Daniel A. Begun
Daniel A. Begun
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Alternative energy advocate, Dr. Lyle Dennis, loved the idea behind General Motors' (GM) Chevrolet Volt electric concept car so much, that he not only created a Website devoted to it (GM-Volt.com) soon after GM announced the concept vehicle in 2007, but he has spent a significant amount of...
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Vudu might be on to something with its new promotion: "Stay in. Rent four movies for the price of 1 gallon gas!" At today's prices for movie tickets, concession snacks, and the cost of gas for getting to and from the theater, a family of four could easily spend upwards of a $100 for a night out at the movies. Staying at home and watching movie...
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The high-speed Internet advocacy Web site, Speed Matters, has just released a report on the average Internet connection speeds by U.S. state. If you live in Rhode Island (6,769 Kbps), Delaware (6,685 Kbps), New Jersey (5,825 Kbps), Virginia (5,033 Kbps), or Massachusetts (4,564 Kbps), you can...
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A recent U.K. study by AOL finds that most online users are concerned about their online privacy and about providing personal details to Websites. No surprise there. In fact, the study found that 84 percent of respondents said that "they would not give away income details online." What to make...
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A study just released by the Leichtman Research Group, indicates that the "twenty largest cable and telephone providers in the US" now total approximately 65.1 million, high-speed Internet subscribers. Those 20 providers make up roughly 94 percent of the U.S. broadband market. Assuming that...
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Is microvideoblogging the next big thing? "Micro-what?" you say. Picture Twitter, but with video posts instead of text. That's microvideoblogging. Now limit each video post to only 12 seconds long, and that's the idea behind 12seconds.tv. Like Twitter, you can post pretty much anything you...
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Italy has been showing BitTorrent no mercy lately. First, Italy shuts down the country's largest BitTorrent tracker site, Colombo-BT.org, a couple of weeks ago; and now it is trying to block country-wide access to The Pirate Bay--the Swedish-based BitTorrent site that claims to be "the world's largest BitTorrent tracker"--by ordering all Italian...
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Sometimes we have to remind ourselves here at HotHardware that us editors and our loyal readers do not necessarily represent typical Internet users. Many of us consider ourselves to be "power users," and feel we know how to leverage the available tools to find exactly what we are looking for...
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If an Apple patent application that started making the rounds yesterday is any indication, a future version of the iPod or iPhone might be able to remotely access the entire iTunes media library sitting on your computer at home via a Wi-Fi or wireless telephone connection. Instead of having to...
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Unlike the enthusiast system manufacturers, Alienware and VoodooPC, Richmond, Virginia-based Velocity Micro is still an independent, privately held company. In fact, Velocity Micro is doing well enough on its own to have even purchased the enthusiast, boutique system maker, Overdrive PC last year. On top of that, Velocity Micro is one of the...
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Not content to let Nintendo Wii owners have all the fun with motion-based, wireless game controllers, Asus has just announced its own Wii-like controllers for Windows PCs, called the Eee Stick. It seems that Asus is putting the "Eee" moniker on all of its new products lately, such as the Eee PC and the Eee Box. In fact, the Asus press release...
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There are some people whose opinions matter more than others. Take Vint Cerf, for instance. Cerf is often credited as being the "father of the Internet." While that might not be a technically accurate statement, it is safe to say that he played a very significant role in shaping what would...
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One of the key challenges of digital photography technology has been to try to capture images as well as the human eye does. While optics have made significant improvements in recent years, modest enhancements to the resolution density of the electronic sensors have kept the lofty goal of mimicking human perception as just a pipe dream. But...
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According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a dangerous legal precedent has just been set that can potentially unravel existing federal privacy protections for e-mail and Internet usage. The alert from the EFF is not just to sound a general warning, but it also takes the form of an Amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief, filed...
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From a technical perspective, the biggest advantage Blu-ray discs (BD) offer is more storage space--up to 25GB (for single-layer discs) or 50GB (for dual-layer discs). From a more practical standpoint, the best thing BD brings to the table is higher-quality, high-definition (HD) movies. More storage space means less data needs need to be compressed...
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Forget the quest to build the $100 computer; a group of graduate students think they can create the $12 computer--the perfect PC for developing countries. And no, this is not the $10 computer than India announced last week--which turned out to actually be a $100 computer. But India does play an important role in this story...Graduate student,...
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The potential throttling by ISPs of certain types of Internet traffic has been in the news quite a bit lately. In fact, this last Friday, the FCC issued a ruling (PDF) against Comcast, stating that "Comcast's network management practices discriminate among applications rather than treating all equally and are inconsistent with the concept...
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What do providing secret service protection for former vice presidents and going after cyber criminals have in common? (And no, Al Gore did not have his identity stolen--at least not as far as we know). They are both part of the same bill that was just passed by the Senate. Current legislation lacks the necessary breadth to go after and punish...
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J.D. Power and Associates has just released the results of its 2008 Digital Camera Usage and Satisfaction Study, based on responses from over 8,000 digital camera purchasers between April 2007 and March 2008. Not only does the study identify which cameras consumers liked best, but it also...
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It was only a month ago that we reported how various police departments are setting up systems for receiving anonymous tips via text messaging to help solve crimes. Now the New York City Police Department's (NYPD) Commissioner, Ray Kelly, is embracing another social media technology to help...
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It's been said that you can find virtually anything you are looking for on the Internet. Sometimes, you stumble upon some things you wish you didn't find, or at least hope that your children never see. Such are the concerns of the U.K. Parliament's Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee...
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If you have any doubt that cloud computing is the next wave of remote and distributing computing and is poised to make major inroads into both the enterprise and consumer markets, then don't tell HP, Intel, or Yahoo!--who all just joined together in an initiative to create a "global...
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