Joel Hruska
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Back in the early 1960s, Bell Aerosystems developed and demonstrated the Bell Rocket Belt. It was the first successful jetpack, capable of reaching speeds of up to 30 mph, could travel up to 30 feet vertically, and had a maximum range of ~400 feet. It weighed 120 lbs loaded and flew for a whopping 21s on a single tank of fuel. Unsurprisingly,...
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A few weeks ago we covered a controversial case that erupted in Pennsylvania's Lower Merion School district. A student at the district, Blake Robbins, was disciplined for activities that allegedly occurred in the privacy of his own home...
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Yesterday, we brought you news that a batch of Core i7 processors that shipped out of NewEgg had been complete fakes. The boxes in question looked real enough from the outside, but opening the cardboard revealed "fans" that were actually stickers and processors made of aluminum. and a bit of...
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There's been a fair amount of chatter surrounding Microsoft's upcoming Windows Phone 7, but thus far the software developer has been reluctant to reveal much in the way of details. On Friday, Microsoft's partner group manager for Windows Mobile, Charlie Kindel, announced via blog entry that...
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We've already covered AMD's upcoming Magny-Cours processor and associated Maranello server platform in some detail, but AMD is apparently wanting to build some buzz around its new hardware. Over at his AMD blog, AMD's director of...
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It's not often that we hear credible reports that a driver may have caused actual, physical harm to a video card, but that's precisely what an unhappy group of users has done. According to reports, the latest series of Forceware (196.75)...
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Ubisoft's eagerly awaited Silent Hunter 5 was released last week as the first title carrying the company's new DRM system. That system, as we've previously discussed, requires that gamers maintain a constant Internet connection or be kicked from the game. One of the major flaws in that system...
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You know what's even better than weird news? Weird news well-flavored with legal stupididy, that's what. Our saga today starts with a shipping oddity; specifically the fact that Overclockers.com forum member Dreadrok ordered a Core i7 920...
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When a game developer releases a demo, it's typically intended to entice players into first trying and then purchasing the full version. In keeping with that goal, demo versions of a game are (usually) designed to be fun. This is the stuff of Game Design 101 for most of us, but a crack team of...
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There's two bits of Ubisoft news today, one of which we're still investigating. First up, the company apparently payed attention to the outrage of gamers who discovered the DRM in the PC version of Assassin's Creed II would throw them out of game without saving if they lost an Internet...
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Speaking at the Digital Landscapes Conference this week, Google vice president of Global Ad Operations, John Herlihy, made a rather surprising prediction regarding the future of desktops and laptops. These two types of devices (including netbooks) may be the Internet access points of choice...
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Competition in the video card market can be pretty cutthroat, particularly when it comes to predicting the whims of the enthusiast market. Companies regularly vie for the title of Largest Pe... Fastest Video Card Available and they're willing to pull out all the stops to take home the crown...
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Panasonic is facing down a class-action lawsuit alleging that the company's G10 line of plasma televisions is defective. The 'alleged', in this case, is a bit of a misnomer, as the issue has been independently confirmed and admitted by the company itself. The question at hand is whether or not...
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Scientists have theorized that there might be frozen water on the moon for decades—while water vapor quickly boils away on the moon's surface, frozen water was predicted to exist inside permanently shadowed polar craters as far back as the 1960s. Evidence has mounted for the existence of water...
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It may seem an odd way to write news about a product, but before we talk about the Sony Dash, we're going to talk about the Chumby. A Chumby is a bit of consumer electronics designed to run a variety of widgets that can do...well...just about anything. The entire project has been open-source...
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We've already covered the launch of NVIDIA's power-saving Optimus technology and associated Next-Generation Ion platforms for Atom today (including the ZBox from Zotac), but there's a nifty video over at nTersect (NVIDIA's company blog) that's worth a watch if you want to see just how "Off"...
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Intel announced its AppUp application store at Mobile World Conference last month and the company is pushing out an incentive package aimed at luring developers into netbook-centric programming. The new program—the Million Dollar Development Fund—is currently made up of three separate...
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Zotac gave details on the next system in its line of mini-PCs today, the HD-ID11. Externally, the HD-ID11 is nearly identical to the HD-ND01 we reviewed last year, but the manufacturer has made a number of small upgrades to add a few of the features we had on our wishlist for the original MAG...
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In the United States, discussions of copyright protection and infringement inevitably revolve around the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. Since it passed twelve years ago, the DMCA has become the weapon of choice for US companies seeking to fairly protect their property as well as...
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Ever since NVIDIA's original ION chipset proved it was possible to pair Intel's low-power Atom processor to a relatively powerful graphics core and attain acceptable multimedia performance, the market has been curious as to what NVIDIA's Ion 2 Next-Generation Ion product might offer. This...
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Much of the e-reader chatter of late has focused around the Kindle and how it will compare to the iPad, but there'll soon be another hat in the ring. Last October we discussed the Entourage Edge and its nifty dual-screen design; we now know that the tablet-sized e-reader/netbook (Entourage is...
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If current rumors are to be believed, AMD's hexa-core Thuban processors are headed for desktops in the near future. First we'll see the new 890GX chipsets launching in March, with three Thuban models following on April 26. The new desktop processors will reportedly come in three flavors:...
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