[KLUG Advocacy] Really cool article

[Adam Tauno WIlliams]

> > Oh, please. That is just silly.  Your going to do a full-text index
> > for
> > twenty jillabytes of goop - and your result is going to be
> > meaningless.
> Hmmm, I wonder how Google would want to solve this one?  I have heard
> rumors that they want to eventually be the search engine on your
> desktop too.  

Everything I've seen about that still seems pretty sketchy and nebulous.

> Also, how about a more feature rich version of locate
> that would index everything nightly for faster lookups.  Or it could
> do an initial indexing and then on the fly update the indexes
> accordingly.

I thought it already did that, indexing the hard driver every night via
a cron job.

> > Eh?  Does he understand the .NET architecture at all.  Java was
> > theoretically platform neutral, .NET is language neutral.  That's
> > the
> > whole friggin' point.
> I think that most people don't really understand .NET yet except as a
> word you need to throw around to sound up-to-date.

Pretty much.  They fail to grasp that .NET is a "platform".  They've
been confused by the Java-Write-In-Java-Run-Anywhere world view, where
as .NET is Compile-In-.NET-Run-Anywhere.

> > witty Javascript developers. Two new web applications, Gmail and
> > Oddpost, both email apps, do a really decent job of working around
> > or completely solving some of these issues. And users don't seem to
> > care about the little UI glitches and slowness of web interfaces. Almost
> > all the normal people I know are perfectly happy with web-based email,
> > for some reason, no matter how much I try to convince them that the
> > rich client is, uh, richer."
> Yeah the stand-alone client is richer but I love my Yahoo webmail.  I
> can get to it no matter where I am at or what the operating system
> just by accessing the Internet.  I love the functionality!  If I had
> my email on a PDA that I had wireless access on then I may think
> differently but I wonder how feature rich that would be?  I also love
> that I have addresses and calendar and notepad/memo functionality
> with Yahoo mail.  Oh and they just up'ed the storage to 100MB for the
> free account.  Of course if I use IE on Windows I can get additional
> functionality but I have no desire to move away from mozilla/firefox.
>  For people on the go webmail rocks!!!!

Exactly.  And I use webmail too, all day,  but you'll have to pry my
local client out of my cold stiff fingers.  They are just so many things
a web app just can't do well.  Thanks to Cyrus I can have them both open
at the same time. :)

> > "Which means, suddenly, Microsoft's API doesn't matter so much. Web
> > applications don't require Windows."
> For the most part it is true.  There are not many sites that are
> crippled if you do not use Windows and IE.  Internal to companies
> that may not always be true but on the Web I have not had any
> problems.  It is more important to have flash loaded than to be using
> IE on Windows on the Web of today!!

Depends on what you're trying to do - financial services and
vertical-B2B sites are VERY often IE specific.  But hopefully the recent
IE foobar will light a fire under at least a few of them.