Gregory Sullivan
Gregory Sullivan
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Dell Computer is opening up a factory in Chennai, India, to manufacture desktop PCs, and later notebooks as well. But the factory is not there to take advantage of cheap labor to make computers for the US market. India's market is poised for explosive growth, and the Chennai plant will be a foothold for Dell in the Indian subcontinent....
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Google saves too much information about you, and keeps it too long. At least that's the general consensus among privacy watchdogs and various governmental agencies. But Marissa Mayer, VP of Search for Google, said Google is trying to find a way for Google to allow you to explicitly consent to archiving your search data for longer than the...
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Sony has a lot of money and prestige riding on their Playstation 3 gaming console. Blockbuster's recent announcement that they would stock only the Blu-ray format in high-def movies might help PS3 sales a little, as the console is also a Blu-ray player. But there's been an enormous problem right from the start with it: There's really not much...
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The US 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, Ohio has ruled that law enforcement must obtain a search warrant to look through your e-mail accounts without your permission. The ruling gives e-mail communications the same privacy protections that letters and telephone conversations have. “The content of e-mail is something that...
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Computer maker Gateway has voluntarily recalled about 14,000 lithium-ion battery packs, sold as primary or spare power supplies for some of their laptop computers, because they pose an overheating and fire hazard. The Irvine, Calif., computer maker said the affected battery packs were shipped as the primary or spare battery pack...
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20th Century Fox scrapped a plan to make a movie based on Microsoft's smash hit Halo series of video games, but they've inked a deal with Redmond to become the primary licensor for the Halo franchise anyway. They'll sell books, clothes, and various other collectible stuff, and probably cash in big in September when Halo 3 is released....
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In what many are calling "The Italian Job," cyber thieves have infected a host of legitimate Italian websites with a redirect code that sends the unwitting user's browser to a server that downloads a keylogging tool called MPack. MPack is a sort of off-the-shelf malware sold by crooks to other crooks. Although attackers have...
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It's a charming idea: Why not have municipal Wi-Fi in your town or city, just like municipal water? Well, a lot of municipalities are giving it a go --424 according to industry cheerleader Esme Vos of MuniWireless LLC--and they're discovering that it's expensive, and it doesn't work very well. Some municipal officials whose cities...
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Blockbuster video has thrown their considerable weight behind the Blu-Ray format by deciding to offer only that format in its video rental stores. They offered high definition discs in both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray format as a test in 250 of their outlets, and consumers opted for the Blu-ray more than 70 percent of the time. The release...
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PayPal is a real, live bank now. In Luxembourg, anyway. It's not currently allowed to be an American bank, partly because of the complexity of their arrangements with other financial institutions like GE and Mastercard. A funny thing has happened to that funny little payment service you use to buy junk on eBay; it's beginning to make the...
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When counterfeiters dupe a movie or make a knock-off Louis Vuitton handbag, the harm accrues only to the companies that would have sold the genuine article. But ersatz goods can kill, or do grievous bodily harm, too, as we learned with tainted pet food from China recently. And businesses that hold copyrights deserve protection like everybody...
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IBM was out yesterday with a new blade chassis they are aiming towards small to medium size businesses. (SMB) The idea is to allow businesses that have previously needed a room full of separate servers to integrate them all together and handle the ever-growing list of different essential business computing applications like anti-virus, firewalls,...
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Kodak is one of those companies that had problems adapting to changing technologies. The death of film cameras- you remember film cameras, don't you? -sorely tested Kodak's reason to exist. Now researchers from Kodak have made a 2 - 4 times improvement in the light sensitivity of the image sensor in any digital camera using what they call...
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The UK's Barclays Bank is beginning to use two factor authentification for transactions online to combat fraud. They are supplying 500,000 customers with a PINsentry device that would make it imposible for a phishing scam to clean out your bank account by simply getting their hands on your log-in password. While broadly welcomed,...
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The essential difference between Microsoft and Apple as corporate entities with wildly differing worldviews is being highlighted by the release of Apple's Safari browser for use on Windows machines. Some new users report that they have trouble reading the text on a Safari presented page. No, Safari didn't make you go blind; although eventually...
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John Carmack, owner of id Software, appeared at Apple Worldwide Developers Conference and delivered the first public demonstration of id's next generation game engine. It allows almost unlimited visual tinkering separate from the mechanics of the game. Tools to be provided by Id mean "They have unlimited flexibility to change as much...
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HotHardware's own Nick Welles told you earlier this week about Apple's plan to release its Safari web browser for use on Windows machines. The Apple crowd assembled seemed to like the idea. But they're probably already using Safari. Now that the dust has settled a bit, Leander Kahney at Wired asks and answers the question: "Who in their right...
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We're all moody recluses now. We're weary from telephone salesman calling us, wary of people looking around for us. And we never offer any information to anyone about ourselves without a second thought anymore. One of the results of this desire for telephone privacy, coupled to the rise of people who use a cellphone as their only phone, is...
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According to the Financial Times, Apple is preparing to offer a video-on-demand download service that will offer prime content from Hollywood's major movie studios -- and at a price point and length of rental that could make tumbleweeds blow through your local video rental store and mail order rental houses. A film would cost...
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Just a week after Hitachi and Phillips announced their massive 1 terabyte drives, Seagate has announced they've come up with a way to put quite a bit less --250 gigabytes-- into their 7200.10 series of hard drives. The kicker is that they're putting all 250 GBs of capacity on one platter in their 3.5" drive. The advantage of running...
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What's an Apple TV for, exactly? It's not a DVR, can't function as a cable set top box, play a DVD, or rip one. If you don't have a wireless network in your house, a speedy internet connection, a digital television and an iTunes account, it won't do much of anything at all. And unlike most Apple products, a teardown of the components and...
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Mozilla is thinking of allowing its users to automatically block websites, identified by Google as a risk for malicious downloads, in their next generation web brower. Google collects lists of presumably malicious webpages using information gathered by Stopbadware.org, Lenovo, and Sun. It's not a done deal, but if so it would amount essentially...
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