Women make up a tiny proportion of developers, but we still see passion plays like this in forums where developers dwell on a daily basis. So, who precisely is harassing who here?

Hell, if I put a Raspberry Pi inside the scooped out guts of ENIAC, it would be just like ENIAC was streaming a movie... right?

I'm thinking of pulling the beads off an abacus and throwing a Raspberry Pi to show how an abacus can stream movies... and then maybe hollowing out a stone and showing how cool streaming could have been in the Neolithic...

Sarcasm mode off

Code monkeys are, and that's the way that managers who hire code monkeys like it.

There are plenty of programmers out there creating interesting and useful new software, and plenty of customers/clients willing to pay serious money for the value that software offers them without all the unnecessary bureaucratic overheads and middle management crap.

If you are a good programmer and professional in your general conduct, you owe it to yourself not to be a code monkey for anyone, IMHO. You have to be really, really unlucky with the time and place when your current gig(s) run out not to have better options in 2014.

If you're developing on a platform as developer-hostile as that and you're locked into it so your business can't port to other platforms if necessary, I would submit that you have bigger strategic problems and long-term risks than merely being a small company. An arrangement like that is an axe hanging over the head of almost any size of company and you have absolutely no control over when it might fall.

(No, I don't develop iOS apps or write console games, despite occasionally getting enquiries in those fields, and this is why.)

I used to hold an attitude very much like yours, but I took some tests on this site

Congratulations, you've just been push-polled. Those tests aren't built to discover bias, they're built to convince you that you are biased.

Every time some man acts like an ass to some woman, it counters 10 men being perfectly civil. If you don't like it, try to keep your bro's in line. It turns out they're assholes, and no one likes assholes.

It turns out I neither have power, authority, or even influence over those "bros". So, you can take your collective guilt elsewhere; I'm not buying.

Whatever you say, debt slave.

Yes. Lets ask children if they want to be treated like adults, and trust them to act like adults if they answer in the affirmative.

Or, maybe that's a cop out, and we should start acting like men.

For certain limited definitions of "support".

The only "special" insult they make to women is rape, because they know that will piss them off.

Really? Did they stop threatening male players with buggery?

Is this what we've come to? Pretending online trolls are a problem specifically for women?

Here's a hint for the author of that article: Trolls are adept at identifying that which will get under your skin, and will hit that button repeatedly as long as it keeps spitting out a pellet ( much like this article ). If we're going to generalize it, men don't get this particular brand of trollling because it doesn't work on us. Ultimately, it has very little to do with sexism.

But no; let's work on trying to make ourselves a better brand of troll. Let me know how that works out for you.

( and no; had the author been a man, I'd have responded in the same manner )

For some tasks I can understand recycling. I use older hardware to build routers, anti-spam gateways, VPN appliances and the like. Normally these are fairly low-cycle tasks, at least for smaller offices. But I've learned my lesson about using older hardware in mission critical applications. I've set up custom routers that worked just great, until the motherboards popped a cap, and then they're down, and unless you've got spares sitting around, you're in for some misery.