Joel Hruska
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
The impact of piracy on the music business has been studied in detail, but the relationship between illegal downloads and film revenue hasn't been explored to nearly the same degree. A new study from researchers at the University of...
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Sony's new chief executive, Kazuo Hirai, has a monumental task in front of him. He's been charged with reversing Sony's years of losses, even as problems continue to pile up in the wake of ex-CEO Howard Stringer's departure. The road back...
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AMD's Financial Analyst Day last week made it clear that while the company is primarily focused on consumer products and SoC design, it still wants to be a player in the server market. The various presentations were a bit unclear as to how...
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Over the past 10 days, we've discussed the question of used games and how revenue is divided. One of the few points that both GameStop and game developers agree on is that buying a used game doesn't directly benefit the publisher or developer in any way, though there's reason to think that a...
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Fresh news out of Taiwan is that Intel and AMD, despite their keen interest in the tablet market, "cannot compete with solutions from ARM in terms of price." The statements, purportedly from various notebook manufacturers, are meant to...
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For most of the 27 years since the first portable computer was announced, computer power use has been treated as a function of the underlying hardware. Even today, OS-level power optimizations are discussed in terms of whether or not the operating system properly supports the low-power...
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With all the recent discussions of future consoles from Sony and Microsoft, we've decided to tackle one of the most significant questions--should future consoles be upgradeable? Historically, console add-ons that boosted the performance of the primary unit haven't done well. Sega's Mega-CD and...
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Bethesda Softworks released a one-two punch today; simultaneously debuting the Skyrim Creation Kit and a surprise -- new, high-resolution textures for its smash hit. The Creation Kit gives modders access to the same tools the game...
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AMD's Financial Analyst Day last week contained very little information about the company's plans for its workstation graphics division, but Sunnyvale remains committed to professional graphics. That was the emphatic message from the FirePro personnel we spoke to about this launch; we'll have...
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Our coverage of the content lockout in the just-released game Kingdoms of Amalur and whether or not studios deserve a cut of used games sales kicked off quite a debate last week. We heard from a number of you with strong views on the...
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Today is AMD's Financial Analyst Day -- and it's been a long time coming. Questions about the company's future have been piling up since Bulldozer launched and AMD layed off much of its PR/marketing teams. Today, the company lifted the...
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In the ongoing HP/Oracle lawsuit, the judge has dismissed Oracle's fraud case against HP and decided to allow the unredacted version of Oracle's claim to be published, and it's chock full of juicy bits and choice quotes. None of the newly...
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Studios and publishers are fighting back hard against the used game market, with the upcoming title Kingdoms of Amular, the latest to declare it'll use a content lock. In this case, KoA ups the ante by locking out part of the game that's...
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The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has released a ruling that invalidates the third of three patents Rambus used to intimidate Nvidia into settling with it early last year. The decision is a further blow to Rambus'...
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Last year, the trio of developers at NimbleBit released their iOS game, Tiny Tower. The game puts players in charge of a building and the diminutive residents, dubbed "bitizens" who reside there. The game was a smash hit on both iOS and...
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If you've paid attention to quarterly earnings reports from the major computer OEMs, you've likely noticed that the hard drive shortage this fall had an impact, but not a disastrous one. Companies like Intel reported that manufacturer inventories were substantially affected as company's held...
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Yesterday afternoon, Alma Whitten, Google's Director of Privacy, posted a blog entry stating that the company is preparing a major overhaul and simplification of its various privacy policies. According to the entry, Google is planning to...
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AMD announced its fourth quarter and 2011 results yesterday. The figures aren't bad in and of themselves, but the company's overall position headed into 2012 is decidedly uncertain. Yearly revenue was flat at $6.57B, with total net income for fiscal 2011 at $495M, up four percent from 2010...
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Google's efforts to improve Internet efficiency through the development of the SPDY (pronounced "speedy") protocol got a major boost today when the chairman of the HTTP Working Group (HTTPbis), Mark Nottingham, called for it to be included...
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It's been awhile since we covered the announcements coming out of the Building Windows 8 blog and there have been a number of interesting new articles published. We've got three of the biggest discussed below: New Network Management:...
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The CPU design firm Venray Technology announced a new product design this week that it claims can deliver enormous performance benefits by combining CPU and DRAM on to a single piece of silicon. We spent some time earlier this fall discussing the new TOMI (Thread Optimized Multiprocessor) with company CTO Russell Fish, but while the idea is...
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The battle between HP and Oracle over the future of the Itanium processor has gotten large enough to pull Intel into the courtroom, but the CPU manufacturer successfully appealed to a judge to allow it to keep certain documents...
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