When I'm talking on the phone, the timer for the screen-lock should NOT be running. I frequently have calls that last more than 15 minutes, often set the phone down and use headphones during the call, and it's really annoying that after I hang up, the phone's locked. (If somebody else calls me when me phone's locked, locking when the call's done is fine, but not when I'm the one who made the call or the phone was unlocked when the call came in.)

I'm running 4.4.2 on a Samsung. The phone is provided by $DAYJOB, so they specify which locking options are available (face-unlock isn't), but otherwise it's pretty vanilla. The code used to require 8 digits, now it seems to be text-input instead; both require me to put on my reading glasses to unlock the phone, especially because the numerical unlocker was really bad at touch-screen control, so I had to look at every digit I pressed and count how many actually got detected. Keypress beeps help, unless you're trying to unlock the phone after silencing it, which I often do, but those have a non-zero time lag after the keypress before it notices it should beep, and you can't always tell 1 beep from N beeps. I can now use Swype, which I couldn't when the requirement was all-digits, but it's not much of an improvement since my password isn't a dictionary word, though I suppose I could set it to "qwertyuiop" or "asdfghjkl".

Wired had an article back in the late 90s about Julian Simon's predictions of "The Long Boom", where our high-tech economy with the Internet connecting everybody and delivering education and liberal economics was going to keep growing and making the world a better place indefinitely. Wasn't the Late 90s a great time!

Yeah, unfortunately, several sets of thugs decided war was a much better way to run a world, but even before that hit us, we'd started to question the value of buying dogfood online, and the parts of the tech boom that depended on Y2K-driven replacement of everything were thanked for their fine job and let go, and people started manipulating the US interest rates to affect the upcoming elections (2% rate change in a couple of months), which really didn't help a capital-intensive tech sector that was already getting threatened with anti-trust. And lots of other bad things happened, and good things stop happening, and good things happened in ways that make stuff enough cheaper it's hard to make a profit (Moore's Law etc.), and yeah, too bad.

There's starting to be some interesting science fiction about the problems of what happens when we can cure Alzheimer's.

And I suspect Sir Terry Pratchett would have volunteered to try this if they'd announced it a few months earlier.

I picked storage, and that's what I've had the most problems with at home, but it's especially what I've had the most problems with at work, because if the storage goes bad, I can lose data, whereas if most other parts of the machine go bad, it's the IT department's problem. Back in the 1980s, when I used VAXen instead of laptops, lots of things had problems, but it was still usually either disk head crashes or tape drives doing something odd.

Reality? It's the SOFTWARE that's been the problem.