bprieto

You may not remember that, but when he was writing this TV showed Palestinians singing and celebrating in the street the attacks.

No, it's not stupid. It's how most people think: hey, this girl is like me and she loves the product, so I will love the product too.

Unless your product is developed for engineers, having testimonials in your sales materials is a must, and throwing lists of hard facts and functions is a sure way to scare customers off.

I actually did this the other day to show a friend that a newspaper had greatly exaggerated the number of prostitutes in Spain (300.000).

There are 40M persons in Spain, 50% are women, 50% of women have an age suitable for the trade, it is impossible that 3%, or 1 in 30 are prostitutes.

Why not open source software? They actually say something like "you can be free, but you can't be cheap". Making money with OSS is not easy, but there are certainly ways to do it.

And for cheap consumer software, it's just that you need to be really big to win money being cheap. You can't do it as a one man company.

Thanks, I also considered briefly Python+Flask. Might be worth to give it another look.

I'm afraid I can't. Or at least I can't do it in a reasonable time. There were times where I could be programming for ten or twelves hours a day. Now I'm lucky if I can get two straight hours without interruptions. So I need to optimize my time.

Well, you know that thing about people being more careful spending their own money than spending other people's money... this is the same, but with time. It's my project, but it wouldn't be fun to toss everything six months down the road. Sure I would have learned something, but still... any way, thank for your comment, maybe I'll do the coin thing (and try not to look back)

I think the "Look at our desks" post is more than interesting. It is very useful to visualize how a XXI century company looks like. In fact, I am using it next week in a seminar about business models and will compare it to the office in Billy Wilder's "The Apartment".

So maybe not technical, but definitely not "merely interesting"

Agree. In a startup or a small business, the employer is the weakest. He/She must pay a high enough salary to get a competent worker, must pay for training, must pay salary while the worker is employed even if the company is not making money, must be aware and comply with labour regulations or risk a fine...

The employee just has to show up and do a barely acceptable job to get a steady pay.

Number types are meant to store numbers, not text. Even if you know the text will be just a subset of the alphabet (just 0-9) it is not a number.

Just a couple of problems: some day in the future the field could need another character beyond 0-9. In Spain National Identity Numbers were once just numbers, but they changed and added a letter for validation. If you had stored this as a number you would need to change data types, and suffer a massive application update.

Another problem: if you order a number field you get something like 1, 5, 100, 2000. But if you order a text field you would get 1, 100, 2000, 5. It's not nice to get the "number" order when you are expecting a "text" order.

I use music (with headphones) when there is noise in the background. I have a list in iTunes named "work" just for this.

It's a mix of progressive rock from the seventies (Pink Floyd, Yes, King Crimson, Mike Oldfield) and new age (Enya, Madredeus)

I'm afraid it shows my age...

Actually, Lem is more like a XX century Jonathan Swift, but if you love Adams you will like Lem.

Of course it is.

If there is no competition, you can get by with a crappy product or service if your client need it.

You can do it online. Just Google delaware+company and you will find plenty of shop that do this.