The precise origins of poker aren’t known. Some say the origins are German from the game pochspiel which has an element of bluffing. Others suggest it comes from an eighteenth-century French game, poque. Still another theory is that it evolved from the Hindu word “pukka”.

In the United States of America and several other countries, online gambling for real-world cash is considered highly illegal – as such, Yahoo! claims that their online gamble-for-real-money outfit is technically not open to US users – though technical limitations probably aren’t extensive given the fact Yahoo! has opened up their gambling portal for just about every other country on the globe, and all the bank accounts that come with it. Yahoo! is hosting Yahoo! Gambling in the United Kingdom where online gambling is allowed.

It’s sad to see that this is what Yahoo! has become, but it’s quite clear that they’re just doing what they can to increase viewership and make themselves a more valuable acquisition subject – regardless of the cost to their image and family-friendly history.

The particular post being referred to is Ryan Stewart’s “Why Do People Hate to Build Desktop Apps?” It comes in response to the article by Don Dodge and a conversation with Simon Bateman. Now that the background’s succinctly (hopefully) out of the way: While Ryan’s article makes a valid a point about the ease-of-use of Microsoft’s .NET Framework and Adobe’s Apollo and just how powerful-yet-easy these two technologies make desktop software development – his entire article is based on an invalid premise! People don’t hate making desktop apps!

Sure, .NET and Apollo make building desktop apps easier, but no one was really complaining before. Before there was .NET there were millions of programmers out there “suffering” with Java and C++ but that didn’t stop companies from making Microsoft Office, Quake, Lotus, Windows, Linux, Solaris and just about every other commercial and freeware application out there. Apollo is still coming out, but no one ever complained about how they just hate to develop desktop applications. To the contrary, if you ask the average programmer, you’ll find out they enjoyed making desktop apps more than web-based ones.

Two reasons: First, people making desktop apps aren’t usually concerned with supporting different systems, and if they are, the toolkits needed are freely available. Programmers are given a specific (e.g. make me a blog reader that runs on Windows and can post comments back from the native interface) and they build it. Second, before PHP, building a web app was harder than a desktop one!

You can’t really consider HTML a programming language, ((For those that care, it’s a hypertext markup language, not a hypertext programming language… “HTPL??“)) so the next easiest thing would be PHP. Before there was PHP, there was CGI and Python. Oh, and C++ too. Yeah, that’s right, people used to make a desktop program then tie it in to a web interface – and they still do! ((Bloglines runs on C++ folks!)) So making a web program meant making a real program first, then putting more work into a web UI afterwards – talk about tiresome waste of time! CGI before Perl 4/5 was a pain-in-the-ass, and Python is just as complicated/hard-to-use as C++ (depending on how you look at it).

One other point that Ryan makes is that desktop applications “look uglier.” Sorry – but where’s the evidence? To make a .NET program look decent and have a great GUI before there was ever WPF and XAML (the two technologies that Ryan rightly states are redefining the concept of UI) it doesn’t take HTML, CSS, color theory, and psychology. You just have to drag controls onto a form in some sort of slightly-logical manner, and it’ll be far more usable than an entry-level PHP application with some half-baked CSS job (and tons of tables to boot) – with a hell of a lot less work.

All this just begs the question: whoever said people hate to make desktop applications? According to who!?

At NeoSmart Technologies we’ve done almost everything you see on the site and in the downloads (with the exception of this blog, of course). From the download scripts to the revamped forums to the WordPress plugins. And of course, our desktop products too. It’s infinitely more enjoyable to build a desktop product than it is to make its web equivalent. The reasons (besides what’s written above) are extremely simple.

You have more tools to work with, tons of space (relatively speaking…), more mature languages, more extensions and libraries available, virtually no lag time, no bandwidth worries, far fewer security vulnerabilities, faster code, better IDEs, ((Just try comparing Visual Studio’s C# IDE with Komodo or something… You just can’t!)) and a hell of a lot more fun. With desktop apps, anything’s possible, and the only limit is your creativity.

It doesn’t take a datacenter to run a desktop app, and you don’t have to worry about mod_rewrite rules, network downtime, ISAPI extensions, and all that nonsense. You just code – and watch as the magic happens. What could be more enjoyable and satisfactory than that?

It does seem that the idea was scrapped, as a matter of fact, MSN adCenter was “looking for guinea pigs” since over a year ago. While some sporadic blog posts on the subject, the only contextual-advertising solution coming out of Microsoft’s camp any time soon is for advertisers who want in on the MSN Live Search ads. It seems that Microsoft has finally decided to stop re-inventing the wheel, and learn from the mistakes of others. Yahoo!’s own Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) isn’t doing too hot, so perhaps that’s a wise decision in the end.

But has Microsoft completely dropped plans for its publisher-side context-driven ad program? That is highly unlikely. While at the moment MSN’s adCenter can support the demand for ads on its Live Search pages, the fact remains that as demand goes up (and the market saturates), Microsoft is going to need more room to place advertiser’s ads. In the ad-campaign business, it’s quantity that matters. Charging more for limited real-estate space on Live Search (simple rules of supply and demand) is only a temporary solution, since what matters most is exposure – lot’s of it, and the cheaper the better.

While Superbowl ads rake in hundreds of millions every year, if the Superbowl were on TV everyday, no one would pay that much – at least, not for too long. It’s the same thing with MSN’s current adCenter model. Sooner or later, they’ll need to expand it to include content publisher’s websites and visitors into the equation. The only question is, when will this happen? Microsoft certainly has had its hands full this year, especially with the constant delays of its operating system, and the sudden barage of new software needing immediate attention for release. Now that Vista, Office, and Exchange are out of the picture, maybe Microsoft will take this time to focus on context-based ads and re-analyze what they have.

The contextual-advertising market is huge. It’s nowhere near tapped for all it’s worth, and no matter how hard Google tries, it doesn’t have the entire market covered. Yahoo! may have bungled things up with their poor “context-analysis” and absoloutely dismal customer support/response times, but that doesn’t mean that only Google can play this game.

Yahoo!’s biggest obstacle to success and popularity today is that despite all of it’s Web 2.0 efforts (like an extremely-hyped WordPress Blog, Web 2.0 AJAX toolkits, a re-designed email interface, etc., etc.), it remains associated with “old” in the minds of many geeks today. That’s not necessarily true, and as you will see from some of the points below, the only archaic thing left at Yahoo! is the Management.

Without further ado, the list in increasing order of “perfection:“

1. Yahoo! Answers
   
   Just recently, Google Answers closed up shop. No explicit reasons were given, but obviously it was a flop. Besides the terrible 1980s interface and lack of community-feel to it (it was more like a business), it just wasn’t popular enough. The reason is that Yahoo! Answers did a hell of a lot better. Plus it’s free.

   Although the answers model differs completely between the two, in the end it was ask a question, get an answer. Yahoo! Answers is accessible via a much more user-friendly interface, and it actually has an active user community to keep it going – the most important ingredient in any Web 2.0 site today.

2. APIs for Programmers
   
   Yahoo!’s extensive API library and various odds and ends for programmers and coders is second to none – except Microsoft’s, but that’s different. ((You can’t honestly compare the thousands of APIs Microsoft produces for it’s own OS to the useful freebies provided by Yahoo! for website developers)) The point is, Yahoo! reaches out to the developers much more than any other corporate monstrosity out there today. From simple spelling-correction APIs to tag-suggestion modules, from AJAX libraries to sample files and support, you can’t beat Yahoo! when it comes to developer-support.

   Still not convinced? Surely you’ve heard of the Prototype (TM) library, used in virtually every big Web 2.0 package out there? Let’s just say Yahoo!’s framework rips it to shreds.

3. Yahoo Mail
   
   Yahoo’s email may be the least “dramatic” of the big three right now (Gmail, Live Mail, and itself), but it’s nothing to slight at. The newly re-designed Yahoo Mail is just as slick, but it’s Yahoo! Unlike Gmail, that doesn’t mean it’s cool and totally Web 2.0, but that it’s reliable, extensive, and always on. Whereas Live Mail’s interface is iffy and slow, Yahoo! just has slow & under-powered servers, but the script itself is excellent. Gmail takes hours to initialize the first load, Yahoo! doesn’t. Most importantly, Yahoo!’s email is built on years of rock-solid reliability, and has the very best spam control from all three!

   It’s always on, loads fast enough, doesn’t require a bleeding-edge browser, is as close to spam-free webmail as you can get. What more can you ask from a webmail service?? ((IMAP support of course!))

4. Yahoo.com
   
   No, that’s not a typo. Yahoo.com isn’t the number 1 most visited web page in the world for nothing. “Web 2.0” start-up pages with customized RSS feeds and widgets and stuff ((Offered by Google and Microsoft)) may be great at first, but it’s nice to have all the content Yahoo! gives you all at one go. And unlike MSN.com, Yahoo.com uses a much more straight-forward approach with slightly nicer (more down-to-earth) aesthetics. Sure, it’s not as flashy; but remember, flashy isn’t always good.

   Yahoo.com’s homepage gives you what you need to know, and a bit of what you don’t. It has interesting stories (like MSN in that sense), and no ads. No wonder it’s number 1.

5. We lied.
   
   Yep. There’s only 4 things Yahoo! does best, that’s probably why no one likes them! (Kidding!) As a matter of fact, there’s one more thing, it’s just not that big of a deal. More information on this later.

So if Yahoo does all these things and does them this well, why aren’t their stocks reflecting it? More importantly, why aren’t the people (read: geeks) satisfied? Read on.

Earlier today, Slashdot featured a story on EarthLink’s “random” dropping of email messages. We just concluded a test of our own, and we find the results may not be as random as they seem. In fact, the results point directly to a big spider of sorts, sitting in the middle of all the tubes and picking what goes through and what doesn’t.

According to EarthLink themselves, “EarthLink’s mail system has been so overloaded that some users have been missing up to 90 percent of their incoming e-mail.” But what they don’t mention is, it isn’t random. As a matter of fact, our tests lead us to believe that EarthLink is indeed prioritizing not only message delivery time but also whether the messages ever get there or not.

We sent out 20 email messages from a EarthLink account, and discovered that 100% of them reached an @Gmail.com email, 30% reached a no-name domain, and 100% of them reached an @Yahoo.com email. This could of course be a coincidence, but at a time like this, we don’t think so.

When a system is under load, generally speaking it (attempts to) deliver messages in the order they were received, and they either go through or they don’t. What makes EarthLink’s results a bit more interesting is, the messages that went through and those that didn’t have absolutely nothing to do with the physical network routes:

EarthLink’s mail servers are hosted in New York; Gmail’s are hosted in Mountain View, CA; Yahoo’s servers are in Redwood City, CA; and our no-name servers are in Chicago. Technically speaking, packets sent from New York should arrive in Chicago before they do all the way on the other end of the continent. But of course, our no-name server isn’t on any high-politics list, nor is it loaded with money.

If “dumb” networks existed, then the packets would have most certainly made it to our server before they reached Gmail’s or Yahoo’s all the way in California. Unless, of course, net-neutrality is no longer just a concept or idea for the future, but something applicable in the here-and-now. If the big names in computing are prioritizing one-another’s networks to such an extent, we’re in trouble.