Re: Did Microsoft lose the API war ?

Any of you used Google's Desktop search.

I haven't downloaded it (yet) because first, I don't have so much stuff that I can't find it using Explorer and second, I read some bad reviews about it - mostly having to do with making your system slow to a crawl.


My system hasn't begun crawling till now. Creation of the first index does take some time. In any case give it a shot. You will definitely find more stuff than you ever wanted. And its fun to try some 'delicate' keywords. (single quotes as I have been writing SQL queries of late!!). You can always uninstall the app later.


Are you sure Google is starting a local web server? Why would they need
to?


See this screenshot of Google Desktop in action. Notice the address bar. Thats what
tells me a local web server is started on port 4664. Also since results are shown in a web browser, html has to be puked from somewhere. Any of you guys have other info/ideas?

Talking about web servers check this


Microsoft threw everything they could at IE. And I'm not talking about UI or security etc..., I'm talking about support for DHTML, CSS, (X)DOM, XML, XSL within the browser. Plus they introduced Iframes, DHTML behaviors, XML data islands and XMLHttpRequest in IE 5.


Mohn mentioned a whole plethora of protocols enabled in IE. How many are supported my major browsers, and how many are standards. Coz co's will not use IE only functionality within their sites/web-apps (hopefully not in the next gen apps).

Do any of you know how Gmail works internally? We had this prof who told us a bit. Like server farms are maintained. And each email is saved in three locations on diff servers. Mohn - You think Gmail uses DHtml? Tried to analyse the source? Any info on the working of Google actually?


I dunno what the current numbers are but a couple years back, Windows and Office made something like 60-70% of their revenue. The other businesses weren't doing very well.


Any idea on the gaming front? MS is releasing a new XNA platform or something that unifies dev. Dinesh could probably provide loads of info on this. And other game dev stuff.


Plus, I think Apple is making a huge mistake (same that they made with their computer business), in only being compatible with their AAC format. You have to convert everything to AAC. Why would you want to when others can play them?


Dinesh has an iPod Mini. You can dump mp3 songs (read illegally dloaded) onto it. I am not sure if they are converted to AAC on the way. Don't think so coz the transfer was really really fast. As fast as it seems possible in Usb 2.0. Never tried retrieving the mp3's back again. Maybe iTunes songs are in AAC format.

Apple released some cool products recently. The mini Mac and iPod shuffle. Sure would want to own some apple product some day.(read apple.com product not juice)


I would actually say that MS is not that big with kids


Actually just overall exposure to the OS by using it is a good starter. Many co's/products just do not get noticed by the public eyes.


What I was confused about was backward compatibility vs forward compatibility. With generics I think Java is trying to accomplish this.


I think as discussed earlier, by forward compatibilty they mean that no new bytecodes were added to the language. The syntax has changed, but it is optional in Java 5.0 and is just a wrapper for doing the old things in a new way. The core language remains same. Had they added Generics without erasure, there would have been a break in compatibility. There is no way in which I can run 5.0 code on a <5.0 VM as the lib's will simply not be present.


Java 5.0 has made up a lot of ground


One problem is how long will co's take to adopt the newer version. One article mentioned that co's wait around 2 years. (I'll provide a link when net is ON).


The one place maybe that they are lacking is ASP.NET like functionality. It seems they haven't come out with anything to counter that. Any work going on towards that?


Which features of ASP.NET? Lots of dev stuff is going on with Jsp and related web tech in Java. Some advanced UI rendering libs are being built like Jsf though I am not sure thats a good defn. But by itself the Web Platform is very mature with loads of really advanced features. If I am right ASP was a joke comparatively.


In another defense of MS, it has to be said that they bend over backwards
to make Windows backwards compatible.


Some really good info provided which cleared a lot of MS stuff (almost). What was the author (Joel Spolsky) talking about? Was it a small set of real internal, unsupported features that just manage to break applications??

Also could Mohn provide some info on Web Services later some day? Are Java and .NET webservices compatible today? Longhorn wants to focuss majorly on Web Services. That should be slightly worse than the Web strategy.

Hey I am still blurting!!