If Google Ran XP

How come when I go to this Google result, I get this new Google logo? [_Go_]

2:00:41 PM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Cross Country Blogs

Sooz pointed me to an interesting entry she made about cross country weblogs.  [_Go_]

10:43:49 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Allchin and Google

I heard about this from Scoble.  Thanks for the pointer.  Although I'm late to the game, I hope I have something to add.  The topic specifically is about the new Longhorn file system and from an article in the Seattle Times.  One of the Microsoft staff starts with this:

The biggest change is to the file system that stores documents in the computer. Longhorn's system will be based on a new database the company is developing that is designed to make it easier to find, sort and retrieve each document.

Jones explains how this works by talking about how searches for digital photos would be handled: "You don't want to search by file name, because they're all called dsc035.jpg. You want to search, 'show me the pictures I took last month,' 'show me the pictures of me and my wife,' 'show me the pictures of my children,' 'show me the pictures from Christmases.' (emphasis mine)

"To do that requires a change both in our user interface and also a change in our model for how information is stored on the computer." [_Go_]

And then there is this with Allchin's response:

The search tool sounds similar to the popular Google search engine, but turned inward into the computer rather than out onto the World Wide Web.

But Allchin bristled at the comparison. "Google's a very nice system, but compared to my vision, it's pathetic," he said.

Allchin said his goal is to have computers learn about the user, helping set the context for searches.

"Whether it's Google or any of the other search engines, the amount of random stuff you get back is pretty overwhelming," he said. "But if you knew a little bit about me — for example, I love music — so when I'm searching for 'strings,' you know they should know this guy's probably thinking about guitars." [_Go_]

Hm... So that's a bit more of the overall context for things.  What Allchin seems to be saying is that for every single file on your computer, it will get stored in a fashion where meta data about the content is extracted AUTOMATICALLY and then stored for queries.  And this extraction will be extensive down to the level of object recognition within images.  If this is true then it is indeed interesting and perhaps Allchin was justified in his comment.  But can Microsoft really do this?  And if they can, what are the RAM and CPU requirements.  They seem enormous at least from a quick glance (of course Intel will love that).  It strikes me here that there is a very useful middle ground of basic full text indexing of your hard drive coupled with some awareness of file name structures -- i.e. what Apple does today -- before you get to this utterly revolutionary (if that's what it is) approach.

10:41:15 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

How is Notification Going to Work in the Future?

I just had a neat conversation via IM with Sooz of Exploit Boston.  She was commenting that Tekka, Mark Bernstein's new online magazine, lacks a mailing list for notification of updates and the like.  My response was that I thought Mark was right in not bothering with this since spam is such a concern for people.  My feeling is that I'm on enough damn mailing lists already and I don't want more.  I suspect others feel the same way.  So then the conversation moved onto RSS which definitely works but is really a solution for the elite right now.  We then pondered the concept of "What if Microsoft put RSS viewing right into Internet Explorer?" and that brings up the issue of bandwidth consumption when millions of people have aggregators.  Yes the excellent REST stuff done this past year is great but there's still going to be a big hit coming if RSS goes mainstream. 

We concluded that perhaps people need to just browse to the sites they care about -- the 1996 solution.  Thoughts?

10:27:34 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Command Line PHP

PHP Architect has a good (and free) article on command line PHP in their March issue.  [_Go_]

10:19:49 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This