How do you make the handiest tool in the
world handier? Make it cordless, and scale it
down so it’s easy to carry around, that’s how.
Dremel’s pistol-grip Stylus is the perfect size
for small jobs, and has ample power despite
being battery-operated. The lithium-ion battery
is rechargeable via an included charging cradle.
The stylus even comes with a handful of bits for
polishing, cutting, and grinding; plus, it works
with standard Dremel bits. $70, http://www.dremel.comDremel Stylus
Cancel Christmas, folks—WinFS is
dead, and it ain’t coming back to life.
The oft-delayed futuristic fi le system
once touted by Microsoft as a must-
have feature of Vista has gone from a
product that’ll ship after Vista’s launch
to a product that won’t ship, period.
Instead, the WinFS technology will be
rolled into Microsoft’s enterprise data-
base products.
The news came directly from the
horse’s mouth. Posting on the WinFS
team blog, Quentin Clark, a WinFS pro-
grammer, wrote about several changes
the team was making to the system,
and noted: “These changes do mean
that we are not pursuing a separate
delivery of WinFS.”
For consumers, the demise of
WinFS is disappointing, to say theleast. It would have allowed users to
attach metadata to emails, images,
Word documents, and other fi les that
would be indexed by the OS. You could
then perform searches based on this
data, which would have been a revolu-
tion in the world of fi le storage. Oh well,
at least Aero Glass looks shiny.Microsoft Pulls WinFS from Vista
The file system goes from ‘it’ll ship later’ to ‘it won’t ship for consumers, ever’
quickstart THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL
NETCELL GOES UNDER
This month we’re sad to report that Netcell
has gone out of business. You don’t remem-
ber Netcell? Neither did anyone else, which
was one of the big problems. Netcell was
the maker of the Revolution RAID
controller we used in last
year’s Dream
Machine.
Though the com-
pany secured a
distribution deal with
XFX, its driverless add-in
RAID controllers never really
took off with consumers.MICROSOFT CUTS OFF WIN
SUPPORT
News flash: Some people are still using
Windows 98, 98SE, and Windows Millennium.
We found this out when Microsoft announced
its plans to discontinue support for these
old, crappy OSes in July 2006. Look, you
don’t have to be excited about Vista, but for
the love of Pete, at least upgrade to XP, you
damn Luddites.MICROSOFT PREFERS GOOGLE
Or at least its employees do. According to
Internet-tracking firm VisitorVille Intelligence,
66.3 percent of Microsoft employees use
Google for searches. Not surprisingly, 100
percent of Google workers use Google.
Yahoo workers are also very loyal, using that
company’s search engine 68 percent of the
time and Google the rest of the time.MAN ARRESTED FOR
STEALING WI-FI
We’ve all considered driving up to the parking
lot of a coffee shop that offers free Wi-Fi and
mooching off the connection for a few hours.
A guy up in Vancouver actually did it—for
more than three months—until finally the
coffee shop called the cops on him. Now he’s
facing charges for theft of services.FUNSIZENEWS
Reverse-Hyper-Threading to Arrive
Sooner than Expected?
In July, we speculated that one way AMD might be able to compete with Intel’s
Conroe CPU is to implement reverse-Hyper-Threading. By having two cores appear
to applications as one super-core, multicore CPUs could deliver more performance
to single-threaded applications. The latest rumors hint that not only is the tech real,
but it’s already implemented in AMD’s new socket AM2-based CPUs. Even more
surprising, it seems Intel might have similar technology embedded in Conroe. An
image popped up on the Internet of an Intel 975x mobo with a “Core Multiplexing
Technology” option available in the BIOS. We contacted both companies about this
issue, but neither Intel nor AMD would comment on the rumor.&was one of the big problems. Netcell was
the maker of the Revolution RAID
controller we used in lastdistribution deal with
XFX, its driverless add-in12 MA XIMUMPC SEPTEMBER 2006