Joel Hruska
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
You've probably noticed, Gmail is down. It's not just down for you - it's down across the US and the world, with reports coming in from Europe, Canada, and India that one of the planet's largest email networks has suddenly failed. The only thing missing is any information from Google. Ironically, Google's App dashboard was one of the last...
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Over the past few weeks, net neutrality has seen serious challenges from the likes of Verizon and AT&T. Verizon won a court case in which the FCC's rules on net neutrality were effectively gutted, while AT&T introduced a new pricing plan for content providers called Sponsored Data, which pushes companies like...
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Today, AMD is launching a pair of power-optimized server parts based on what it calls the "Warsaw" refresh. These chips are still Piledriver-based, but AMD claims that the new core offers an optimal performance per watt solution for virtualization without breaking the corporate bank account. "With the continued move...
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A new breakthrough at Virginia Tech could be the beginning of a new type of commercial battery production. Granted, tech companies make these claims on a regular basis -- but this one may be worth paying attention to in the long term. According to EurekaAlert, a research team led by Y.H. Percival Zhang has created a...
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Update: Sharp-eyed reader Justin Jaynes has pointed out that the Llano lawsuit against AMD has been filed by lawyers hoping to convince investors to jump onboard, not by AMD itself. We've updated the story accordingly. There's two pieces of news on the AMD front as the company prepares to announce earnings this...
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Of all the rumors that swirled around Kaveri before the APU debuted last week, one of the more interesting bits was that AMD might debut GDDR5 as a desktop option. GDDR5 isn't bonded in sticks for easy motherboard socketing, and motherboard OEMs were unlikely to be interested in paying to solder 4-8GB of RAM directly...
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Ever since Sony cut a major deal for the Gaikai cloud gaming service, pundits have watched to see how the company would integrate the technology into the PlayStation product line. At CES this week, Sony finally took the wraps off that announcement and the initial program looks amazing. The upcoming PlayStation Now...
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Ever since it debuted on Kickstarter, the makers of the Oculus Rift have promised to deliver the kind of VR experience that the late 90s and blithely promised and never created. Each developer kit or milestone has substantially improved on the underlying technology, with higher resolutions, better eye alignment...
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NVIDIA's Jen-Hsun Huang took the stage at CES 2014 to discuss NVIDIA's overarching gaming technology efforts, starting with a discussion of PC gaming streaming courtesy of NVIDIA's Shield. We've discussed Shield's game streaming capability before -- it's easily one of the stronger selling points for the product. According to the NVIDIA CEO,...
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NVIDIA's Jen-Hsun Huang took the stage at CES tonight to discuss NVIDIA's overarching gaming technology efforts, starting with a discussion of PC gaming streaming courtesy of NVIDIA's Shield. We've discussed Shield's game streaming capability before -- it's easily one of the stronger selling points for the product. According to the NVIDIA...
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Over the past few years, short game writing "jams" have become a popular way to bring developers together in a conference with a single overarching theme. These competitions are typically 24-48 hours long and involve a great deal of caffeine, frantic coding, and creative design. The 28th Ludum Dare conference from held from December 13 - 16...
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New details on Intel's upcoming 14nm Xeon Phi (codenamed Knights Landing) suggests that the chip giant is targeting a huge increase in performance, throughput, and total TFLOP count with the next-gen MIC (Many Integrated Core) card. Knights Landing will be the first ground-up redesign of Intel's MIC architecture --...
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Facebook is facing a lawsuit from two users who allege that the company's "private" messaging is anything of the sort. We've seen a number of these cases over the years, going all the way back to Google's ad-crawling for Gmail, and it's generally known that if you use a service, company's are going to attempt to monetize your input. In Facebook's...
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A fresh set of allegations and disclosures by der Spiegel claim that the NSA operates a Tailored Access Operations program designed to dig into spy targets conventionally perceived as "ungettable" for the purpose of extending the institutions global reach. The program has targeted individuals, companies, government...
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According to a new report, the NSA once paid the RSA Security $10M to implement a flawed security standard as the default protocol in its products. This new information builds on allegations from September that claimed the RSA had deployed a flawed, broken cryptographic standard. The new allegations, like much of what...
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Technology development company MagnaCom thinks it has a new wireless approach that could revolutionize wireless communication. That's the bottom-line takeaway from the company's presentation (in-person demonstrations will be given at CES in January). With a sheaf of freshly minted patents and an impressive pitch...
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One of the problems with writing about a technology like Nvidia's G-Sync is that it's nearly impossible to actually show the technology in action. Websites like YouTube or DailyMotion either don't accept 60 FPS video at all, or automatically convert it to 30 FPS when it's encoded. While that makes perfect sense from a business perspective,...
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Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is a gorgeous game, but if you've played it on the PC, chances are you've noticed the erratic frame rate. Whenever the action kicks up, the frame rate drops, often precipitously. This is caused by V-Sync -- if V-Sync is active, the game will only run at either 60 or 30 FPS, and if it...
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Rumors continue to spill out into the Internet ahead of AMD's next-generation Kaveri launch regarding the CPU's overall performance, capabilities, and architecture. It appears AMD is upping the ante with this CPU in several ways, including a gaming bundle that will include Battlefield 4 with the highest-end A10 APUs...
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New rumors on an upcoming release of Windows could be sweet tidings for users who either aren't satisfied with the OS's current state or who have refused to upgrade to the present version. Microsoft is reportedly planning a new release of the operating system, codenamed Threshold -- and it contains two huge changes...
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We've seen a lot of strange information come out of the Snowden leaks, much of it deeply worrying. We've learned that the government allegedly has enormous siphoning capability, and sucks up data from the Internet at will, gains access to the entire database of cell phone metadata on everyone in the United States, and...
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There's a rumor going around on social media that you can enable Xbox 360 backwards compatibility on an Xbox One by hopping through a series of steps meant to enable Developer Mode, changing a setting, and restarting the box. Don't believe it. There is no method of allowing the Xbox One to play Xbox 360 games...
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