Strange Kite http://wind333.wordpress.com Just another Wordpress.com weblog Fri, 27 Nov 2009 11:30:04 +0000 http://wordpress.com/ en hourly 1 http://www.gravatar.com/blavatar/9877b8d2dbd7ec5a53ca6d2bea52db26?s=96&d=http://s.wordpress.com/i/buttonw-com.png Strange Kite http://wind333.wordpress.com My daily readings 11/27/2009 http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/my-daily-readings-11272009/ http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/my-daily-readings-11272009/#comments Fri, 27 Nov 2009 11:30:04 +0000 wind333 http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/my-daily-readings-11272009/ ]]>

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

]]> http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/my-daily-readings-11272009/feed/ 0 wind333 My daily readings 11/25/2009 http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/my-daily-readings-11252009/ http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/my-daily-readings-11252009/#comments Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:30:05 +0000 wind333 http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/my-daily-readings-11252009/ ]]>

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

]]> http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/my-daily-readings-11252009/feed/ 0 wind333 My daily readings 11/24/2009 http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/my-daily-readings-11242009/ http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/my-daily-readings-11242009/#comments Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:30:04 +0000 wind333 http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/my-daily-readings-11242009/ ]]>

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

]]> http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/my-daily-readings-11242009/feed/ 0 wind333 My daily readings 11/23/2009 http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/my-daily-readings-11232009/ http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/my-daily-readings-11232009/#comments Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:30:04 +0000 wind333 http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/my-daily-readings-11232009/ ]]>

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

]]> http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/my-daily-readings-11232009/feed/ 0 wind333 My daily readings 11/22/2009 http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/my-daily-readings-11222009/ http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/my-daily-readings-11222009/#comments Sun, 22 Nov 2009 11:30:09 +0000 wind333 http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/my-daily-readings-11222009/ ]]>

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

]]> http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/my-daily-readings-11222009/feed/ 0 wind333 My daily readings 11/21/2009 http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/my-daily-readings-11212009/ http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/my-daily-readings-11212009/#comments Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:30:04 +0000 wind333 http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/my-daily-readings-11212009/ ]]>

  • The best questions we got while raising venture capital

    tags: Startup, VC

  • What Makes an Entrepreneur? Four Letters: JFDI

    tags: Startup

  • Tutorial: Getting Started (Hello, World!)

    tags: Google, Chrome, extension

  • Want To Try Out Google Chrome OS For Yourself? Here’s How.

    tags: Google, Chrome, OS

  • Google Is Keeping Chrome OS Simple. Maybe Too Simple.

    tags: Google, Chrome, OS

    • Rather than support Android apps and other sorts of apps, there is only one kind of app Google is interested in: the Web app. Chrome OS is all about making Web apps the only apps you will ever need. Which kind of makes you wonder how long we’ll need Android apps, or iPhone apps for that matter, because you know it is only a matter of time before a phone comes out running on Chrome OS.

  • Live From Google’s Chrome OS Event

    tags: Google, Chrome, OS

    • This includes a full product rundown and details about the formal launch, which is expected to occur early next year.
    • We aren’t launching it today and not beta today. But we’ve made progress. As of today the code will be completely open. We’re excited to announce this.
    • 3) Extensions are coming. We’ve taken our time to do this right. We have more details coming about extensions with certain partners. These update automatically.
    • HTML5, we want the web to apps as well as they do natively. We’ve been working hard on this. We want web apps to be able to use system resources the same way. Graphics is one example, we need a way to access to the GPU. Audio/video playback is key. And we need apps to work offline. We’re working with the other major browser vendors to make sure HTML5 comes along.
    • We’re moving from laptops down to netbooks on the regular computer end. On the other side we’re going from phones to tablets – these are all computers. Laptops are becoming more like phones too – always on connectivity.

    • We focus on three things. Speed. Simplicity. Security.

      We want Chrome OS to be blazingly fast, basically instant-on. Chrome (the browser) on Chrome OS is going to be much faster.

    • What happens if you plug in a camera? It simply opens a window with the camera’s files. I can pull any picture and open it in a new browser window.
    • We want this to feel much more like a television than a computer. All Chrome OS devices will be based on solid-state storage.

    • The File System: It’s always auto-updated. There are a few areas of the hard disk. The root partition is read-only. This is locked down, which is unusual in OSes today. User data is always encrypted. This is key for safety of your data. So important if you lose your machine.

      All user data is synced with the cloud at all times. If you lose your machine, it’s not really gone.

    • While netbooks are popular, but some have usability issues. We want to make slightly larger netbooks with full sized keyboards and big trackpads.
    • If you are a developer and have the right type of netbook (and a screwdriver) you can get Chrome OS running today.

    • Q: What netbook are you running this on right now (for the demo)?

      SP: That’s an Eee PC.

    • Q: Will there be an app store? What about driver certification? What about editing apps – like editing photos?

      SP: We will have more details about the idea of an app store down the line. We care about web apps – on the web there are hundreds of millons of applications.

    • SP: And we’re investing in new tech to make web apps run just like desktop apps. Chrome OS will also influence Chrome (the browser).

    • Q: Virtualization, can you run it now?

      MP: Sure, you could build it and run it in a virtual machine. That’s a great way to compile and debug.

    • SP: Independent of Chrome OS we’re all about moving web apps forward – including things like Photoshop on the web. Android apps currently will not run on Chrome OS.

    • Q: What does Chrome OS do that other browsers on other OSes can’t do?

      SP: Most of what we show here you can do in other browser. But there are new user concepts we’re exposing, app tabs, panels, and there will be more.

    • Q (from Steve): Realtime notifications on every page?

      SB: I think we definitely need support for that in the browser. And especially in Chrome OS. Hopefully we can solve the problem of chatting when you’re not signed in to Google.

      MP: There is a new notification API standard that is being worked on now.

    • Im the perfect target market for this. I do my work on a main computer and travel a reasonable amount with my netbook.

      I use the netbook for email and web apps and some music. All of which Chrome OS can do…

    • Be creative, some of the things being described here as limitations can surely be overcome rather easily. Do you really think it will stop here? The next thing is Chrome running on your little fileserver at home (NAS), in your TV, etc. This opens up so many fantastic opportunities.
    • Chrome OS Is more of a thin client to Google Apps.

    • Exactly… Just like windows is a place holder for office. They _used_ to have different approaches – not anymore. I barely distinguish between the two companies anymore.

      Here you are fed with Win/Office, there are you fed with Chrome/G-Apps. Here you pay upfront, there you pay through ads, etc.

    • The funnything is that MS is dramatically more open then Google at this point. Is there a place for Google within an MS world? – of course, it’s mostly open.

      Is there a place for Apple/MS within a Google world? – not even a link.

      You login to Gmail, implicitly pre-forced with Google apps, without any option to integrate anything else. Same with Chrome, Chrome OS, and other Google online facility.

      Google is the closest web eco-system today. Nothing but Evil.

    • Did you miss the part about it being Open Source? Dell, Acer, Gateway, HP, anyone making Netbooks can put links to whatever cloud based apps they want. They don’t HAVE to link to Gmail, Google Docs, etc.

      I suspect they will voluntarily based on a cut of ad revenue. But the point remains, anyone can build a non-Google netbook using Chrome OS.

      You can’t do that with Windows.

    • “the ultimate Goal of Google, which is to index all the worlds information”

      Yes, and you can’t do that unless all the information is online. Or, even better, online and inside our data stores.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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  • Smartphone Showdown: iPhone 3GS vs Motorola Droid

    tags: iPhone, Droid, Review

    • This is a huge point, and one that often goes overlooked in reviews. For the past 10 years, Apple has really only done one thing, over and over: they’ve taken something we thought worked fine, and then simplified the hell out of it while maintaining the feature set. That’s exactly what they did to the idea of the smartphone with the iPhone, and it turned the damned market on its head.
    • Two thousand plus words later, you might be a bit sad to read: Nope. But I wouldn’t recommend the iPhone over the Droid, either – and that’s the Droid’s real win here. This is the very first phone in over two years that I would consider carrying for day-to-day use instead of my iPhone, but that doesn’t mean I would recommend it whole heartedly to everyone.

  • A Chink In Android’s Armor

    tags: no_tag

    • But hold on. There’s just one problem. Android, an open source operating system, must avoid the fate of J2ME, an open source mobile applications platform. Open source is great, until everyone splinters off into their own world. That’s what happened to J2ME, and a number of frustrated Android developers are now saying that there is a risk Android will follow the same path.

    • We’ve spoken with a number of high profile Android application developers. All of them, without exception, have told me they are extremely frustrated with Android right now. For the iPhone, they build once and maintain the code base. On Android, they built once for v.1.5, but are getting far less installs than the iPhone.

      And now they’re faced with a landslide of new handsets, some running v.1.6 and some courageous souls even running android v.2.0. All those manufacturers/carriers are racing to release their phones by the 2009 holiday season, and want to ensure the hot applications will work on their phones. And here’s the problem – in almost every case, we hear, there are bugs and more serious problems with the apps.

    • First of all, the compatibility between versions issue may be overblown.
    • But if developers are forced to create and maintain multiple versions of their apps for various devices, Android may be in trouble. The whole idea of Android is to let app developers build once and let users install on any Android device. Right now, it’s not a certainty that will happen.

  • The Google Phone Is Very Real. And It’s Coming Soon

    tags: Google, Android

    • There won’t be any negotiation or compromise over the phone’s design of features – Google is dictating every last piece of it. No splintering of the Android OS that makes some applications unusable. Like the iPhone for Apple, this phone will be Google’s pure vision of what a phone should be.

  • The Google Phone May Be Data Only, VoIP Driven Device

    tags: no_tag

    • The Google Phone may be a data only, VoIP driven device. And Google may be lining up at least AT&T to provide those data services for the Google Phone, says one person we spoke with today.

      Users could still make calls just like a normal phone, of course. The calls would just be over the data service instead. In fact, this is the exact vision Google proposed back in 2007 when they were bidding on the FCC auctions for the 700MHz spectrum.

      Google can even issue phone numbers to users via Google Voice. In fact, I’ve already ported my mobile number to Google Voice, and Google has plans to roll out that feature more broadly. Google Voice can also handle the VoIP function for the phone.

    • Our sources at AT&T have confirmed that they’ll sell data-only plans to customers who bring in BlackBerry and Windows devices, and strip out the voice plan. They won’t do this with all devices – you can’t get a data only plan on the iPhone, for example. But AT&T is open to data-only customer relationships.

      Will the Google Phone be data/VoIP only? Right now we only have one thin source for this. But we’re continuing to dig.

  • IEBlog : An Early Look At IE9 for Developers

    tags: Browser, IE9

  • Hacker News | Big productions: Why ‘Fail Early, Fail Often’ Is The Wrong Approach

    tags: no_tag

    • Speaking as a former founder of a video games company, I think that this kind of thinking is inherent to the entire industry and it is killing it. The inspiration clearly comes from the movie industry where admittedly, you don’t make a movie in small iterations. As it stands now, triple-A titles have to make it to the top ten to be profitable due to extreme development costs which drives up marketing prices which in turn drives up the price of the games to the consumer. This spiral is really bad for the industry. I think that indie and small developers will take over most of the market because they do much smaller and more frequent releases.

  • Official Google Blog: Finding the laws that govern us

    tags: no_tag

    • As many of us recall from our civics lessons in school, the United States is a common law country. That means when judges issue opinions in legal cases, they often establish precedents that will guide the rulings of other judges in similar cases and jurisdictions. Over time, these legal opinions build, refine and clarify the laws that govern our land. For average citizens, however, it can be difficult to find or even read these landmark opinions. We think that’s a problem: Laws that you don’t know about, you can’t follow — or make effective arguments to change.

  • Hacker News | Finding the laws that govern us

    tags: no_tag

    • “full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts”

      If it’s actually comprehensive, this is a very big deal. I don’t know how LexisNexis Westlaw are going survive now that Google is giving away a huge chunk of their services.

      (Of course, this stuff has always been technically in the public domain; and much has even been online in disparate and badly organized sources.)

  • Hacker News | Ask HN: what’s the best business you’ve ever seen?

    tags: no_tag

    • I think Google probably has created more value for more people than any technology firm in the last decade.

      I also really admire Wal-Mart. An example: I pay $50 to ship money between Japan and the US, which is fairly competitive for international wire transfers from first world financial institutions. Wal-Mart wanted to offer financial services to Mexican immigrants to let them ship money between the US and Mexico. They said “Screw it: this is going to cost $2.99. Until we find a way to lower the price.” They impress me with their relentless, all-consuming, borglike quest for improved efficiency, which I think does wonderful things for poor people. I wish all businesses I deal with had Wal-Mart forever nipping at their heels. (For example, I wish they could bring that pricing pressure to bear on my behalf for financial services.) I know, I know, I’m supposed to feel class-based superiority to their customers and pretend that their $12 China-made shirts are grossly inferior to my $100 China-made shirts… but I’ve never been good with that sort of mental gymnastics.

    • De Beers

      Convincing people they need a carbon rock through a brilliant marketing campaign (“A Diamond is Forever” named best advertising slogan of 20th century by Advertising Age). This slogan convinces Americans and global consumers to change their courtship practices; that it is completely normal and expected to spend 2 months salary on a diamond engagement ring as a symbol of love.

      Another ad urged consumers to hold on to family diamond Jewelry as heirlooms. This cutoff the aftermarket of diamonds and increased the market power of the firm.

      De Beers then artificially keeps the prices very high. These carbon rocks aren’t rare in the natural world. The company restricts supply through a cartel system. Less than 200 companies are allowed to buy from the firm.

      http://science.howstuffworks.com/diamond5.htm

    • What makes a business good?

      To me, there are multiple inputs: profitability, efficiency, building value for customers, ethical behavior, innovative-ness, leadership, brand.

      Companies like Swoopo / C4G are really profitable, but they score very low on everything else (except perhaps brand). They prey on people’s stupidity, which can be really good for a smash and grab type operation (high profitability over a short time), but I don’t see them being sustainable in the long run (could be wrong on this — anyone know how long C4G has been around?)

      Companies like Apple are 2nd tier to me — their strength is in leadership and branding (they aren’t bad in the other areas, but they aren’t really that innovative except for form factor).

      My all star list has companies like Amazon on it. Started as a bookstore, now is one of the leading providers of cloud services (in addition to everything being sold there). They put a huge investment early on in infrastructure, which was a really interesting tactic that looks to be paying off.

    • Any business that disintermediates (cuts out the middleman).

      Amazon, DELL, eTRADE, etc.

  • Hacker News | We perfected our simple first product, won the market, and have nothing to do.

    tags: no_tag

    • 6 points by enoren 2 days ago | link

      “I also agree with this tweet from Dustin Curtis: ”I have never heard an entrepreneur say ‘I wish I had launched my product later.’””

      I am sure Cuil would disagree with this, however their problem was more mass marketing too early and having too big of an audience for their effectively Alpha release.

    • That assumes that a later release of Cuil would have done any better. My assumption is that an even buggier release much earlier would have indicated that there was no market for what they were offering, and saved their investors $x million dollars.
    • There’s a subtle but important difference between “the market isn’t ready” and “there is no market”.

  • We perfected our simple first product, won the market, and now have nothing to do. | Jon Steinberg

    tags: Startup

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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  • Poptop Questions & Answers

    tags: PPTP, internet, access

    • Cannot determine ethernet address for proxy ARP

      This is due to an issue with the pppd program, which attempts to find a
      hardware interface on the subnet to which the pppd client has been
      assigned. In this case its looking for a hardware interface on the
      192.168.5.0 subnet. It will fail to find one, and will drop the
      proxyarp request.

      The simplest way around this problem, and the one that is suggested in
      the pppd documentation, is to set the pppd client IP assignment to be on
      the local subnet. An example in this case might be 192.168.56.129.
      However, it may not be possible to do that. In the case of a fully
      loaded subnet, there may not be any addresses to spare. Or there may be
      some security issues with giving out local subnet addresses. What to
      do?

      The place to look is in the arp table. If you run tcpdump on host
      (192.168.56.12) during the time when client is pinging, you will see
      unanswered arp requests from host attempting to find the hardware
      address for 192.168.5.12. You need to proxy the hardware address of the
      pptp_srvr for client in order for this request to be fulfilled. This is
      the job of proxyarp. However, proxyarp has let us down in this
      instance, and we need to find a workaround.

      This can be done manually using the arp command on pptp_srvr. For
      example, if the ethernet card on pptp_srvr is
      eth0, you could force the arp to proxy the client pptp
      address by saying 

      	arp --use-device --set 192.168.5.12 eth0 pub

      You should now be able to ping from client to host through the pptp
      connection.

  • Proxy ARP

    tags: no_tag

    • Proxy ARP can be used to make the systems with addresses
      130.252.100.18 and 130.252.100.19 appear to be on the upper
      (130.252.100.*) subnet. Assuming that the upper firewall interface is eth0
      and the lower interface is eth1, this is accomplished using the following
      entries in /etc/shorewall/proxyarp:

  • pptp – dns problem

    tags: no_tag

    • Even when I’ve connected to a remote pptp server, my PC uses the DNS servers
      assigned by DHCP server.
      So, I can’t resolve the host names on my intranet via DNS…
      What I hope is that, once the pptp connection set-up has been done, the DNS
      servers on the PPP adapter are used by default.

      Any Ideas?

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

]]> http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/my-daily-readings-11182009/feed/ 0 wind333 My daily readings 11/17/2009 http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/my-daily-readings-11172009/ http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/my-daily-readings-11172009/#comments Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:30:04 +0000 wind333 http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/my-daily-readings-11172009/ ]]>

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

]]> http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/my-daily-readings-11172009/feed/ 0 wind333 My daily readings 11/16/2009 http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/my-daily-readings-11162009/ http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/my-daily-readings-11162009/#comments Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:30:04 +0000 wind333 http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/my-daily-readings-11162009/ ]]>

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

]]> http://wind333.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/my-daily-readings-11162009/feed/ 0 wind333