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. The district's evidence for said activities was a photo taken by Robbin's...
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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 paint. At the time we identified D&H Distributing...
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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 developers of current or hypothetical future Windows...
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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 product marketing John Fruehe recently spilled the beans on a 48-core contest. The...
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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) caused certain cards to overheat or fail altogether due to a fan control problem...
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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 was the fact that the game wasn't saved before...
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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 from Newegg and received a completely fake processor. It's a good fake, too—if...
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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 cutting-edge gaming researchers at Sony have applied...
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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 connection in a single-player game. AC2 won't be released...
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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 for an overwhelming majority of people worldwide,...
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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. Case in point: Sapphire. The manufacturer's latest...
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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 the change is picture quality constitutes a breach...
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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 in the last 10 years, but new findings from NASA...
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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 from the beginning, and the touchscreen device is...
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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" your video card is when a system uses Optimus technology....
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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 elements: Fast Track 2010, Dollars for Downloads 2010,...
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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. There have also been a few subtractions; we'll...
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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 institutions attempting to unfairly silence criticism...
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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 has also been a topic of some discussion between...
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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 calling it a Dualbook) will retail for $490. That's...
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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: Phenom II X6 1035T, 1055T, and the 1075T. We've got...
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