I swear by Lee jeans, but to be very specific, the Lee 'Brooklyn' model which I have only found for purchase in Europe. Comparable 'loose' jeans, (not really loose on biker thighs) from Lee in the U.S. are slightly different, and not nearly as nice IMHO. I wish I knew where to buy them in the U.S. It seems companies like Jockey and Lee have totally different products for the E.U. and U.S. Lee used to have a 'Portland' that was even better than the 'Brooklyn', but that was years ago.

What was a most-pleasant surprise for me was to discover my 4" Nokia N9 fits perfectly tucked into the right-hand 'change' pocket. Really perfect and super comfortable, and it still leaves the larger right-hand pocket free and useful; and the phone doesn't roll around in it, look weird, etc. No one can even tell I have a phone on me. The U.S. version of the closest Lee jeans for me (not sure what the model is called) leaves the phone sticking about halfway up and out and not nearly as nice or comfortable. Probably for this reason alone, I'll stick with 4" phone factor, but there's other reasons too, like I plan to keep the N9 for a long time.

You don't have to understand everything, but you do need to at least understand the basics, like how networking works, how crypto works, etc. at a conceptual level. I feel like too many developers learn how to program by learning JavaScript and other scripting languages on their own, then jump into app programming thinking that it's only one step harder because you can sort of do it in Python/Ruby/other Obj-C bridged languages/other .NET languages, or because Swift looks like JavaScript, or whatever their logic might be. Unfortunately, it's not one step harder if you care about doing it right; it's a hundred steps harder, but the apparent accessibility of app programming tries to hide that fact, resulting in a lot of people getting in way over their heads.

Too many developers then balk when we tell them that they need to read conceptual books, insisting that they just want to learn how to solve their particular problem. The result is that they understand just enough of what they're doing to be dangerous. It's like deciding to build a house and telling someone, "I just want to know how to cut a board and hammer in a nail." You're likely to get a very strange looking house with no right angles. You really need to start with higher-level design and philosophy texts, then work your way down to the practical texts. That's equally true in programming, but the short-attention-span instant-gratification crowd just doesn't get that.

And I understand the desire to just learn how to solve the problem. I've been there, and I've done that, but only in areas where I was reasonably comfortable. Even then, I've often later discovered that snippets that looked right weren't quite right in certain edge cases, but at least this happens fairly infrequently, because I've taken the time to learn what I'm doing. Developers who don't do this aren't just hurting themselves; they're hurting their users. There's just no reason for that.

It could've been an accidental overdose, although reports from The Prosecution regarding the video evidence seem to indicate the alleged and easily identifiable tattooed hooker was rather cold-hearted given the accident/situation, and more than willing to walk away from all of it entirely, with the curtains drawn once it all went down, perhaps even with some sense of thrill given her past praise published on the internet for the TV series known as 'Dexter'. She could have looked around for a phone somewhere and at the very least dialed 911 as quickly as possible.

If this case was a result of Google Exec stress, then it has to due with the levels of competition not just in order to compete and to survive within Silicon Valley, but also the extremely high cost simply trying to live to get a job in the first place, and then subsequently have anything close to an actual life there. Some will survive and survive very well, and others will not. Which is what this story is all about. Stress is stress after all.

I think Charles Dickens even wrote a book on the subject called a Tale of Two Cities. Economists have termed this phenomenon as economic disparity; which of course drives competition.

But a psychotic self-absorbed young hooker might also be the predominant story here.

I think there is a third, and perhaps more likely explanation: Parts of the Russian military is not under the control of the government. Putin is not exactly stupid, and what is happening in that area is rapidly becoming stupid, so I think it is a reasonable guess that he hasn't got things under his control. Only very few countries are 'terrorist states' - there is something inherently incompatible between level-headed, routine administration of day to day business and hell-bent, wild-eyed terrorism; I can only think of Libya under Gaddafi.

Code recycling is one thing, but not understanding what that code does when you put it into a production app or not following best practices is another. As Android gains popularity as a platform to develop for, we're going to lose quality as the new folks jumping onto the band wagon don't care how their apps work or look beyond the end goal. This mentality is already popping up with Android Wear developers who cram as much information as they can on the screen and claim that design guidelines are "just recommendations."

The exact same thing happens on every other platform, though perhaps to varying degrees. I refer to it as the Stack Overflow effect. One developer who doesn't know the right way to do something posts a question. Then, a developer who also doesn't know the right way to do it posts how he or she did it. Then ten thousand developers who don't know the right way to do it copy the code without understanding what it does or why it's the wrong way to do it. By the time somebody notices it, signs up for the site, builds up enough reputation points to point out the serious flaw in the code, and actually gets a correction, those developers have moved on, and the bad code is in shipping apps. Those developers, of course, think that they've found the answer, so there's no reason for them to ever revisit the page in question, thus ensuring that the flaw never gets fixed.

Case in point, there's a scary big number of posts from people telling developers how to turn off SSL chain validation so that they can use self-signed certs, and a scary small number of posts reminding developers that they'd better not even think about shipping it without removing that code, and bordering on zero posts explaining how to replace the SSL chain validation with a proper check so that their app will actually be moderately secure with that self-signed cert even if it does ship. The result is that those ten thousand developers end up (statistically) finding the wrong way far more often than the right way.

Of course, it's not entirely fair to blame this problem solely on sites like Stack Overflow for limiting people's ability to comment on other people's answers unless they have a certain amount of reputation (a policy that is, IMO, dangerous as h***), and for treating everybody's upvotes and downvotes equally regardless of the reputation of the voter. A fair amount of blame has to be placed on the companies that create the technology itself. As I told one of my former coworkers, "The advantage of making it easier to write software is that more people write software. The disadvantage of making it easier to write software is that... more people write software." Ease of programming is a two-edged sword, and particularly when you're forced to run other people's software without any sort of actual code review, you'd like it to have been as hard as possible for the developer to write that software, to ensure that only people with a certain level of competence will even make the attempt—sort of a "You must be this tall to ride the ride" bar.

To put it another way, complying with or not complying with design guidelines are the least of app developers' problems. I'd be happy if all the developers just learned not to point the gun at other people's feet and pull the trigger without at least making sure it's not loaded, but for some reason, everybody seems to be hell-bent on removing the safeties that would confuse them in their attempts to do so. Some degree of opaqueness and some lack of documentation have historically been safety checks against complete idiots writing software. Yes, I'm wearing my UNIX curmudgeon hat when I say that, but you have to admit that the easier programming has become, the lower the average quality of code has seemed to be. I know correlation is not causation, but the only plausible alternative is that everyone is trying to make programming easier because the average developer is getting dumber and can't handle the hard stuff, which while possible, is even more cynical than the original assertion and makes me weep for the future.

Either way, there's something really, really wrong at a fundamental level with the way we search for solutions to coding problems. There needs to be an easy way to annotate the fact that a code snippet was derived from a particular forum post, and to automatically receive email notifications (or bug reports) whenever someone flags the snippet on the original forum as being wrong or dangerous. And we as developers need to take the time to learn enough about the OS and the programming environment to ensure that we at least mostly understand what a piece of code does before we ship it in a product.

And a lot of innocent people caught in the middle.

The problem is, the innocent people are also Muslims and saying that Muslims are suffering just doesn't garner much sympathy in the modern, xenophobic world.

The sad fact is, the only reason a lot of people, especially the Fox News crowd care about the Palestine conflict is that it's someone fighting Muslims... they don't give a shit about the Israelis (they'd just as quickly hate the Jews with the same irrational enthusiasm)... they only care that someone else (not a Muslim) is fighting Muslims.

Now, now, now, it's not the version control system's fault that you checked in a bug....

As for IT costs - I have worked in several companies over the years with both UNIX and Windows server rooms. Being a UNIX person, I may be a bit biased, but my personal impression is that supporting Windows servers is a lot more painfil than supporting UNIX/Linux - at one point I supported some 50 UNIXes alone, while the roughly similar number of Windows systems had a team of 5; I had a pretty relaxed daily routine, but they were always overstretched. Not because they incompetent, I learned a lot of generally useful stuff from them, but so many things in Windows seem to require either clicking through graphical interfaces, system by system, or require a specialised, graphical tool, where I would just run a few scripts from a command line. The power of tools like ksh (or bash), ssh, sed, grep, find etc should not be underestimated.

The other thing I have heard increasingly - from Windows admins themselves - is that Windows is just such nightmare to handle. I wouldn't know - I left Windows behind as soon as Linux became viable, and that's a long time ago.

I got the same error after a glitch. Turns out the redemption was successful the first time, but because the server was too slow responding to the redemption request, the App Store app timed out. For whatever bizarre reason, it appears that the app store server infrastructure doesn't treat redemption requests as idempotent (clearly a bug), so subsequent attempts to redeem the same code from the same account fail. Ideally, those subsequent attempts should do nothing, but should return whatever magic value tells the App Store app to update its list of purchased items and then do whatever other work it needs to do.

To make a long story short, if you quit the App Store app and relaunch it, the Yosemite beta should appear under the Purchases tab in the App Store. From there, you can start the download.

A nonprofit competitor is required by law to spend any profits they make on upgrading infrastructure. So unless they massively overhire or have higher expenses because of economies of scale or renting a more expensive building, the nonprofit is pretty much guaranteed to be able to undercut any for-profit competitor while providing better service, because it doesn't have the extra overhead of profit taking.

Particularly if all you need is heat. You could potentially build an almost entirely passive desalinization plant fairly readily by building a greenhouse atop the ocean and making the roof slope towards the sides with catch basins that then flow downhill towards the shore. The only thing required is an insane amount of glass (and an insane amount of space to dedicate to it).

Rum, of course. Or, if you prefer, vodka.