Daniel A. Begun
Daniel A. Begun
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Crowdsourcing just got a new outlet today with the social polling site, millionheads. The millionheads site is positioning itself as a sort of magic eight ball of personal indecision. But instead of relying on the random, one-in-twenty, and often out-of-context responses of the Mattel toy...
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Large corporations, universities, and research labs have relied on high-performance computers (HPC)--or "supercomputers"--for years to solve complex problems in science, engineering, financial modeling, and other similar uses requiring advanced, heavy-duty computations. The high cost of these...
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There should be no doubt that streaming video is quickly gaining in popularity. Recent studies shows that about 20 percent of U.S. households are watching TV online. Hulu has quickly grown to be the eighth-largest video site in the U.S., and it is even hosting a number of TV season premiers...
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Pardon the headline mashup, but we're combing two automotive stories into one post here. While the two stories might not necessarily be directly related, they both shed light on different views of what the future of automobiles might look like. The first story is about the juicy tidbits General Motors (GM) has just revealed about the production-version...
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In a move that will leave many saying, "Duh! What took so long," the Internet Movie Database (IMDb.com) has just added movie and TV streaming to its site. IMDb has long been the first stop for many (IMDb.com claims 57 million users) looking to find information related to movies, TV shows, and the people associated with them, such as actors...
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When microprocessor manufacturers ran into increasing complications as they tried to make chips runs faster, they shifted gears, and started building more powerful processors using multiple cores. We're still at the early part of the multi-core revolution, but researchers at the University of...
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If there was any doubt that the U.S. economy is hurting, taking a gander at today's financial news should sober you up quickly: Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, and Bank of America is bailing out foundering Merrill Lynch. If you are not an investor, you might ask why you should care and what does this have to do with technology. The state...
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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been collecting lots of headlines this week as it finally ramped up to full speed. It has garnered attention for the massively sized experiments it will undertake (simulating conditions of the Big Bang), the questions its experiments will seek to answer (find the "God" particle), the cost of the project...
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Scientists in Pisa, Italy claim to have set a new world record for the fastest wireless data transmission. They report that during an uninterrupted 12-hour experiment, they were able to achieve throughput speeds above 1.2 Terabits per second; which they say beats the previous wireless data...
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Here's a quick quiz for you: Which smartphone in the U.S. accesses the mobile Internet the most? If you guessed the iPhone, you're wrong. According to metrics published by the mobile Internet ad-serving company, AdMob, More RIM BlackBerry 8100 smartphones accessed the Internet in the U.S. in...
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Today's Web search engines are driven primarily by searching for text keywords. This works fairly well when what you are searching for is words; but it fails pretty miserably when you are searching for video. Video search is almost entirely dependent on someone taking the time to manually (and...
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Before you post photos of your night of drunken debauchery to your Facebook profile, you might want to consider what kind of impression it might make on prospective employers. And lest you think that baby-boomer-generation hiring managers wouldn't know Facebook if they tripped over it, think...
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In case you missed the brouhaha on Monday, United Airlines' stock dropped from $12.50 to $3 per share in the matter of 15 minutes because of an Internet bot--and not just any old Internet bot--the king of all bots, the Google News crawler. The circumstances that led up the event were...
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Remember when AOL was king of the Web portals and when it had over 30 million members? That was a good six or so years ago. The expression Web portal is now considered passé and AOL claims only slightly more than 8 million members today. But with a number of significant changes taking place on AOL.com, AOL hopes to regain some of its lost...
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Tuesdays are typically the day the Apple reserves to make big announcements, and today was such a day for Apple. Steve Jobs took to the stage Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco to announce a number of new iPod-related products and new iTunes features. Apple billed the press event as "Let's...
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It appears that Microsoft is doing a lot more than having Jerry Seinfeld munching churros and going shoe shopping with Bill Gates to help bolster the company's image. Part of Microsoft's $300 million marketing campaign includes placing Microsoft customer service representatives in select...
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If you think the contents of your work computer are your business and only your business, then think again. Applying federal rulings from other jurisdictions to help guide its ruling, the New Jersey State Appeals Court ruled in a recent case that "an employee has no reasonable expectation of...
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What is the most important thing to you that you can do on the Internet? Forget communicating and gathering information; according to results from a just-released study, for ten percent of all U.S. online households, entertainment is the single-most important thing that the Internet offers. In...
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If you use a computer on a regular basis, chances are you are running some sort of anti-malware application. If you aren't then you really should be, as recent studies show that malware is becoming more pervasive and more sophisticated. No operating system (OS) is immune from malware attacks, but Microsoft Windows is the most frequently targeted...
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The tech industry just can't seem to keep any secrets anymore. Conspiracy theorists will tell you that is exactly how companies like it, as it builds up plenty of viral buzz before a hotly-anticipated product is ever officially unveiled. The latest product to prove the rumor mill right is...
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Sony has been dealing with the fallout from overheating batteries for a couple of years now, so it should be used to the fire drills associated with running damage control on overheating products. That practice should come in handy, as the latest hot potato form Sony is an entire line of...
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There is no doubt that spam is pervasive and can be a major productivity killer if the right safeguards aren't in place. In fact, MessageLabs indicates that 78.2 percent of all e-mails sent during the month of August were spam. To make matters worse, Sophos reports that by the end of June, 96.5 percent of all e-mails to businesses were spam....
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