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Apple and MS Battle For Desktop Search Supremacy
markmcb writes "As Microsoft and Apple go back and forth about who came up with what idea first, it's been hard to tell who the real innovaters are. Michael Gartenberg and Jim Allchin of Microsoft give some fair opinions on the current desktop search battle. While they do give credit to Apple's iTunes for search inspiration and to Apple being first out of the box in the OS race, they both imply that Microsoft will provide more robust features with the release of Longhorn."
Windows XP keeps your desktop from becoming overly clutterled with icons you haven't used recently, which makes searching your desktop *much* easier. Clearly, they are the TRUE innova[tt]ors here.
And if that's not enough, the second core should drastically improve that little doggie's performance.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Uhh--- the first real mainstream desktop search I started to see people use was...
Google Desktop Search?
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
I'm amazed to not see it in the blurb, considering the love affair with Google. I know it works better than 'find' for me.
My little site.
Searching for stuff requires you to have organized it well in the first place. I haven't seen anything right out of the box from either Apple or Microsoft that's any more innovative than anybody else's butt out there.
This is the crappy pot calling the crappy kettle crappy.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
So where does Google fit in here?
BUT, they implement them better than anyone else.
they both imply that Microsoft will provide more robust features with the release of Longhorn.
It's pretty easy to make empty promises with a product that won't even be released until next year. The point is, OSX has this feature NOW...
Whats the release date on that now? 2020?
-1 (Troll) is antihammer
they both imply that Microsoft will provide more robust features with the release of Longhorn
So, OS technology will have improved in 18-24 months?
Amazing!
I just keep my hard drive carefully arranged and orderly. Folders are your friend. Nest them with wild abandon. I also print out any interesting info tidbits (stuff I know I'll reference multiple times) I find online, and put them in a couple large notebooks that I maintain.
FTFA: "While they do give credit to Apple's iTunes for search inspiration"
Do they mean "Spotlight?"
Longhorn will probably have more robust search features than Tiger has today (mid 2005). But what will happen with an upcoming version of OS X? It's easy to make predictions with an unreleased/beta product.
Google!
Because anything Apple or M$ comes out with will be trumped by Google's next idea or improvement.
Gotta love the first 3/5 comments I could see mentioning that Google did something like it too.
But none of this is a 'first' thing - I mean, it's just a more advanced version of a tool that has existed since the beginning of my time - grep.
My little site.
Wasn't Sherlock on 8.5 the first "desktop search" tool? For the Apple/Windows fight, or did it get web intergration with 9? It's been so long ago I forgot.
Excuse my ignorance but I don't understand the need for a desktop search tool. I can search through e-mail using my e-mail client (or now that I've switched to Gmail, use it's searching ability) or just set all my Internet programs to download all files to a directory (my desktop for convenience). Using Firefox as my default browser, typing google along with my search query will use Google's search engine to find whatever it is that I'm looking for.
As Microsoft and Apple go back and forth about who came up with what idea first, it's been hard to tell who the real innovaters are
Didn't Google release a add on bar which did all this and some other things? I know we all hate Microsoft here and Apple is "cool" now. But come on, we're all Google fanboys no matter what OS we use.
I like muppets.
...I'm sure that Apple won't have been doing anything in the meantime.
Like, oh, working on Mac OS X 10.5.
Which will, quite literally, probably be shipping around the time Longhorn ships.
I'm sure there are those that do care and think everyone else should too, and good for them, but I want to hear from those that don't care for whatever reason.
Speak truth to power.
The best way I found to find files on my computer is to keep them organized. Keeping them organized allows me to find files without having to keep an index of what's on there, or worry about whether a certain program can tell what's actually in the file. In the end it all comes down to proper organization.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I thought that they had pretty much junked what would have been good search. I was looking forward to WinFS, hoping it to be an improvement over NTFS (a modern FS, one with no fragmentation!). And on top of that, cool searching!
But instead, they are going to make a background process that just indexes things like Spotlight.
I hope it is at least as flexible as Spotlight, to allow developers to make plugins for their indexing engine so that new filetypes can expose information to be searched.
I also hope they do a good job at making it transparent. I don't want my computer to be noticeably bogged down while it indexes a 4GB movie file (hopefully it won't index it in the first place!)
Don't count your messages before they ACK.
'man find'
We can currently download Beagle for open source operating systems and desktops, and it's already somewhat usable. It's written in C# and requires Mono, and I think it's one of the killer apps for OSS too. We've also see it ported to Windows so things are getting very interesting here.
:)
So between Spotlight and Longhorn and Google and Beagle, it's not just a 2-way battle
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
they both imply that Microsoft will provide more robust features with the release of Longhorn.
VAPOR alert
yeah, if and when it gets here, it'll be the best. yeah, that's the ticket
"Tiger is nice in that they've put search capability in a lot of places, but there's a lot more (in Longhorn)," Allchin said.
Referring to an OS that is at least 15 months from release in the present tense is plain crazy, especially when comparing its features to those of an OS that will be on store shelves in 10 days. He might as well just say Longhorn will cure cancer and make your breath minty fresh while you use it. No matter what features it has, they're not doing anybody any good at 6PM on April 29th, 2005-- Tiger's will.
Windows 95 brought us far more features than Macintosh 84.
Breakthrough technology: a file search tool that finds things on your pc. Who could have thought up something so innovative and so 2005? Except wasnt file find in the first release of msdos and unix? Or is the breakthrough the magnifying glass icon in the top right corner?
Makes finding files or email messages a breeze.
that CNET comes up with a shitty article, totally ignoring Google?
You mean that two Microsoft honchos say that the product they will probably ship sometime next year is better than the stuff that's available (more or less) right now?
Wow. Stop the presses.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Anyone here old enough to remember Lotus Magellan? If any company or product could be considered first in the desktop search category, it would be Magellan. Released in the late 1980s, it indexed every file on your hard drive into Btrees; when you searched for a term, it would narrow the results in realtime with every keystroke -- blazingly fast. Found files were displayed (many looking just like they would in their native program thanks to several file type filters) with the search word highlighted. Truly one of the MS-DOS highlights of the 1980s.
Having not used any of these services I don't know exactly what they do. How does their functionality compare to locate?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Yup, searching and indexing is such an obviously valuable feature and such a darling of CS, there wasn't any real insight required to want to implement it. These utilities have been growing incrementally for 30 years -- I can't think of any one (besides the Unix standbys, perhaps) that's more important than the others.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
How exactly do we get a "fair" evaluation of the head of Microsoft's Windows unit?
Check the inside of your pants after you view that pic.
I think they're talking about apple and microsoft's own desktop search in their own os's. google doesnt make their own os.
"Instead of being a static graphic indicating the type of document a file is, an icon in Longhorn will be a smaller representation of the first page of a document." ... so I'll have to read the filenames carefully if I'm trying to grab all the .pdf's I've made of my Word documents if they're in the same directory! Wheee, thanks!
I remember seeing a demo years ago of Rapsody years ago. The creation of a folder that dynamically added/deleted aliases of matching files.
While they are battleing, I'm happily using beagle on my nice Gnome desktop.
Honestly, I don't know if the search features OSX and Longhorn are going to provide are better than beagle or not, however I do know that beagle is a great technology, works well for me and above all, allready works and runs on my system.
they both imply that Microsoft will provide more robust features with the release of Longhorn.
Of course they will. They have 3+ years to respond to Apple's feature.
I mean, thats ridiculous. Thats like saying "Yeah, this new game has good graphics, but this other game coming out in 2008 will look much better!"
Of course it will. You have three years of additional programming and hardware improvements.
I don't understand how these desktop search products are any different then what you can get using "Search" off of the start menu. Every OS I've ever used has had the ability to search through the drives for files containing a word either built in, or available with a 3rd party program. I jsut don't see what is so special about these search bars that are popping up everywhere,
BeOS , it had file metadata support years ago and worked well with it . .in an MS vs apple fight since Tiger comes out in 10 days and longhorn comes out god knows when, its pretty one sided and apple wins hands down
not to mention the other companys that have since been making products of this nature
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Which religion is best?
I've been looking into various types of spirituality and am seriously considering Jainism as my main operating system. Since there's no other way to find out such things, I figured I'd ask the Slashdot crowd. Which is teh one true religion?"
Spotlight is largely an improvement on the ideas he developed with LiveQueries, adding natural language metadata searching to an OS that's pro-actively metadata oriented in the first place.
If anything, everyone else copied BeOS... the real difference is Spotlight is available to the public at the end of the month. With WinFS, who can say? 2007? 2008? 2009?
The open source world can look forward to Spotlight-like functionality once Beagle and inotify mature, the only real drawbacks are that it's currently rather unstable and written in .NET/Mono
Whats going on here is as plain as the nose on your face. Each company wants to get their users used to using a specific search program. Even though on the surface it appears to be aimed for local information i am sure at the onset or sometime later there will be a check box that allows you to search the internet from this app. Therefore Microsoft can send more people to its search engine thus bypassing the need for Google or others. It seems to me to be a way to exploit the average user...
Engineer 1 (GENIUS): Wow, these 100GB hard disks sure hold a lot of data.
Engineer 2: Yeah, I know, half the time I can't find a file I made a few days ago.
Engineer 1 (GENIUS): Well, these are computers after, all, wouldn't it be nice if there were some way to actually search for your data?
Engineer 2: Well, there's that cute puppy thingy.
Engineer 1 (GENIUS): No I mean a way that didn't suck.
Engineer 2: *** dumbstruck ***
Manager: Quick, call the patent attorneys!
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Microsoft has been the *best* and *truest* inovator of the MS Windows desktop (and of MS Windows OSes for that matter) the world has ever seen. Nobody puts more features in to MS windows applications than anybody else. True it does borrow some ideas from *completely* unrelated fields (such as OSX for instance). But putting those features into MS Windows is the real litmus test of MS Windows OS inovation.
Anyone remember xargs?
/dev/null
find . | xargs grep foo
ah, the good old days.
Most of the guys who wrote Magellan got back together and released a new desktop search package called X1. http://www.x1.com
It is quite good, and worth looking at, especially if you were a Magellan fan.
Why do the editors bother posting links to C|Net articles?
They are routinely inaccurate or just rehashed PR for companies like Microsoft. Or, in the case of this article, both.
This is the modern quivalent of posting links to John Dvorak articles. You know C|Net articles are rubbish so why waste people's time?
This just in! Microsoft downplays competitor's achievement with a promise of better functionality in a vaporware product! Film at 11!
SoupIsGood Food
I just installed Tiger and Spotlight is really really impressive. It found everything I searched for in less then a few seconds. Had no idea I've been collecting so much junk. I'm also really proud to mention that nothing showed up when I searched for "porn". Guess I also have a good spam filter! :D
(yes, I will buy Tiger as soon as it hits the shelves)
Hardware-centric OSes are decendant. The war for the desktop is at Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL level now.
Search-centric OSes usher in Web-hosted clients and 24/7 presence on the net. Standalone OS is irrelevent when an input device and screen is all that's needed for *your stuff* from anywhere, anytime. The network is the computer and MS will stand to own the lion's share with BrandX's (Apple, HP, Moto etc...) providing hardware-centric non-network services.
The only problem with all this inovation is the OS itself gets bigger and bigger and far more tied into the core, meaning more problems if theres a security 'blip', which we know will happen. No software is ever 100% secure.
Tim (http://tim.igoe.me.uk)
Computers are like Air-con, open windows and they stop working!
locate is way better than sherlock, search, whatever...
$0.02
Vaporware will always be better than a shipping product. Just go back through history looking at every vaporware announcement just in the 20th century alone. "My vaporware product will do everything Joe's shipping software does, plus X and Y and Z! So don't buy the currently shipping product. Wait for my vaporware."
Maybe it is time to change that old IBM joke into a Microsoft joke. You know,the one where Ballmer/Gates/et.all just sit on the edge of the bed telling her how good it is going to be, but they never do anything. Wish I could remember that joke.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Why is it that everything will be better/faster/more robust/stable with the NEXT release of Windows.
Just imagine how happy this will make all 75 of the world's desktop Linux users.
MORE advanced than grep?
Maybe more (nontechnical) user-freindly. But can these search engines use RegEx syntax? Hell No.
In my book, that's LESS advanced.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Desktop search will be wonderful in Longhorn. Like I can wait until 2008 to find those desktop icons MS keeps hiding :o)
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
The "battle" Microsoft is already loosing is that the features are being compared at all. This is publiciy for Apple, and the two OS's are being compared on the same playing field.
This is common sense to me, but there are people who don't know there is an alternative.
As the media start to wonder which OS is better, and as Microsoft begins to publicly insist that Windows is better, it's just another reason to walk over to the shelf at the back of the Best Buy computer section and check out this Tiger thing.
Seriously, man. Come on. Using grep is technologically equivalent to searching a book for a particular word by turning to the first page and scanning each line until you find what you're looking for.
Modern technologies, on the other hand, are the equivalent of using the index. Totally different in both theory and execution.
Vaporware
Apple registered a patent for the Spotlight technology 2 years ago, so I'd say Apple wins. Patented first and released first.
The real story will be when Longhorn does finally ship and the media reports that "Wow, Apple REALLY did copy Longhorn's search".
It will happen, and scores of Windows fans will believe it to be the truth.
...2005 for some OSs is circa 1996 BeOS.
and it ran on a Mac. The promised Windows version never materialized.
"However, its implementation(Apples) is not as universal as what Microsoft is proposing."
So what does this really mean? Apple already does this but Microsoft promises to NOT ONLY do exactly the same, but have improved uppon the ideer by their next release.
We have an OS versus a Proposal. How can it be they declare the proposal the winner? By that time chances are OSX will have evolved just a tad bit. It takes less time to develop a feature already implimenten then it does starting from the bottom. Even if you do have somthing to copycat.
No, scratch that.
Really wrong.
1. The user does not have to organize the contents. At all.
2. Almost all metadata, except the one example you picked, requires no user action or intervention. Things like the contents of a textual document (text files, word documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, email messages, bookmarks, etc.) Things like the properties of a file (larger or smaller than a given size, created before, after, or during a time, etc.) Things like the properties of image files (all CMYK files of type X with resolution Y, etc.)
The ONLY thing you have to add keyword metadata to manually is pictures.
So, in sum, you're completely wrong.
Locate running on the Berkely(SP) Database.
Kosh: "Understanding is a 3 edged sword, your side, their side, the Truth."
Totally 'Microsoft PR', nothing more.
First of all, OS X and Mac OS had a superb search FOR ages which works VERY good. Windows search compare to that is a JOKE. Spotlight is just more branded and search more metadata and gives it in more user friendly form. But as search on my OS X stations I just click on input where i start to type file name which I look for and...whola! there it is.
And second - Longhorn is 3 YEARS still to go! It is like middle ages for history! For christ sakes, Microsoft must be desperate to push such PR stunt like this.
And yeah, as open source advocat, I have to say that Beagle will certanly rock the world too - because it is actively developed and pushed by Novel/Ximian guys. And of coarse, let's not forget king of the hill in search now - Google.
And if it is not paid article - however it looks like - then it is such "we just love Microsoft" style press which I simply can't stand anymore.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What's really fascinating to me about this is that Microsoft is even talking about Panther's search capabilities. The shift in the public's (and the stock market's) perception of Apple seems to be mirrored by a shift at Microsoft. They're no longer writing Apple off as an also-ran. Interestingly, in taking Apple seriously again, they only give more credence to the notion that Apple is a more powerful competitor than it has been in at least a decade.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I just keep everything on my Desktop... and then sort the folder either by filename or date modified and scroll quickly to find what I need. Anyone else employ this method?
My WinXP desktop is very cluttered... but on Mac OS X i just disabled the desktop and open the desktop folder from a link on the dock. It's useful still to use the desktop for the "dump everything" folder since in Mac you can go there easily with control-D.
And WinXP it's just Window-E, click, theres my desktop crap.
I can't say I don't care about the inclusion of better search features in my desktop OS. I hate waiting for a long search on a huge hard drive, and I do use search rather often.
But I chose my OS for a lot of reasons that easily trump fast metadata searching, so this supposed "desktop search battle" doesn't really figure into my life at all.
The problem with this is that now we have Yet Another Process Which Periodically Iterates My Entire File System.
Along with:
Prebinding
Permissions Repair
Disk First Aid (Repair)
Virus Scanner
It's nice that this is a "background process" - but I do not leave my computer "ON" all the time. I keep it in "sleep" mode, and I wake it for an hour or two tops, each day, to use it. I don't leave it running long enough to index my entire file system, and I sure as hell don't want that background process running while I'm using the system. Unless it's smart enough to just do ONE scan, and then add to it's metadata index as new files are added. One of the things I absolutely detest about Microsoft's system, is that it bogs down every day when it tries to index the hard drive for searches. And that's for my work-system, which is left powered on 24x7.
If we could get a single process to iterate the file system ONE time, and take care of all of these chores (permissions repair, virus scan, prebinding) at the same time - (I know, you don't really need constant periodic prebinding, only after new software installs) - then that would cut down on the time my system's bogged down walking the file system for maintenance chores.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
welcome the battle between my OS overlords
GET FREE APPLE STUFF!
And I don't see how this is remotely new. Apple has had Sherlock since OS 8, and Find File since well before that. Microsoft has had the Find command on the Start menu since Windows 95. Where's the beef?
sulli
RTFJ.
Maybe more (nontechnical) user-freindly. But can these search engines use RegEx syntax? Hell No.
:
Maybe not, but you don't need to
mdfind "query" | grep "regex"
best of both worlds.
Also, it should be trivial to write a tool using the Spotlight APIs that can use regex syntax.
...would be what Microsoft has now, to what Apple has now.
Or what Microsoft's going to release in a year or two, to what Apple's going to release in a year or two (which we don't know anything about, but based on how far Mac OS has come in the past 2 years, is probably going to be pretty nice).
Even if you think Microsoft's plans for Longhorn are better than Apple's implementation in Tiger, in 2 years Apple is going to have more experience, more actual deployments, and hence more feedback. With something as wide-open as "search", having real-world experience could be a huge factor.
*Of course* Microsoft people can say that what Microsoft will have in 2 years is better than what their competitors have this year. *Everybody* who's in the technology world can say that -- if they didn't believe they could put a better product on the market some time in the future, they wouldn't be in business. The only "fair" comparison is two products *at the same point in time*.
Grep type constructs are difficult to use with an index, and of course these modern tools are all about indexes (which is why they're actually usable).
Does this imply both sides have their team in position to do the fight? I would call this a forfeit by MS. Hype for three years in the future never wins a fight when the other team is delivering the good next week.
In Gaming News.
Duke Nukem Forever will be better than Half Life 2.
I've used the Google search for finding PPT files that I need to study for an exam. I type in the topic of what I want to study and it finds the files. I don't have to remember which file contains which topic.
... util4.ppt and have stuff from different philosophers in them. Now I don't care what the name of the file is, I can just type in the philosopher's name and find what I want.
This helps a lot because for example on the topic of utilitarianism the ppt files are util1.ppt
You mean that MS might provide more robust features. They are not the first and not the last company to over promise when it comes to software. DNF anybody? Longhorn was supposed to have the new WinFS. No, it doesn't. Wait, now it does. It's changed so much I can't remember.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Clearly there is a lot of misunderstanding here. But hey, people jump in before they read up.
The new search feature Spotlight in OS X quietly indexes everything in your mac, including meta data and makes it available in your menu bar at the top. The search is always almost instant. It has nothing to do with searching the web (yet) but then, hey Safari has had a google search box for ages.
Microsoft are also going to be building something like this into Longhorn, eventually (probably when Duke Nukem Forever comes out)
First, Apple is shipping their desktop search tool more than one year ahead of Microsoft's.
Jim Allchin says "but there's a lot more (in Longhorn)". No, Jim! Present tense does not apply to vaporware.
Besides, by the time Longhorn is out (which by the latest account will be late 2006), Apple will already have released Mac OS X 10.5.
Anyone cares to bet who'll be ahead in general features (and desktop search in particular) late next year? I go with Apple.
Grep does real-time searches. Can be VERY slow.
On the other hand, swish-e has been around for many years, and works quite well as a desktop search engine (although it wasn't intended for that use.) Best on Unix, although works on Windows too.
...nothing beats GNU find.
(It can even compete with MS in terms of bloat...)
- Mac OS X sucks. It copies 17 MB file in 20 minutes.
- Apple is charging for a point release. Even MS gave away SP2.
- What's the name of the next OS X feline?
Do I miss anything? Now that we get this out of the way, maybe we can have a Tiger thread without rehearshing the old or trollish posts.
and I refuse to read this crap from Microsoft. They can make claims about their accomplishments when they have accomplished something. Tiger is here, and it makes an important evolutionary advance in desktop search. All Microsoft has done is publish a spec sheet for Longhorn.
As has been pointed out numerous times before, Apple will probably have 10.5 out the door about the same time Longhorn is scheduled to ship. Who knows how Apple engineers will refine and enhance the search capabilities in OS X by that time.
To Microsoft, sit and down shut up until you actually deliver!
Why is desktop search such a big deal again? Are people just writing files to random locations on their hard drives? Even when I have to use Windows at work, I put things in logical places so I don't have to search for them.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Even real-work programmers can't memorize RegEx syntax other than the fundamental few, let alone trying to a typical end-user to understand anything more than the wildcard *
RegEx can be offered as a powerful option for Spotlight, but Spotlight must also be powerful while doing simple searches in order for any end-user to embrace it.
Desktop search is an ad-fad.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
It's the Contextual Linkage Engine that will be part of KDE4. They got some pretty cool ideas which you can read about in that article and also in the comments.
Bill: Hurry with that Tiger Gold Master download! Damn BitTorrent... 23MB downloaded but over 210GB uploaded.
Microserf #1: Master, it is downloading as fast as possible.
Bill: I don't care, we have less than three years to reverse engineer this and sell it to the sheep-errrr Windows Users.
Microsoft #1 and #2: Yes, Master.
Bill: Crap that reminds me, did you two patent the whole concept concept of "Searching", "Looking", and "Finding" yet?
Computers are REALLY good at searching from the beginning of the book to the end. There's nothing wrong with searching that way for a modest number of documents.
Honestly, I put all my docs that I care about searching into a directory ~/docs and just run glimpse. It's been around since 1994, and is not some rinky dink program...it is a fast, indexed, search engine for your computer. It supports regular expressions (with limitations), as well as the usual keyword, date, etc. matching.
But all of this is to say: grep *is* modern, since glimpse is based on agrep. I really have a distaste for people that bash (no pun intended) the traditional UNIX tools because they are not "modern" or "advanced". That's specious - it's like saying that bash is "modern", but printf() is not. How the heck do you think bash prints things to the screen? Everytime we try to start from the ground up building a new "modern" tool and ignore the *real* tools, we do ourselves an injustice, and we waste time. There's no point in throwing away everything we've done that worked up until now. We should be using the "old" tools to build more sophisticated ones.
In 10 years, all your "modern" tools will fall by the wayside, but we'll still have grep and glimpse, and perhaps the next generation built on those two. Google Desktop search and Longhorn Search (if it's out yet) and Spotlight will be rewritten 5 times, but the basic tools for searching, like grep, will always be relevant.
This, of course, applies in a much broader context. The UNIX philosophy of creating basic tools and using them in concert to create larger, more complex tools is echoed in good software development practices, and in both cases, it is The Right Way.
The universal search facility in Palm OS is one of its killer capabilities. It's been saving me from wasting neurons on trivia for the past 5 years, and I eagerly await an improved desktop clone of it no matter who it's from.
Is it me, or does it seems that Longhorn will be released with a free copy of Duke Nukem Forever??
By that, you can already expect the release date.
"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." E. W. Dijkstra
I can imagine it, but I can't imagine a reason to do it. Why is this important? Who wants this feature? This sounds like something where the first time you see it, you say, "Cool!", but then turn off almost immediately because it's pointless.
Apple has been releasing a new OS version every 12-18 months, where as M$ is on the order of 24-36 months.
It doesn't matter whether MAC OS X 10.4 has better search than Windows 7.0/Longhorn. MAC OS X 10.5 will probably ship either Q4 2006 or Q1 2007, or roughly 6 months after Longhorn ships (assuming it doesn't slip into Q3 2006.
How sad that there has been no mention of the excellent MSN Desktop Search, which has been available for some time now. MSN Desktop Search is fantastic, it really kicks google's offering in the nuts. Don't believe me? Ask these guys:
h .ars/4/
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/desktop-searc
Jargon Alert: somewhere in there is a quote about people not being able to find what they just saved. Saving a file in whatever folder appears in the dialog is called a "Mommy Save."
WinFS was originally going to be like, the next version of "Organize your Photos Wizard". It grew into something so scope-out-of-control that it had to be cut from LH client (at least, the full WinFS vision). The ship vehicle seems to change daily.
:)
:/
That said, what WinFS is trying to tackle currently is considerably more ambitious than what Spotlight, MSN Desktop, or Google Desktop Search do. The "someday" WinFS is not a background process that indexes text documents. Not even close. What Apple is delivering is a "search thing". That is _one application_ of WinFS, but by no means the point of doing it.
The comparison of Spotlight to WinFS indicates (understandable) misconceptinos about what WinFS does. That's reasonable since the WinFS story isn't universally clear within MS, much less outside it
Oh - about NTFS fragmentation. I've been trying to fight this good fight internally for a couple weeks (it was bugging me). The NTFS people claim that defragmentation on NTFS isn't strictly necessary, but it can make certain disks MUCH better and makes most disks "somewhat" better. There are some people on the NTFS team that would be happy to tell customers not to bother with defragmenters but old habits die hard. In any case, i presented the case for ffs cylinder groups and made sure the NTFS developers i talked to understood it. It's not news to them, and they dont feel there is a significant difference in the observed fragmentation levels in normal NTFS volumes and normal ffs volumes.
Personally, i never run a defragger on my NTFS volumes so in that sense, its no different than ffs derivatives (i dont worry about fragmentation)
In any case, there is no current WinFS plan in which NTFS goes away - WinFS's filesystem component attacks a different problem space than NTFS, and WinFS (currently, and, afaik) needs NTFS under it anyhow.
Re: Indexing a 4GB Movie - you might be surprised what WinFS does when it finally gets all the way cooked. Whenever that is
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Apple had document indexing and document content searching in their development tools CDs in 1991.
Computers were REALLY slow back then but if we're just thinking about "who was first" now, it's been around in one form or another since at least 1991.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Well, until Tiger, Apple was doing 12 months per release, now it's at about 18 between Panther and Tiger. Assuming the same, April 2005 + 18 months equals... November/December '06
That's "November/December '06" as in equal to or earlier than the scheduled Longhorn realease (mid-page, "The final version of Longhorn is scheduled to be broadly available in December 2006.").
Of course, we'll have to wait till WWDC or later to figure out when 10.5 is actually scheduled for release, so this is all just speculation.
It seems that everyone has forgotten that WinAmp had "search-as-you-type" functionality that was aware of ID3 tags and other meta data long before iTunes was ever conceived.
http://brandonbloom.name
Surely nobody can realistically believe that there's going to be a real battle of numbers in the same way there is for games consoles/competing digital disk formats etc?
I don't know the exact figures, but I do know that Windows gets about the same number of new users each year as Mac OS has in there entire installed base... No matter how good Mac OS is (and I'm sure it's very good) it's not like we don't know with infinity+1:1 odds which OS is going to be the most widely adopted?
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
If I am allowed to come out with a product 3 years down the road and use an existing product as an example, of course I'm going to make something more robust or give up and not release something at all.
If longhorn came out at the same time as tiger, then we might be comparing, um, oranges-to-oranges. Showing up late to the show just proves once again that M$ is the better parasite, re-innovating the wheel.
"Oooh, my bottled air is better than yours because I waited until after you rolled your product, made my bottle slightly larger, and copied your marketing strategy." Innovation, NOT.
Hasn't Linux had a gread indexing search program for years?
No and yes.
No, I don't care about the race.
Yes, I care about desktop search because I'm an unorganized, digital packrat of a power user... as is plainly obvious by the folder labeled "Stuff" in my dock
Maybe it's me, but I don't see this as a solution to a real need. I'd rather the focus be put on the OS better handling large file transfers and manipulation. If I want to find something on my machine Search and find work fine. Guess I'm just getting old.
I'd say On Location was the first serious tool of this type. Find Pro was a freeware/shareware search tool which eventually was licensed by Apple and became Sherlock.
For example, say I want to read my eMail then all I have to do is this:
"cmd+space" - M - a - return
This can be done from anywhere, I don't even have to be in a terminal to do it. The same process can be applied to launch any program. I can also check a phone number without opening the address book, select a song to play in iTunes, or even just simply browse the file system. All of this can be done without removing my hands from the keyboard - so in a lot of ways it is kind of like using vim.
The reason why people are making such a big deal of this is because it is radically different from how we currently do things. In addition, it is that much more productive.
So give it a chance and try it out when it is available. Your point of view is just like was before I tried it, and it made a big difference for me. ;)
William
Here's an example. I work in a group of about 15 people. We all do the same thing, but each person likes to do it differently (naming conventions, job directory structures, etc.) but all finished work gets dumped onto one network drive.
On top of this we have about 20 years worth of electronic files from at least 4 generations of applications that would be impracticable to convert to whatever the flavor of the day is.
Having a good search tool makes finding previously related jobs is a big bonus. Currently I use Copernic for this and I think it's great.
For a home system, I can see where you are coming from and I agree I wouldn't find it as useful as I do at work. The only exception is my growing digital photo collection.
You are dangerously insane.
Well we have little to worry about, as this could be someime in 2010 or later. MS is killing themselves.
Ross Winn "not just another ugly face..."
Why do I hate Windows search? FastFind. It always indexes the disk when I don't want it to, so I turn it off, resulting in slow searches. So how will Longhorn fix the pathetic indexing strategy?
And how many times do people go searching for files based on content? Not a whole lot. People typically KNOW where shit is, so is the overhead of previews (supported by both ole, adobe stuff, etc) and indexing worth the overhead?
Maybe for e-mail, and I hate to say it, but CyberDog had the slickest search capabilities ever.
(p.s. I agree Magellan was an awesome product for its time.)
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
And I would like to say to stratjakt about his page-widening attmpt,
YOU FAILED IT!
Jobs to Gates: "We're better than you."
Gates to Jobs: "You don't get it. It doesn't matter."
And it still doesn't...
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
You are correct in that the UNIX way makes software *last* a long time and is the best strategy for development; however, more monolithic and "polished" software like that of Spotlight(which I got to see in action last night from a friend's pirate install of Tiger) is preferable for an end-user.
The problem in saying that only the UNIX way is the best is that it becomes expensive for end-users to learn the full power of their tools - I must admit that I don't know very much at all about find or grep. But I can use Google, so having a simplistic Google-like search tool would work for me. And the additional problem with that is that making a dumbed-down interface for powerful tools often introduces a lot of problems.
What seems to be completely absent about this discussion is the fact that Apple developed this technology in the mid nineties. Dubbed V Twin. This technology was part of the failed attempt to bring Mac OS into the future, called Copland.
It's still very much alive, as is much that was developed as part of Copland. Today, it's called Apple Information Access Toolkit.
"Michael Gartenberg and Jim Allchin of Microsoft give some fair opinions on the current desktop search battle."
p py-3D-thingy"
Yeah, sure.
Like,
"Allchin rejects the notion that Microsoft is a Tiger copycat, noting that the company demonstrated some of the virtual folder concepts in its Fall 2003 preview of Longhorn.
"They just might have copied us," Allchin said." -Of *course*!
Or,
" "Ever since (CEO) Steve (Jobs) has come back to Apple, they've been on my radar screen," Allchin said. "I think it's just good competition."
At the same time, he noted that the Mac's growth pales in comparison to the number of Windows users added each year. "Our growth this year in PCs is bigger than the entire Mac install base," Allchin said. And he added that much of the growth Apple has seen has come on the music side. The Mac, he said, "is now a peripheral to the iPod." " -You buy an iPod and get a G5 for free in the bundle?
Ok, get this straight: THEY work for M$, they say marvelous things about M$ (of course), and they spread FUD about Apple. That's not a "fair opinion" IMO.
Eh... in 10 days some of us WILL be using many of Longhorn's yet-to-be-implemented "ideas". And by the time Longhorn arrives (with Duke Nuken Forever instead of the classic minesweeper), Mr. Gartenberg and Mr. Allchin will say M$ did it first and it's "oh-so-innovative-and-everybody-loves-the-new-cli
Microsoft has all the lawyers. Microsoft has many lobbyists and has funded politicians to office. Who can stop Microsoft? If Microsoft does not make it, who can stop Microsoft from stealing it, sending a stream of lawyers to fight it, or calling in political favors?
Who can stop AT&T? Who can stop the American Tabacco Company? Who can stop Standard Oil?
The only thing that's definite is change.
It's happened before. It will happen again. Someday they will be the #2 player.
Developers: We can use your help.
Came with Office Professional 95, indexed Office documents only, but it did it extremely well and ran in the background. As far as I remember, searches were done without copious disk thrashing.
I have no idea where Mac desktop searches were in 1995, but that was probably the first time I saw a search that pre-archived results and indexed content within a document. Ok, so it was only Office documents but it was a breakthrough at the time. Since then they've fiddled around with Index Services, but they're awful and system intensive.
I do not understand why the media is comparing OS X 10.4 with the next version of Microsoft's consumer OS. Would you compare the 2005 Honda Accord with a 2006 or 2007 Toyota Camary? By the time Microsoft releases the next version of Windows, Apple would have released another version of OS X.
Where Macs Belong in the Living Room
Like Apple gives a rat's ass what MS is doing on the Winduhz desktop?!
Google clearly has the edge on the PC desktops and I would think Apple would be more concerned about Google than Microsoft.
first, this whole "sometime in the future" business won't fly. in the 2 years longhorn's been under development, they've pushed the release date back only once (from may 2006 to oct 2006). in fact, they have been very open about the promised date for some long time. so don't all act like no one knows when it's coming out just because you don't.
another thing: except for some under-the-hood changes, tiger is barely an upgrade, more of an update or service pack. in fact, shame on apple for making you pay!
as for the desktop search, who gives a crap who was first? they both have it, and longhorn's is far better, even in alphas 4051 and 4074. sure it's good in tiger (8a420 and 8a428) and more than is in windows xp, but the fact remains: it's not as good as the one in longhorn, and any innovation in OS X desktop searching will be reflected in future builds of longhorn. then, when longhorn adapts it or comes up with something better, OSX will pick it up. then here we will be again with idiots spouting "sure longhorn's is better but Ocelot or Leopard or whatever-cat-they-name-it-next is out now.
QUIT BITCHING!
great, now instead of just your email being recorded in a database and completely dying due to corruption, you can spread that out to your entire filesystem! should be fun, will they start putting airbags outside tall buildings?
Does this mean a reliance on RAID5 as well as a second processor?
I'm guessing that WinFS also means that the filesystem will also be inaccessible by any other means? so much for the Knoppix rescue disc idea that seems to be popular around here... I have to admit that I generally would rather give up a bit of speed in favor of an alternative access method.
I admit I'm bashing a bit, but after one or two bites, one is entitled to be a bit shy.
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
The Foghorn Leghorn cartoon chicken! Think about it....
"What's the big, I say what's the big idea. "
" No no no, ya doin' it all wrong."
"I've been a good sport about this up 'til now, but that boy's forcin' me to use stronger measures."
You get the idea. Except Foghorn was much cooler than Longhorn will ever be.
[rant]Who cares who did it first. It's a well accepted innovation with lots of implementations. Think of it this way: who invented Calculus as we know it? Newton did -- then again, so did Leibniz. The use of Calculus benefits us all, regardless of who founded it. Does someone deserve some credit on this: sure, but what will it mean? A patent?[/rant]
No one seems to be talking about benefits of virtual folders for all of us pr0n lovers, so I'll take a second.
Instead of arranging your "goodstuff" or "system" directory into various subdirectories like: asians, boobs, matures, anime, pics etc., and knowing that some asians belong into both boobs and matures, and that some pics can go either into anime or pics, you can now just have smart folders that organize stuff based on conditions:
Busty AND Asian NOT Mature for example, or any other myriad of combinations that will help your collection stay useful.
The same principle can also be applied to other situations, like organizing your work files, ie. by project only, or by project AND sender, etc.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
The EU. They are the only organisation that seems to have the balls to stand up to the MS monopoly.
Wasn't Winamp using a find as you type feature long before anyone else?
So with the exception of image-specific data, how is this at all different from the search features that have been build into Mac OS for aeons? System 7 (or at least 7.5?) "Find File" would allow you to search by creation and modification dates, file types and creators, file sizes, labels (a kind of user-input meta-data), visibility, and of course name - all relative (greater than or less than dates, sizes, etc), and in whatever domain you'd like (select volumes or folders).
The only new thing added in Sherlock was integration of Copland's V-Twin text indexing and search technology, now called just "Find by Content" (fbc). Later versions of Sherlock added general Internet meta-search (across multiple search engines), and then later fancy specialized search modules (for movies, travel, etc).
I still don't understand what exactly Google Desktop Search or any of these other "desktop search" utilities add that is new or interesting. All I hear so far is "you can find by content!" and "you can search by meta data!" Like finding by anything other than just name is new and impressive? Even the basic Windows Find does some meta-data, doesn't it?
All I can tell so far that's new is filetype-specific metadata: image resolutions, MP3 tags, that sort of thing. I hope there's a plugin architecture so you can add your own search modules too. Like what Sherlock does for category-specific Internet searches, except on your desktop. Is that it?
Even this whole "the search results come up as you type!" isn't new: the built-in search field in every Finder window does that under Panther. It would be cool to see that in a general search, but that's not exactly revolutionary.
So is that it? Filetype-specific metadata searches and realtime results? That's neat and all, but is that the only thing that this hubbub is all about?
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Shakespear once wrote, "there's nothing new under the sun"... but he actually stole that line from Moses. Who knows where Moses heard it? I don't think one can truely know the origins of an idea. BTW... why do they call it Longhorn? I get the "long" part... I've been hearing about it for about the last 4 years...
I'm a power user, accessing many hundreds of files on my machine on a regular basis.
Personally speaking, I don't find much need for a full system search every time I want something as I keep it well organised to start with.
Maybe these new-fangled searches will make such hosekeeping requirements a thing of the past, but can you really imagine a time where you save everything to root or a 'docs' dir just because the OS search is so good?
I, for one, will always favor actually knowing where my files are.
Do my parents, or even my friends, have so many files that such a feature will help them be anything other than even more mindless users?
I think not.
what is up with desktop search anyway. I never had trouble finding something anyway. I think this Microsoft trying keep their product significant in light of OSX. Avalon technology has been done since 10.0, Spotlight is here now, location manager allows PowerBook users to switch their settings from place to place, and decent security out the box among others. Microsoft drop the ball because they become complacent. In the end, of course, it won't recruit new users (certainly not in droves) into the mac fold but I get a better a OS and so will Windows users -eventually ;)
on a side note, as anyone notice the bias at cNet towards Apple. At lot of quotes from Allchin, but where are the quotes from Apple representatives. I am sure Oppenheimer or Schiller would love top chime in with their sale pitch. Did they even bother to ask them for a quote?
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
I've just posted about how keeping files organised is a better idea but given the 'smart folders' idea isn't TIVO a good analogy? i.e. Set and forget?
Guess I'm putting both sides of the argument here but - meh. Personally, don't care either way.
So what if Longhorn will be more robust than Apple? What makes Microsoft so sure that OS X 10.5 won't have even better features than Longhorn. Based on the previous records of both companies, I would say that 10.5 and Longhorn should be expected at roughly the same time...
Who freakin' cares who was first, I wish them all good luck on their impelmentations. In the end all that will matter is does it work on the desktop you are using.
Seriously.
Index updates are slow operations. It's the reason DBAs drop them all before doing loads into the databases, then recreate them afterwards. So if you have a filesystem that is really an RDBMS which indexes the contents of a file as it's created in the filesystem, expect it to be slow.
I suppose you could try throwing hardware at it.
Deleted
"Tiger is nice in that they've put search capability in a lot of places, but there's a lot more (in Longhorn)," Allchin said. "This is trying to slice and dice the data and let you visualize the data in a much richer way than what's in Tiger."
Now if I could only figure out how the heck they are going to "slice and dice" my data. An animated disk-formatting tool, perhaps?
"And as a result their newest operating systems bear uncannily like-minded search tools." I *know* later on in TFA that he acknowledges that Tiger is coming in a few days and LongHorn is late next year, but he really can't legitimately say "their newest" OS until it IS their newest OS. In 9 more days he can say that about Tiger, but he'll have to wait a year and a half to say it about LongHorn.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
Having labored in the factory, designing and building better mousetraps for many a year, I can say unequivocally that the reason important and obvious needs go unmet, year after year, is because there is neither (a) money to be made addressing the issue nor (b) money to be lost not addressing the issue. Call these the twin criteria of business irrelevance, if you will.
Contrary to folk wisdom, the posesser of a superior mouse trap design does not find the world beating a path to his door -- no indeed. He finds himself in the position of having to educate a bad-mousetrap-ridden world that mice are not an inevitable fact of life, and that it is possible and in fact beneficial to live without them. Unfortunately, it is only the designer of a mousetrap which makes a statement about its purchaser who can leave the path-beating to others.
That said, I think we may see something from MS pretty soon here, because the second criterion of business irrelevance no longer holds. Yahoo and Google rule a space Microsoft deems strategic to making money in the future; the key missing piece is any presence on the desktop, which continues to be Microsoft's near exclusive province. I've seen nothing to indicate Microsoft's mania for using its desktop monopoloy to asphixate competition in emerging markets has abated. For that reason, you will see the Microsoft make some stab at a good enough entry sooner than Longhorn. Indeed I predict it will be released for all supported OS's, including 2000 and XP.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
How is this a battle for desktop search supremacy? I can't imagine someone selecting their operating system between Microsoft and Apple based on the built-in desktop searching. It seems to me there will be a winner for each platform and that may not be the same guys who make the OS. Google has stumbled a bit in their first effort but thats still where my money is.
Microsoft says "when longhorn is released... blah blah blah"
Apple says "Tiger in 10 days!"
I make these: http://beatseqr.com
That's odd, cos I clicked on the red hat, then on the "Find Files" menu item and it brought up a "Find Files" desktop search dialog, AKA KFind. Course, Gnome has a desktop search capability too with gnome-find. So I guess Linux users have the best of all worlds.
Deleted
I see many people have a lot against organizing file into folders. Just put it into the computer and let it search. It's just sitting there anyways...
I like organizing stuff. I like to put my hammer, screwdriver, etc into my toolbox, food in my fridge, underware in a separate drawer. Maybe it's just me...
I love the comments like "man find" and "BeOS/Google Desktop/etc does this" but take a look at this link
...Spotlight gives you the ability to plug your application into the operating system and work with files in a totally new way. For example, if you were building an asset management application you could use Spotlight to find all of the files that match certain criteria rather than trying to slog through the file system yourself. Or, if your application specialized in supporting various kinds of workflows, you could use Spotlight to find all of the files that needed to be marked with a particular keyword.
... ] If your application, however, uses its own file format or an unsupported file format, ... you can provide a meta-data importer plug-in with your application that understands the in-and-outs of your file formats.
A few great quotes:
[Spotlight] is tightly integrated with a fundamental part of the OS: The file system. Every time a file is created, saved, moved, copied, or deleted, the file system automatically ensures that the file is properly indexed, cataloged, and ready for whatever search query might be issued--all in the background. These abilities build on the already impressive capabilities of the journaled HFS+ file system.
When Tiger ships, it will come with importers for a variety of common file formats... A partial list of file formats includes: [jpg, tiff, png, gif, pdf, doc, xls,
There's one more thing about Spotlight that should be mentioned. Since the core of Spotlight lives at the very lowest levels of the operating system, it is only natural that there are some command-line tools for power-users to work with file system meta-data and perform queries.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
"they both imply that Microsoft will provide" does that statement also imply that MS will set a standard that doesnt suck or come up pathetically short?
Abandon all hope ye who enter here...
Indexing exists in windows
Meta tags can be added in streams in ntfs
So why would MS create a new system, well because the new one uses a relational system as it can keep track of related documents. Fox example if you an email related to your calendar item, which is related to file, the search will allow you find items that way. This is where the DB comes in.
Your hatered for MS gets you named a slashbot, sir lacks a brain
Looks like Microsoft is launching a 15 month "Start Something" campaign to get people to re-visit Windows XP.
Does this not give us the best indication yet of when to expect Longhorn? And in July, 2006, what will Apple's Cat have drug in?
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
While I agree with the sentiment regarding typical users, stop by perlmonks.org and you'll find plenty of folks who use even the experimental regex features with aplomb. There is very little to memorize about syntax. Most concerns are with the particulars of Perl's optimizing NFA engine.
These are "real-work" programmers, as if that term has any meaning regarding a person's knowledge.
Firstly, all of the content from all of the files have been pre-indexed which should make this FAST.
Don't under value this. The "search results come up as you type" does not happen in Panther as you claim. It is actually "search results come up as you type and the brute force searching actually runs in to the file."
So the reality is that traditional OS search tools aren't really useful except for finding files that you have lost. In general it is quicker to look for files manually as you are smarter about where a particular file might be saved.
However, if the search tool (spotlight or whatever) has indexed all of your files then it can give you results "as you type" quicker than you could navigate your directory structure.
So yeah, this isn't going to change the world, but it is new (new as in built into a mainstream popular OS) and will be much more useful than the traditional find systems.
(Note also in answer to your question, Spotlight does provide a plugin architecture to add your own search modules - see the spotlight developer resources).
Is your brain organised beyond top-level regions?
Do you manaully and consciously store and retrieve your thoughts, or do you just "think" and get on with something.
If Spotlight is anywhere near as useful as Quicksilver then OS X will be even more out of your way and even more productive.
Longhorn - I look forward to the cute in-your-face animations and new ways to uninstall MSN messenger while grappling with balloon help and patch update reminder dialogs. Yeah, Palladium too, or whatever it ends up being called. Start Something. Start using alternatives.
-- Rod Shuffler can't be arsed to register an account
Again.
... They both say "now" but then postpone until whatever date ...
Compare: Facts vs Fiction
I love that.
Fact is that Apples Spotlight works, will be released very soon and is an amazing enrichtment for the desktop.
Fiction is Longhorn, It might have a lot of features, but nobod knows, things should be so cool, but nobody knows and at the and really nobody knows when it might be released. So it is easy to say that it will be so better than Tiger.
Fact is, that when Longhorn comes out, Tiger will be so up to date, that Longhorn will look like an old beaten horse compared to it.
Seriously. MS release cycles are almost as slow as Debians
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
Hmm.... I think I'm somewhere in between.
I'm pretty used to organizing my files I need to find in sensibly named folders/directories - and I tend to delete the old stuff as soon as I know I'm done with it. So I've never felt the need for a more powerful search feature for locating my documents. (I've REALLY needed it on a couple other people's machines though, when I was doing work for them and was expected to locate/edit a number of specific files I had no idea where to find in their huge mess of 5+ years worth of documents.)
I have this nagging feeling, though, that OS-wide powerful/fast search capabilities will become the cornerstone of a whole new "metaphor" for using the computer. Right now, pretty much everybody is hung-up on organizing things in the metaphor of folders and sub-folders containing files. Just because we've always done it this way doesn't mean it's the only proper way to do it, right?
I mean, if everything was fast and friendly enough in its operation, perhaps we could free ourselves completely from *caring* about giving "filenames" to our files, and making an effort to store them in folder names that make sense to us. Instead of worrying about the functionality and features of a given "file manager" program - we could just ditch it completely. (Or at least turn it into a tool for software development or troubleshooting/repair, rather than a necessity for regular use.) Let the machine auto-save everything using some unique file name/structure that's best for it - and feel confident it could be pulled back up with any type of search on its contents.
I marvel at how Microsoft can find a new way to fuck up my data no matter where I put it.
well since i work for Microsoft its hard not to sound that way at times, but i do make an attempt :)
The lack of specific information was intentional on my part - i've read documents and seen presentations that presumably you don't have access to, and i'm basing my comments on knowledge i have which you presumably do not, and which i am not at liberty to share with people not under NDA.
The product team i work on has a huge interest in WinFS and it's been a pain point for us to try and nail down exactly what WinFS will do when, as its _architecturally_ relevant for us. i can assure you that we're not looking to WinFS to index documents. Speculate to your hearts content.
The point was - people making the WinFS+Spotlight comparisons don't have a full understanding of what WinFS is trying to accomplish. I'm not blaming them for that because MS isn't necessarily being clear about what will be delivered when. I'm just letting you know that there's more to the entire WinFS picture than desktop text indexing.
Much more.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
"How many angels can stand on top of a pin at one time?"
"If God is all-powerful, can he break a brick he can't break?"
"Which came first: The Chicken or the egg?"
Many questions like this have been posed over the centuries. Who cares who invented what first? I only care about what features are currently provided or that will be available in the next OS releases.
INACTIVE ACCOUNT
I'm using Tiger *NOW* -- do you understand that Microsoft?
For example, Freelance Work -> [name of client], or Pr0n -> Ashley Renee. (Purely for example purposes.)
But now I could just dump every single file in the Documents folder and use a super-search engine to find them!
You must think in Russian.
That is the command line tool to access Spotlight searches, for those that did not realize that was an OS X command...
So you can use spotlight like a really powerful find/grep combo and still chain it the same way (say, using tar).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
But how do the paid for Apple© Slashvertisements(TM) fit into all of this?
I'm sorry, but I'm not ready to buy the idea that all things must end up in a relational DB at some point. The way file systems are structured are very good for structuring data, and the addition of indexing systems on top of that really removes the basic problems you end up with.
What we have is a case where the optimal compromize seems to have been reached early, before the pendulum could swing all the way to a fully relational filesystem nad then swing back.
Personally, I have doubts we'll ever see WinFS as we know it today. I think thet for a very long time we'll end up with further refinements of the Spotlight model.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you were doing that, good luck! Because when files got too deep below you, things got wacky.
The real way to do that was in fact:
find . -exec grep -l foo {} \;
Which would work for any depth of files and not crap out about eight levels down.
I have personally seen someone just last year not find anything they were supposed to using the "find" command because they used the exact command you just gave. And last week I saw someone else using it as well... I find it odd this misuse has become so widespread.
On a sidenote, there's no nostalga for me since I use it every day for real development!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I remember an actual quote from a Microsoft executive (Ballmer?) many years ago along the lines of, "They just copied what we're going to have to the next version of..." something.
That's a statement you have to go to Bizarro World to parse.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
"If Longhorn had appeared on store shelves this morning thanks to the overnight efforts of magic software gnomes who worked all night it would still be one more stinking Microsoft pile of shit and there's not one person in the world with a clue who doesn't know this."
How about Paul Thurrott?
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
The step doesn't seem to steep. I can see myself clicking on a "smart pile" and the files "spring out" like that apple patent talks about....
I'm sure Microsoft will have "more robust" versions of all of Tigers 200 new features one day. This combined with the 100,000 viruses that are exclusively available on Windows will make it worth the wait....
IIRC, the main issue was more to do with a crappy sh or csh truncating a long path. The underlying find, xargs, and grep programs have probably been quite capable for years now.
/" and having it descend into /net or /mnt and spending waaaay too long searching all the remote mounts that I'd visited recently because I forgot to say -xdev.
The issue I remember most clearly is doing "find
Are any of them ready to use? I'm pretty sure Beagle (the only one in the list I've heard of) is not...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
You mean fully usable... I have it installed now and it works great. Let me demonstrate... I can search through all the websites I have visited in the past couple days.. lets search for "troll"... aha 15 results and all of them slashdot.org!!!
No I'm serious.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
but i don't think any regular user would. i'm looking forward to making smart folders that will cache my queries, but most users won't invest the time learning how to do that or use that. it's a great feature for power users, but i bet regular users will just keep putting things in folders.
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Of course, you know that IBM was a pioneer of the "Announce blue sky features for a project 3 years down the road and then weasel out of half of them when it's released." They got dinged for doing that in the DOJ monopoly suit and instructed us to NEVER talk about new projects until the release date due to that fact.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Windows 95 didn't "really" have Internet support eather until OSR1 IIRC. BillG's famous "December 1995 memo" was when they "got" the Internet, so Microsoft was pretty much asleep too (or having delusions of MSN/Blackbird grandeur).
-Stu
Three women are discussing how their husbands make love. The first says, "My husband is a footbal player. He is really powerful and energetic in bed, and this is a real turn on for me." The second says, "My husband is a musician, and when we make love it's as if he were playing me. He al- ways knows exactly what I want and gives it to me without my asking." The third says, "Well, my husband is a sales representative for IBM. When we make love all he does is sit on the edge of the bed and tell me how good it's going to be when I finally get it."
(http://www.holysmoke.org/wb/wb0213.htm)
Curtains for windows?
I know where my stuff is too, but I don't necessarily know which file I want to find. I know exactly what folder my IM client saves all my logs in (which is buried in other folders, so using Spotlight to find _it_ could very well be faster), but I don't know which file contains the street address that my brother told me about two weeks ago. The logs are all named by date, and I can't change that. I can use Spotlight to search the content of those logs for his screen name and the street name (or partial zip code or any other random tidbit I remember from the conversation--maybe I know that conversation was the time he mentioned his girlfriend: search for her name) and get it instantly. My files are all organized pretty well. I have school stuff sorted by year and subject. I have large projects in their own folders. But when I want to find a rough draft of a big paper I wrote 2 years ago that I probably titled Rough Draft because it was in its own project folder, I will be able to find it faster by typing the killer last sentence that I still remember than by navigating through my well-organized folders.
I can see desktop searching being useful once in a blue moon, but whats with all the hype about it?
People should know where they store their pictures, documents, etc.. I.e c:\documents, c:\porn, etc..
We still have valve technology too, but it's utterly hopeless in anything but audio.
Unix is not friendly enough for users. Spotlight and other searching technology may be re-written several times in ten years, but the point is that it *improves* over time. grep is static, and about as friendly as being bludgeoned by a brick.
It may have been a csh at work, but why risk it? -exec is so clean and simple.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
where do you figure that i dont know what spotlight is? I'm certainly not an expert on the matter, but that's more due to lack of interest as opposed to not being allowed to read public documents.
:)
:/]
So far you've assumed things about who i am, what i know, what microsoft is doing, what WinFS is, what the rules regarding my employment are, and again what i know.
Based on what you've written publicly, on all accounts you've been incorrect.
I appreciate it when people tell me what microsoft needs to do better. It's always so obvious to everyone but us, it seems
Let me explain: if it were _that_ obvious, we'd be doing it that way. Perhaps there's some factor (even a few factors!) you're not aware of, not considering, or not weighing the same way that the people that run MS are.
My standard advice when people have an axe to pick with microsoft, and a know it all attitude: if you can fix our problems to the satisfaction of the relevant parties: you're hired. Name your salary and nobody will blink about writing you the check. Do you beleive that MS is an organization of tens of thousands of highly paid, highly stupid people? If so, we'd love to have the help of an expert.
In any case, your criticisms about project scope are not news to anybody. The things you suggest are all good ideas, and MS certainly could be better at all of them.
Sometimes scope creep is acceptable, because with commercial software the key point is to deliver the right product at the right time. Staying in requirements deadlock before a line of code is ever written has a few drawbacks in light of the following realities:
1) the problem changes
2) the requirements change (this is inevitable, because you're smarter tomorrow then you are today)
3) the marketplace changes
4) your dependanices change [you cant begin to imagine what a problem this is at MS
As far as what you've seen: we've already been over this. You don't know everything about WinFS or its future, so claims of what competing technologies might be able to do the same work are kind of meaningless. Essentially i've told you that i know some people who are making a car, and you've told me that yours is just as fast. What an assinine remark!
On a simplistic level, you're fundamentally correct - WinFS is not making light exceed c, nor is it making zero-resistivity p/n junctions. It's not doing anything revolutionary from a technology perspective.
Unfortuneately, even the non-revoultionary software doesn't yet write itself. And no matter how good the developers and testers are, when somebody up high says "this is good, but its not done" that means there's more work to do.
Getting WinFS right the first time matters, because it's got its fingers in more pies than Google Search or even *gasp* Spotlight.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
I've often had to consider whether implementing the "perfect" solution "on paper" was worth the increase in scope.
More often than not, the "not perfect" solution turns out to be the best choice in the end and tends to far more scalable.
I'm not convinced that a relational database built on SQL technology is very scalable or efficient.
Ultimately, you want to design a system that is extensible for future and unforeseen needs.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Shiping the wrong thing is worse than not shipping anything.
;) and we'd be adding support baggage. And for what?
:)
.NET is we can start to leave Win32 behind. Surely you dont want us to release CreateFile only to later come up with CreateFileEx a while later.. or Foo() followed by Foo2() and Foo3()...this is the kind of crap that happened with Win32 as it evolved.
:)
Everything we ship has to live for at least n years, where n changes depending on what it is. We have to patch it, we have to run regressions against it _forever_. When we come up with something else better, we have to convince developers why this is bad and why they should switch. We never, ever get to remove it without upsetting everyone.
Just throwing out something that kind of solves a few Photos/PIM scenarios means we're introducing new concepts and APIs that we cant unload.. even though we want it to do more and to do it better.
My team for instance is way far out from shipping its product. We've been letting key customers work with our unreleased internal milestone bits. Parts of it are utterly broken. It doesn't do anywhere near what it needs to do. We're just getting feedback to make sure we're on the right track and to get people thinking about what's coming and how it may help what they're trying to acheive.
Even so, the overwhelming feeedback is "just give it to us now". I suppose we could, but it'd be unfinished crap (even more so than some other things we _did_ release
As someone on a team who has no idea when their work will see the light of day - i am at least as frustrated as you are about MS stuff not shipping.
But ultimately, it comes down to shipping the right thing even if it takes longer. The risk you take is that you miss your opportunity - it's obviously a tradeoff. I cannot make those sorts of "soft" decisions, and especially not about the WinFS project as a whole. Guys down in the trenches (even very smart NT kernel guys) don't always see the picture the same way the people at the top do.. or even as their trenchmates do. I don't have (or need to have) undying faith in the abilities of the management above me, but the arguments i've heard for doing things the way they're being done are generally not objectinable. Again - the course of action is not obvious, so you dont have unilateral approval
Incidentally, developers dont like 1 billion APIs per year. They dont like it when we "get something out there" and then abandon it.
We've done that in the past and we'll probably do it in the future, but it really sucks and lots of people hate doing it, up and down the chain.
As an aside, one appealing thing about
Normally I'd figure we'd get a warmer response for trying to do the right thing in the first version
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
From your terminology, it seems to me you're using Windows.
:)
In the current version of OS X, Finder's Find feature is actually quite fast. I just checked, my two year old 1GHz Powerbook finds all of my harddrive's 1124 ".doc" files in about ten seconds. If I use the default location for searches (my Home directory), the search is much faster - to the point where it really is faster to use the search than navigate the folders.
If Tiger is faster than this, I'll be very positively surprised.
And yes, I'm sure Longhorn will make you Explore less - I'll be happy with my Finder in the meantime.
"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid, it is true that most stupid people are conservative."
...because it isn't here yet. Promises are cheap, functions get pulled at the last moment or turn out to be useless after all.
Thus, let's compare systems we can actually see, in front of us, and have experience in using.
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
I've read through a few hundred of these posts and wonder if people might be a little short sighted in this debate. It's not how well implemented and 'fast' the search is, its what the computer does with it that counts. I doubt I'll use Spotlight that much because it means I have to move my mouse to the top right of the screen, click and type away. Far too much effort! What will make the difference is how the OS provides me with data; for example having a list of related documents appear to the side of any document I am currently in - so while i'm working on something and need to find a document, it is already listed read for me to open; none of this searching rubbish. Can anyone say Dashborad?
...without having to keep an index...
But you do have an index, it's in your head. Computers are supposed to free your brain up, not fill it with more stuff.
Go to Finder, press Apple-F to open the Find menu. In the area labelled "Search for items whose", change "Name" in the pulldown menu to "Content". Type the words you want to search in the textbox, click Search. You'll get your files sorted by relevance to your query.
"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid, it is true that most stupid people are conservative."
Reminds me of the Apple motto, 'real pirates ship'.
Playaholics: Lightning Pool
Suttree, a weblog about casual games development
for file in `locate whatever` ; do grep "myterm" $file; done
Of course, searching inside images and word-processing files makes it a little more challenging.
Using a database would be cool, but I think that it would encourage sloppiness. "I can just save my files anywhere, because I can find whatever I need in them". IMO, that is a bad thing to encourage. However, I do think that it would be helpful to have metadata for backup purposes. Flag a file for backup, then you could just run a backup script to find all of them and back them up. Of course, if your database gets messed up, you are hosed. Unless you have stored your files in logical locations anyway.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
i never claimed that MS alphas are better than what apple has made, so stick a tampon in it.
what i did claim, however, is that MS's alphas are breaking new technological ground than is apple at present. way more. in ways apple hasn't even thought of yet... and furthermore Alpha 40074 with dce enabled is far more functional and stable (sans the application and driver support) than is tiger RTM (8A428). i'm no liar, mr.-i-like-to-call-people-names.
this is a matter of fact, not opinion. and if you don't know any better then try RESEARCH. get real info and cross-reference. i am an MS and Apple beta tester. have been for years. i know what i'm talking about. do you?
Them's fightn' words, lest get it on!
I doubt I'll use Spotlight that much because it means I have to move my mouse to the top right of the screen, click and type away. Far too much effort!
Um, you can also bring up the search field by hitting Cmd-Space.
You're also a pansy non-power user running a mac, so you don't figure into anyone's life at all.
Your comment is incorrect in one respect. I can't talk about the M$ search mechanism since I have never seen it but as far as Mac OS X "Tiger" is concerned it is not the application that generates the Index.
:)
In Tiger the system notifies every new (or changed) file to the search engine. The search engine generates indexes. One index for full content searches, another index for metadata. For the metadata index it uses plugins for the different file formats. The plugins tell the search engine which information in a file's structure has a particular meaning.
So it is not the application that creates the indexes. The index is not included in the file (which anyway would be impractical for full file system searches). Thus applications and file format remain completely unchanged.
Apple provides plug-ins for the most important file formats and gives you the possibility to write further plug-ins for other file formats in xcode.
That's just the best way I can imagine. The Apple guys are geniuses.
Does everyone title their digital photos? I have loads of them, and iPhoto does a nice job of keeping them organized. I'm not sure Spotlight can help me unless I've named all the photos something besides p01239487 ... or does it know the "keywords" I've assigned to a few in iPhoto? That would be good. No way am I renaming those bastards though.