Re: XySearch is unavailable

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from Harry Binswanger  on Thu, 25 Aug 2005
20:51:46 -0400


> Interested?

Absolutely! That's an extremely GENEROUS offer -- and I accept with gratitude.
XySearch doesn't need anything more powerful -- I was shopping for something in
precisely this vicinity (400MHz or thereabouts). A laptop, because you can
close the cover (almost), stick it in the closet, and forget about it. And
because Quiet! With built-in monitor for maintenance! Screen flicker is, as
you say, utterly irrelevant; the screen will be black all the time. My old
specs were Win2K Pro, 166Mhz P1, 2Gb hard disk, and 96Mb RAM. I compile on a
really fast machine, then transfer an image of the entire search engine to the
slow machine, which then is capable of updating the indices daily -- but if you
asked it to compile the whole thing from scratch, it would take a couple months
probably. XySearch is the only thing the machine does.

XySearch gets a LOT of hits, BTW! When XySearch started, there were very few.
Recently I see a hundred a day, sometimes 150. Which, hopefully, translates
into fewer (or more informed) "live" questions. Some people use it to read the
maillist: note that, for a clever few, it represents a friendly, fast,
weightless way to read the maillist (even without being a subscriber).

You know, I used to have a lot of spare or discarded machines. But fewer and
fewer of them have the capability to handle modern programs. Right now, I have
none. So this is a very welcome gesture. Bravo to Harry -- he's doing it for
all of us, you know.

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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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