Building the Super Computer: Indexing Data and Documents with 'Google Desktop'

I'm not exactly sure what this thread is about either.

And me too.
A little bit of everything I guess. :blink:
I have yet to find a way to integrate the situation in the Middle East.

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No, the 'Super Computer' I mentioned has to have a different, more intuitive approach than today's Personal Computing. People collecting insane amounts of data is just one reason. Of course, a control freak who buys a technical manual with every new OS, doesn't want to hear that. I'm a control freak too. I want to know everything that is going on, on my system. But that is not the average person.

How about a look into the future of Personal Computing, lets say ten years from now?
Here's an idea: 'Folder structure my ass.'
That's right. You can make ten or twenty, maybe even a little more folders for your belongings. But at some point it turns into insanity.

Soon people won't know where their thousands and thousands of files are located on the hard drive. Everything will be safe and secure, backups can be made, but in order to access it all, people will go through a GUI that takes care of the internal structure. The order will be one that the computer generates on the surface (for the user). How it looks under the hood won't concern people in the future. Kids that grow up with iPads and similar products won't be interested in making folders.

Searching inside of documents like PDF is my personal situation. But a 'deep search' like that is a good representation of future issues, because the amount of possible search-results is much higher. I print countless news articles to PDF for example, so I can go back and read them again. But if I'm honest, what are the chances? So, those articles are just piling up. But if they're indexed it would give me access again, cause every page of every document would be subject to every search. As the storage capacity of computers increases, the access to all the data just has to change.

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I heard about another application. It seems to have a good reputation too.
http://www.dtsearch.com/dtsoftware.html

BTW, people shouldn't get hung up on Google. It's just one possibility, cause I'm used to the Google Look. I wouldn't let a computer that has been indexed by it, on the Internet.

If somebody wants to chime in on the future of Personal Computing, under the aspect of increasing capacities, and a public tendency towards products like the iPad...
 
^--- So you want a Mac with Spotlight.
 
If you really want to look into the future, everything is slowly going the way of streaming and cloud computing. Personal storage may very well someday be a non-issue.
 
If you really want to look into the future, everything is slowly going the way of streaming and cloud computing. Personal storage may very well someday be a non-issue.

No way am i ever storing all my shit on the internet.
 
I hate the idea of it too. But I can't deny that it is happening. Not in the near future, but if you look at stuff like OnLive, once they finally get it working properly it will really take off (the necessary network infrastructure needs to be put in place too). 50+ years from now I can see a personal computer just being a dummy terminal.
 
Btw does anyone know a program that allows OpenOffice to create a document database akin to how email programs manage the received emails.
Simply something that automatically builds a database where the created documents are stored by date and then indexed for key words.
 
50+ years from now I can see a personal computer just being a dummy terminal.

A dummy terminal alone wouldn't do it, the single computer had to serve a purpose and contribute. As far as belonging to a global network that is almost an organism. With the single computer acting as sort of a cell.

If Everything has a tendency to be connected with everything else of it's kind (in this case, technology driven by the motivation and goals of people), this concept would be possible.

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Nobody with a solution for #27?
Anyone?
 
Yes, that is more akin to what I am talking about. Dummy terminal isn't quite right, but the real horsepower would not be in the machine sitting in front of you.
 
A dummy terminal alone wouldn't do it, the single computer had to serve a purpose and contribute. As far as belonging to a global network that is almost an organism. With the single computer acting as sort of a cell.

If Everything has a tendency to be connected with everything else of it's kind (in this case, technology driven by the motivation and goals of people), this concept would be possible.

Nope. The current trends of "cloud computing", "Netbooks" and "web 2.0" point away from this, (and thus, from Skynet and Wintermute) to the everything but the display being "in the cloud", which is a classic client-server concept with dumb terminals. Even in MMORPGs your computer does not do much more than to interface you with the server. The only difference to a VT100 terminal is that today's applications require more power to even display them.
 
The dumb-client/almighty-server concept is no evolution. It would mean that everybody has to rely on one centralized point. The 'Super Computer' would just be outsourced to another single location. And if that One fails, everything is down.

Having computational power and even storage spread out over a network in fragments would be advanced, cause if one point fails the network would fix the hole.

The iPad would fit in such a dumb-client/server scenario. The whole idea is just not evolved, let alone challenging.
 
Having computational power and even storage spread out over a network in fragments would be advanced, cause if one point fails the network would fix the hole.

It would also be the end of privacy and maintainability. It would certainly be an evoltution, but none one could seriously want when thinking it through. Client/server was bad enough and i find it telling that most of the advocates of cloud computing and the like are too young to have experienced how bad client/server computing was in it's heyday.

What we need (or, at least, what i want to keep) is a device which core functions are autonomous. What we need furthermore is a storage solution for personal data that can be 100% removed from the cloud/network/whatever. That's the only way to be safe (and why i'm not on facebook, by the way).
 
I'm far from an advocate. I hate the concept and you can pry my gaming machine from my cold, dead hangs. But I can't deny that we are heading in that direction.
 
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