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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."
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.
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.
...this side of a Teen Titans [TT] comic book...
Hey, that's cheating!
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
"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
pile of shit, perhaps, but it's funny how Microsoft's pile of shit is still better in Alpha than is Apple's latest-and-greatest. over and over again...
good point. i've been beta testing all sorts of things recently, especially longhorn (4051 and 4074) and tiger (8a420 and 8a428). sure, longhorn's alphas blow away tiger's latest-and-greatest. in fact, enough so that Apple will have to pull a fuckingmiracle out of their ass just to compete... a miracle like Adobe Flash and Flash 3D. another point in fact, the current alphas are stble enough to use as a primary OS-- it just has little or no application and driver support. now with the new wave of betas this summer, you're going to see that change. one thing, however, that you will not see change this summer is people talking about longhorn's latest-and-greatest. seriously, if you're only exposure to longhorn is heresay and unrevealing screenshots, you ain't seen nuthin' yet. the XAML scriptable realtime 3-d interface that MacOS won't have until it's next major version release, OS11 or later. so it comes to this: with all the work going into longhorn (2+ years so far-- mostly for the new graphics subsystem), and all of the work going into Tiger, Apple simply hasn't had the development time to complete a project so big as to supplant Quartz Extreme (OSX's current graphics subsystem). sure apple has stated that they're slowing their OS releases, prolly for this very reason-- and the customers are getting bitchy about having to pay $130 each time Apple forces an upgrade by making sure nothing new works on it's cats-of-the-past. i love windows. i love MacOS. but while OSX is prettier and nicer and seems more refined, windows has several times the application and hardware support, and microsoft has taken the lead time-and-time again. i'm sure we'll all be on this see-saw ride till october of last year.