Noise-cancelling headphones won't help with the visual distraction of people moving in your field of vision. Unfortunately I'm speaking from experience, at least I can't help registering extra movement in my field of vision even if I'm trying to concentrate on what's going on my displays. Sure, there are some occasions where I've picked up a valuable piece of information from conversations going on around me in an open office, but most of the time they are just an annoying distraction. As far as I'm concerned, open-plan office isn't the right place for developers.

It must be F. I wouldn't want to be sleeping in a tent if if were low 30's in C as I'd be too busy sweating to get any sleep at all. For example here in Finland the official heat threshold is 25 C and warmer countries have the limit a few degrees higher. 30 whatever is still really warm in C. Seems like low 30's in F are around 0 C and decent camping gear should have no problem with that like you mentioned.

Yep. There is the 2014 Mac mini, but with the quad core options going away and RAM getting soldered with no justifiable reason (form factor didn't change a bit), it doesn't really count as an upgrade. So the Mac mini has not been upgraded since 2012 indeed :P This is quite annoying as my 2011 mini is starting to get rather old.

This is actually fixed in Windows 8. I was a bit surprised to see that Windows 8 (and 8.1) in the desktop mode are better than Windows 7 when it comes to multiple displays.

Whoops! Did I get bitten by a beta bug or what? I'm fairly positive I had proper quote tags in the quoted part, but apparently they were ripped out when publishing the comment. Sorry about that.

The correct tense is had. http://www.businessweek.com/ar...

I should've noticed it was an AC. Point taken.

XP Works. Vista, 7, and 8 really don't

Wow, this has got to be one of the most opinionated and/or misinformed things I've read in quite a while. XP was the last consumer Windows that was more or less designed for the "isn't everybody an admin?" mindset. Part of Vista's bad reputation was due to it being the messenger that got shot while delivering the "hey guys, the party's over. We really need to stop assuming every user can write to system locations. This time for real." message to developers and users. Naturally the ultra-paranoid UAC settings didn't help with that. In 7 and 8 the new security model was fine-tuned to actually work instead of bombarding users with multiple confirmations for the same operation and as a result the modern versions of Windows are reasonably secure, especially when compared to the security nightmare that XP was prior to SP2.

I guess it's safe to assume that Sir Jony is not a knight who says NI!

Indeed. While 1Password does provide the possibility to sync via Dropbox, you can also choose to use a local database and handle possible mobile sync via local wifi. That's what I did back in the day when they didn't have the Dropbox sync as an option. No, I'm not in any way affiliated with AgileBits. Just a long-time 1Password user.

I beg to differ.

The 8.1 start button actually has one good reason to take up all that extra space: It now provides more area where to right-click to bring up a menu with shortcuts to many useful functions. Back in Windows 8.0 it was only available when you dragged the cursor to the corner and got the Metro preview. According to a quick survey on IRC, it turned out that not that many people were aware of that handy context menu there. Can't blame them, though. Microsoft's done quite a job with hiding all the stuff Windows 8 can do.

Sounds like a common combo I'm also familiar with: http://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org/

I had my parental leave a little less than a year ago. While at first returning to work seemed like a nice break from everything related to taking care of a pre-term infant, a nasty issue related to SharePoint was all it took to make diaper changes feel not bad at all actually. In those cases, at least someone is happy at the end and general happiness is restored a whole lot quicker.

Umm, time to (re-)read TFA? Blocking browser access is exactly what they did here. Just checked on my company-issued Lumia 800 that accessing maps.google.com on IE still redirects to the mobile version of their main page.