Daniel A. Begun
Daniel A. Begun
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
At HP's invitation-only "Connecting Your World" media event in Berlin today, HP unveiled a slew of new laptop designs--some of which will be available in just a few weeks. Leading off the gaggle of new laptops is HP's Pavillion "dv" consumer series: "The entertainment-packed HP Pavilion "dv"-series notebooks is adorned with a sleek, liquid-metallic...
Read more...
Long gone are the days when the primary differentiating factors between competing laptops models were just battery life and weight. Don't be mistaken---battery life and weight are still important; but with so many folks now using a laptop as their only computer, laptop manufacturers have stepped up their efforts on the very look of their notebook...
Read more...
Sophisticated, targeted phishing attacks have successfully swiped data from roughly 15,000 victims within the last 15 months according to Internet security company, VeriSign. VeriSign believes that almost all of these attacks are coming from just two groups. "Unlike traditional phishing attacks, which are sent to millions in hopes of luring...
Read more...
When the 2009 Audi Q5 "compact crossover vehicle" debuts this fall, it will feature an additional kind of powerful engine: Driving the car's audio/visual interface control panel will be an Nvidia GPU. The Q5 will include the latest generation of Audi's Multi-Media Interface (MMI), manufactured for Audi by Harman/Becker. Harman/Becker refers...
Read more...
According to BitTorrent news site, TorrentFreak, at any given moment, nearly half of all active BitTorrent users are downloading pirated TV shows. TorrentFreak estimates that one of the most popular TV shows, Lost, garners "close to 10 million downloads per episode." According to the Nielsen TV ratings for last week, the two-hour series finale...
Read more...
One of the more curious items spied at this week's Computex trade show in Taipei, is an Asus laptop prototype with a built-in mini projector. There is still not too much known about the unlabeled notebook, other than that the laptop has a large space above the display's bezel, in which a working, pivoting mini projector is housed. Mini...
Read more...
Researchers at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory have developed a new technique that gives a whole new meaning to water cooling: Circulating water inside the chip itself. The concept is not meant for today's CPUs, but actually for the chips of tomorrow. Historically, CPU performance improvements have largely been a function of generating faster...
Read more...
This week marks the beginning of Comcast's month-long experiment with protocol-agnostic network management practices in Chambersburg, PA and Warrenton, VA. Comcast has come under fire recently for throttling certain types of traffic on its network, such as with data for P2P clients. This alternative approach focuses purely on how much bandwidth...
Read more...
This coming Monday, June 9, should be a big day for Apple. It is the first day of Apple's 2008 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC08) in San Francisco--which not coincidentally--has been at sold out at capacity for some time now. When Steve Jobs takes the stage at the Moscone Center at 10 a.m. PT, he is expected to unveil the much-anticipated,...
Read more...
McAfee has released its annual "Mapping the Mal Web" report, which reports on "the riskiest and safest places on the Web," after analyzing "9.9 million heavily trafficked Web sites" using its own McAfee Site Advisor technology. Topping the list of most dangerous domains is the .hk domain (Hong Kong); the safest domain is .fi (Finland). Ranked...
Read more...
Results from a study just released by global consulting company, Accenture, find that only about five percent of all consumer electronics product returns are due to actual failures or defects. The rest of the returns can be categorized as "no trouble found" (68 percent) or "buyer's remorse" (27 percent). The study also finds that "the average...
Read more...
Not only has Starbucks been busy outfitting all of its company-operated Starbucks locations with AT&T-supplied Wi-Fi, but that Wi-Fi will now be free to Starbucks card holders for up to two hours per day: "As a way to thank our loyal customers, Starbucks is offering a reward for registering and using your Starbucks Card - complimentary...
Read more...
Move over Microsoft; Comcast is taking over the role as being perceived as the next "evil empire." Just ask hackers, Defiant and EBK, who managed to take over Comcast's Web portal for over five hours Wednesday night and into Thursday morning: Thursday, the pair were dealing with their newfound fame, laughing over the press coverage with a...
Read more...
The FCC is gearing up to auction off exclusive use to a spectrum of airwaves (2155 – 2175MHz, a.k.a. the AWS-3 band), and it is considering requiring the purchaser to provide high-speed (768Kbps) Internet access to most of the U.S. for free: ''We're hoping there will be increased interest (in the proposal) and because this will provide wireless...
Read more...
The Data Center, HotHardware's new community for IT professionals, is sponsored by Dell's Future of Storage. This article is part of our ongoing series of topics and discussions related to IT, Enterprise Storage and related storage technologies. While other hard drive manufacturers have been busy churning out Solid State Drives (SSD), Seagate...
Read more...
You might remeber the name "Splashtop" from when DeviceVM, made a, er, splash, with DeviceVM's announcement last October that it was partnering with Asus to integrate the light-weight Splashtop OS into Asus motherboards. Asus calls the technology "Express Gate," and includes it with a number of its motherboards. Beginning in June, Asus will...
Read more...
The Wall Street Journal's sixth All Things Digital conference (D6) continues to make news--this time with Sony Corp.'s CEO, Sir Howard Stringer, showing off an OLED TV prototype that he claims is a mere "0.3mm" thick, has a contrast ratio of "a million to one," and is "a hundred times brighter than an LCD screen." Sony plans to introduce a...
Read more...
Microsoft is going multi-touch crazy. First it was the Microsoft Surface technology, which debuted last year at The Wall Street Journal's (WSJ) fifth edition of its All Things Digital Conference (D5). Next came multi-touch walls, which Bill Gates demonstrated only a few weeks ago at Microsoft's own CEO Summit. Fast forward to last night, and...
Read more...
The New York State Supreme Court issued a ruling today against Dell and Dell Financial Services (DFS), finding the company guilty of "fraud, false advertising, deceptive business practices, and abusive debt collection practices." The ruling is the end result of a lawsuit filed by New York State Attorney General, Andrew M Cuomo, in May 2007....
Read more...
Earth Trek has released what it claims is the world's smallest projector: "Earth Trek, a Hong-Kong based company, recently released the world's smallest handy projector, the 90-805R mini projector. Our little device features a card slot (SD/T-flash card), built-in lithium battery (1-2 hours), built-in speaker, MP4 player, and provides a 22"...
Read more...
In keeping with the trend of Intel Atom-based product announcements coming from Europe and Asia, U.K.-based Tranquil PC has announced yet more Atom-based products: The T7-HSAi and the T2-WHS-A3i--updates to Tranquil PC's fanless chassis-based Microsoft Windows Home Servers--both powered by 1.6GHz Atom 230 processors. Tranquil PC is pitching...
Read more...
Watch out MP3, AAC, WMA, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis--there's a new digital audio format about to be introduced and it's creators are setting their sites on it becoming the new "de facto standard" for digital audio. The new format is called Music 2.0 and it will use MT9 as its file extension: "The distinctive feature of [the] MT9 format is that it...
Read more...
