Joel Hruska
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Earlier this week, we covered Amazon's announcement of its new 5GB Cloud Drive service. Amazon is pushing the free service as a "upload once, access anywhere" option that allows users to play the music they want, wherever they are. When questions of licensing were raised, Amazon spokesperson...
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Reducing mobile power consumption has been a top priority of the PC industry for years. Much of the work in this area has focused on hardware, but a recent post from Microsoft's IE blog raises the question of whether or not browser choice can make a difference in battery life*. It's not a...
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The Canadian ISP, Rogers Communications, admitted yesterday that it throttles games like World of Warcraft in its bid to maintain QoS for all customers. The issue came to light when a Rogers subscriber filed a complaint against the company in February. The author details why she believes...
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One of the persistent criticisms of the Motorola Atrix and HTC Inspire is that the devices don't deliver anything like the wireless speeds AT&T claims they're capable of. AT&T has been coyly playing cat and mouse over the question...
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It's been several months since news of the PS3's core vulnerabilities hit the news, but the case remains stuck in judicial limbo. Sony wants to move the case to California on the grounds that Hotz accessed the PlayStation Network (PSN), which is physically located in that state. Hotz's lawyers have counter-claimed that since Hotz is not a
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Windows Phone 7 devices haven't hit the sales targets Microsoft hoped for when it launched the OS late last year. The users that have purchased WP7 smartphones, meanwhile, don't seem all that happy at the rate MS has rolled out new...
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Two weeks ago, we discussed Asus' claim that certain AM3 motherboards would function properly when paired with AM3+ processors. We've since spoken with both companies and have a (slightly) clearer idea of what to expect. Asus' announcement...
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Only a few months ago, Honeycomb (Android 3.0) was a much-hyped fundamental improvement over previous Android releases like FroYo or Gingerbread. Thus far it's been mostly sizzle, rather than steak. Reviews of Motorola's Xoom often discuss...
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The Japanese earthquake of two weeks ago has had a significant impact on the country's output of manufactured goods in every sector. As a result, the business markets are watching the company's silicon wafer and IC production carefully, with an eye towards foreseeing off any shortage-related...
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We've discussed Sony's decision to shut down Other OS functionality and abandon the supercomputing market several times in the past 12 months. One of the expansions in progress even as Sony killed these programs, dubbed Condor, is now fully online for the first time. This new cluster is...
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It's been nearly a decade since the music industry declared war against file sharers via its controversial policy of suing individuals supposedly identified via their IP addresses. After all this time one would expect the various companies...
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Two major textbook publishers, Pearson and McGraw-Hill, announced today that they've invested substantially in a company that creates iPad-specific interactive texts. The company, Inkling, believes that it delivers a better comprehensive...
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One downside of the upcoming Phenom II - Bulldozer transition is that the new processors won't be compatible with current AM3 motherboards. This news disappointed certain AMD enthusiasts, given that Sunnyvale typically focuses on chipset...
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Note: This is not a full review of IE9 in all its puissant glory but a quick tour of the new browser, its additional features and UI changes, and a quick check of its performance vis-à-vis the other major browser options. Internet Explorer 9 debuted this week into a flourishing...
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Intel's Sandy Bridge processors have won acclaim for their hardware-accelerated video transcoding capabilities, dubbed Quick Sync, but there are significant limitations in the current iteration. LucidLogix, a company that's heretofore been known for its multi-GPU Hydra hardware, has developed...
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When Steve Jobs launched the iPad 2 recently, he was even more close-mouthed about its enhancements than usual. With NVIDIA's Tegra 2 starting to ship en masse and tablets on the hot seat for 2011, there's a tremendous amount of interest...
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Today, Intel formally announced a new class of low-power Xeon processors meant to fill the growing demand for cloud computing servers. Intel has dubbed such servers micro servers, and believes they'll be the major source of server market...
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The Chinese have been climbing up the supercomputing staircase for some years; the country's upgraded Tianhe-I system is currently in the lead out of the TOP500. Despite Tianhe-I's success, it may be the last supercomputer China builds using both Intel and NVIDIA parts. (The Tianhe-I...
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One of the unfortunate consequences of AMD's inability to match Intel's performance at the ultra high-end of the CPU market over the past few years is that there's been a substantial decline in the number of high-end AMD motherboards. NewEgg presently stocks just two AMD motherboards in the...
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Much of the talk about AMD products has centered around Bulldozer of late, but Llano is on track for launch this year as well. AMD has released a new video pitting Llano against Intel's Sandy Bridge, with results that (un)surprisingly favor AMD's own solution. According to Godfrey Cheng, AMD's...
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This week, at ISSCC (International Solid-State Circuits Conference) Intel unveiled its next-generation Itanium processor, codenamed Poulson. This new octal-core processor is easily the most significant update to Itanium Intel has ever built and could upset the current balance of power at...
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When Nvidia announced its next-generation Tegra product at the Mobile World Conference, it pulled out all the stops in an effort to impress. The stats themselves were impressive—the chip packs a twelve-core GeForce GPU in with a quad-core ARM CPU—but NV opted to hammer home the...
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