Amy Vernon
Amy Vernon
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Acer is recalling its Predator Gaming desktop units, in conjunciton with the U.S. Consumer Safety Product Commission, because of the potential for them to overheat, melt and catch fire.The models being recalled are ASG7200 and ASG7700 (printed on the bottom right-hand corner of the panel on the right side of the unit), because there are certain...
Read more...
It's always a pain in the rear when a friend sends you a link to a photo or video when you're in the middle of doing something and you don't want to take the time out to open the link in a new tab.Google decided the pain was too great to force those using Gmail to have to do that one moment longer, and users now can get previews for YouTube...
Read more...
The New Millennium Research Council has bad news and good news for the cell phone industry.The bad: Millions of cell phone users in the United States may cut back or cancel their service altogether if the economy continues to tank (OK, they didn't phrase it so bluntly, they said, "if the economic downturn continues as expected").The good:...
Read more...
Where's the first place you'd look for maps of Mars?If you didn't say Google Earth, why not? After all, a 3D mapping tool of Mars was added to Google Earth for the 5.0 release. But Google today announced an update to the program that includes historical maps and images, a stream of the latest images from the Red Planet and not one, but TWO...
Read more...
Google Voice, which some are calling Gmail for phones, is being rolled out.For now, it will be available only to users of GrandCentral, which Google acquired all the way back in 2007.GrandCentral basically consolidates all your phones, giving you a single number to ring on your home, work and mobile phones and a voicemail box you can access...
Read more...
With data theft seeming to be increasing in frequency (read this and this), a California legislator has introduced a bill that would make companies report more information to people affected by the breaches.State Sen. Joe Simitian's bill would require companies involved to report to the state attorney general any data breach that affected...
Read more...
People kind of went batguano crazy when Hulu insisted its content be taken off Boxee because its content providers freaked out and insisted on it.Since then, Boxee has been in talks with Hulu and its content providers to come up with a workable solution that would allow Boxee users to watch Hulu on their televisions (Boxee, for those who don't...
Read more...
Teleconference calls are so 2008.IBM today announced a new software tool, Sametime 3D, which allows people to hold virtual business meetings in virtual conference rooms.It has its origins in the worlds of Sim City and MMORPGs. Users will be able to create their own avatars to represent them in the "rooms," and will be able to talk, share presentations...
Read more...
Marketshare came out with a report today showing just how dominant the iPhone is in the mobile browsing market: a whopping 66.61 percent of all mobile browsing is done on the ubiquitous smartphone.Not all is rosy for the apple of Apple's eye, however, as the Android and BlackBerry markets are gaining marketshare rather quickly. No one's too...
Read more...
College students with a valid ".edu" e-mail address from an accredited institution can snag a download of Microsoft Office 2007 for less than $60.With ever more free options (think OpenOffice) and college students being a traditionally poor and penny-pinching market, the average college student isn't going to shell out $679.95 for Microsoft...
Read more...
Google's taken the next step in linking together all its services to make it an absolutely unstoppable force online as opposed to the virtually unstoppable force it currently is.Google owns Blogger (in case you didn't realize this), and always had a follow feature where you could, from your Blogger page, follow all the blogs you wanted to...
Read more...
Apple today announced the beta release of Safari 4.0, and it's promising blazing fast browsing, for Mac or PC users.It has a new "Nitro Engine," that Apple says executes JavaScript up to 30 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and more than 3 times faster than Firefox 3. (Side note: Firefox is THAT much faster than IE7?) It also loads pages...
Read more...
This week brought news of two advances in nanotechnology that could bring us ever-smaller devices with ever-increasing capacity.One brought us transistors a mere fraction of the size of most the advanced currently used on silicon chips. The other gave us the ability to store 250 DVDs worth of data on the area the size of a U.S. quarter.First,...
Read more...
College students are always looking for new and creative reasons to ditch class.A new study has just given them teflon ammo: New psychological research suggests that university students who download a podcast lecture achieve substantially higher exam results than those who attend the lecture in person.The reasoning behind it, according to...
Read more...
Research in Motion issued a security alert today for its customers who use the BlackBerry Application Web Loader and Microsoft Internet Explorer.Basically, the web loader's ActiveX control has a vulnerability that can allow someone to attack the device remotely or cause the browser to crash.In the company's own words: An exploitable buffer...
Read more...
Back at the end of January, we told you about the expected announcement today of the Kindle 2, the next-gen e-book reader. This morning, Amazon.com confirmed the news at a media event at the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan. The upgrades on the Amazon Kindle 2 include:• slimmer design - .36 inches thick, weighing less than 10 ounces•...
Read more...
Imagine, if you will, having a basic checkup without even having to go to your doctor's office.It's not quite so extreme, but a partnership between IBM and Google makes that concept seem, perhaps, not so far-fetched. With software deveoped by IBM and Google Heath's medical record database, a patient's vital stats - heart rate, blood pressure,...
Read more...
All those blank spots in the broadband spectrum where no signals are being broadcast are known as white spaces. They're all over the place and all kinds of providers want to take advantage of them.So seven major tech companies — Comsearch, Dell, Google, HP, Microsoft, Motorola and NeuStar — have joined together to basically catalog all these...
Read more...
Is Skynet nearly upon us?A Japanese program has been created that finishes people's sentences, according to a report in New Scientist.A team from the National Instititute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba developed it and they claim it's virgin territory. There have been plenty of speech recognition software programs...
Read more...
Nearly 10 percent - 9.9 percent, to be specific. That's how much of the market share Apple's Mac OS X has captured, even as tech journalism has been rife with stories about the impending Microsoft Windows 7.Let's face it - Windows is still the 400 lb. gorilla, with 88.3 percent of the market, according to stats from Net Applications. And some...
Read more...
Should cell phones, GPS devices and, heck, even cars be banned just because the bad guys use them?John Hanke, the man in charge of Google Earth and Google Maps, invoked those three pieces of modern technology in defense of his company's satellite imagery application, which has been blamed by some for helping terrorists plot their acts of destruction.A...
Read more...
New research out of the University of Manchester in Britain appears to herald the imminent creation of the Cylon race. It appears the structure for computer processors will switch from silicon to carbon, just like people, perhaps, eventually. It's not news that graphene (carbon in sheets an atom thick) conducts electricity exceptionally...
Read more...
