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KDE Plans 'Google-like' Search Capabilities 356

Posted by michael from the slocate-not-good-enough-for-ya dept.
CoolFX writes "Developers of KDE have announced plans to simplify searching for files on the open-source Linux desktop environment by adding a Google-style search feature. The next version of KDE, which will either be called 3.4 or 4, is expected to include the new search feature... Aaron Seigo, a KDE developer, said the community has already been discussing and writing code for the new search engine at the KDE Community World Summit."
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KDE Plans 'Google-like' Search Capabilities More

KDE Plans 'Google-like' Search Capabilities

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  • How will this work? (Score:5, Funny)

    by SeanTobin ( 138474 ) * <byrdhuntr@hot[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Friday August 27, 2004 @10:03AM (#10088452)
    Now, how is this going to work? First off, when I do a search on google there are dozens if not hundreds of PC's involved in various aspects of the search. I get my results in under a second. My computer - although fairly decent itself - is only a mid-tower. There is no way I can support even one PC to assist in searching.

    Aside from the logistics problems, where the heck am I going to get the pigeons [google.com] anyway?

    • Re:How will this work? (Score:5, Informative)

      by barcodez ( 580516 ) on Friday August 27, 2004 @10:09AM (#10088533)
      Now, how is this going to work? First off, when I do a search on google there are dozens if not hundreds of PC's involved in various aspects of the search. I get my results in under a second. My computer - although fairly decent itself - is only a mid-tower. There is no way I can support even one PC to assist in searching.


      Having played with and done some work on the open source Nutch [nutch.org] search engine I know from experience that you can return search results from ~10,000,000 pages in much less than 1 second on a mid-range desktop. It's all done with indexes in much the same way as relational DB have been doing it for years.

      • Re:How will this work? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by FlipmodePlaya ( 719010 ) on Friday August 27, 2004 @10:11AM (#10088561) Journal
        I'm wondering why they're saying it's 'Google like'. Do they just mean 'search engine like', and got caught up in the brand name (like they do with the iPod so frequently)? Or is there something about it comparable only to a Google technique?

        • Re:How will this work? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by barcodez ( 580516 ) on Friday August 27, 2004 @10:15AM (#10088601)
          To many people google == search engine. The word is in the Oxford English Dictionary ffs. So like xerox, hoover and escalator the brand name has become (is becoming) the generic word too.
          • not to be pedantic (or a karma whore) but 'google' is not a word. Googol, however, is a word representing the number 1 followed by 100 0's.

            • Re:How will this work? (Score:2, Informative)

              by Billy69 ( 805214 )
              No to be even more pedantic, but as the parent noted, the action of 'googling' or 'to google' was indeed added to the last revision of the Oxford English dictionary, and therefore by definition it is a word.
              • You need to ratchet up your pedantry even further. There is no specific group or organization charged with deciding what is or is not part of the English language. While the Oxford English Dictionary bears a great deal of prestige, and their decisions can be taken as strong evidence of the "wordiness" of google(verb), there is no single litmus test for inclusion/exclusion of a word from the English language.

                Now, the French have an entire division of the government devoted to defining the French langua
                • You need to ratchet up your pedantry even further.

                  And you need to crank yours up even more. The OED is accepted by many institutions to define the English language. Words in use that are not in the OED are considered slang and/or technical language. While you are correct that there is no royally or federally defined definitive language, the OED is, by common agreement, the definition of the language.

                  --
                  Evan

              • Re:How will this work? (Score:3, Insightful)

                by modecx ( 130548 )
                No doubt.

                When I hear a middle aged waitress (who's not known to be especially computer savvy) use the term "google" as a verb--and in the right context--well, let's just say that google has become a word. Just like xerox, kleenex, or any other widely used trademarks.

                Welcome to our lexicon, the word "google".
            • While we're exploring pedantics, it should be noted that Googol was not a word either, until it was coined about 65 years ago as an example of a non-infinite number that was nonetheless unimaginably large.

        • Re:How will this work? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by athakur999 ( 44340 ) on Friday August 27, 2004 @10:50AM (#10088988) Journal
          It sounds like they're just capitalizing on a buzz word. Google's big claim to fame is that their search algorithm looks at the links between pages in addition to the pages themselves. Files on your hard drive, for the most part, aren't linked between each other (aside from stuff like source code), so the Google comparison is fairly bogus.

      • Exactly, my mysql database on my 450 MHz Pentium II computer has thousands, if not tens of thousands, of key words in its database, and easily manages to serve up query in less than a second. And what's a mid tower anyway? For all that means, you can have a mini-itx cluster going on in that tower, or you can have an old 286. ;)

        I've been waiting for a decent search engine app for the desktop - for both Linux & Windows. Grep is fine, but it's not always the best tool for the job. Alta vista had a decent

    • It doesn't take THAT much computer resources to index your individual PC. There are efforts and programs that will use lucene to index your pc and you can query the index quickly and with low memory overhead even with the expense of a JVM loaded.

      The theory of search is scallable - just the amount of documents on your PC is of such a low scale that even low end PC's would return results quickly.

    • Re:How will this work? (Score:5, Funny)

      by shawb ( 16347 ) on Friday August 27, 2004 @10:36AM (#10088817)
      Oh, this wouldn't be run on pigeons. KDE is of course working on PenguinRank, in which a flock of penguins (volunteers, naturally) would run the analysis. Although one technical difficulty will be in maintaining the cooling systems necessary to keep the penguins at a comfortably temperature.

  • Great. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 27, 2004 @10:04AM (#10088462)
    Just as long as they don't call it Koogle.

  • Do they search inside files? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Nos. ( 179609 ) <andrew@nOSPAm.thekerrs.ca> on Friday August 27, 2004 @10:04AM (#10088464) Homepage
    Not only for KDE's but also googles? For example, will they scan inside my oowriter doc for the keywords I'm searching for? What about email? If not, I don't really see the advantage over things like find.

  • An updated law. (Score:4, Funny)

    by gowen ( 141411 ) <gwowen@gmail.com> on Friday August 27, 2004 @10:06AM (#10088487) Homepage Journal
    Once upon a time, the Law Of Software Envelopment was
    Every program in development at MIT expands until it can read mail.
    Now it appears it needs revising to be
    Every program in existence expands until it gains search engine capabilities
    Search Engine capabilities : one level below self-awareness
    • Every program in existence expands until it gains search engine capabilities

      That's actually perfectly sane for apps that need search capability, as long as:

      (i) The search engine facility is factored out of app code so that there is only one instance in the system which can be invoked by any application that needs it; and

      (ii) The search engine is distributed in some way, perhaps using a DNS architecture or a P2P one, since most of us don't have machines with the processing nor storage capacity of a Googl
  • Google is on the /. "good list" (and with reason), but its support for linux hasn't been inspirational so far.

  • May I suggest naming the next KDE (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Kornhorn.

  • Like Spotlight? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by stealthv ( 225644 ) on Friday August 27, 2004 @10:09AM (#10088539)
    What exactly is a Google-like search feature? I'm assuming they mean something like Spotlight [apple.com].

    • Re:Like Spotlight? (Score:5, Informative)

      by sultanoslack ( 320583 ) on Friday August 27, 2004 @12:48PM (#10090104)
      Well, this idea was from my talk at the KDE developers' conference. I actually submitted it just a few days before Spotlight was announced.

      Similar, but more pervasive and based on some pretty different models for data collection and ranking. Unfortunately this article hits at a time when there really isn't any reasonable resource for what the plans are, but that should show up somewhere on public mailing lists in the next week or two.

      The important differences are that it will be based on a generalized idea linkage inside of the desktop and that it won't be a stand alone tool, but a framework that can be used for having search-centric UIs throughout the desktop.

      It was mentioned that this is similar to KMail and JuK at the moment; while I wrote the search code for both of those and that got some of the ideas rolling in my head, this is a pretty big jump from both of those.

  • Um, what? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MyHair ( 589485 ) on Friday August 27, 2004 @10:10AM (#10088551) Journal
    So, what's the deal? I actually RTFA'ed, but did I miss something? What will KDE do that ht://Dig [htdig.org] and mnogosearch and the like don't? User-friendly setup and use, I suppose.
    • If you actually did RTFA, you would have seen that this search engine is for searching through files on your local drive, NOT searching the web.

  • wow (Score:4, Interesting)

    by minus_273 ( 174041 ) <aaaaa@NOspam.SPAM.yahoo.com> on Friday August 27, 2004 @10:10AM (#10088553) Journal
    the spotlight [apple.com] is really on KDE right now.. hmm..

  • Ho hum (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mehaiku ( 754091 ) on Friday August 27, 2004 @10:11AM (#10088562) Homepage
    Somebody wake me up when this has been integrated with various useful reiser4 plugins.
    • reiser will never make it i'm afraid. document stores are where it's at because they work transparently, on any filesystems. which is what gnome/kde etc need for these nifty meta-data search features. see beagle/storage from gnome.

  • Google, and Tao (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ka9dgx ( 72702 ) * on Friday August 27, 2004 @10:14AM (#10088591) Homepage Journal
    Google couldn't exist without the internet, and HTML. The reason Google is so good is that they are the best on the planet (except maybe the NSA) at extracting metadata from the internet. The pagerank algorithm lives on links, which don't exist on most people's hard drives. Searching and indexing hard drives, like the "find" in Windows, isn't the same, isn't close, and is very likely to disappoint someone expecting Google quality results.

    It's a whole system, the Google/InterNet/Authors... you can't have parts of it standing alone.

    --Mike--

    • Re:Google, and Tao (Score:3, Insightful)

      by MyHair ( 589485 )
      Ah! I forgot about page rank when comparing their idea to ht://Dig and mnogosearch. However, I see some possibilities for 'ranking' local files:
      • Track through Konqueror period and recency of each data file opened
      • Use created, last accessed and last modified date stamps of files
      • Use owner and group and perhaps permissions in ranking
      • Daemon or filesystem hook that tracks period and recency of file access
    • Is there an existing desktop search system that finds connections or similarities between files? How about what programs use what libraries? Finding orphaned libraries?

    • The pagerank algorithm lives on links, which don't exist on most people's hard drives.

      Google itself claims its algorithms work also without links. From their Google Search Appliance FAQ [google.com]:

      Google's search algorithms use more than 100 factors to determine the ranking and relevancy of search results, many of them independent of link structure.

      So it's worse without links but they had to figure out a way to get subscription fees from companies.

      Google is good at this time but if they turn evil, nobody
    • you can do decent search thru the PC-style data without relaying on links. See plug in my sig ;-)
    • "Google quality results"? You mean when I search my hard drive for files related to "history report", I'm NOT going get back 5 pages of results saying "this is the best file for 'history report' nokia samsung"?

      What a rip...

    • That's because all that "find" does is look for filenames matching a pattern, or text within a file. WinFS (and this project, most likely) operate by allowing the search to be performed on the contents of the file, regardless of which application wrote it. So, for example, you could search base64-encoded messages just like you could .conf files or excel spreadsheets. The fact it uses the internet and runs via HTML is really not that important. Neither is the ranking algorithm. The "google features" the
    • I guess that's why Google doesn't provide enterprise solutions for searching documents [google.com].

      The alogrithms underneeth all of the glizt and glamour of the internet apply to many different searching tasks. The engine may not be the same as "Page-rank" but they've got some really smart people over there at google. If KDE can develop (kdevelop? :)) search technology that far surpasses existing capability and approaches that of a Google solution it would be a killer app that could set KDE above the other DE's. B

  • Beagle? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by marvin2k ( 685952 ) on Friday August 27, 2004 @10:16AM (#10088623)
    Please somebody tell me that they will cooperate with the Beagle [gnome.org] project on this and don't reinvent the wheel yet again. It would be a real pain in the ass to have too indexes wasting your hd space which basically do the same thing.
    • Please somebody tell me that they will cooperate with the Beagle project on this and don't reinvent the wheel yet again. It would be a real pain in the ass to have too indexes wasting your hd space which basically do the same thing.

      Well, you could could say the same thing about people who have both KDE and Gnome on their system. I won't find it too hard to believe that two different desktop environments are going to have two different indexing schemes. Just like they have different file managers, defaul

    • Re:Beagle? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by glesga_kiss ( 596639 )
      I'm gonna regret this and lose a lot of karma...BUT...

      Weren't we all slagging of Microsoft for implementing the EXACT same feature in Longhorn, i.e. a databased file system, not all that long ago? But now it's in gnome and kde, it's alright?

  • Why??? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by drmancini ( 712059 ) on Friday August 27, 2004 @10:18AM (#10088646) Homepage
    That's the main question ... in my opinion features like this should be developed as close to the FS as possible ... And if they want to create something like this on a higher level (meaning FS independent and all that stuff ...) why not just create a simple GUI for locate? I mean it's clearly a similar indexing feature and IMHO the work involved shold rather be invested in future FS development ...

    • no (Score:3, Insightful)

      by imsabbel ( 611519 )
      Well. I dont think it should be as close to the files system as possible.
      I want to search engine to index my html files, expand .ps.gz files and scan them, using the newest pdf library to index pdf files, read the compressed staroffice format, ect...

  • Feature request! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bahamat ( 187909 ) on Friday August 27, 2004 @10:20AM (#10088665) Homepage
    Don't tie it to KDE! Make it KDE independant!

    Make it so it can be used from the command prompt. Make it so it can be used from GNOME. Make it so it can be used by other non-de X apps. Make it so it can be used by Apache, or Samba, or anything else running under UNIX.

    Even better, make it compatible with Spotlight [apple.com]. The search API's are diagrammed at a low enough level that it might be a part of Darwin and not Aqua and thereby released as Free Software. But if it isn't, Apple is pushing Spotlight very hard and they want developers to get behind it and use it, so the specification should be pretty open and reproducable.

    • Re:Feature request! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by killjoe ( 766577 ) on Friday August 27, 2004 @10:50AM (#10088975)
      Clearly this is in reaction to spotlight which was in reaction to the "filesystem is a database" mumbling from MS.

      It will be truly ironic if both Apple and KDE beat MS to this punch. For the first time MS vaporware announcements will have caused actual products from competitiors before the vapor even settled.
    • Gnome already has similar plans and looks good already
      http://www.gnome.org/projects/beagle/
      ht tp://www.nat.org/dashboard/
    • The GNUStep project is fairly good at tracking Apple APIs (they've got most of Foundation and AppKit, as well as some extra things such as the Address Book), so I wouldn't be surprised if they develop an implementation of the Spotlight APIs as well, once they're finalised. GNUStep apps don't require X - the best supported implementation of the GUI backend is X11, but there are experimental GDI (Windows) and OpenGL ones, and there's no requirement for a GNUStep application to use a GUI at all.

  • Reality Check (Score:3, Insightful)

    by alexborges ( 313924 ) on Friday August 27, 2004 @10:22AM (#10088681)
    Okay. I think this is a great idea. Everyone that has seen how windows will work post-longhorn, how OSX works today, can see that the filesystem hierarchy metaphor is, thank god, on its way out.

    But, this has to be done well. I mean, this has to be not desktop implementation centric, but filesystem/kernel centric. That is, in order for this to work really well, you need a filesystem that can categorize files and search through them efficiently (almost like a database).

    Reiser4 may be able to do this, WinFS will do this (will have a mssql core), and if this all means a neat kde interface to locate or an extra indexing service, it will suck on linux.

    So. It would be really cool if they put it up in freedesktop.org as an RFC so that the whole community may get involved. This cannot be the sole effort of KDE if it is to work well.

  • Google is fast, but not the best for the desktop (Score:5, Informative)

    by orasio ( 188021 ) on Friday August 27, 2004 @10:22AM (#10088683) Homepage
    What I would like to see, is the speed of google, adapted for the user. The web metaphor justifies going to a text-box, and hitting Enter, but I'm not willing to do that just to look into a page. That's why incremental search is so successful. Maybe it would be nice to implement better metodologies, that have already been proposed. Just because the Google interface is good for the web, it doesn't mean it's good for the local machine. Maybe it would be nice to go to one of the sources of recent improvements (incremental searching) and implement what he suggests, in its full form.

    from Jef Raskin's
    The Humane Interface [sourceforge.net]


    Part II: WHAT INTERFACES SHOULD HAVE

    A useful starting set of solutions to the problems outlined above includes

    * A better text search methodology, effective both within a local document or system and with respect to extremely large data spaces such as the web
    * A method of eliminating all modal aspects of the basic human-machine interface, a method that is readily learned by newcomers and which is habituating
    * An improved navigation method, as applicable to finding your way around within a picture or memo as within a collection of images, documents, or networks; a method which makes use of inborn and learned human navigational skills
    * A set of detail improvements to some existing mechanisms that make them consistent with the goals and principles of the rest of the design.

    Better text searching requires that the search be extremely fast (the next instance appears within human reaction time), interactive at the typed character (or spoken morpheme) level, and not based on dialog box interaction. You should be able to change the pattern (what you are seeking an instance of) at any time, including during a search. The results should be shown in context and not as a list of documents or sites. A search mechanism that is sufficiently fast and powerful also can serve as a cursor positioning mechanism in text. Such a cursor positioning tool can be significantly faster than graphical pointing devices and can unify local and internetworked information retrieval.

    -------------

    Well, maybe KDE is not the right project to do that, and I should shut up and help with the project Jef Raskin himself has started, and is slowly being developed, The Humane Environment [sourceforge.net].

    • Rememberance Agent (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Tekmage ( 17375 )
      That whole text searching, no-dialogs blurb sounds a lot like The Remembrance Agent [remem.org], as it plugs into emacs.

      I had started coding up a Java-based front-end which monitored the X clipboard buffer, but didn't get very far - lack of time. What little code I did write can be found here [clothbot.org].

  • If the article... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jayloden ( 806185 )
    It actually points out that rather than just searching files by name, the new search would let you search something the way you search on google...

    i.e. I want to configure my ftp server, so I type in "configure ftp server" and it returns an appropriate help document, or I search "foo" and it will search through my files for that phrase.

    that's how I see it working, in any case, not just "find -name filename" because that would be reinventing the wheel...that's what slocate and find are for, or "find files"

  • search capabilities at the FS level (Score:4, Interesting)

    by InodoroPereyra ( 514794 ) on Friday August 27, 2004 @10:29AM (#10088753)
    There is a nice whitepaper on the future of reiserfs and other filesystems [namesys.com] for Mac* and Win* OS. The question is: at what level do you need to implement efficient search capabilities ? Filesystem ? Userspace ? Both ?

  • the statement makes no sense (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dioscaido ( 541037 ) on Friday August 27, 2004 @10:31AM (#10088769)
    Why "google like"? What separates google from other engines is its page-rank algorithm. I hardly think KDE is applying page-rank to local disks (wouldn't make sense). So then, the headline should just read "KDE plans search capability". Whoopdy do.

  • "Google" the new version of "enterprise enabled"? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dirk Pitt ( 90561 ) on Friday August 27, 2004 @10:38AM (#10088836) Homepage
    'Seems like just yesterday that every press release for every company had to be loaded with such synergistic words as enterprise-enabled, web-widgeted doo-dads, whether it was really relevant or not. Is Google the next version of this? I can see it now:

    Duke Nukem: now with Google-style weapons lookup!

    Norton Antivirus: Now with Google-style virus lookup!

    AutoCad 2005: Now with Google-style component lookup!

    Crazy world. Next thing you know they'll be hooking up lava-lamps to build machines.

  • Very odd quote from RedHat (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Morgaine ( 4316 ) on Friday August 27, 2004 @10:39AM (#10088846)
    From the article:

    Paul Salazar, the European marketing director at Red Hat, said his company has chosen to focus on Linux on the server rather than on the desktop, due to the fact that it cannot compete with Microsoft's research and development budget.

    This is a pretty odd statement coming from a corporation with all its eggs in the Open Source basket. One would normally expect a company to believe in the superiority of its chosen business model.

    Surely it's an article of faith that the "virtual equivalent R&D budget" of the FOSS community is hundreds of times greater than Microsoft's corporate R&D budget, and our R&D manpower is thousands of times larger. What FOSS lacks (comparatively) is strong product focus, but many would say that that is a good thing.

    Is RedHat having second thoughts, or was this just an unfortunate individual comment from a marketting droid?
    • I'm not being rude here, but it's a business not a religion. It has to be concerned with actual, tangible resources. The theoretical millions-strong geek coding army is a nice idea and somewhat accurate, but it can't be called on by Red Hat to help them or their products when they want. It's no Batman.

      You read the article, so you've seen the amount of money they have, versus that spent by MS each year. There's absolutely no way on earth they can compete. I mean, Microsoft (whether you hate them or not

    • It's a perfectly valid quote. How is it "pretty odd" or "unfortunate"?. How does it imply that Redhat doesn't believe in its business model?

      Redhat's business model is:
      1. Take an available open-source OS
      2. Use it's own engineers to build upon the OS
      3. Sell the OS into the market

      That's they're business model and they aren't changing it. They're just focusing their market. In the desktop market, parts 1&2 don't allow them to compete with MS. The features needed to compete don't exist in the OS, and RH doesn'

  • Looks a bit... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Abaci ( 808471 )
    To be honest it looks like a gimmick. The reason for the commands in Googles search is because your narrowing down literally billions of pages of crap. You dont particularly need that flexability with an O/S search facility. I have found pretty much all I need with current functionality. Whats more important is the speed of the search being attempted but they are building on top of the standard search facility. If anything it may even slow it down.

    As for its comparison to WinFS if MS get it right. Which

  • Background (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kris ( 824 ) <kris-slashdot@koehntopp.de> on Friday August 27, 2004 @11:00AM (#10089116) Homepage
    The article in N&T is based on ideas by Scott Wheeler (and Till Adam, and Aaron Seigo and others). See Beyond Hierarchical Data: Search and Meta Data as Fundamental Interface Elements [kde.org], Scotts lecture on query-based interfaces at aKademy.

    "Google like" here means just "searching", but the result will in fact be more like WinFS than Google in that it is using file data and file metadata to index and find things. Interface-wise expect more quicksearch bars like the one in Kmail 1.7 (KDE 3.3.0, Till Adam) and JuK (Scott Wheeler).

    See also a Blog entry of mine [koehntopp.de] (german language) in the same vein.

  • Where are the breakthroughs? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wandazulu ( 265281 ) on Friday August 27, 2004 @11:04AM (#10089156)
    This idea, while it sounds neat, also suggests that it's trying to keep up with the Spotlight feature of OSX Tiger and Longhorn's whatever-you-call-it. I'm not at all bashing the project, but what I'm curious about is why we haven't seen Linux leading in more advanced features, stuff that would be really advanced out-of-this-world concepts that will, eventually, someday, really advance our idea of computing.

    I'm sure that it's being done to some extent, I would think that if you're a Phd doing advanced windowing research, you'd want your platform to be Linux so that you can code it the way you want.

    While Linux is the natural choice to use for the breakthrough concepts, I really don't know of any. While Linux has *great* technology, and is definately an OS par excellence, it feels like it's more-or-less keeping up with the Joneses, instead of leading in new ideas and technologies. It's said that everyone waits for Apple to come up with something so that it can be copied. Well, why wait for them?

    Maybe there isn't as much research going on as I would think (not being in Academia), or it's more of the "faster-smaller" variety, but when the "next big thing" happens in computing, I hope it is on Linux *first*.

    • Re:Where are the breakthroughs? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Seanasy ( 21730 ) on Friday August 27, 2004 @12:29PM (#10089963)

      I don't think Linux is a natural choice for breakthrough concepts in user interfaces. It is in lots of other areas and maybe in more basic research in UI but it's not user driven as much as OS X and Windows.

      Both KDE and Gnome are good at constantly progressing, trying new things. And they're good at listening to users. But, I think they don't have the pressure/motivation and resources right now to come up with something truly novel.

      I would guess that this partly because they're under some pressure to provide the functionality in OS X or Windows. They're playing catch-up almost constantly. Also, their flexibility seems to slow them down. There were big changes in Gnome 2.0 but they seemed more like a change in direction than movement forward. My impression of KDE is that they put most effort in the backend of the system where you're not likely to notice it. And both projects work hard to try to make everyone happy.

      My impression of Apple is that Apple (Jobs) likes to think big picture and then throw lot of effort behind a handful of projects. The media hub picture spawned the iApps and iPod. The interface picture birthed Expose, Spotlight and that widget thing. MS seems to try to do (or at least promise) everything then implement it poorly, then keep plugging away at it until they get it right or give up. But they do get it right sometimes and they do try make things a 'better experience' for the user. I personally think they miss the mark more times than not because they burden their innovations with user-hostile elements like DRM.

      OSS needs visionaries but to implement a vision you need everyone to get behind it. I think that's harder in OSS because visionaries seem a bit dictatorial. It's not impossible, I'm sure, but going from a mainly academic research project to something people can use is hard and probably needs a steady guiding hand.

    • I submitted this talk before Spotlight was announced. Fundamentally they're different concepts, but that's not clear from the pretty poor coverage that's hitting the news sites now.

  • Directional problem (Score:4, Insightful)

    by invisik ( 227250 ) * on Friday August 27, 2004 @11:04AM (#10089162)
    IMHO, KDE should be moving toward better functionality and ease of use for the desktop then writing Google into it. I understand the desire to dominate the world, but I don't think the basics are quote covered yet.

    The functionality of the K-apps and how loosely they integrate (and don't integrate with anything else) is at about MS Office 95 level.

    I see searchings importance on a scale of 1 to 10 at about a 3. Most users I know have everything in one folder, maybe a couple of nested folders and that's it. Not too hard to find stuff if there's one or two places to look.

    -m

    PS: Was there an article to read? :)

  • It's just journalists (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JRiddell ( 216337 ) on Friday August 27, 2004 @11:08AM (#10089202) Homepage
    This is a classic case of journalists picking up on keywords (Google) and jumping on them. The article had us screaming with laughter here at akademy the KDE conference. The point is just that it is easier to find things on the web than on your desktop. Files and settings should use search because they have outgrown the heirachical setup. However this is just vapourware for now .

    By the way the next version of KDE will be KDE 3.4, branching to KDE 4 when Qt 4 beta is available at the end of the year.

    Transcripts from all the talks I went to are at http://conference2004.kde.org/sched-devconf.php [kde.org].

    Jonathan Riddell

    "KDE goes for IPO selling 145,233 shares at 1059,342euro each giving KDE a higher market capitalisation than Microsoft and AOL combined."

  • I'm feeling lucky.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by l4m3z0r ( 799504 ) <<kevin> <at> <uberstyle.net>> on Friday August 27, 2004 @11:25AM (#10089387)
    This button will be great, instead of opening *random webpages it will now open random applications...



    * note: not actually random, void where prohibited...

  • YES! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Bluesman ( 104513 ) on Friday August 27, 2004 @11:27AM (#10089403) Homepage
    This is where file storage, at least at the level where users interact with it, should be headed. I think file managers should be more like Google.

    Hierarchical trees are horrible ways to manage data, especially if it's a bunch of data that can be classified multiple ways and you typically won't remember everything you save.

    There's no reason why /home/user/photos/Christmas should be distinct from /home/user/Christmas/photos. I should be able to type in either path and get the same result set.

    This would solve a lot of the hassle of organizing files. The only choice I'd have to make is how specific I want to get when choosing file names and directories.

    Indexing of file contents is an added plus, but not even necessary for a huge gain in organization.

  • Time for the usual really bad name (Score:4, Funny)

    by Catbeller ( 118204 ) on Friday August 27, 2004 @11:35AM (#10089497) Homepage
    Let's see, after GIMP, GNU, Ogg-Vorbis, and all the other really badly chosen names for good software, what will this one be named?

    Possible names that will sound cool only to the geekly-enabled:

    - Dingo
    - Dingus
    - HeadCheez
    - Buffy
    - MK-47
    - FUALL V56.34
    - All-seeing crystal of Gompfor (unique artifact)
    - STDcipher

    Seriously, someone call a professional here... :)

  • You can already use google to search your computer (Score:3, Funny)

    by kavau ( 554682 ) on Friday August 27, 2004 @01:19PM (#10090426) Homepage
    He pointed out that currently, it is much easier to find files on the Web than on a computer.

    Simple solution: put all your files into your public_html folder!

  • I Think I Want A Semantic Desktop (Score:3, Interesting)

    by reallocate ( 142797 ) on Friday August 27, 2004 @03:11PM (#10091360)
    Better desktop searching is welcome, but how about something that imposes some order and structure on the data on my machine?

    Not in terms of a filesystem, and not in terms of a tool that indexes everything and points a search engine at the index. Rather, I want something that overlays all that and imposes structure and organization on the information and knowledge that is recorded in all the those data.

    Having done that, give me the tools to browse and manipulate it.

    Gnome's Dashboard seems to be sniffing around the edges of this notion. But I'm thinking of something more significant, something that might potentially represent the user's concept of the machine, relegating filesystens, files, and data formats to lower and less relevant levels.

    I.e. computer users do not need to be aware of the actual structure of their hard drive, or how their chips and circuit boards operate, because the OS and other software abstract all that out of the way. Why not bump it up?

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