Gregory Sullivan
Gregory Sullivan
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
The need for IT workers with very specific skills is driving up the wages earned by those workers. And a reluctance to jump around from job to job (Hello 1998!) is making it difficult for employers to fill IT positions. That translates into a shortage -- and higher wages for the right...
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Last month, nearly 10% of the Class of 2008 at Duke University's business school were caught cheating on a take-home final exam. But is it really cheating to collaborate on projects anymore? How dumb would you have to be to work that way in the real world? Still, many believe that a...
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Creative is out with an inexpensive, tiny MP3 player. They call it the ZEN Stone. Its 1 GB of storage will hold about 250 songs, unless you're into Wagner, and the $39.99 price has Creative executives dreaming of customers buying a handful of them. "The Creative ZEN Stone, at just $39.99, opens up a huge new market for MP3 players,"...
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The internet riot over the posting of a decryption code for HD-DVD discs yesterday at Digg was fascinating and amusing. But the end result for Digg, and others that post-- or allow to be posted-- that mundane but magical string of numbers and letters could be very severe. The Electronic...
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IBM has pioneered a new method to make chips that essentially assemble themselves into a usable framework. It should yield a savings in power consumption and a goose in speed. The technique works by coating a silicon wafer with a layer of a special polymer that when baked...
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We hardware fanbois at HotHardware always keep a close eye on the horserace between Intel and AMD. But you know who's making real money in the chip world? Analog chipmakers: Research firm iSuppli forecasts a 10.1% jump in analog chip sales this year, to $47.5 billion. ISuppli analyst Gary Grandbois says that analog sales growth...
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Apple has an update for its ubiquitous Quicktime multimedia software, to fix the exploit discovered at a security conference two weeks ago. Remember, the exploit works if you're running Windows too, so everybody should get the update if you have Quicktime. The exploit with...
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The internet is a fever swamp of hackers. Rasmus Lerdorf of Yahoo is in the news with his simple solution to avoiding the most common way bad people steal your good money: Cross-site scripting vulnerablities. His simple fix: use two browsers. The idea is to separate all the surfing where personal information may be exposed from...
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Microsoft is very late to the party with Silverlight, its cross-browser cross-platform plug-in for rich media on the web. Adobe's Flash is so far ahead delivering stuff to look at that it seemed Microsoft would have no chance to catch up. But what if it was better? A lot better? This sounds better: A lot of the demonstrations of Silverlight...
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It's likely that the recently announced security flaw in Apple's QuickTime media player will be expoited by hackers in just a matter of days. The vulnerability is caused by an error in the way Apple QuickTime handles Java. It can be exploited if a user visits a malicious Web site...
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A professor at MIT has come up with a new programming language and an associated compiler to overcome the challenges presented by programming for powerful multicore chipsets. They call it StreamIt. "Creating software is still something a lot of people can do, but if they had to deal with parallelism, it becomes much more difficult,"...
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HotHardware mentioned earlier this week that Google had surpassed Microsoft as the most visited internet site. And pretty much every Tech analyst and Apple fanboi has been talking non-stop about the problems Microsoft has had getting their latest OS, Vista, to click with the public. Well analysts or no, the cash register doesn't lie:...
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It's pointless to point out that an iPod nano is a spiffy little piece of gear. It's the industry standard now. But even if you don't want to listen to Blink 182 through waxy earbuds all day, it's still a powerful piece of storage equipment. XtremeMac has an inexpensive microphone/speaker interface for your little Apple wonder that turns...
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Microsoft is no longer the most visited website or the most valuable global brand. Google is: Google had 528 million unique visitors in March, up 5 percent from the previous month, according to comScore. Microsoft had 527 million visitors during the same month, up...
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IBM announced today that they're going to integrate the "Cell" processor used in Sony's Playstation 3 gaming console into IBM mainframe computers. The Cell is very well adapted for performing the calculations needed to generate 3 dimensional images, and IBM wants to keep up with technology that any multiplayer virtual world application takes...
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Some very smart people over at MIT have come up with an inexpensive way to generate holographic images that works along with standard computer hardware and gaming consoles. Thus, Bove and his team have developed Mark III--expected to be completed within a couple of months--which is based on the earlier systems but has three major differences....
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Researchers led by the University of Tokyo have broken the speed record for data transmission using standard communication protocols.The new record, 9.08 gigabits per second, will probably stand until someone comes up with a new protocol for data transmission. Don't worry, they're working on it. That likely represents...
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Think Geek has a terrific little USB ready digital microscope for sale. Nifty. You'll need some of this: Simple plug and play operation with included software that allows you to magnify objects and view them on your PC up to 200X and take snapshots and time-lapse movies...
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Intel announced price cuts, as much as 40%, on both its desktop and server processors. Rival chipmaker AMD announced a 611 million dollar loss for the first quarter already. Someone please take AMD's belt and shoelaces away for the rest of the week. For the desktop market, the Core 2 Quad Q6600 has fallen in price to US$530 while...
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Research In Motion, makers of the popular Blackberry handheld, is going to offer software to allow smartphone users running Windows Mobile 6.0 to use the Blackberry's applications without changing their hardware. “Extending BlackBerry applications to a broader range of devices is...
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Spanish Wi-Fi startup Fon has convinced Time Warner Cable to allow home broadband customers to turn their connections into public wireless hotspots using Fon's hardware. It's a sort of take a penny leave a penny format for subscribers to the service, and they call their members "Foneros." ...
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News outlets are always anxious to offer breaking news to their readers. But how fast is too fast? Our friends at Engadget reported that Wal*Mart had made a blockbuster purchase of HD-DVD players. Big enough to have an effect on the viability of the format. "Get ready to get your cheap HD on kids. Wal-Mart just threw down some serious...
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