For the last year or so, I have been using my Laptop to allow me to connect to my server hosted in VM at my home. I had to use port forwarding to forward 3389 to my machine but I was reasonably happy (not thrilled) with the performance over Verizon’s EVDO rev A broadband network. I have been in a constant struggle of wanting a powerful laptop to host the 4-5 virtual machines on the road and portability.  I could go out and get a T61P and load it up with 8GB of RAM.  But, lately I have been thinking that I don’t want to carry my laptop around, I actually am thinking of something like the MSI Wind netbook to satisfy my need for always connected.  The other issue is that I now have an Amazon Kindle and I don’t want to carry anything big around anymore.  The Kindle is a topic for another post. So, enter RDP over HTTPS, sound familiar?  Well it basically uses the RPC over HTTPS that Outlook 2007 uses and tunnels your Terminal Services connection.  Cool right? ...

If you add IIS7 and ASP.NET on Vista, many of the common HTTP modules are not installed by default – including the one for static content. The problem is that it doesn’t return a 404 or other error, but rather zero-byte files. If you’re seeing empty files returned for CSS, images and JScript files, this is likely the culprit. (You’ll all see the Static Files handler for * being mapped to the DefaultDocumentModule). The answer is to go into the Windows Features dialog and make sure that the Common Http Features are checked off. Hope this helps.

Well it wasn’t meant to be.  But anyway I went and saw Wall-e.  Definitely another great movie from Pixar.  The movie had a wonderful message and did a great job (without any dialog) of getting you to feel for Wall-e and Eve. Unfortunately for a lot of people you either loved it or thought it ranked on the bottom of Pixar’s previous works. Keep up the great work Pixar. Now unfortunately the second part of the day wasn’t meant to be.  No iPhone until July 11th.  Lucky for us AT&T will allow us to get in on some iPhone 3G action at the subsidized price.  However, next year I don’t think that they will be so generous when iPhone 4G comes out. But by then we may have Google’s Android OS on some other smartphone and we will have forgotten how cool Google maps was on the iPhone. Or maybe, a blackberry will port their software to Android and smartphones as we know it will never be the same… Enough wishful thinking…

I've gotten a bad rap over the years as a "gadget guy". Every time something new is released, people have come to expect me to have it. I'm definitely a gadget guy, but I think people often miss why I buy gadgets. Unlike, say, Alex , you'll rarely, if not never, see me buy something new just because it's new. I don't own an iPhone. I'm definitely an early adopter, but only when the new technology enables me to do something I couldn't do before (or makes what I could do before drastically easier). For example, let's walk through my history with music players. I first had a Walkman back in the day. It was great, because I could make my own mixes and run with it. (My favorite version was the yellow Sony Sport one. It even had a sweet strap for running. Kick ass). Then I got a DiscMan. This enabled me to skip to the next song, something that was more tedious with cassettes. It still sucked because I had to carry a whole ton of CDs based on what I was...

Notches is hiring developers . We’re looking to bring on developers to be part of the core engineering team. We want people that can contribute to the product in a myriad of ways beyond coding. We want people who can ask the tough questions and challenge us. We want people who are not afraid to take ownership over an area and really drive it forward. Our core platform is written in C# / .NET, so familiarity there will help – but ultimately we’re looking for smart, ambitious people with a good background in computer science, algorithms, and so on. Our offices are currently in downtown New York City (SoHo). We’re certainly flexible in terms of hours but we do want to spend as much time as possible collaborating in person – in other words, we’re not looking for offshore firms or out-of-town developers right now. You can find a more detailed job description here . If you’re interested or know anyone who might be, please contact us.

While obviously a bit of an oversimplification, I think Erik’s drawing really does a great job of capturing the base dynamics of how copyright works ( via Dan ).   Basically, anything in the left circle requires permission; anything in the middle requires justification under the Fair Use test; and anything on the right is allowed by law.

I wrote in the past that sometimes you can take too much money - doing so creates certain expectations for an exit that might not be achievable and limits your flexibility. In the context of the discussion last week, I think it's important to highlight that these economics are not always the fault of the venture capitalist. For example, Jason Calacanis said you should take as much money as you can get and Marc Andresseen said “ in general, [you should raise] as much as you can ”. Billions or Bust Another one of my favorite recent examples is Slide, founded by Max Levchin of PayPal fame. Slide recently raised $50M from T-Rowe Price and Fidelity - giving up 9% for a pre-money valuation of roughly $500M. Granted, T-Rowe Price and Fidelity probably aren't quite expecting the same kind of returns over the same time frame as a VC, but it still sets a ridiculous high floor for an exit. That is, in part, the plan. As Sarah Lacy put it , "Levchin, who co-founded and later sold PayPal...

We’ve talked a lot about the anti-stealth movement here and on the nextNY list, and the topic has resurfaced again recently thanks to Brad Burnham’s post about the advantages of being open . I noticed that, at least anecdotally, there was a correlation between how open entrepreneurs were with us and their ultimate success. Simply put the entrepreneurs who are aggressively open in describing their plans seem to do better than the ones who are cagey. There is absolutely no data underneath this observation. It is just my sense after meeting hundreds of entrepreneurs over 15 years as a VC. If it is true, it could be for lots of reasons. The more experienced an entrepreneur, the more likely they are to understand that ideas are rarely unique, but the ability to assemble a team and execute against that idea is rare. Perhaps they are just more confident, and it is confidence that is correlated with success. But recently, I have started to think that there might be something more going...

Susan Jacoby’s latest article examines how the word “elite” became a slur. Pity the poor word “elite,” which simply means “the best” as an adjective and “the best of a group” as a noun. What was once an accolade has turned poisonous in American public life over the past 40 years, as both the left and the right have twisted it into a code word meaning “not one of us.” But the newest and most ominous wrinkle in the denigration of all things elite is that the slur is being applied to knowledge itself. . . . America was never imagined as a democracy of dumbness. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written by an elite group of leaders, and although their dream was limited to white men, it held the seeds of a future in which anyone might aspire to the highest — let us say it out loud, elite — level of achievement. Amen to that. Personally, I would prefer an elite leader. I want “the best” - an intellectual, pragmatic leader who understands nuance, doesn’t see the world in...

I’ve talked a bit in the past about the economics of free , and anyone who reads TechDirt knows that Mike Masnick has long been a proponent of these “new economics”. Mike recently gave an awesome presentation at mesh08 presentation called the The Infinite Good on this subject, making the case why free is not a bad thing and how it can actually make you more money. The video is available at rabbletv . Unfortunately, they allow you to embed but not link to a specific video. To watch, select “On-Demand”, choose “mesh Conference 2008″, then select Mike’s presentation. ( via Rob , who also happens to be a co-founder of mesh). When dealing with infinite supply, artificial scarcity is not the answer – limiting a resource shrinks the market. On top of this, infinite goods are much more prevalent in our digital world. The trick is to figure out how to use the infinite goods (i.e., the music that can be easily copied) to make the scarce goods that you control (i.e., the artist, the concerts) more...