Joel Hruska
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
You can't swing a dead cat these days without hitting a research team claiming to have discovered a new technology or ability that will miraculously enhance battery capabilities as soon as a few quick problems are patched up or some niggling cost factors get fixed. The majority of these announcements splash down and...
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When Microsoft announced the Xbox One, one of its headline features was the creation of new TV and video content. Headlining this new endeavor was a custom Halo-themed television show directed by Ridley Scott. Microsoft didn't reveal much additional information and the news itself was generally swept under the rug in...
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This week, Broadcom announced that it would exit the LTE modem market and shut down its LTE research division. The move comes less than a year after Broadcom bought Renesas' (formerly known as NEC) LTE modem -- and that purchase was supposed to give Broadcom a leg up in modem design after its own in-house LTE product...
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A new patent filing today shows that Apple has been granted a wide-ranging patent for a future smartwatch device (dubbed the iTime). Apple's patent refers to a device which is removable (it continues to function when detached from its wristband) and can be upgraded or swapped with other products. Apple's patent...
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Microsoft's plans to lay off some 18,000 employees have caused ripples in the tech industry -- it's one of the largest layoffs ever announced at a major IT company -- and some of those ripples have spread to Capitol Hill. On Friday, Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala) tore into Microsoft for the hypocrisy of pushing for...
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AMD reported its second quarter results today, and the stock market is anything but happy with the numbers -- in the past hour, the stock has shed more than 18% of its value, plunging from $4.57 to $3.86 as of this writing. Given the size of the plunge, you'd think the company had just announced its own imminent...
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When AMD launched its Radeon R9 295X2, we praised the GPUs performance and its impressive water liquid cooling system, but noted that the price, at $1500, was quite high -- even given these positive characteristics. AMD's Never Settle Forever bundle helps to sweeten the deal, since it's worth about $150 at retail...
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From the beginning, the anti-net neutrality argument has been built on a single premise: Give companies free rein to charge more money for services, and they'll respond by improving the customer experience, rolling out service to more people, and aggressively adopting faster technology. Over the past few months...
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It has been almost two years since AMD launched the FirePro W9000 and kicked off a new battle in the workstation GPU wars. Today, we're reviewing the company's FirePro W9100 -- a new card based on the same Hawaii-class GPU as the desktop R9 290 and R9 290X, but aimed at the workstation market and professional consumers. Does...
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A federal judge has authorized a nutritional supplement manufacturer, Ubervita, to subpoena Craigslist and Amazon for the personal details of reviewers who reportedly posted negative things about the company and its products. We've seen this question come up more than once in the context of an individual's right to...
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Over the past year, as criticism and anger have built over the NSA's numerous excesses and abuses of American civil rights, it's been easy to forget that underneath the justified anger, a genuine war has been raging. The NSA may have overreached in many respects, but that doesn't mean the government agency has...
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Normally, the question of whether a game runs better on the PC or a console is a no-brainer -- at least, for PC users. Watch Dogs, however, with its problematic PC play, challenges that concept. And since the gap between consoles and PCs is typically smallest at the beginning of the console generation, we decided to take the Xbox One...
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One of the great universal truths of modern gaming is that preorders suck. The term refers to the practice of ordering a title at some point before it actually ships in order to get access to a variety of minor outfit tweaks, a few starting weapons, or a few boosts to early gameplay. Today, some publishers take this...
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Last week, we reported on the problems dogging Crytek, with UK staff allegedly going unpaid and increasing concerns over the company's ability to continue as a going concern. Those concerns have only amplified in the past week -- it's now reprorted that the majority of Crytek UK staff have turned in formal letters of...
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One of the trickiest aspects to launching a major new platform update is the chicken and egg problem. Without any hardware to test on or take advantage of, developers are leery of committing to supporting new hardware features. Without software that takes advantage of new hardware capabilities, customers aren't...
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Ever since Edward Snowden leaked details on how the government had forced various IT companies to disclose information (or secured their willing cooperation), companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have been desperate to regain their users' trust. Six months ago, Microsoft announced that it would reengineer...
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Today, the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision on data privacy, holding 9-0 that neither police officers nor federal law enforcement have a unilateral right to search cell phones without first procuring a warrant. Prior to today, the government had previously argued that the police could search a cell phone under...
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Crytek -- developers of the CryEngine and the hit Crysis series -- is, by all accounts, in significant trouble. Reports of problems are mounting at multiple publications as employees speak out about missed paychecks, layoffs, and multiple staff departing in the wake of non-payment. Eurogamer is reporting that Crytek...
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The transistor is one of the most profound innovations in all of human existence. First discovered in 1947, it has scaled like no advance in human history; we can pack billions of transistors into complicated processors smaller than your thumbnail. After decades of innovation, however, the transistor has faltered. Clock speeds stalled in 2005...
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When Sony bought the Gaikai streaming service and announced it was building custom PlayStation 3 boards to drop into servers for its PlayStation Now game service, a lot of folks got excited by the potential. This type of service delivery could mark the future of gaming, make backwards compatibility a non-issue, and in...
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If you're bored this weekend with a fast Internet connection and some time to kill, EA is offering a free download of Titanfall to everyone, no questions asked, for the next two days. The game is the full version -- you won't have any feature restrictions or locked-off areas. While it's being billed as a weekend...
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For years, we've heard rumors that Intel was building custom chips for Google or Facebook, but these deals have always been assumed to work with standard hardware. Intel might offer a different product SKU with non-standard core counts, or a specific TDP target, or a particular amount of cache -- but at the end of the...
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