Gregory Sullivan
Gregory Sullivan
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Online video rental service Netflix noticed that their big rival for your rental dollar, Blockbuster, was wooing away their customers with lower prices. So Netflix is lowering the cost of two of their most popular subscription plans to match Blockbuster's prices. With the reductions announced Sunday, Netflix will charge $16.99...
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The days of the importance of a single core processor's speed alone seem to be over. With major manufacturers already able to put up to 80 cores on one chip, the consensus is that multicore is where it's at going forward. There's a problem, of course. Nobody knows how to program the things properly to use the digital horsepower already available,...
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There are many obstacles to our relationship. You're 75 years old, but age doesn't matter to me. You live in central Sweden, which is kind of a long haul from New England. I'll commute. Both you and I are already married, which might be an impediment as well. But, Sigbritt, you have the world's fastest broadband connection, 40 Gigabits per...
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Dell is out with a line of laptops and desktops aimed at the small business market. They've named the line Vostro, which is latin for... Oh, who cares, it's a dumb name. Never mind the name, it's a great idea. Businesses of a dozen or two people (SMEs) can't afford to have in-house tech support, and need inexpensive, powerful machines ready...
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The third installment in the Bourne Trilogy, "The Bourne Ultimatum," will open in theaters on August 3rd. Part of the appeal of the character is his casual, savvy use of technology as he breezes through far-flung exotic locations. He'll reconfigure your phone after he punches you with it, while driving like a madman. Universal decided to...
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Mobile phone carrier Sprint Nextel has sent out about 1000 "Dear John" letters, terminating service to customers that called Sprint's customer support line between 40 an 50 times a month, often about the same thing over and over. Industry analysts estimate that it costs $10 to $20 per call to handle customer service. So, right, wrong, or indifferent,...
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Google shelled out $625 million for Postini, the messaging security company. Why would they do that? According to Google: "Google already has world class spam and virus protection as part of the Gmail service." Well, that's nice. But in the big business world, that won't cut it, and Google knows it. On the official Google Blog,...
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TV broadcasts are going digital. That's fine. Their former broadcast spectrum, at 700 MHz, is going to be available for other things. That's great. That spectrum is very useful, as the signal can penetrate walls. That's terrific.The head of the FCC, Kevin Martin, thinks that the spectrum should be turned over at auction to wireless broadband...
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AJAX and streaming media has killed the page view as the metric of choice for people trying to figure out who's looking at what on the internet. Statistics giant Nielsen/NetRatings will announce today that it will immedately use total time spent by users as the benchmark for measuring internet use. "It is not that page views are...
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Information Week goes beyond asking who would buy used tech gear, -the answer is pretty much everybody- and examines the real-world factors that drive hardware hungry equipment users to look for goods unauthorized by manufacturers, or the so-called "gray market" of counterfeit hardware, to look for bargains or just plain hard to find stuff....
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Visa helps a lot of people buy a lot of stuff: $1 trillion dollars annually. They're currently testing a payment system, along with Wells Fargo Bank, that allows its customers to make payments using their mobile phones. Such payment methods are already common in Japan and South Korea. Using "account-level processing," Visa's payment-processing...
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Sony has lowered the price of their Playstation gaming console by $100. Or they'll sell you a new model with an improved 80 GB drive at the old $ 599 price point. While Microsoft is busy going through the couch cushions looking for a billion dollars to fix all the Xbox 360s with the "Red Ring Of Death," this move will probably jumpstart...
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Engineers Ravi Vaidyanthan and Lalit Gupta of Southern Illinois University have determined a way to measure and utilize the minute changes in inner ear pressure, caused when a person moves their tongue inside their mouth, to operate equipment like a wheelchair. It's bound to be a boon to the severely disabled, but eventually might find a...
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CNNMoney examined the growing use of worker performance software by large companies to rate their employees' skills, ongoing progress, and value, and how it's transforming the mundane yearly review into a bar chart extravaganza. Does it work? Since only 39% of employees surveyed by Salary.com think the current employment practice of a yearly...
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The least Hot Hardware in the world might be your set-top cable box. It unscrambles your signal and changes the channel. The FCC thought it would sex up the lowly technology and spur competition by requiring set-top boxes be configured to allow the end user to purchase the box, with an installable card supplied by the cable provider to make...
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When you get right down to it, there's really only one thing that matters about a cellphone. Can I call someone on it? No matter what? Because most cellphones are fairly delicate, the answer too often is: No. Casio's "ruggedized" G'zOne phone might be the solution to the abuse the real world dishes out to your cell phone. Inspired...
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Google has been purchasing unused fiber-optic capacity from cable and telephone companies for several years. How much is unknown, but it appears to experts that they have much, much, more than they could ever use to simply connect all their data centers together. What's it all for? Canada's Financial Post thinks they may be preparing to...
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In a report charmingly called "The Ampere Strikes Back," Britain's Energy Saving Trust has predicted that electronic gear will consume nearly half of the total electricity used by the typical household by the year 2020, surpassing the traditionally big electricity eaters in the home: kitchen appliances and lighting. The most striking number...
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HotHardware told you earlier about the nifty web-based phone service GrandCentral. It allows you to ring every number you have on any phone of your choosing, along with a powerful caller ID and a host of other features. Well, Google was interested in the service, too, and thought GrandCentral would make a grand addition to their stable of...
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I like clever people. Not smart people, exactly. Smart people do dumb things all the time. I'm talking about people who look at a situation a little differently than the rest of the crowd, and profit from it. Not cheaters. Inspired.So while everyone was lining up to pay an outrageous amount for an iPhone, because the item seemed nifty or cool,...
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Universal Music Group has notified Apple that it's not renewing its annual contract that allows Apple to offer Universal's music through Apple's iTunes service. They haven't ended the relationship entirely, as Universal continues to market through iTunes as a sort of tenant at will. It's all about leverage when the pennies get counted....
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The Harry Potter series of novels is popular, to say the least. It's popular enough to spawn a malware e-mail scheme. An e-mail promising an attachment that contains a copy of the latest wildly anticipated novel "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" contains a virus instead. But at least it's an amusing virus. It attacks USB memory drives...
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