That industry has gone the way of the IT industry...

It used to be very lucrative, great hourly rates were available to the best in the field. Now there's been an influx of eastern europeans, and customers have discovered they can order cheaper options from the far east...

The other thing that's changed is the way people drive on motorways. When I was first driving, back in the early 90s, you could sit on the motorway at 80mph (for those outside the UK, that's a little above the legal limit of 70) and be overtaken by a steady stream of ton-up drivers. The outside lane was a hazard and you'd need a huge gap to overtake and still have frustrated drivers getting right up your arse.

It still happens to an extent, but it does seem that the average speed has dropped. I see far fewer cars driving at 90 and up. OK, that's partly due to the increase in speed cameras, but I reckon fuel economy plays a part. There are more people seemingly content to sit below the limit, at about 60, and that was very much a rarity 20 years ago outside of the elderly cloth cap brigade.

I pretty much use email. It's virtually instant, arrives on all of my devices simultaneously, and flexible enough to handle longer messages with attachments when the need arises. SMS is handy for communicating with dumbphone users, but otherwise email is the answer.

As of Kitkat, at least on the Nexus 5, hangout is the default SMS application and does this if you're not careful. It can try to start the conversation via a hangout if the contact has a gmail account, which is kind of useless if they don't have an android phone and you want to use SMS as most people do - to contact them *right now* on their phone.

You have to remember to select their phone number specifically, then it will send an SMS. It will also always reply in kind - get a text it will always reply by text.

To my mind that's where Apple went wrong with the new Mac Pro. Looks pretty, no internal expansion. So you have this nice object on your desk - with a bunch of trailing wires to your storage, optical drive, card readers etc...

If it had an internal optical drive, multiformat card reader (SD and CF at least) and room for at least one or two extra drives (hot swappable would be nice), it would be a great machine. I'd imagine more people would find that useful than the dual graphics cards. I know I'd prefer it all in one box, with just one external drive, or array (USB would do) for backups. And of course I could build a PC to the spec that meets my needs for a lot less.

I do actually use a Mac, and prefer OSX to Windows, but the hardware choices are sooo limited.

The sidebar is one of the most important features for me. I filter various emails to skip my inbox, so I like to see an unread count against the labels to know when I've got mail I might want to look at. I like to keep the inbox to the more important stuff, as that's the one I sync with my phone.

I like the way the current gmail uses space as well - not too much whitespace. Email is a tool I use constantly - I don't need it to look good, I need it to be functional and have as much information as possible available at a glance. Site designs that are OK for casual browsing are not necessarily appropriate for real work and power users.

Gmail was the first web interface that was good enough for me to replace a desktop client for PC use. I'd rather not go back, but that interface will have me switching, either back to a mail client or to outlook.com

I get the point, but I'm surprised at the poor battery life on the Nexus 4. I have a Nexus 5, and with very little use I get four days out of it on a full charge. That's syncing one email account and a few things like weather widgets. It's the screen that kills the battery, but with moderate use I still get a good couple of days. GPS and Bluetooth off, obviously, and it's on wifi at home and work.

I used to get two days out of it when I had Facebook installed. Then they came out with an update that wanted too many extra permissions, so I binned it. Lo and behold, battery life almost doubled...

It's not the amount. It's the ideas - getting things done. I've known programmers who can work a week on something and produce a thousand lines of convoluted code full of bugs. Someone else can come in, see the problem differently, and knock out a solution in a few dozen lines - which may have the odd bug to be ironed out, but simply due to the number of lines of code will have an order of magnitude fewer.

The ones that are 10 times more productive simply have a better grasp of which algorithm to use, as well as an in depth working knowledge of the libraries available and how to find new ones. For example, I've seen guys reinvent big wheels badly in Perl, when there are well established modules on CPAN that do the same thing and are going to be far better tested and more reliable.

The difference between average and good is in how quickly you get a reliable working system that meets the requirements. In that respect, I truly believe there is at least an order of magnitude between OK and good, let alone great, programmers.

Exactly, it's a nuisance. On my phone even a 4 digit pin is a pain - I just want to swipe and start using it. I do put up with a pin to prevent casual nosiness if I leave it on my desk, but otherwise I wouldn't bother.

I care about security, but I also care about the balance between that and convenience. It's risk management - the likelihood of losing my phone is low, the stuff on there isn't that sensitive, so I opt mostly for convenience.

I think golf can count as redneck when the Masters was won by a man called "Bubba" :)

Or just one of you is left handed...

At the Masters, the winner gets to choose the meal for the champion's dinner the following year. Does that count?

I actually like watching golf, it's almost hypnotically boring (and I mean that in a good way!). I do count it as a sport - it might not be as physical as some sports (you don't get out of breath), but skill and strength are required. A top player couldn't drive without getting worse injuries than they currently do without good physical conditioning.

There are other reasons they're more expensive than purely artistic. They cost more to make for a start, but also give you benefits such as a brighter viewfinder and the ability to take pictures in lower light. The last is less relevant now, because high ISO performance is modern DSLRs is so good, but even so, more light getting in helps the camera focus in low light.

Funnily enough, I upgraded to an LED TV from a CRT just last week. My old TV was 14 years old, still a good picture and the sound was better than the new one (would need a soundbar to match it). I only did it because I was getting fed up with watching streaming stuff on the PC, and was finding that subtitles, scores etc are now displayed so small that they were hard to read (broadcasters expect you to have a bigger TV now, obviously).

I could have upgraded much sooner. I buy toys when I want them. There's nothing for me to save for, really. Interest rates are so low you're almost losing money by saving. I have a house, and the jump to upgrade that by moving would be too great (and bring too little benefit). So I agree, in the main - might as well have what I want when I want it.

And in context of this article, I'm an android user. Just prefer the interface. I prefer having live widgets on the home screen, and there are some useful apps that don't exist in the iOS world due to the sandboxing of applications. I like the auto backup of SMS to email, for example, and don't think an equivalent is possible in iOS (may be wrong, but couldn't find anything).