period has been 5-10 seconds, although growing to about 20 seconds after 3-4 years of use.
Let's do it again. The last set of CFLs I bought cost 50p each (the ones before that were 30p, but that was a special offer). According to my electricity bill, I pay a tiny fraction of a penny under 15p/kWh. That means that the bulb costs slightly more than 3kWh of electricity. It's a 15W bulb replacing a 60W one, so that's a 45W saving. Assuming that the incandescent is free, then it takes 75 hours of operation for it to save money. At 3 hours a day, that's 25 days. When I first did the arithmetic, the CFLs were 3-4 times more expensive, so it worked out at 3 months.
This is why I find the resistance to CFLs so hard to understand. It's saved me quite a bit of money over the last decade.
If you save more on energy, but spend a lot more on replacement bulbs, what is the break even point before it was a good investment?
When I did the arithmetic quite a few years ago, the break even point for CFLs was about 3 months. The bulbs I bought back then all lasted 6+ years. The cost of a CFL is around the cost of 3-10kWh, depending on the brand, so even if they incandescents were free you don't need the CFLs to last very long to break even.
How is the objective-c compiled and ran on Dalvik? Are you doing: objective-c -> LLVM -> dalvik bytecode?
It isn't. It runs natively via the NDK.
I maintain the GNUstep / Clang Objective-C stack. Most people who use it now do so in Android applications. A lot of popular apps have a core in Objective-C with the Foundation framework (sometimes they use GNUstep's on Android, more often they'll use one of the proprietary versions that includes code from libFoundation, GNUstep and Cocotron, but they almost all use clang and the GNUstep Objective-C runtime). Amusingly, there are actually more devices deployed with my Objective-C stack than Apple's. The advantage for developers is that their core logic is portable everywhere, but the GUIs can be in Objective-C with UIKit on iOS or Java on Android (or, commonly for games, GLES with a little tiny bit of platform-specific setup code). I suspect that one of the big reasons why the app situation on Windows Phone sucks is that you can't do this with a Windows port.
It would be great for these people to have an open source Swift that integrated cleanly with open source Objective-C stacks. Let's not forget that that's exactly what Swift is: a higher-level language designed for dealing with Objective-C libraries (not specifically Apple libraries).
Objective-C is a good language for mid-1990s development. Swift looks like a nice language for early 2000s development. Hopefully someone will come up with a good language for late 2010s development soon...
It wasn't just about interface. People tend to forget how search engines did an absolutely horrible job of intelligently ranking the sites you wanted to see.
I find it pretty easy to remember - I go to Google today.
The UI was what made me switch both to Google originally and from it some years later. When I started using Google - and when Google started gaining significant market share - most users were on 56Kb/s or slower modem connections. AltaVista was the market leader and they'd put so much crap in their front page that it took 30 seconds to load (and then another 20 or so to show the results). Google loaded in 2-3 seconds. The AltaVista search results had to be a lot better to be faster. I switched away when they made the up and down arrow keys in their search box behave differently to every other text field in the system.
The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.