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Examining Mac OS X 10.4's Spotlight
Ton writes "Apple has published a discussion of Spotlight, the radical systemwide search technology that will be part of Mac OS X 10.4 'Tiger'. The really interesting part is that metadata will be playing a big role in Spotlight while just a few years ago people were afraid metadata in Mac OS X was going the way of the dodo."
woot
There's something loud
in the neighbourhood,
who're you gonna call?
SPICBUSTERS!
There's cigarette butts
fallin on your head
who're you gonna call?
SPICBUSTERS!
can I dare say "First post" Damit, two people beat me to it.
Yeah I know, it's probably a lot different than Windows' search function, but the way it seems to work is very similar (according to the Apple press release in any case).
I wonder how one would go about disabling the feature. On Windows, it was only a matter of time after including the "continually chew up CPU time indexing the hard disk" in Windows 95 that Microsoft was forced to add in a menu item to turn that off. It just consumed too many I/O resources and CPU cycles to continually update the system search feature.
Yes, the searches were blazingly fast when executed, and they were excruciatingly slow when the indexing was removed. However, how often does one do a blind search of the whole system anyway?
Filesystem metadata is great, but "instantly" updated search indexes sounds like a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist.
I have been waiting, watching, with my unblinkey eyes for making the first post. But some nut was even nuttier than me and beat me to the first post. Why???
Or should it be co-operative since it's a mac thread
Twentieth century called, they want they trolls back.
Hello.
I did a series of suggestions for Syllable a while back, and had planned to start working on it. My life changed around a bit, and sadly I could not. Seems none else picked up the thread either.
The things I suggest is not _that_ far from the new Spotligh feature, allbeit somewhat more radical (=
www.knutsi.com/syllable
. K
Steve Baller called, he wants you back
What the hell is wrong with you people? There is mounting evidence of voter fraud in the election and you people can only talk about metadata? Get some priorities for fuck's sake!
What if I want to find files from male colleagues?
modded funny, but very much true. the method of generically referring to an individual in a gender neutral way is using the male form ("he", "his"). this is true for many other languages as well. in fact, in languages that are more particular about genders of objects, a group of a thousand females and one male is still referred to in the masculine form. using the feminine form implies the exclusion of males from discussion (as the parent suggested). the author merely shows his (or her, i haven't bothered to check, thus i can safely use "his") ignorance of the language by an assinine attempt at 'equality'. having used a female as the subject of an example would have been just fine and would have satisfied the author's pc boner. having the female form in a neutral sentence is just foolish.
p.s.
no, you are not clever in pointing out that i did not properly capitalize anything in this post.
what you said was commonly held to be true, say, 25 years ago. more recently, however, the realization that there is no semantic or syntactic reason that "he" can be inclusive and "she" cannot has changed that. please remember that languages (except dead ones) are evolving things. this deficiency in our language, in fact, is a product of that evolution: we once had gender-neutral second-person-singular pronouns in english, but they fell out of use. "she" was a (comparatively) late addition to the language.
looking at linguistic history, the fact that "he" got the widespread use as a gender-neutral pronoun and "she" didn't reflects the fact that "scholarly" control of the english language was firmly in the hands of men: if nothing else, they ran the universities and printing presses.
various people aware of this problem use a range of tactics for addressing it. there's a few small movements to, effectively, make up words for the missing gender-neutral pronouns. this tends to sound "silly", at least for the first hundred years or so. the most common approach is to use "they", "their", &c, but this actually introduces a grammar conflict, and most scholarly and "benchmark" (folks like the NY Times) sources object to this solution. using "he" and "she" interchangeably for this purpose is sub-optimal, but has the benefit of being an easier "sell" (as evidenced by its presence in mainstream "benchmark" sources), not arbitrarily/artificially introducing new words, and not altering the syntactic value of any existing words.
also, your comparison to languages without gender-neutral nouns or pronouns is not useful. their evolution and history are very different from that of english. in such languages, the lack of gender-neutral nouns makes the lack of gender-neutral pronouns kinda moot.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.