Gregory Sullivan
Gregory Sullivan
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) has won a default judgment against Valence Media's download site Torrentspy. The judgment is handy for figuring out exactly how much all those free movies everyone's downloading are worth. According to a federal judge, $110 million dollars ought to about cover it. In 2006 TorrentSpy was more...
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Mozilla has found and removed a virus from its Vietnamese language pack for their Firefox 2 browser. The virus loads remote content, showing the unwitting users unwanted advertising, but does not propagate the virus itself to others. Everyone who downloaded the most recent Vietnamese language pack since February 18, 2008 got an infected copy. ...
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Grand Theft Auto IV sold six million copies in its first week alone, netting $500 million for its publisher, Take-Two Interactive. That's even better than the wildest estimates by industry pundits, and probably will make Electronic Arts' bid to purchase Take Two a whole lot more expensive. The significance of the sales extends beyond buoying...
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Comcast has taken a lot of heat for limiting their customer's P2P traffic based on vague references to traffic overload concerns. They confused and angered many of their customers by offering "unlimited" bandwith that was limited, and added a bit of insult to injury by never revealing what the ceiling on traffic actually was. Broadband Reports...
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The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign is a hotbed of high-tech research these days. They've recently demonstrated a process for "growing" upright copper nanowires on surfaces made from a wide array of materials. These nanowires could be used to make Field-Emission Displays, brighter and sharper than existing flat panel...
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We don't know what to do with all the multi-core chips we already have, never mind the eight and sixteen core processors looming on the horizon. The software is not keeping pace with the hardware. That realization is dawning over all the big players in computer chip design and tech educators. Think tanks dedicated to parallel computing...
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Microsoft has walked away from their takeover bid for Yahoo!, and today is the day when the market will have its say about the wisdom of Yahoo! chief Jerry Yang's frantic actions aimed at avoiding being folded into Microsoft at any cost. Kara Swisher at All Things Digital rang up some executives at Yahoo! after the deal disintegrated,...
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There was a fire in LG Chem's plant in South Korea in March of this year. "So what?" you might ask. Well, that plant makes lithium-ion batteries, and that's helping to limit the supply of laptop computers. "I think maybe the battery shortage may hurt every brand," said J.T. Wang, chairman of Acer, at the company's investor conference...
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Toshiba backed the HD DVD format against Sony's rival Blu-ray high-definition disc method, and Toshiba lost. One wonders whether Sony might ask themselves from time to time if it might have been better to have lost. More or less, no one wants a Blu-ray player. Sales of Blu-ray players, excluding PlayStation 3 game consoles, dropped 40 percent...
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The State of New York enacted a statute requiring Amazon.com to collect NY sales taxes on orders going to New York State residents. Technically, all Internet sales have long been subject to sales tax; the NY consumer was supposed to report such purchases and pay tax on them. You can imagine how little tax was collected by relying on consumers...
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Lite-On, the Taiwan-based electronics conglomerate, is selling its digital display business to another Taiwanese company, Wistron, for about $300 million. Wistron itself is a spin-off from Acer. Lite-On's Digital Display business unit generated NT$82.75 billion in revenues for the company in 2007. Wistron said it hopes to strengthen its LCD...
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The lawsuits that the RIAA bring against illegal downloaders garner most of the attention paid to online music royalties, but suing grandmas and college kids is never really about the money; it's about discouraging many by suing a few. The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, better known as ASCAP, took a more direct approach....
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Om Malik at Gigaom has made an interesting analysis of the effects of widespread broadband penetration into the US market. As the demand for broadband tapers off because the pool of persons that don't yet have it slowly dries up, there's really only one thing the providers have left to sell: faster speeds.It should come as no surprise that...
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Sorry about that tired old joke about who invented the Internet. Of course Al Gore didn't invent the Internet, he invented weather. But if any one person can be said to have "invented the web," it's Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Today's the fifteenth anniversary of the date when the code that makes our beloved series of tubes work was first uploaded...
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Hans Reiser is a pretty well known Linux programmer. His ReiserFS file system has "...played an integral part in Linux’s core kernel." He parlayed his prominence in the Linux community into his own company, Namesys, and put his wife, Nina, in the Chief Financial Officer slot. He eventually accused his wife of mismanaging his funds, and they...
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Never heard of Quanta Computer? Can't blame you. They don't put their own nameplate on the laptop computers they build in Taiwan. They manufacture units for most all major computer vendors, so if you've got a Dell or an HP in your lap, for instance, the chances are pretty good that Quanta made it, or one just like it. They even make the One...
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It used to be fairly straightforward choosing a browser. Internet Explorer came bundled with everything, a few hardy souls got on the Firefox bandwagon early, Apple freaks used Safari, and Ron Paul voters used Opera. Since hackers concentrated their attention on the target-rich environment of massed IE users, everybody else benefited from...
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Google has a pretty reliable algorithm for determining page rank on text searches. All sorts of attempts are made to game the system, by both legitimate and unscrupulous Search Engine Optimization schemes alike, but those strategies always seem to fail in the long run. But put a search query into Google Images, especially with safe-search...
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Fortune's Apple 2.0 column asks an interesting question. It appears that iPhone users really like using their handsome little phones to surf the Internet, and at least in some areas, that usage is translating into a great deal of bandwith strain on the iPhone's cellular carrier, AT&T. Will that become a problem as new users continue to...
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AOL has been synonymous with "get off my lawn, you young whippersnappers" for quite some time. Their massive revenue stream of dialup subscription money finally dried up completely a couple of years ago, and they desperately needed to find some other reason for people to look at their pages. They seem to have managed it the old-fashioned way;...
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As if on cue after HotHardware's News Item about the future of solid state memory, USA Today has a article today about the plentiful supply of flash memory chips, and how that oversupply is putting downward pressure on prices. Some are even being sold at a loss to shed supply. Memory bargain hunters, start your engines.Some wholesale flash...
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The President of Toshiba, Shozo Saito, delivered a fascinating look at near future of solid-state memory last week. He's in a position to know about NAND flash memory and Solid State Drives, and the future not only looks bright, it looks like the future is right now. He predicted one-quarter of notebook PCs will have a solid state...
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