Apple and MS Battle For Desktop Search Supremacy 707
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."
No Contest! (Score:5, Funny)
And if that's not enough, the second core [slashdot.org] should drastically improve that little doggie's performance.
Re:No Contest! (Score:5, Funny)
Well it seems obvious. Ben and Hoss need to head on up to Redmond and get us our horse back, if you know what I mean.
And by horse, I mean a usable OSAnd by get back I mean, shoot some people
Re:No Contest! (Score:3, Informative)
I mean, if you're going to be accurate, let's be accurate.
Re:No Contest! (Score:4, Funny)
Uhh, GOOGLE? (Score:3, Interesting)
Google Desktop Search?
Uh...OS 8.5 (Score:5, Informative)
More like OS 6 + On Location (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Uh...OS 8.5 (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, and it had banner ads.
This was nicely unobtrusive until OS 9, at which point Apple made Sherlock the Find command and replaced the simple, clean interface with the bloated "brushed metal" that we see to this day. Same functionality as previous incarnations with a more OMG TEH INTERNETS!!!! emphasis.
Oh, and it had banner ads. AND it was big and ugly. So I hauled in my "sherlock" from 8.6 and used that with my powerbook until I switched over to OS X.
And I didn't do that until they peeled Sherlock back into a separate app (that I've never launched on this machine) and left a useable Find in its place. Which we didn't have at all in between 8.6 and 10.2.
Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? (Score:5, Informative)
Spotlight indexes every file on your system for which there's a scraping agent (I forget the correct term). And companies can create those agents for their own file formats and tag all sorts of metadata about files in addition to the raw text content.
For example, if your word processor supports a structured title page (i.e. if it knows who the author is, what the title is, etc.), and if there's an agent that understands its file format, you could do a spotlight query that searched specifically for any file where the author was "Anonymous Coward".
More importantly, after the initial indexing pass (where applicable), spotlight doesn' index files nightly like Sherlock. Spotlight knows when you've been sleeping, it knows when you're awake, it knows when you change files a bit, and keeps its index up-to-date. :-)
Comparing Spotlight to Sherlock is a lot like comparing an RSS-enhanced version of Google to the old world-wide-web worm.... It's an entirely different animal altogether.
Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The same thing was being said before the release of Panther. The strengths of longhorn were touted and Panther was conceded as being "admittedly out first, but longhorn will be better". Now 18 months later we have Tiger that is 'admittedly out first, but longhorn will be better".
I bet when Apple announce their next OS (let's call it Ocelot) the commentary in the media will again be...
"Ocelot is admittedly out first, but longhorn will be better".
Of course, the world will suck it up and nod their heads, agreeing that this fabled new version of Windows will be better, sometime in the future, while ignoring the last half decade of "admittedly good" OS X versions which ACTUALLY EXIST AND CAN BE USED!
Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? (Score:3, Insightful)
The PS built a reputation on having good games to play on the platform. I think this was a large part of why people waited for the PS2 - banking on good games for the platform.
Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, those that have followed Microsoft's career know that their basic strategy is always promising, if not guaranteeing, that the next version of their applications will be perfect. Amazingly, some users still believe this hogwash.
Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? (Score:5, Informative)
Don't expect Microsoft's new file system to be available before 2010. At this point nobody knows what form it will take. WinFS has been kicked around for about a decade now and nothing has come of it, so Microsoft may choose to make incremental improvements to NTFS instead of going the database-driven route.
Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've evaluated plenty of SQL filesystems, attempted to implement my own, and with mild success, ran and tested many implementations. Here's what I found out:
SQL sucks as a filesystem. While it's great that SQL can store relations incredibly well, make finding files easier, and provide a good, intellegent backup system, its faults are with the implementation, every time.
It requires the programmer to make two choices; "Do I want to include an entire SQL engine in kernel space, or leave it in user space?" and "Do I want the 'parsing agent' to run in user space or in kernel space?".
To anyone who's ever worked with an SQL engine, the answer to the first question is obvious. If you move the entire SQL engine to kernel space, you're introducing kernel bloat in the size of 40-80 megabytes for the software itself (including caches, sql tables in ram, etc). But if you leave it in userspace, every user has to have their own copy of the software running for them, or your parser agent has to have a kernel hook that basically takes the input from the user accessing the file system, and redirect it to the SQL engine itself.
The "Parsing Agent" as it were, is a piece of code that actually rips apart the files you send to it, grabbing the content's type, and any metadata it can filter out of the file. It can then use two seperate transfers to send the file to one table, and the metadata to another. When searching for a file, it simply queries the metadata, and matches a file index to the files located in the data cache. This is how almost all modern desktop search technologies work (Google Desktop Search, Spotlight, and whatever Windows Longhorn will have).
The existance of a good parsing agent makes an SQL file system virtually irrelevant. I commend them for not wasting their time storing the whole files in an SQL database, but the metadata should be. That way, using a common API, all programs should be able to quickly find files they need to operate, making the file system more amorphous, and less rigid. Hell, if software engineers cared enough, we could get rid of the whole idea of a heirarchial file system now; simply tag incoming files with a UID, and write them to disk, making the "Parsing Agent" keep all of the metadata, and letting it deal with finding and opening files. You could have links on your desktop to commonly used searches "All files Containing the word 'Lyrics'" (a common one used during my tests).
Really, I'd love to see what Apple has in store for Spotlight, but I definitely know that Windows Longhorn is better off without WinFS the way they originally planned it.
Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? (Score:4, Informative)
If I'm not mistaken, Apple is using Core Data's sqlite interface to manage the metadata, so they're doing almost exactly what you are proposing.
Re:hey, dumbass (Score:3, Informative)
So Spotlight isn't as good as Longhorn? Care to explain to me their strengths and weaknesses? Can you provide me with a screenshot or two? The story linked to in this article is no good, it tells of things that Apple already h
Uhh, BeOS LiveQueries? (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:Uhh, BeOS LiveQueries? (Score:3, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? (Score:5, Insightful)
But in this case the point isn't the user interface to the search capabilities. It is important, but not the technical issue.
The technical issue is the filesystem / operating system has the necessary hooks to reduce the subjective overhead to zero.
By having the hooks integrated such that indexing occurs when files are updated, moved, or otherwise changed the search capabilities are dynamic. It isn't necessary to scan the file system to detect changes, the changes are already known and the search query itself simply has to refresh. It doesn't scan the filesystem for the relevant files, it simply looks them up in it's index.
I've used BeOS and I am hopeful Apple's Spotlight will match, or exceed BeOS' implementation. In my mind it is imposible for Microsoft to do it better, So I don't understand that part of the issue.
I believe Apple is supplying the necessary tools and information so that a new file, created by an application can have it's filesystem details index, as well as call a custom routine to pull any application specific data from the file and have that indexed.
Lets say you have a new word processor that stores it's data in a compressed format; a routine for the application could process the file and update the index with all the keywords, perhaps all the text, etc automatically.
A third party company would have difficulty putting forth a standard for such a function, and would have to support the major applications themselves.
Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? (Score:3, Interesting)
The guy who developed the Be filesystem is the same guy who developed Spotlight at Apple, so yeah, it'll probably be pretty good.
What about google's desktop search? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Lol. Mod me redundant. (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe more (nontechnical) user-freindly. But can these search engines use RegEx syntax? Hell No.
In my book, that's LESS advanced.
empty promises... (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:empty vaporware promises... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:empty vaporware promises... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
That joke... (Score:5, Funny)
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)
They're not empty promises (Score:5, Funny)
Re:They're not empty promises (Score:5, Funny)
You might be right, but those guys at Gator/Claria sure gave 'em a run for their money.
Hmm... (Score:4, Funny)
So, OS technology will have improved in 18-24 months?
Amazing!
And... (Score:5, Insightful)
Like, oh, working on Mac OS X 10.5.
Which will, quite literally, probably be shipping around the time Longhorn ships.
Re:Hmm... (Score:3, Interesting)
Dunno... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Dunno... (Score:5, Interesting)
But now, the promise of these tools - in theory - is that we can eliminate this investment of time. We can drop file wherever we want to, and the searching is instantaneous, by whatever bit of criteria we happen to need, conceive, or have access to, at the time of search.
It's not perfect, though: I know that my sense of organization has devolved since I started using Quicksilver [blacktree.com], and that is sometimes a problem, when I am forced to go manually through folders. Heh, who knows - maybe Apple will release some sort of Spotlight -> Automator transition that allows people to use spotlight queries to actually reorganize their data permanently, not smart folder this and query that, but actually reorganize data in the filesystem based on certain things (kind of like how iTunes manages the folders in its library folder.)
Re:Dunno... (Score:3, Funny)
-5 Scary
*ponders*
Re:Dunno... (Score:3, Interesting)
You can do this already with the search tools already built into Windows XP. Just type the name, part of the name, or search by type of file.
I don't see that this new "desktop search" thing is going to do anything other than teach people how to be disorganized. So now you can put any file anywhere you want without even knowing where it physically is on a disk. Big deal. T
Re:Dunno... (Score:4, Informative)
- Give me the 25 most frequently played songs by either Spears, Beyonce, or Aguilera, added in the past 6 months, that are longer than 3 mins but shorter than 5.
Bam you have the list. And auto-updates as you add new songs and as time moves on.
Now imagine the same thing for the entire OS.
Smart Mailbox, Smart folders.
Even though Windows 98 has a really weak "Find" too, I use it everyday at work by dumping all my documents in "My Documents", and use search to find the file I want instead of going through folders, and scrolling hundreds of files.
Re:Dunno... (Score:5, Funny)
... aaaannnd DELETE.
You're right, this is a useful feature!
impromptu poll (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:impromptu poll (Score:4, Insightful)
[cue "but what about symlinks?" responses]
Re:impromptu poll (Score:3, Funny)
You *completely* missed your cue!
Okay, everybody, from the top of page four!
Re:impromptu poll (Score:5, Insightful)
I care, because knowing what utilities can and can't do, and how to take advantage of the former and cover up for the latter, is what makes me a "power user".
Re:impromptu poll (Score:3)
Who makes the best mouse-click and type-in-the- name look up. Who CARES?
My favorite search engine is...my BRAIN and eyes and a good shell program. On any system that supports any version of Norton Comander/ Midnite Commander, I can usually find a file in pretty short order.
Search Technology (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Search Technology (Score:3, Insightful)
The point of Spotlight and desktop search, in general, is that the computer handles the proper organization.
Who would be more anal, perfect, and organized than a computer? Someone with OCD?
Re:Search Technology (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed true. Some people are forever looking for certain physical things, such as their car keys, cell phone and other small items. The computer is like a workshop. A workshop with its tools well organized is a pleasure, but a disorganized one, with tools mixed up is a real pain. Organization in a computer is just as beneficial in getting work done as it is in a real workshop. Even so, adding a good search system should not affect an organized comput
Re:Search Technology (Score:3, Informative)
Spotlight can do this.
What about Excel files printed in the last week? Spotlight can do this too.
Or dog photos added to Pages documents that were subsequently sent to a friend?
With a little image metadata ("it's a dog") Spotlight can do this as well.
Organisation is great, but it's only giving you one part of the picture. Spotlight also tracks what you've done with those files, allowing you to effe
WinFS (Score:3, Interesting)
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!)
A few misconceptions.. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 deliv
No. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 co
ahem (Score:5, Funny)
What about Beagle? (Score:5, Informative)
So between Spotlight and Longhorn and Google and Beagle, it's not just a 2-way battle
Why Mr. Allchin, what a big RDF you have! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why Mr. Allchin, what a big RDF you have! (Score:4, Insightful)
Not Really. Longhorn Beta 1 ships in just over a month, and the RTM date is set in May 2006.
Yes, really. Until it's preloaded on systems, and in boxes on store shelves, and can be bought and used by the public at large, it doesn't exist. Betas don't count for shit, even if Microsoft says they're okay for use in a production environment (HA!). Neither does some RTM date that's more than a year away and not even remotely set in stone no matter what Microsoft says.
Microsoft has delivered in the past. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Microsoft has delivered in the past. (Score:4, Interesting)
"Mac OS X may be a nice-looking overlay to Unix, but it still leaves much to be desired. For example, networking in an environment where multiple servers are used is decidedly flaky, permissions must be changed to do simple things like adding fonts or nonstandard printers, and administrative access is difficult."
"...the view from the trenches is that Windows will be the way to go until an OS that is as user- and admin-friendly comes around."
And another:
"A couple of years after the release of Win 95, I attended an Apple event celebrating the new features in Mac OS 8.0. As I sat watching this operating system version that offered full-screen wallpaper (a feature of Win 3.1), Internet options (catching up with Win 95), systemwide sound effects (another Win 3.1 feature) and more, I said to the longtime Mac user sitting beside me that this was Apple's attempt to maintain parity with Windows 95."
Re:Microsoft has delivered in the past. (Score:3, Insightful)
Win95 was the most hyped thing in computer industry history, and Apple's management was so screwed up at the time they just ignored it (other than the snarky W
Re:Microsoft has delivered in the past. (Score:3, Interesting)
Neither of them were first! (Score:5, Informative)
Magellan lives on as X1 (Score:5, Informative)
It is quite good, and worth looking at, especially if you were a Magellan fan.
Re:Magellan lives on as X1 (Score:4, Interesting)
About Yahoo! Desktop Search
Well, THIS sure is helpful... (Score:5, Interesting)
And the winner is (Score:5, Interesting)
not to mention the other companys that have since been making products of this nature
Re:And the winner is (Score:3, Informative)
Did you know that Dominic Giampaolo, one of the file system gurus from Be, now works at Apple? you can even download a book he wrote about file systems from his web page [nobius.org].
Cool!
Let's peek in on GENIUS at work. (Score:4, Funny)
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!
nostalgia moment (Score:3, Funny)
find . | xargs grep foo
ah, the good old days.
This just in... (Score:5, Funny)
SoupIsGood Food
Oh great... (Score:3, Funny)
Magic Icons. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
This article drove me nuts (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:This article drove me nuts (Score:5, Informative)
Basically everything you said here is wrong.
Ever since Panther, we've had a thing called Search Kit. (The technology behind Search Kit goes farther back than that.) Search Kit would index the contents of readable files, meaning plain text, and allow you to search them.
It was slow, it wasn't extensible, and it wasn't modular.
Spotlight is completely different. Spotlight has a content-search component, but it also has a metadata-search component, and both are linked to data through modular pieces of code called importers. Each importer is associated with one or more file types. When a file of a given type changes on disk (is written to, moved or created), the Spotlight import task (mdimport) calls the relevant importer(s) to re-index the file. These importers are very simple and run very fast. Even on old hardware, the overhead of Spotlight indexing isn't noticeable, in large part because it runs at a very low priority.
So Spotlight is really something new. It's ubiquitous and it's modular and it's fast.
Microsoft's search technology looks strikingly similar on paper. Problem is it only exists on paper.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
3 words - locate | grep (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Some mentioned Beagle, I'll mention Tenor (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Some mentioned Beagle, I'll mention Tenor (Score:5, Funny)
I think you were trying to point here. [linuxplanet.com]
Battle... (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:They both suck (Score:5, Insightful)
No it doesn't. The point of searching is to bypass organization or to impose organization on data according to current needs.
Re:They both suck (Score:5, Interesting)
Smart folders WILL change the way you use your computer. There's no need to hunt through folders for a certain document, as all organization can be done at a smart folder level. Plainly put, it doesn't MATTER where your data is stored in the file structure, smart folders will allow you to organize everything easily and quickly. Just like file systems make it where you don't care where the bits lie on the disk, smart folders will make it where you don't care where the files lie in the directory structure. This is a BIG improvement.
Of course, you didn't actually bother to think about the point you were attempting to make, because you were rushing to get your post near the beginning of the dicsussion so it could be modded up.
Re:They both suck (Score:5, Funny)
If Smart Folders detect porn, and put all my porn into one folder, then I'll literally have a hundred thousand files in one folder. I doubt Finder, Explorer, or Nautilus can handle browsing such a beast.
Unless; Smart Folders can automatically put my porn into; Readheads, Asian, Lesbian, Threesomes, Celebrities, etc. . . .
Re:They both suck (Score:3, Informative)
Re:They both suck (Score:4, Interesting)
iTunes 5 will get the benefits of the souped-up V100 database, though, so searching will be even faster. (This won't affect you unless you have hundreds of thousands of songs in your library.)
Re:They both suck (Score:3, Interesting)
First, Linux is our closest competitor. It's not a very good competitor, for reasons that should be obvious, but it's our closest. We have no desire to advance that. That's purely a business decision. (I'm not a business guy. I don't have an opinion about this. But it's how things are.)
Second, Linux is utterly impossible to support. An operating system where every nin
Re:They both suck (Score:5, Informative)
Ideally, if you can't remember what you called the document, then maybe you can remember a few key words from its contents, the approximate day when you created it, some metadata such as "photo taken at the Mackinaw Bridge" or something like that.
So while this may not be groundbreakingly new, I think that Spotlight really will provide USEFUL features. Based on what I've seen in previews and whatnot, it would be extremely useful to have an always-ready and always-accessible search feature which can handle metadata easily.
Actually, you're kind of wrong (Score:4, Informative)
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.
No it doesn't (Score:3, Interesting)
This helps a lot because for example on the topic of utilitarianism the ppt files are util1.ppt
Re:With longhorn? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:With longhorn? (Score:3, Funny)
That's "snowball's chance in hell" [google.com] (Results 1 - 10 of about 27,300), not "snowman's chance in hell" [google.com] Results 1 - 10 of about 615. Oddly enough, I did not use longhorn's fancy search engine to find that out...
Re:Microsoft always steals features (Score:5, Funny)
With the exception of GUI design, networking, popup menus, text rendering, web standards, file systems, security, user friendliness, software licensing agreements, programming languages, feature creep/application bloat and general business practices.
Other than those things they're great! :)
Re:Why a desktop search tool? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:grep anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)
For instance, if you have some text in an OpenDocument format (i.e. the file format of OpenOffice.org, and soon KOffice and maybe AbiWord) then you will never find that text using grep. (Because an OpenOffice.org file is actually a ZIP file.)
Search tools need to have custom plug ins that know how to search specific filetypes. Searching an HTML file, then use a plugin that won't find the tags, for example. Searching a GIF or JPEG, then search the im
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why compare OS X 10.4 with Longhorn? (Score:3, Insightful)