The Inquirer

This article is about the British technology news website. For Inquirer (disambiguation), see The Inquirer (disambiguation).

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The INQUIRER

The INQUIRER (sometimes shortened to the INQ and commonly referred to as The Inquirer without caps) is a British technology tabloid news website focusing on the computer and semiconductor industries.

History

The INQUIRER was founded by Mike Magee after his departure from The Register, in 2001. The magazine is entirely Internet based with its journalists living all over the world and filing copy online. This is co-ordinated by Magee in the UK.

On January 26, a press release was issued announcing that publishing company of The INQUIRER had been acquired by Magee's former employer, Dutch publishing giant VNU Business Media Europe.[1]

In addition to the English site, as of 19 June 2006, The INQUIRER has editions localized for Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, and Spain. [[2]]

Writing style

The site hews to The Register's slogan, "Biting the hand that feeds IT", and is known for its early access to industry news based on insider sources. When served with "cease and desist" orders, the website sometimes publishes them in full, with commentary.[3] It has also recently started publishing information regarding hardware available in the U.K., U.S.A., France, and other countries[4].

The INQUIRER's articles are written in a subjective and opinionated tone, that similar to British tabloid newspapers. In the English version of the site, slang terms, particularly those common to Great Britain, are used.

The publication, Private Eye, is likely the inspiration for the style The INQUIRER uses with comments from the editor, where the word 'editor' is abbreviated simply as Ed.; Private Eye is also the likely source of other phrases occasionally found in INQUIRER articles, such as "Inspector Knacker of the Yard" and "shorely shome mishtake."

Despite getting alleged scoops, none of the reporters for the INQUIRER have ever signed non-disclosure agreements. The publication has various connections with the industry; Intel in particular has acknowledged that its staff have a tendency to send details of meetings to the Inquirer.

Some INQUIRER articles include information unconfirmed by official sources within the companies they report on. When dealing with such information, they typically preface the article with a statement such as the following, "We've heard an odd, but strong whisper on the grapevine . . ." [5]. As such articles lack official confirmation, they can be classified as rumor or speculation.

Criticism

Some information published by The INQUIRER is later found to be erroneous, such as a 31 August 2005 claim that that PlayStation 3's GPU is less powerful than the GeForce 7800.[6] NVidia responded to this claim [7] by stating that the GeForce 7800 is less powerful than the Playstation 3's GPU.

The INQUIRER on 23 June 2006 non-exclusively reported on a rumor of an upcoming improvement called "reverse hyperthreading" that AMD had included on its Athlon 64 Socket AM2 processors [8]. A follow-up article [9] was posted on 10 July 2006 in The INQUIRER, in which availablility of "reverse hyperthreading" was disclaimed. On 13 July 2006, technology website Ars Technica debunked claims of such a technology existing in AMD Socket AM2 processors [10]. Technology website X-bit Laboratories has posted a timeline detailing the affair [11].

On July 2006, The Inquirer was embroiled in a photoshop scandal where images claiming to show "cheating" by NVIDIA drivers in an anonymous and perhaps fictional benchmark called Rydermark 2006 turned out to be obvious fakes according to Dailytech.com and Behardware.com [12] [13]. The Inquirer denied any wrongdoing and called the allegations against them irresponsible, [14] but a user from the ModTheater.com forums managed to track down some of the stock art used in the screen renders, and later demonstrated that the entire image is an obvious photoshopped fake. [15] [16]

Nicknames and terminology

Following the standards Mike Magee set at his previous publications, The INQUIRER uses nicknames for many IT firms and persons:

• Another Plaice - The Register
• Cappuccino - Cupertino
• Chipzilla - Intel
• Chimpzilla or Cheapzilla - AMD
• Graphzilla or the Green Goblin - nVidia
• Captain Canuck - ATI
• Fruitzilla - Apple Computer
• iAMD - Intel's 64-bit Pentium 4 CPUs, also known as Pentium 4 EM64T (Extended Memory 64-bit Technology).
• FireFerret - Firefox
• interweb or inter-web - Internet
• Itanic - Intel Itanium processor
• MacInteltosh - Apple's laptop with an Intel chip
• Marchitechture - "marketing architecture," or the process of designing products and naming technologies in a way which will benefit marketing and/or sales.
• Mozzarella - Mozilla
• Open Sauce - Open Source
• the boy wonder - Anand Shimpi of AnandTech
• the Pabster - Thomas Pabst of Tom's Hardware Guide
• the Vole - Microsoft

Another Plaice is a pun on the term used in the House of Commons to refer to the House of Lords (another place) and vice-versa.

Other

Some of The INQUIRER's writers visit the Ace's Hardware website's message board, including Charlie Demerjian, who uses the nickname Groo_ on the board.[17]

External links

• The INQUIRER
• 'The INQUIRER Guide to INQUIRER Editorial'
• Article about The INQUIRER at ExtremeTech
• "VNU buys into tabloid news - The Guardian"