Comments on: Virtually on parity

By: acl

acl — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 06:53:41 +0000

I am long time Mac user (since 1985) but I am interested in hearing what Brandon has to say. Since I don’t personally use Vista (I do use XP at work) it is interesting to hear from an “expert” on Vista search.

It sounds like Vista is using change notifications similar to Tiger. Anyone else confirm?

By: Steven

Steven — Fri, 30 May 2008 22:20:10 +0000

I agree, Brandon has every right to comment here, and he was hardly trying to disguise himself — he linked to his blog — so it’s nonsense to accuse him of “astroturfing”.

Ixian — that is a really amazing story!

By: addicted

addicted — Fri, 30 May 2008 21:09:08 +0000

I am back to using Vista on my sister’s computer, and I am constantly reminded why I installed XP over the pre-installed Vista on my PC. It is SLOW!

It took me 15 minutes to rename 5 files. They were scanned images, and I had the preview turned on (so the icons were previews) and every click brought on a 10-15 second delay. It was really frustrating…

By: Brian

Brian — Fri, 30 May 2008 18:57:31 +0000

I am no Microsoft fanboy (in fact, I am typing this note on my iMac), but I am troubled by the way commenters in this thread are spanking Brandon Paddock. He posted under his own name and linked directly to his identity. In my book, it’s only astroturfing if you attempt to conceal who you are.

It would have been ideal if he had started his post with a disclaimer (a “claimer”, maybe?) saying that he is a Microsoft employee who works on search. Hell, we should be encouraging Microsoft employees to publicly claim ownership for their work and defend it. I myself would love to have a frank exchange of views with whatever Microsoft employee thinks it’s OK that my wife’s new Vista laptop took 20 minutes for its first boot.

By: Eytan

Eytan — Fri, 30 May 2008 18:16:16 +0000

Brandon, indexed search was added in Mac OS 8.5 as part of Sherlock. The VTwin index engine Apple had been working on for a few years before then. This was background indexing. Tiger introduced the Spotlight idea of updating the index whenever you did a save, after an initial index, and of using extra metadata for indexes – is that being done in Vista (indexing at every save the file being saved)?

By: Ixian

Ixian — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:26:56 +0000

Steven, depending on how many files the PC has to go through it can take a very long time on XP. Especially if the windows search tool hasn’t already looked for and found the file before (it can be set to cache results if you want). I misplaced a text file once (ironically while trying to organize them) on one of my home machines, really a media center but I do some writing and what not on it. Being a media center it’s got over 1TB of storage between it’s two drives currently in use (about 1.15TB out of 1.25TB to be accurate) all of which are images, text files, a few movies and shows, and the popular LAN games I play (since the media PC is less than 1/3rd the weight of my main gaming comp and much easier to transport around for LAN parties not happening at my place). Anyways, hundreds of thousands of files and a powerful but not cutting edge processor combined to take a few hours to find the document I’d misplaced. I didn’t actually time it but I did manage to make dinner, eat it, watch a few TV shows, and up my play time in what was then the latest Castlevania release (for the record, it was Curse of Darkness and I made it through the whole church while waiting) before checking back and finding it still wasn’t done searching. Eventually the document was found, but by then my muse had left me, at least I wasn’t frustrated to the point of forgetting to remedy my error.

Still, I would’ve been very happy if it was only minutes for that search.

By: Jeff Gardner

Jeff Gardner — Fri, 30 May 2008 13:25:48 +0000

Brilliant. I love it all.

I own a mac, but as a peon worker in a company full of windows machines, I can see the beauty of XP. It may be annoying when compared with OS X but when compared to Vista, XP is an efficient, easy to use system that responds the way you expect. Vista acts like it has a mind of it’s own (granted it’s the mind of a 3 year old, but hey…).

Our company bought 10 licenses of VIsta and so far 2 have been used. I for one, used it for about 2 months, then switched back to XP. Noticed a massive boost in productivity as well! And our resident computer ninja has promised to quit if the boss forces Vista on him.

And to give some perspective to the people that say it’s only Mac users that hate VIsta, he doesn’t use or like Macs. But one thing is for sure, he hates Vista.

By: Brian Warshaw

Brian Warshaw — Fri, 30 May 2008 11:34:36 +0000

From the website of Brandon Paddock:

“Hi. I’m Brandon. I’m a geek, and I work on Search technology for Windows at Microsoft. This is my blog.”

It’s possible that what you’ve posted here about Vista is true, but I doubt people are inclined to listen to what you have to say when your blog indicates that this is nothing more than you defending something that you worked on.

By: Steven

Steven — Fri, 30 May 2008 11:25:50 +0000

Search does NOT have a noticeable impact on Windows Vista’s performance characteristics.

Nice! No “noticeable impact” is almost as good as “virtually equal”. There is an impact, but, er, it’s not “noticeable” (always depending, that is, on the kinds of things you normally notice)…

I must admit I was also intrigued by this bit, which remains in the document:

The result is users can find information significantly faster (measured in minutes), increasing productivity far in excess of the loss in speed of operations (measured in milliseconds).

Did Windows customers really use to have to wait minutes for a file or email search to complete? I’m only asking.

By: Harvard Irving

Harvard Irving — Fri, 30 May 2008 07:07:31 +0000

I love the first line of the document:

“No one would expect a new OS adoption to be easy…”

Huh? I’ve used many different Operating Systems over the last 25 years, and the only one I’ve ever had any difficulty “adopting” was Windows.

So, hell yes, I sure as hell do expect migrating to a new OS to be easy. Why wouldn’t it be easy? It’s 2008, modern Operating Systems are pretty damn reliable and easy to use. Except for Windows, of course. I expect that there might be some small differences that “take some getting used to” – but that’s not an actual difficulty or problem – it’s easy.