Whatever I might want as far as *tasks not suitable on a small screen* - ebooks, doc editing, some games (cards work just fine as does Carcassone), some web sites.... - the limit is the size of my front pocket on my pants, the inside jacket pocket on my suit jacket, and the size of my hand. These sizes all sort of map together.

If I need bigger screen size, I'll pack a tablet or laptop in a shoulder bag.

Not everyone feels this way, but Google and others releasing ONLY the larger phones in the new generation is rather short sighted (and also the price of the new phablets is $$$$ versus the smaller ones).

Really, they should be releasing same OS, good hardware, with several screen sizes from about older iPhone size up through some of the 6-7" tablet sizes. That would cover everyone's needs.

Right now, they are just trying to get more $$$ per device.

Um, except I like having the ability, at need, to check weather, to check a map, and so on without having to drag a full fledged tablet along. My Nexus 4 is big enough (actually, it is the limit of acceptably big).

It:
- fits in my front pants pocket
- fits in my hand
- is sort of okay as a phone (could do with better speaker/mic)
- has a big enough screen to allow me to check weather, maps, text, and so on.

This is the niche I want my phone to fill. Your solution does not go there and requires me to buy two devices.

I was worried I had lost my Nexus 4. I went to look for a new model Nexus 4... only there's the Nexus 5 and it is TOO BIG. Google is no longer serving the community that don't want phablets and have moderate sized appendages.

I'm going to have to hang on to my device for as long as it is supported.

That's true. It was Jedi where they made Boba Fett die the most meaningless death since his dad Jango....

Guys can be made some fun of for being geeks or nerds or dorks by the jocks and sundry other forms of the male of the species. Women get peer pressure and crappy treatment (worse than what the guys get - women know how to wound in ways guys will never learn because they would have went to fist bludgeoning many steps before) from other women for deviating from social norms. Women are worse to women than guys.

A guy can be a geek and a few women might make fun of him, most won't. Some guys will, but its less than it used to be.

A girl who is a geek/nerd/etc gets a lot of flack from a lot of her ostensible peers in high school and a lot from guys who are intimidated or just disrespectful.

The pressure levels aren't the same in my observation.

I wish the world were as you suggest - with both boys and girls experiencing only a SLIGHT discouragement to their choices which strength of character would deal with nicely. It isn't. The discouragement is often far worse than slight. And it comes from teachers, other students of both genders, everywhere in TV and advertising, etc.

Teachers tend to see girl's first instinct upon hitting a problem (which is a social response of seeking help) to be somehow indicative of a weaker student whereas boys inclination to just bash their head against the wall until the wall collapses or their skull does to be somehow indicative of a stronger student. The truth is, the best response is usually 'try the most obvious things and then ask for help'. Extremes of either approach can be bad for any real world project. But that isn't the point - the point is teachers frequently see the student differently based on common gender-associated problem-solving approaches and often aren't even aware they do that. This is most common with male teachers who tend to be more common in STEM courses.

This is just an example of how the girls have the deck stacked against them in STEM areas. CS among them.

There are many double standards in our society. If a guy beds many girls, he's a stud. If she does, she's a slut. That's just one classic example.

Those gender norms are really societal constructions. When women get bombarded by subtle messages every day growing up about what will make them happy and what are presumed to be appropriate values, concerns, toys, goals, etc. then we can hardly expect anything else.

Gender stereotyping is a massive aspect of where women end up going. Same with boys.

Those who aren't comfortable with non-stereotypical gender roles like to argue this is nature, but it isn't (at least 95%), it is nurture (education and advertising).

This is why women raised outside of the cultural norms (Dad wanted a boy, raised her like a boy) will make these sorts of choices. This isn't a genetic limitation but a cultural one.

+1, Factual

I am a male and I claim a fairly different nature than thou.

I also claim your notion of predestination is absolute BS.

My observations:
- Women protect their own time more than men in this industry (don't want to do as much overtime, don't want their weekends to vanish, etc) and this leads to a negative management style that penalizes healthy behaviour and thus limits women's progress
- Women take maternity leave and have kids and that hurts prospects in the high-grind world of CS
- There are a lot of poorly emotionally developed males in management roles (not all, by any means, but enough that an 'I like my coders young male and single' comment isn't a surprise out of a manager)
- Women will try to ask for an answer when stumped, guys will try to battle through (taking a long time sometimes) - the best course is usually somewhere in the middle.
- Women don't particularly love to be abused and they are less willing to put up with it from management than men (who are willing to get called some nasty things by their boss most times)

The industry is hard on developers and artists and QA people. It burns them out, treating them like disposable resources. Women are smart enough to recognize this and fewer of them want to enter this. Guys are still 'hey, neat tech!' and 'I get to code a video game/drive the space shuttle/build smartbombs/code networked scrabble/etc'. So they still throw themselves into the grinder more willingly.

Guys also respond more to challenge and to hostile bosses (that's likely deep in our genes) by trying to outperform. That same climate I believe makes a lot of women just want to leave.

So in summary, it can be a hard field on people and it is managed in ways that drive women from the field.

My cred: 18 years in software development in a lot of companies (custom software contractor much of the time in and out of companies of all sizes).

The main tragedy, if I ever have to come off Gmail, is exactly how much grouping (in the form of hundreds of labels, many nested). It's how I classify and find my way around gigs and gigs of email.

I can recover my email itself from Gmail via POP. WTF can I recover or port the whole classification and grouping - the labels!

If there was a way to get that out in a way that would import to something else, I'd darn well consider it.

This is the scale of what I want (although I'd take the screen and mount it into a hardwood table). The price tag is.... insanity. That's about $9-11K Canadian. I can get a 60" LED smart TV with a 4K screen for under $2K.

So, yes, this is what I want, along with some of the neat software for it and some of the hardware that interfaces with the screen. And I'd like it in the $2500 or less range which should be achievable with economies of large production scale.

Because occasionally I forget to stop it after I play a game at the end of the day. My work laptop happens to also be my current steam platform since my gaming box is now out of support (XP). (By work, I mean 'the laptop I do useful work on' vs. 'the laptop provided by work').

The Ottawa Public Library is having a significant budgetary shortfall due to a reduction in late fees.

The sad thing is that these entities have integrated punitive fines into their standard funding expectations and financial plans.

I think that sort of thinking needs to be scorned. It is a poor way to manage an institution. You don't want your model to be 'well, we will depend on and be incentivized to encourage people to break the rules we claim we want them to follow'. It's a rather ethically laughable situation.

Yes, orbital habs over Earth (or maybe around the moon) are our best bets. We can likely control sunlight and gravity and have enough air and water in them to support a good population (if we can get the construction tech).

We might be able to terraform Mars, might be able to adapt bodies to the low partial pressures in the atmo. What we can't do is fix the low gravity and its effects on our immune system, reproductive system, etc. Low G is one of the 'hard' things to live with and one of the things we have no ability to change.

If we build a sufficiently good station, we can get 0.8+ gees by rotation. That ought to be enough. There are issues to the orbital colonies (materials, construction science, where to get air, water, etc, orbital safety, and so on) but they are the best low-environmental impact living spaces if we can make them truly not requiring Earth to ship resources on a continuing basis to support them.

We can even build multiple stations. Probably a good idea if our first few Babylon projects go poorly. (And the fourth one might just disappear)

Hmmm.

I'd say I prefer my windows to just *be gone* when I minimize them. I know they end up in the system tray. I don't need an animation to tell me that my UI/Desktop Manager is doing its job.

You can provide status information visually WITHOUT animation.

Just to say: Some years back, I had a boss who, using a dual monitor station for software development, frequently hit the Windows 2000 Window Limit (64 I think).

I currently have 22 windows open. Of them, about 8 are tabbed browser windows so you can figure I likely have about 60-80 tabs open concurrently. My editors and PDF viewers also run multiple documents concurrently. I'm not even on heavy workload right now or there would likely be another 10-15 windows open. I sometimes do notice slowdowns but I suspect I may be pushing the available memory from time to time, but animations may also play a role.

In the background or actively running on my machine, I have 2 Tomcat instances, and HFS instance, iTunes, SQL Server instance, a My SQL Instance, Apache Instance, Netbeans, Eclipse, KeePass 2, Adobe Chrome, IE, SVN client and server, Steam, Calibre, and the list goes on. There are likely a number of background servers I'm actually forgetting.

I begrudge my cycles to animations I don't need and that actually I find visually distracting and which don't aide me in figuring things out but I find distract me and confuse the issue.

Not everyone just has a handful of apps open. Not everyone benefits from animations. A lot of $ are used getting them to work and making them pretty when that money could be spent on truly functional software features.

Or perhaps the excess packaging....