Joel Liu's Public Library

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

 If Twitter has taught us anything in the past year, it’s how powerful simple can be and how much work can be done to perfect it.  For example, I was playing with Intense Debate last night, and in working to perfect commenting, they’ve got this very powerful “plugin” functionality.  Those kind of innovations only come when a company or team has a narrow and specific focus.

Certain things need to be complex by their very nature, but to start you need to start simple – and especially in the world of 1 to 2 person teams, or evening hours entrepreneuring –  beginning with complex is just too complex.

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.