Joel Hruska
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
According to a now-pulled update pushed to Age of Empires Online, Microsoft's Games for Windows Live will shut down altogether by July 1, 2014. That unofficial announcement follows official word that the Games for Windows Live marketplace would close on August 22 without a replacement service being offered. MS has...
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According to a joint survey from Intel and IDC, the PC market could see sunnier days in 2014. That's the proposed takeaway from a survey IDC conducted of 3,977 adults across both suburbs and cities. The respondents, who all owned at least one PC or Mac, were organized into two basic groups -- those using a PC 4 years...
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Microsoft has made an art out of reversing course on everything people thought the Xbox One was going to do (largely for smart reasons), but up till today, the company has been firm on two points. You will be buying a Kinect at launch, though you could turn off its voice-activation feature, and it would be required for any gaming or console...
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We've covered Elon Musk's proposed Hyperloop before, including some speculation on what kind of system he might propose. The mass transit concept unveiled today is similar, in some respects, to the evacuated vacuum tube first proposed by the Rand Corporation in 1972, but varies in a number of key areas. It doesn't...
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When Microsoft developed Windows 8's controversial UI and new Start Screen, the major impetus driving the design was the need to support touchscreen devices. Microsoft hammered this home at every opportunity, describing the new Metro design as a "touch first" experience. Then Windows 8 shipped, and precious few laptops had touchscreen support....
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Good news for everyone who saw Microsoft's reversal on the Xbox One's family sharing capabilities as a major negative back in June -- the company is planning to allow for sharing capabilities after all. The news, which broke today, doesn't clarify every aspect of how the program will work, but it offers a great deal of information on the ins...
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Nvidia posted its earnings for the second quarter of 2013 (Q2 of fiscal year 2014 by the company's reckoning) and the results are relatively great. The company posted earnings per share (EPS) of $0.16, beating analyst expectations by three cents, with total revenue of $977 million. While that's still a decrease of...
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Microsoft has announced yet another difference between the original version of the Xbox One console and the version you'll be able to buy on store shelves come late November. When it announced the console, the company stated that the Xbox One would not ship with a headset. The reason for this, supposedly, was that Kinect's speaker and microphone...
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CBS and Time Warner have been engaged in a public battle over network access fees and the result has been a blackout in key markets that's left TWC customers unable to access certain CBS properties, including Showtime. These sorts of battles are ill-received by a public that's generally sick of paying an average of...
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Ever since it unveiled the Classmate PC several years ago, Intel has taken an interest in providing educational technology to students in the developing and developed world. The company has just announced the next phase of its efforts -- a pair of tablets that are designed to interface with sensor packages, include...
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One of the greatest obstacles standing between chip manufacturers and the pursuit of smaller, faster, processors is the lack of a proper light source. Current chips are etched using a deep ultraviolet wavelength of 193nm, but at a 28nm semiconductor process geometry, we've reached the limits of what a 193nm wavelength...
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The Elder Scrolls Online got a pair of new videos this week and a lengthy multiplayer demonstration at Quakecon.Buzz around the new MMO has been building steadily for months. Much of what the two trailers show indicates a game that hews closely to Elder Scrolls conventions as well as Skyrim UI standards. There's an...
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The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are more similar than any two consoles from competing vendors have been in decades, but as far as hardware specs are concerned, Sony has a decided edge. While both systems use AMD CPUs and Radeon 7000-derived, GCN-based graphics cards, the Sony system has 1,152 shader cores compared to...
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John Carmack's annual Quakecon keynote is one of the most interesting events of the entire year. The man is incredibly intelligent and understands programming and development to a degree that very few people can match. id may have struggled to replicate the gameplay successes of its early years, but Carmack's...
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One of the contentious issues that's swirled around the NSA since whistleblower Edward Snowden began leaking information on the organization's capabilities is exactly what it can -- or can't -- do. Snowden has stated that as a contractor with Booz Allen Hamilton, "I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities...
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Ever since Microsoft's Surface debuted to tepid reviews and weak sales figures, analysts and pundits have wondered just how well -- or poorly -- the tablet was selling in the market place. From the beginning, Surface was a tough sell -- Microsoft did next to nothing to explain how it differed from a conventional...
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One of the most intriguing events in Bioshock Infinite occurs near the end of the game. Your companion, Elizabeth, opens an interdimensional tear into another reality to help you both escape from a monster. Upon leaping through it, you find yourself in a decaying underwater city, with the creature -- Songbird --...
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If you live in the United States, chances are that you don't think much about the prices other people pay for US products. Everyone is generally aware of the exchange rate, so it's logical to assume that a game, PC, or other product costs the same here as it does in England or Australia, save for shipping costs and...
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A new report (albeit from unnamed industry sources, not Edward Snowden) alleges that the government has used the broad powers granted it by the Patriot Act to demand broad information about a user's passwords, website security, and even encryption information from service providers. The benefits of having this type of...
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The CEO of Activision Blizzard Bobby Kotick announced this morning that he would lead an investor buyout of the company worth approximately $8.2 billion dollars. The move would free Blactivision (how has this moniker never caught on?) to become an independent publisher and free it from the clutches of Vivendi, the...
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Nvidia is showing off a bit more of the capabilities of its upcoming Kepler-based mobile GPU at SIGGRAPH this week, and the next-generation chip should be a quantum leap over what Nvidia is shipping currently. Then again, that's scarcely difficult -- Tegra 4 is based on 2005-era graphics hardware with some L2 cache and a few feature enhancements...
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Intel unveiled a number of new data center initiatives this week as part of its broad product strategy to redefine some of its market goals. In the past, Intel's efforts in this area have boiled down to giving customers more of what they wanted, where "more" was defined as higher clock speeds or more processing cores...
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