Gregory Sullivan
Gregory Sullivan
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
The Cell microprocesssor is the very powerful heart of the Playstation 3 gaming console. People have found all sorts of uses for them other than playing Assassin's Creed, including using them for medical research through the Folding at Home program. Now the US military has spent $133 million to put together the world's fastest supercomputer,...
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If you've been wondering if Intel's 80+ percent market share of the microprocessor market amounted to a monopoly worth investigating, wonder no more. The Federal Trade Commision has started a formal review of Intel's business practices to see if they run afoul of any anti-competitive laws. They're sending out subpoenas to AMD and some of the...
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You gotta love Steve Ballmer. He's like the crazy uncle at the family reunion that wants to sing karaoke with a lampshade on his head. I imagine that when the Washington Post asked for a wide-ranging interview with the Microsoft CEO, they figured they'd get all sorts of inside spin in Ballmer's tussle with Yahoo! chief Jerry Yang, or maybe...
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Broadcom really isn't a sexy business. They supply Integrated Circuits for broadband communications. It is a big business, however; Broadcom had revenue of $3.67 billion in 2006, for instance. According to indictments handed down recently, various people at Broadcom backdated millions of stock options to raid company receipts for themselves...
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E-Trade is offering its account holders a free application for their BlackBerry smartphones that allows them to get real-time stock information and execute trades on their phones. Now if you're walking down the street in a big city and see executives throwing themselves out of the windows of some skyscraper, you can read the name on the building,...
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The Firefox browser from Mozilla is on version three. And version three is currently available as "Prerelease Candidate 2". That means it's not ready for public consumption, but many people are using it. It's unlikely that much will change after Prerelease Candidate 2, so let's go with it. According to Walt Mossberg at least, Firefox 3 is...
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Many eBay users are up in arms about the changes in fee structure on the site that favor large vendors selling goods at fixed prices on a "Buy it Now" basis instead of eBay's original auction format. The little vendors who have made the site what it is today don't like it, but eBay might simply be acknowledging the obvious: Online auctions...
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Pure Digital came out of nowhere last year with one of the hottest consumer electronics devices on the market. Their compact Flip Camcorder cost just $149, had four buttons and a hatch for a couple of alkaline batteries, took pretty good quality video, and plugged right into your USB port to download the video bits of your life. Simple,...
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It hasn't gotten a lot of play, but Wal-Mart has launched a free Internet Classified service, as sort of virtual bulletin board for people to buy, sell, and trade all of their worthless... oops, I meant valuable stuff. Wal-Mart's funneling their customers to an existing web service called Oodle.com. The service doesn't charge the seller or...
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I never use up my cell-phone plan minutes, do you? The cheapest plan gives you more than I'll ever need. But it's still always in the back of your mind when you're talking on the phone: Don't go over. Time Warner Cable wants to put "don't go over" in the back of your mind, too, when you're uploading or downloading stuff on your cable Internet...
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Hewlett-Packard probably looked at the big pile of cash Microsoft pushed under Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang's nose, and thought: If you're not interested, I wouldn't mind a piece of that. Microsoft just wants to find a way to drive users to their Live Search toolbar, and they really don't care how they do it. Now Microsoft has struck a deal with...
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It's hard to say if Adobe is saying "me first," or "me too." They've launched new applications for their suite of web-based document generation software at Acrobat.com that goes head to head with Google Docs and Microsoft's Office Live Workspace. Now you can have a virtual typing pigpile hosted by Adobe, too. At the heart of the new launch...
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Apple issued a large patch yesterday for its Leopard operating system. While the iCal calendar exploit got a good bit of press back when it was discovered in January, most of the over forty bugs and vulnerabilities addressed in the patch haven't really been front page news, although many of them seem fairly serious. The days of "security by...
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Dell's been in a kind of funk. They lost the title of largest computer maker to HP last year, cut a bunch of jobs, talked a lot about restructuring. Whatever they're doing seems to be working. They're still in second place, but they're making money at it; their first quarter numbers are in and they outperformed analysts' expectations...
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Akamai is a Hawaiian word that means intelligent. It's the name chosen by a very intelligent group of MIT -centric founders for their global Internet content and application delivery business. Since they act as a sort of content mirror for all sorts of customers all over the web, all over the world, they're almost uniquely positioned to offer...
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There's a yearly conference going on out in Carlsbad, CA, called D: All Things Digital. This year makes it D6. There's plenty of interviews of the movers and shakers in our digital world by the movers and shakers in the digital print media that we could talk about. Nahh. Michael Dell went to the bathroom or somewhere else non-official and...
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In the real estate world, there's an old saying explaining the three reasons for the relative value of properties: Location; location; location. One prime location that was verboten for realtors has been the Internet. The National Association of Realtors had obstructed member realtors from using the Internet to mine the Multiple Listing Service...
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Hewlett Packard announced its new blade setup today, and the ProLiant BL2X220c G5 is something of a breakthrough. HP has been able to put two servers into one blade, cutting energy consumption and shrinking the space needed down on the server farm. The two servers are completely independent of each other, but share the same shell. That setup...
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Internet years go by fast. Way back in ancient web history --2001-- Borders books thought it was a good idea to ally themselves with a fast-growing web portal called Amazon.com. Perhaps you've heard of it. I'm sure it seemed like an interesting sideline revenue stream to Borders enormous brick-and-mortar book sales at the time. Borders has...
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I don't know about you, but I feel fine. Viacom doesn't. It sued Google, the owner of YouTube, for $1 billion for copyright infringement. Google, in turn, doesn't feel fine either, because Viacom can sue them even though they claim they have made every attempt to comply with the DMCA. According to Google, the suit threatens the very...
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It's common received knowledge that there was a tech bubble in the late nineties, and then it burst. But what if that wasn't the end of it? What if it was really more like a tech balloon, and it had a pinhole leak? Instead of the pop we thought we heard, perhaps it's was a long slow hissing until we wake up today and realize: Ones and Zeros...
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All of the three major browsers are given away free to anyone that will take them. But that doesn't make the the competition among them any less ferocious; just the opposite, really. Microsoft's Internet Explorer enjoys about a 75 percent share of users, Mozilla's Firefox 18 percent, and Apple's Safari has 5 percent. Mozilla and Microsoft...
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