Rob Williams
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
There's nothing like a racing sim game that allows you to slip into the seats of hundreds of different exotic vehicles, but finding a title like this that's also open-world, and offers a compelling single-player and multi-player campaign is a bit harder. Fortunately, there have been some shining examples released even...
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At Computex a couple of weeks ago, Qualcomm unveiled its next gen Snapdragon platform targeting "always-on" laptops. That came to us in the form of the interestingly named Snapdragon 850 - a mere 5 digits higher than the 845, a chip which currently graces top-end Android smartphones, such as the OnePlus 6, and Samsung...
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Predicting the level of success enjoyed by PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, aka PUBG, would have been very tough ahead of its launch. Who could really predict that an indie title would have three million concurrent players mere months after its launch? Since that time, the game has added two new maps, alternating modes...
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AMD has had some great momentum since it unleashed its first Zen-based processors to market early last year. A little while later, we saw EPYC hit the enterprise market and Threadripper hit soon thereafter, to cater to high-end enthusiasts and workstation users. Recently, the company followed-up its initial Ryzen...
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There are few games that have been able to enjoy the level of hype that CD Projekt RED's Cyberpunk 2077 has generated. In some ways, it feels like the level of anticipation is higher for it than it was for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. That game helped introduce legions of new fans to CDPR, so this new collective (and...
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Valve's Steam platform has been in the spotlight a lot lately, for good, bad, or simply odd reasons. The company has just overhauled its Steam chat client, which is hugely appreciated, and perhaps long overdue. At the same time, the company has deemed it appropriate to let the community decide what content should or...
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Virtual reality (VR) content used to be hard to procure, but that's hardly the case nowadays. VR is both growing in popularity and becoming cheaper and easier than ever to capture. The biggest problem at the moment for the end-user isn't so much the hardware, but the software. For such a young ecosystem, there's still...
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Facebook is delving further into the artificial intelligence realm, and has announced that it is creating its own AI silicon that will directly aide in filtering out inappropriate Facebook Live videos as they happen. Over the past few years, Facebook Live hasn't just grown in popularity; many people appreciate just...
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It's not often that the US Justice Department or FBI pleads with the public to do something, so when this happens, it's worth paying attention. This past week, the agency managed to thwart a botnet called VPNFilter by deactivating a domain that would have sent further instructions to routers belonging to ordinary folk...
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In a blow to gamers who like scoring brand-new game titles at better prices than the norm, Best Buy has decided to cancel its popular Gamers Club program. To many, Best Buy may not have seemed like the de facto place to pick up the hottest new console or PC game, but the company's Gamers Club made sticking with the...
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Over 1,000 North Korean citizens try to defect to South Korea each and every year, and for each of them, the sudden sense of freedom must feel overwhelming. Naturally, North Korea isn't happy with anyone who decides to leave, and the country certainly has the means to seek out and track those who've done so.
While...
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New Spectre flaws have been revealed by the former head of Intel's advanced thread team, Yuriy Bulygin. This is a man who knows what he's doing, so his opinions and findings are not to be treated as fly-by-night like some others. Through his new security agency, Eclypsium (a neat name, it must be said), Bulygin posts...
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Samsung's mainline Galaxy S series of smartphones is without question one of the strongest selling smartphone brands on the planet, but the company's Galaxy Note line is also extremely popular. The Galaxy Note is truly a mobile productivity powerhouse and includes a handy stylus for whenever you need to take notes. It...
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Android users have long been concerned that OS security updates for many phones come far too infrequently. Even those who are lucky enough to receive them may not get them often enough, considering they're typically released on a monthly cadence. At Google I/O this past week, however, there was some good news...
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If you use Facebook Messenger, hate malware, and always click on links you're sent without a second thought, then you're going to want to exercise more caution moving forward. A new strain of malware has been making the rounds since March, and depending on how you view things, the effect of "Nigelthorn" is somewhat...
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The Android ecosystem has progressed so much over the past decade that it's not only hardware we look forward to anymore but the software that drives it as well. As we've become more reliant on our smartphones, our usage models with these operating systems of choice evolve, as does our taste. It's for those reasons...
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When AMD released its first Zen-based processors last spring in the form of Ryzen, the company managed to impress pretty much every hardware enthusiast out there. We suddenly had many-core CPU options that wouldn't destroy our bank accounts. Fast-forward to today, and we now have second-generation Ryzen Zen+...
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It's easy to speculate on anything if you're given a few clues, but it's a bit weird to speculate on something that's right out there in the open, waiting to have its source code read. That's the case with Google's Fuchsia OS, which has just hit the Android Runtime branch, suggesting what the world's been assuming for...
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Companies like Intel deal with the reality that many of their plans are going to get leaked, but sometimes, a company itself can be responsible for a leak, highlighting just how loose top-secret information can sometimes be. What we didn't know a few days ago but do now is that a future Intel processor...
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Microsoft has stepped out to explain its side of a recent story here that made headlines and it underscores that it's never wise to jump to conclusions in legal cases unless you have a firm grasp on the particulars. This week, we reported on an e-waste recycler who was sentenced to prison for 15 months for selling...
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When one of the industry's biggest game publishers acquires a little indie developer, there's probably going to be a bit of a gasp from that developer's fanbase. All too often, we've seen truly great developers be swallowed by a huge beast (EA we're looking at you), and before long, those same developers disappear...
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There's still a lot we don't know about Google's upcoming Android P release, but thanks to an inadvertent leak on Google's own blog, speculation about certain minor details has now exploded. It looks like the Home button icon has turned into a pill, the back button into an outline, and the dialog boxes now have curved...
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