Gregory Sullivan
Gregory Sullivan
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
The Antikythera Mechanism was salvaged out of a shipwreck in 1900. It's the original HotHardware -- the first known example of an analog computing device. Scientists estimated it was made in 100 BC. Researchers are still trying to find out exactly what the device can do, and identify who might have made it, but according to an article in the...
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The trend towards DRM-free music seems to be giving Dell the notion that the market's ready for another digital music player. They tried to sell MP3 players five years ago, but got washed away in the Apple iPod tsunami and gave up in 2006. There's a whiff of "me too" about anybody trying to make portable music players now; Apple's devices...
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Everyone's read something or other about the next version of Windows that will replace Vista, usually referred to as Windows 7. But it's all still Windows. David Worthington, over at SDTimes, says he's gotten a look at internal Microsoft documents that outline their development plan for Midori, a non-Windows Operating System. Microsoft understands...
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Cuil, the alternative search engine, has been out for a day now, and the general consensus is that it measures up somewhere between not-very-good and epic fail. But it's hard to recall any sort of Public Relations campaign that worked out as well as the feeding frenzy we saw in the media for what turned out to be a 404 page for a good portion...
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Now that buying a fixer-upper in the 'burbs, putting in mildly radioactive granite countertops, stainless steel appliances and laminate flooring, and then selling it is a recipe for losing money instead of getting rich quick, people looking to make a fast makeover buck have turned their attention to the Internet. They troll the tubes...
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People dissatisfied with their local cable and satellite services often look longingly at Verizon's FiOS TV service as an alternative. The problem has been that you can't get the service in all that many places yet, and there's a hopscotch effect to the places you can get it. Some people even have Verizon FiOS for their Internet connection...
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Microsoft only has a few cash cows, but they're enormous cash cows. Their suite of Office programs isn't cheap, and many users just root around for old discs or pirated versions when they're loading up a new PC. Microsoft is trying out offering the software as a service (SaaS) for a $70 per year subscription price, along with a few goodies...
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Nvidia shares dropped significantly on news of lower sales, with the double whammy of a estimated $200 million charge to replace defective laptop chips. Nvidia was already struggling to compete with AMD's subsidiary ATI, plus an encroachment on Nvidia's bread and butter graphics processors by industry leader Intel. A soft economy isn't helping...
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Google has been ordered to turn over their logs of user activity on their YouTube site to Viacom. Viacom is suing Google over copyright infringement, and wishes to see how many YouTube users actually look at Viacom copyrighted material on the video service, then compare it to the amount of traffic any given non-copyrighted video might garner,...
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In any discussion of the vulnerability of your computer to malware, the discussion is often centered around the cutting edge of the battles between new threats and new versions of browsers and software to combat them. But the dirty little secret we don't discuss much is: Most software is older than dirt. Does software need a fresh sale date?...
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Gasoline costs four bucks, but a gallon of it will get you twenty or thirty miles farther away from your mother-in-law, so it's worth it. Printer ink is famously expensive, going for upwards of $8000 a gallon, but at least you can use it to print a letter to the editor of your newspaper complaining about high gasoline prices. Lots of things...
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Web designers love Flash, Adobe's industry-standard method of displaying dynamic images. But anyone who cared about Search Engine Optimization knew the dirty little secret of Flash: it was all pretty much invisible to web-crawlers like Google. Adobe is now providing Google and Yahoo with the tools necessary to index Flash content, so it won't...
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There's an old joke about the French surrendering to anyone and anything, but one place France never surrenders is in the courtroom where money is involved. If you're a foreign firm doing business in France and your business model rubs an established French business the wrong way, the French court system isn't shy about whacking you with the...
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InfoWorld amassed 210,000 signatures for a "Save Windows XP" petition, and forwarded it to CEO Steve Ballmer. Today is the date when Microsoft officially ends the availability of its last generation Operating System, and hopes that everybody gravitates to its current OS, Vista. It's unlikely that Microsoft is going to change its corporate...
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Andy Grove was once the Chairman of Intel, and is widely considered one of the best minds in American management. Time's Man of the Year for 1997 isn't spending his retirement from the chipmaker doing nothing; he's championing a push to get plug-in hybrid cars on the road ASAP.During the past year and a half, Grove has created his own crash...
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Have you heard of DMP? Microsoft is applying for a patent to equip devices with a "Digital Manners Policy," a polite euphemism for a kill switch or jammer in your electronic equipment. It doesn't stop at stopping things like using a flash camera in a museum, either; OnStar is implementing the same sort of device to shut off your car remotely....
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The dirty little secret that's often overlooked when we Internet pundits and newshounds discuss throttling of P2P traffic by ISPs, is that it's an indictment of the infrastructure, not the process. Why would you discuss rationing if the capacity was there? P2P is simply the thin edge of a big and growing wedge. It's easy to single it...
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Lawrence Roberts is just another guy with the title:" Inventor of the Internet" in news articles. According to Wikipedia, he's the father of networking through data packets. And he's turned his attention to everyone's favorite data packet topic: Peer-to-Peer filesharing. He's established a company called Anagran, and says their devices can...
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The computer mouse must rank among the most useful things ever invented. Like all great inventions, it's pretty well impossible to even calculate the value that it's brought to society. But many more ways to point at something on a pixellated screen have been developed since the mouse was born back in the sixties. According to an analyst at...
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Demetrios Leontaris knows more about your iPod than Steve Jobs ever will. He cruises around New York City, using his car as his mobile office/workshop, and fixes whatever ails your little Apple wonders, generally right on the spot for a flat $70 fee. He's not alone either; Fortune identifies at least half a dozen iPod repair services in NYC...
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Nintendo's Wii console game is an interesting piece of technology, and a fascinating business phenomenon as well. While Nintendo's competitors produced consoles as powerful and versatile as they could, charged a small fortune for them, and still didn't make much money on them, the Wii concentrated on simple, fun, intuitive gameplay, introduced...
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If you're running Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5, there's a nasty Trojan horse out in wild that antivirus firm SecureMac has spotted being distributed from a hacker website. Taking advantage of a vulnerability of the Apple Remote Desktop agent, the Trojan does every sort of bad thing to your computer.According to SecureMac, the Trojan runs hidden on...
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