struppi

The reasons sound very compelling, but I think one reason is missing. I would suggest that the main reason streetcars survived in many cities in Europe, but not in the USA is:

Here in Europe, public transport is not done by privately owned companies, but by the Cities themselves. So the city is very interested in keeping them running.

And it can also keep the fares low by tax subsidies. For example, here in Linz (AT), I only pay €285,00 instead of €444,34 for an annual ticket, because the city of Linz pays the rest for its residents.

Worth reading. I especially love the section about estimates. I have seen all those problems at my clients in real projects. This is what got me interested in #NoEstimates in the first place (http://devteams.at/how_i_got_interested_in_noestimates)...

All other section from the essay are interesting too, and most are still very relevant - 14 years later!

"Atomic Rockets" has a section about "Dark Matter Planets" on their "Weird Astronomy" page. Those planets could even be heated to temperatures where liquid water can exist by exotic particles - If they are close enough to the galactic center...

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/weirdastronomy....

IIRC it does not help because the trees will decay into CO2 after they die. So you'd basically have to bury the dead treas if you want to prevent the carbon from entering the atmosphere again.

AFAIK you also need special insurance and shorter maintenance intervals for your car, so the total cost is probably higher - And recurring!

The main reason (IIUC) for the verdict was (a little bit simplified):

Most of the drivers for uberPOP break german laws because they have no proper license and insurance to be commercial drivers.

The question was if Uber breaks the law ("Personenbeförderungsgesetz") by simply acting as a broker for those drivers - And the judge said yes, they do.

Who says that they have to be taken like dogma? Sometimes the one-liners are just easy to remember. Often they are funny. They can be a great tool to quickly illustrate a point or start a conversation.

The one liners can never replace a conversation or explanation. They cannot replace common sense or real knowlege. I would never treat them as laws or follow them by the letter...

A nice article, and I think I should add the book to my (already too large) to-read pile.

I totally agree with "DRY might not be great in all cases" - In tests, it's often better to make each single test as expressive as possible. I once read (and forgot who said it):

"Code should be either DRY (don't repeat yourself) or WET (write expressive tests), but never damp)"

And here's a shameless plug: I recently wrote an article about how tests can help you achieve simple design, and the next article in the series will be coming soon: http://quickglance.at/en/simple_design/passes_its_tests

This is very detailed post about my favorite editor. It shows you some of the great things Sublime Text is capable of. I don't do any Ruby development and I still found the post very interesting and useful - Most of the tricks shown there are applicable to other programming languages / editing needs too.

You do realize that 600 dollars a year is next to nothing for a business? I don't even run a business, I am just a freelancer, but I'd happily pay 600 USD/year for this service if I needed it.

The price doesn't make a real dent in any serious budget, so why bother? And 600 dollars is really cheap compared to anything that could happen when you miss an important event. Email campaign not sent? This could cost thousands of dollars or more. Backup not done? Could be millions of dollars for some kinds of businesses.

I think the service is priced reasonably. If you think otherwise, start a competitor. If you can convince me that your service will reliably mail me on incidents no matter what catastrophe happens to your data center, I might use it over theirs (Should I ever need such a service. As I said before, I don't need it right now.).

A german example (from http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapax_legomenon) is "Knabenmorgenblütenträume" from Goethe's "Prometheus". It is a wonderful example for how you can create new words in German by concatenating existing words:

    Knabe = Boy
    Morgen = Morning
    Blüte = Blossom
    Träume = Dreams

The literal translation of this word is somthing like "A boy's morning dreams about blossoms", but the true meaning (according to some internet discussions: http://www.gutefrage.net/frage/was-sind-knabenmorgenbluetent... ) seems to be something unfinished: Every part of the word depicts something unfinished / young.

Sometimes I really love my mother tongue :)

Well, the foreman Uncle Bob describes in his posts is the only person on the team with commit rights. He would review every commit (except those from team members he really trusts) and reject all commits that are not up to the standard.

In my opinion, this kind of foreman he wants to have would lead automatically to the dysfunctions I describe in my post - at least in some teams. And I think the risk is not worth it.

Come on, you spent $5 for an app. For a working app! This is a pretty low price. Actually, it's basically nothing. Of course you can't get support and are not entitled to feature requests at such a low price tag!

I like the idea, but the article has very little detail. How bright is it? Does the brightness fade during the night?

Also, I guess leaves, dirt and snow would be a bit of a problem...

And it shows Austria as AU which should really be AT.

Yes, the stock photos are a really minor issue. But, if you can draw a little diagram that explains your service on a white board, I would prefer that to the lady who has nothing to do with your startup...

I like the overall design of the app, but I don't think the stock images fit well in there. It's just generic people, nothing I can relate to your app.

A little bit more text to explain what your product does would have helped me. I had to watch half of the video to really get it. I still don't know how your product is better than traditional monitoring, though. Unfortunately the tour does not really help me here (but I am a devops-noob): For example, what does this mean: "Snooze tries to fill the gap between cron mailing you and setting up and Icinga stack to monitor all the scheduled tasks in your network." I had to google "Icinga" to even understand what you mean. And the scenario you use before is very technical - Might be hard to read for a non-programmer.

If you did not know it yet, have a look at this post (and the linked info graphic): http://copyhackers.com/2013/04/long-copy/ - I would take this route for adding more text to the home page, if I were you.

Don't get me wrong, overall I like what you did here. I think this product would be useful for me if I ran a SAAS application. But you have not totally convinced me yet...

The widget is a great idea and looks really nice. Well done!

There is some truth in this article, but it also seems a little bit simplistic and/or watered down. It's not really about who owns the biggest computer, it's much more than that. Just access to processing power would not have made facebook and google big, so why should it work in the future?

Also, automation has been replacing traditional jobs for almost 200 years now, and we are mostly better off now then we were then. After some rough time always learned to profit from automation as a society. Maybe, as automation accelerates, the rough time won't stop anymore - like eternal september - but my bet is that we learn to cope with that too...

A very nice article, although I do not agree with everything in there. I guess you just can not be successful just by copying what others did. Especially not when you do not understand why you should do it or how it contributed to their success.

Somewhat offtopic: I do not work in the startup scene, but I have experience something similar a couple of times when traditional companies try to do agile. They see something that works very well for somebody, bring in a consultant (hopefully!) and start doing everything she says. Without really understanding it. But it's just rituals then, and the rituals alone don't work. That's called "cargo cult" or "scrum but" sometimes, though I have my problems with those words too (http://davidtanzer.net/scrum_but)...

I don't habe my copy of "Code Complete" here, but AFAICR it cites a study that says code comprehension is best at 3-4 charakter indent.

So, yes, a tab size of 8 is insane...

When I can freely decide, I set the column indicator in eclipse to 100 and set eclipse to not enforce this limit (maximum line length=1000, never join lines). I prefer it like this because there are circumstances where longer lines make sense for me. Anyway, I try to keep lines as short as possible because I usually use a very large font for coding and have 2 files open next to each other...

I normally do not buy pictures for my blog posts, I try to shoot (or draw) them myself. They are not perfect then, but that's OK for me.

When I need pictures for a presentation (a conference talk, ...) I buy those at iStockPhoto. I always found the high quality images I was looking for there, and the price is reasonable. Even though I need a lot of images for my presentations - See an example here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiKvVO93YU8 (I shot some of the pictures myself, but several are from iStockPhoto).

Unfortunately this seems to be the way the world is working. People who like what you did do not speak up. People wo do not like it complain as loud as possible. Maybe it's because complaining is more likely to lead to responses. Or because when you have a negative feeling about something you feel more urge to speak up.

I know this should not necessarily result in mean complaints, but often it does. So, what can we do against it? Simply ignore mean comments? Take care to write better comments? Or should we just shut up when we have nothing to say?

... which is not really bad... but not really good either. Too exaggerated and populist to be interesting.

9 things I either knew I could do online or never wanted to do anyway ;)

Still, a nice list, and presented really well (visually appelling). Thanks for compiling it!

Cool, good luck with your blog, please share the URL here once you started it!

Anyway, I don't think you really need a logo right now. Just take a template that looks nice and start creating content. When your blog becomes popular - because of the content you wrote! - you can start worrying about logo and design.

I see what you are trying to do here, and I wish you all the best for your freelancing career. But I am not sure if this is the right way to do it. I know, it's better to work for free than to be cheap. But still, I am in doubt.

I have tried something similar, and it did not work out. Not at all. I am a freelancer and I normally work alone, but in this case I was working together with a company. The company was offering a free day of consulting, and I was one of the consultants you could book for free. There was not a single response.

Later I read some posts from patio11 about how people will not value your time or service when you work for free, and I think this was exactly the problem in what we tried.

Anyway, good luck, maybe this works for you. I would love to read a follow-up story from you!

So true!

Also, the JIT compiler of the JVM does dome things that are pretty close to magic, at least from my point of view. And I guess Oracle will continue to improve it. I know the following is a "Sufficiently smart compiler"-type argument, but: It's not entirely impossible that future versions of the JVM - where primitives "don't exist anymore" - would simply use primitives when they detect that it's possible.

Some years ago (in 2005 or 2006) I always ran the latest E17 builds as my primary desktop environment. I really liked it! Some things about it were awesome, but OTOH it always was a little bit incomplete. It just took too long, because in 2006 I bought a mac and moved away from Linux.

On my current laptop I had Linux installed for a couple of months, but I didn't try E17 anymore. It just was too late, I didn't want to go through the checkout/build/install stuff again. And now I have removed Linux completely (again), because an Ubuntu update took four days, and after that my mouse didn't work anymore.

Anyway, congrats to the E17 team! I still think you have a great piece of software there.