Joel Hruska
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
One of the major news stories of the past week has focused on the Lower Merion school district in Philadelphia and the furor created when the school admitted it could remotely activate student webcams and observe them remotely. One clip from an episode of Frontline that aired in June 2009, however, proves that Lower Merion's Harriton High...
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Western Digital recently began to ship a new series of Caviar hard drives that included the company's Advanced Format technology. The new Caviar Green models are nearly identical to their standard brethren, but offer double the cache (64MB instead of 32MB at 1-2TB) and have a different model number. A WD10EARS is an Advanced Format drive;...
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Nintendo's next-generation, up-a-size DS model (the DSi XL) is set to launch in just over a month and the company lifted the lid today on what we can expect at launch. For those of you who aren't in the know, the upcoming DSi XL is a 'large' revision to the DSi's form factor. The unit's iconic twin displays offer 93 percent more viewing area,...
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Once upon a time, back when cavemen ruled the Earth and I was in college, the "in" thing to do (if you were a nerd, anyway), was to port Doom to various Windows mobile phones, PDAs, G3/G4-era Macs, graphing calculators, and other assorted devices with limited functionality and horsepower. Now, some 13 years later...
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If you've never seen the work coming from the dev team behind Project Offset, the game engine Intel bought several years back, you really ought to take a look. While the game has been under development for over five years, Intel bought the firm two years ago and devoted a significant amount of energy towards positioning Project Offset as the...
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In a blog post yesterday, AMD's director of product marketing John Fruehe announced that the company is now shipping its eight and 12-core "Magny-Cours" processors to OEMs and select manufacturers. Magny-Cours, you may recall, is AMD's next-generation server CPU and consists of two Istanbul cores side-by-side on the...
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It's an acknowledged fact that modern technology, Google and the rise of social networking sites like Facebook have changed the rules when it comes to expectations of privacy. Most of the time, when we hear that these evolving expectations have tripped someone up, it's because an employee once considered a shoo-in for a job was disqualified...
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Ubisoft is one of the largest video game publishing companies in the world, but when it comes to DRM (Digital Rights Management), the corporate executives at the helm have the collective intelligence of a ham sandwich. In years' past, the publisher was criticized for its use of StarForce copy protection, the PC port...
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If one were to make a list of 21st-century technologies that deserve to be credited as the hardware equivalent of Duke Nukem Forever, OLED displays might just might sweep the competition. Display manufacturers have been talking about OLED televisions and monitors as "a couple years away" for at least the last...
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Generally speaking, driver updates are rather staid affairs whether you prefer yours red or green. It's been years since the release of a driver series that could be expected to boost performance more than 10-15 percent or so in nearly any game. The benefits of a driver upgrade tend to be more specifically...
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There's no doubt about it—we live in a world of strange mice. In just the last 12 months we've seen a bizarre array of pointing devices including several 15-button+ mice (both for work and play), hemispherical mice, and Apple's Magic Mouse. Even among such storied company, however, the conceptual G-Point mouse stands...
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When AMD renegotiated its x86 licensing deal with Intel last year, one of the most significant long-term changes was a marked reduction in how much of GlobalFoundries AMD had to own in order to remain within the terms of its manufacturing license. As a result of this change, AMD announced last month that it intended...
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If Microsoft maintains a list of its least-popular ideas, initiatives, and software programs, Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) has to be near the top. Initially marketed as a voluntary tool when it launched in September of 2004, Microsoft announced just six months later that any user who wanted to access non-critical security updates for their...
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When we covered AMD's earnings and plans for 2010 a few weeks back, we noted that AMD CEO Dirk Meyer was bullishly predicting continued growth for AMD in desktop, mobile, and server, even as Intel ramps up pressure in all three segments. AMD's mobile offerings have become more competitive over the past few months...
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Internet Explorer 6 may have taken its own sweet time to die given that the browser's security flaws are the stuff of legend, but it appears that the 'Net as a whole is finally ready to move on. While IE6 still accounts for up to 20 percent of the browser market according to some metrics, its share drops dramatically...
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The Mobile World Congress runs from February 15-18 this year, and Intel has announced it plans to display several applications specifically developed for netbooks and mobile devices. Intel first announced its plans to debut an App Store for Atom, aka AppUp at CES in January. The company's plans have drawn inevitable...
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A few weeks back, Microsoft confirmed the existence of a 17-year-old bug in all 32-bit versions of Windows that could, under certain circumstances, be used to gain control of a system. The flaw's usefulness was limited, since anyone with administrative access to a system probably doesn't need a hack to gain control of...
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The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski has been much in the news over the past six months. As we've covered in the past, Genachowski has aggressively stumped for a national broadband policy, traveled the country, and under his direction the FCC has solicited comments from...
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For almost 15 years, Panasonic's Toughbook series of laptops has been the gold standard for anyone who needed a notebook capable of surviving being dropped, kicked, flung, run over, or struck by a small tactical nuke. The company no longer owns the ruggedized laptop field—newcomers Dell and HP have fielded their own...
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Broadband speeds in the United States have long lagged behind other industrialized nations; the average download speed across the US was 5.1 megabits (mbps) in August of last year. While that's a 45 percent increase over the average download speed in 2007 it's just 25 percent of South Korea (20.4mbps), less than half the speed of Sweden (12.8mbps)...
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The x86 architecture has increasingly dominated the server market over the past decade but there's still a market for mainframe, big-iron servers. At present, Intel has challenged old guards Sun and IBM with a mixture of Nehalem-based Xeons and Itanium processors with the octal-core Nehalem-EX waiting in the wings. IBM isn't waiting for Nehalem-EX...
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AMD revealed more information on its first Fusion-class product at ISSCC this week. The new chip will combine both a CPU and GPU on a single package, but don't use either nickname—AMD is calling the new chip an "APU" or Application Processor Unit as part of its bid to shift product focus from the core components...
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