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Windows XP has had Indexed Searching for years as part of the Search Companion - it's poorly documented, and not nearly as flashy as Windows Desktop Search (or whatever it is that Vista uses), but it does the whole indexing thing just fine. After it's finished searching the index, it'll do its regular old-fashioned search, too, so you're getting the best of both words.

Here's how to get started.

Here are some more advanced intructions. Searching for particular properties, boolean operators asf; stuff that's in the Help File but, like I said, poorly documented.(You don't need to use that program)

If you've installed WDS, but would like to go back to using Search Companion by default, John tells you how.

Cheers!

As someone already said Intel's onboard stuff is the best out there. Especially if you are building a new computer, which propably don't have anything but pci-e slots.
With older hardware there were more options. I have an old Ati Radeon 9200 in my closet, just in case I need AGP graphics card. It's the last Radeon that works completely with open source drivers. (also 7000 and 8500 and 9000 work).

So it doesn't look too good, does it..

Well there is hope. Intel is working on discrete graphics chips. read more here and here.
I believe Intel has no reason to change their Linux friendly policy. So I hope they come up with a decent discrete graphics card and release open source drivers with it.
Since Intel is such a big player it just might encourage others to do the same.

I'm amazed at how much of an opinion you have on a device that isn't even been released yet,

Apple's own materials tell us that it has desktop synchronization and no third party applications:

http://www.apple.com/iphone/

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36 919

Furthermore, it's likely that the desktop synchronization will evolve out of iSync and iTunes.

The fact that Jobs has been lying about why Apple made the iPhone so restrictive also speaks for itself.

Of course, Apple will likely offer some form of network-based synchronization at some point (probably at least to .Mac and maybe to Google); that doesn't change what I was saying. A programmable, network-centric Google phone is still a much better choice than Apple's proprietary, iPod-like iPhone.

The backwards compatibility of the PS3 is getting worse rather than better, the next PS3 revision will use software emulation like the 360 and so far test results aren't pretty.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30743

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37 954

Oh, note the Inquirer article that the original article links to:

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37 954
"Vista activation crackers are criminals".

Yup, it's on the web, so it must be true.

Hi, I had posted the article on the site. The reason they took it down is because I openly suggested that the reason that they did not want to preload free Linux distributions like Ubuntu, FC, and openSuSE on inspirons and other affordable models was because they have a non-disclosed OEM agreement with Steve Ballmer. I named Steve Ballmer by name, and I mentioned that such an agreement violates the antitrust settlement Microsoft agreed to with the US Department of Justice.

They clearly got upset and pulled it. The negative article link probably didn't help.

Dell needs to wake up or get out of the computer business. I'll say it here again, Supply does NOT fuel demand.
And they will lose market share regardless of what OEM license discount Ballmer gives them to opt out of Linux on retail systems, because their own customers don't want that anymore.

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=96 78

Remember this 90% discount to Munich, but they still refused.
Well, don't ask yourself why Dell won't load Ubuntu, it's clear they took it, and will continue to take it.

The answer is simple, just don't buy a Dell. Tigerdirect.com laptops are much nicer, cheaper, and you can put whatever you want on them.

I'd argue that death is an effective way to quit.

So after the industry realizes the iPhone doesn't do anything that hasn't been done for years on other phones, and people realize they can't even develop for it, the new marketing hype is that Jobs has made it great because of the deal he made with Cingular?

This sums up how I feel about it...
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37 710

The iPhone just gets better and better via the Marketing machine, maybe someday Apple will get back to actually creating something 'new', right now their best 'new' thing is an OS based on 1989 Next concepts. And the UI paradigm from the 1989 Next still outclasses OSX.

So I guess Apple is radical and innovative if you date everything back 18 years.

I saw this story http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=13 290 dated in 2003 so I checked them out just now. http://www.ntt-east.co.jp/product_e/05/index.html. "Basic" is I suppose an individual at US$90/month. Most people in Japan live in a "Hyper Family Type" and they'll be charged US$46/month, but they could probably get an individual line. These are 100mbps maximum connections. Here are prices from NTT West, going into 40+Mbps. http://www.ntt-west.co.jp/service_guide/5great/gre at03.html

Canada isn't the only nation with slack copyright laws. What about, say Romania, which publically declared that they built their country on piracy. Or for example Sweden which hasn't been cracking down on piracy either?

But that is besides the point. This is just yet another attempt by a US lobby to try to use the US government to boss Canada around.

"PQI, WHICH IS showing an engineering sample of a 64GB flash-based hard disk drive at Computex says the price for the expensive, but desirable, storage devices could fall below $1000 before the end of this year. "It depends on the chip price, but maybe it can get below $1000 this year" said Bob Chiu of PQI's Disk on Module sales dept. A competitor confirmed that such a precipitous fall in price was a possibility."

Because of the low power consumption and modest speeds flash drives will mostly be interesting for laptops, at least initially.

Here's some picture proof:

http://www.bnac.biz/images/im%20in%20ur%20base%20n erding%20it%20up.jpg

(Original source here - http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=27 139 - my, were we surprised when we found our own picture improved upon!)

In the mean while, the inquirer continues its series of posts of articles about external video card connections.

Me? I fly with proprietary fibre solutions! Well, I would if i were dirt rich.

Having your graphics display remote from the consoles they are attached to is absolutely amazing. I wish we could wire our entire office with decent thin clients.

Actually, they rolled it out for a few days without checking for browser type. These guys were reporting on the browser problems before Wal-mart started blocking non-IE browsers.

My impression is that the developers are "low-bidder" types who didn't even conceive that non-IE browsers exist until people started making fun of them. I believe that because of the reports of all the terrible coding and excessive waste of bandwidth in the source for the pages that the video section is serving out.

from the article: http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37 548

"What are those cores? They are not GPUs, they are x86 'mini-cores', basically small dumb in order cores with a staggeringly short pipeline. They also have four threads per core, so a total of 64 threads per "CGPU". To make this work as a GPU, you need instructions, vector instructions, so there is a hugely wide vector unit strapped on to it. The instruction set, an x86 extension for those paying attention, will have a lot of the functionality of a GPU."

To answer your question more directly. An x86 GPU is just what it sounds like: a processor thats main purpose is to produce graphics, it also happens to use the x86 instruction set along with its various extensions and probably a few graphics specific extensions.

In this same sense I can make an x86 dsp, an x86 sound card, etc. now it might not be very good at those functions but x86 is just a description of the ISA being used, nothing more.

According to the Inquirer, it seems to be a wonderfully dreadful combination of cluelessness, a horrible CMS and definitely non-standard HTML (or whatever) code. Just run the page through the W3C validator...

I mean, two contradicting doctype declarations in one page? And it only gets worse.

If MS clamped down on piracy right now, then people would switch to cheaper / free products in a heartbeat.
russian schools abandon ms after piracy case, it's allready happening.

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32 550

From an article in The Inquirer:

"WE'VE BEEN HEARING the "K8L" codename for ages now, but we can say now, straight from the horse's mouth, K8L was never a codename for AMD's upcoming generation of chips."

If we are to believe the article, K8L was apparently the code name for the Turion64 where the L stands for Low-power. K9 was the X2 processors, so that would make the upcoming Barcelona the K10. The article also claims that the differences between the K10 and K9 and K8 are larger than what most people assume.

Did anyone read the open letter to Steve Jobs over at the Inquirer?

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37 522

• FPU boost: this seems to be based on several things - one is the obvious widening of SSE2 issues. Others are increasing instruction fetch from 16B/cycle to 32B/cycle, making the FPU scheduler 128bit, unaligned loads and a doubling of cache bandwidth.
  
• Virtualization: Nested page tables and reduces witching times for the hypervisor.
  
• Power: CPU and northbridge on separate power planes so they can be in different power modes (clock+voltage); apparently, voltages of different cores are independent as well, so that should give lower power consumption when not at full load (with appropriate MB support) AFAIR this is better than what Intel has, but I might be mis-remembering.
  
• the extra cache is long overdue and one will have to see whether their way of managing it is smart enough (things like moving data from L3 to individual caches, but sometimes keeping code shared in L3)
  

There is no point upgrading. XP's got support for the next six years, I'm in no great hurry for a 64-bit OS & DX10 is pointless until there's games support. Vista does have the distinct feeling of WindowsME about it. Another two year wait? No big deal, Vista got put off for that long, anyway & we all survived. Continued incremental hardware upgrades until XP dies a death, I feel.

Good article on the nVidia/Vista driver situation (also applies to MAudio)...
http://www.bit-tech.net/columns/2007/02/10/not_enj oying_the_view/1.html

It'd be rough justice if Intel knocks nVidia out in the meantime & it's set for the same schedule as the next Windows release...
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37 548

According to http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=35 011 there is nothing breathtakingly "new" here. If you were hoping for dramatic changes like r1 += r2 * r3 or altivec style permute, it is simply not there.

"Will AMD dethrone Intel again?" Dear AMD, meet Larrabee. http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37 548 AMD might kick Intel in the nuts a little but definitely not dethrone.

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37 520

I imagine that the prices are very carefully calculated to yield the maximum amount of profit (feel free to correct me if anyone has statistics to prove otherwise).

I couldn't have said it better myself. Of course, this ignores the concept of a "fair" price. But since the word fair is such a difficult word to pin down, I'll have to give it my best shot.
There is the model of competitive pricing, which is more or less built on the cost of selling. When you go the grocery store to buy your dozen eggs, you can see they're not very expensive; a dollar at most in most areas. I would say that is relatively in line with how much it costs to get the eggs there, with just enough left over to make the grocer 'feel like' putting them there, and the farmer to sell them.
Now there's the darker side. I feel like I first became aware of this concept at my local amusement park, with the obviously jacked up food prices. It's $2.50 for the cup of french fries, which after cost of goods and wages, probably set them back 45 cents at most. I use this example not only because it's the perfect example of monopoly pricing, but also because there's a (relatively) fair market price waiting outside at your local fast food joint. 99 cents for more or less the same product.

I think consumers subtly realize when they're getting screwed. Wendy's doesn't have access to a pricing model of "do you get your food or don't you", they're stuck with "get it here or get it elsewhere". The amusement park definitely realizes you can't get it elsewhere, and the prices show it. People buy, of course, because it's usually a pain to leave and come back, and a day with hungry->whiney kids is hardly 'amusing'.
Ok, so maybe I should be thankful that my local amusement park is offering me the choice to not go hungry, but I know I'm getting screwed. They're making their extra buck off of my back, and I'm well aware of it. The same goes with the record labels. They keep the copyrights for the works that 'their' artists produce, so they don't have to fight against someone else selling the same music. Thanks to their convenient cartels, they don't even have to compete with each other over similar genres. The result? You guessed it. Overinflated prices. Again, this concept of a "fair" price is a difficult one to pin down, but I would certainly say it's less than the $12.75 we're stuck with now. Even 99 cents per song for the ones I like is a tough sell. I've been on a farm before (well, at least visited one), and I have a small idea of what a pain in the ass it is to raise chickens. I feel like a dollar is a pretty modest price to pay for 12 of them, actually.

Now there's the RIAA. Of course, their model is based on a certain amount of uncertainty of whether or not an artist will succeed, so it's a bit harder to gett a spot price (as opposed to measuring the effort it takes to raise chickens for eggs). Well, they claim that it's a lot, but in my experience, whenever a company is being secretive about their pricing, I've found that something fishy is usually going on. Music consumers (and artists... the monopoly works both ways) have been getting screwed for a long time, and it's no secret. Now, somebody comes along with a way to screw them back, and they cry foul? Please. I don't want to hear it.

What the Napster era really produced wasn't a country full of pirates. It was a new fair price. Now, the music industry actually has to compete with something. And it sucks for them. Bye-bye amusement park profits. Hello market price. But back to this

Their open sauce OCR reader is a great tool...

And look, people want to sue NVidia for their "Vista drivers fiasco":
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37 396/

ATI has made incredible strides since XP was released. In fact, Microsoft recommends ATI over Nvidia

I agree that Microsoft is partially to blame for rushing the product to market, but in this case I think some hardware vendors responded worse than others. ATI's drivers, in general seem to be much more stable, especially on the x64 version. Even microsoft recommends ATI over Nvidia.

ATI's drivers are the best thats out there, especially for Vista. Don't believe me? Even Microsoft recommends ATI over Nvidia. A quick google search will reveal that ATI's drivers are currently much more stable than Nvidias and offer many more features.



Your experience sounds unfortunate, but it seems like the exception rather than the rule. Of course, the 9600 bluescreens could be caused by the graphics driver OR the AGP driver. The x800 if AGP could be crashing for similar reasons and a driver update could just be exposing them. A lot of AGP hardware has been plagued with these kinds of issues in Vista.

Just because the drivers were released on day one, does not mean they released good drivers. By the way, have you tried running the 64bit version of Vista? Or playing any games? I think your experience will be much different. Also, many of the driver features aren't even enabled even on the latest version.

Your experience seems to be the exception rather than the rule. A quick google search will show that many review sites rank ATI's driver much higher than Nvidias. Even microsoft recommends ATI over Nvidia.

Then how come we aren't hearing about similar problems from ATI? Nvidia has been having problems like this for months while ATI has had solid reviews from the beginning. Even Microsoft recommends ATI over Nvidia.

Blame the US. Nvidia is an American company. ATI's drivers are way more stable even according to Microsoft, this review site and numerous others. Plus, ATI is a Canadian company :) (or at least they were until they got bought by AMD).

While this class action seems to be about high-end graphics cards, which I have ever expectation that NVIDIA are working hard on drivers for, it's worth pointing out that they don't intend to support the NForce/2/3 motherboards with Windows Vista drivers.

Just upgraded a machine, network & sound works, but when I scroll in Firefox, I get choppy audio playback in Winamp; in the process of trying to figure out if it's Winamp at fault or the audio driver.

Nope, they were running NetBSD

Another one is China: they don't even care about DRM. But who produces most of electronics? Who sets the prices?

If China doesn't care about DRM - why have both their attempts to compete with HD-BLU-DVD-RAY included DRM? First, the apparently dying on the vine EVD and now the HD-FVD system?

I believe that these patents are saying that they come out with the same results using different methods. I agree that this is unlikely to affect Vista, at least as long as MS sticks to its own patented methodology.

On the other hand, I don't think that that's what Red Hat is planning. My guess is that they:

1. Want to give their corporate customers the opportunity of DRM, rather than having them switch platforms.
2. Don't want to be locked out of the "Trusted Computing" fun and games.

If they patent their own DRM, no one's going to leave them behind, are they?

Or do the?

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36 455

I think this is more of an attempt to get into the Shuttle XPC market than the Mac-Mini market. Or if you prefer, a way to expand the XPC market - thus giving AMD a bigger piece of a bigger pie.

The poster who pointed out that the "Smashing of air over the processor" not being feasible hit it on the head. The Shuttles (and some other SFF makers) generally try to make a heatsink fan that pushes air out of the case.

There is an article on this at: http://theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36833 with a pic of a mobo. Perhaps by the time the thing gets to market, the fan will have a housing to push air out of the case...

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=35 590/ It does have Bluetooth 2.0. Size difference is minimal. It will support push email (can't find the page I saw that on.) It has GPS functionality. I assume the iPhone does, but you would think that they would mention it somewhere on the website. Also note that the Google Maps shown on the high technology wireless page has a search for "San Francisco Starbucks" If the iPhone was able to open up Google Maps and tie in location you don't need the city in the query. iPhone is cool and will undoubtedly be more popular than the OpenMoko line, but it isn't as revolutionary as they want it to be.

Indeed

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36 761

If you have SIXASSES, you can stick a Poomote in each of them.

(But seriously, only Wii has 12 player mode.)

Indeed they are!

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36 706

You are partly correct about the dynamic positioning of pixels, but the ability to do this is related to the fact that the smallest pixel is an RGB triad of phosphors, and is adjacent to other phosphors such that we could instead specify a BRG triad or a GBR triad. If subpixels in an LCD can be individually addressed, then the LCD also should be able to handle a somewhat wider range of screen resolutions, than we normally see. Perhaps the "driver electronics" for the subpixels is too firmly tied to particular pixels, though, which means that better electronics, and not so much a better panel, is necessary for an LCD to match a CRT this way. I am aware that they can do fairly high resolutions on LCD screens --but I haven't heard that this monitor handles the same wide range of screen resolutions with the same clarity as an equivalent CRT.

Along these lines, last Wednesday the INquirer ran a piece of mine, an interview with Scott Chasin, CTO of MX Logic, talking about the techniques in use by the spammers (branching out into p2p architecture). Chasin, too, believes things will get worse. And, from the sounds of it, the measures taken by service providers and others will continue to make the Net a far more restrictive place than it was originally designed to be.

wg

Yes, as this cartoon illustrates.