Daniel A. Begun
Daniel A. Begun
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Not to be confused with the 1986 Ron Jeremy film, "Deeper, Harder, Faster," Acer has just introduced its new enthusiast gaming rig with the innuendo-laden slogan "Faster, Deeper, Harder, Further." The slogan might be silly, but the system is meant to be taken seriously. The case looks as though it could have stepped out of the Transformers...
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Google Sites, the group Website tool that was originally available only to "companies and organizations that wanted to use the service on their own domains," can now be utilized by even non-business users--and you don't even need to host it on your own domain anymore: "Now we've made it easy for anyone to set up a website to share all types...
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Just in time for the hotly-rumored release of the 3G iPhone, AT&T announces that it will complete the U.S. deployment of its 3G broadband service by the end of June. This will complete a $20 billion investment AT&T has made since 2005 in upgrading the infrastructure of its almost 350 markets--of which 275 markets are already running...
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EA has released a video preview of the "Cell Phase" of Spore--the hotly-anticipated brainchild of Sim's creator Will Wright. The video shows vivid samples of what a game player might experience when first starting out with a new creature in the first phase of the game, called the "Cell Phase" or "Tide Pool Phase." Spore is "an epic journey...
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Just weeks away from the rumored public debut of AMD's new ATI Radeon 4000-series GPUs, AMD clues us in on a tantalizing tidbit about a key technology found in its next generation graphics cards. AMD's new lineup of graphics cards will not only use Graphics Double Data Rate 5 (GDDR5) memory, but AMD also claims that this will...
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Sometimes you've just got to prove a point. The point that Super Talent wants to prove? Just how vibration resistant its line of MasterDrive MX Solid State Drives (SSD) are. And what better could prove the point than to attach a working, 120GB MasterDrive MX drive to a paint shaker, and show Windows humming away normally all...
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Two European vendors have started taking orders for Intel Atom-populated motherboards. German-based, CARTFT is selling the Intel D945GCLF motherboard, populated with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom 230 processor, for $114 U.S. Tranquil PC, based in the U.K., is selling the same setup for £52.90 U.K. (about $103 U.S.). Tranquil PC's site states that...
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The frequent flyers over at Flight are reporting that iPod connectivity to airlines' in-flight entertainment (IFE) systems are starting to take off: "Singapore Airlines last week started supplying iPod and iPhone connectivity on the first of five newly reconfigured all-business Airbus A340-500s. United Airlines is expected to soon offer this...
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The divide between gaming desktops and laptops just got a bit smaller. Today Seagate announced that its 2.5-inch, 320GB, 7,200-rpm, Momentus 7200.3 hard drive is now available as an option in Dell XPS laptops and will be available soon in some Alienware laptop models."Seagate's new 2.5-inch hard drive delivers up to 320GB of capacity and combines...
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AUO is expected to unveil today a number of innovative display technologies, including what it claims are "the world's first Curved Display Technology on glass substrate," and "the world's thinnest Ultra Thin 1.9-inch TFT-LCD." AUO is one of over 550 vendors exhibiting their wares at the Society for Information Display's Display Week 2008 show...
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Samsung has a couple of new products that break the mold on what you might expect from computer peripherals. Samsung's Dual Display 2263DX is a dual display with a twist. It is actually a normal 22-inch LCD display that also includes a 7-inch "companion" display that attaches to the larger display, "via a pivoting, swiveling arm which allows...
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The folks over at UMPC Fever have got their hands on one of the very first-to-market, Intel Atom processor-based MIDs (Mobile Internet Device). It is the Aigo MID, which they claim is the Asian version of the Gigabyte M528 we'll be seeing shortly in the U.S.:"Apart from the interior Intel Atom processor, my first impression on aigo MID is...
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It seems that Intel's forthcoming, low-power Atom processor is popping up all over the news lately. First we got wind of Gigabyte's portable Atom device a few weeks ago--what we thought was an ultraportable named the M912 is really a MID (Mobile Internet Device) called the M528. Now we're hearing about another Atom-based device seen in...
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Reuters reports that the second-largest U.S. ISP, Comcast, has agreed to acquire online address book and social networking site Plaxo for somewhere between $145 million and $175 million. "Comcast will use Plaxo to offer social network links across Comcast-connected devices from TVs to digital video recorders to, eventually, wireless devices,...
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Not only does Microsoft envision turning tabletops into computers, now it wants to do the same with walls. Today at Microsoft’s 12th annual CEO Summit, held on Microsoft's Redmond, Washington campus, Bill Gates demonstrated a prototype of a new technology called TouchWall. TouchWall takes the concept of Microsoft's Surface--a horizontal, interactive,...
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What is a mobile provider to do when only 12 percent of its customers own phones capable of taking advantage of data plans? Certainly having exclusive U.S. rights to arguably the most advanced--or at least the sexiest--smartphone is a good start. And the iPhone has been big a boost to AT&T's sales in 2007. But by the close of 2007, AT&T...
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Enthusiasts are familiar with the Smooth Creations team as the artists behind the airbrushed gaming rigs from the likes of Falcon Northwest, Alienware, and Maingear. Not as many may be aware, however, that Smooth Creations has recently expanded from the realm of painting cases to that of building and selling painted, customizable systems and...
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Sun Microsystems is a long-time player in the enterprise-level world of servers, software, and services. While the company prides itself on its Java technology, Solaris operating system, and UltraSPARC processors, its true bread-and-butter comes from its servers--including rackmount, x64, blade, enterprise, among other types of servers. Sun's...
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Creative has just released the USB 2.0-based Sound Blaster X-Fi Surround 5.1 audio adapter, making it now much simpler to get surround sound on laptops and cramped small-form-factor PCs (LAN party anyone?)--or allaying the fears of those who are hesitant to crack open their systems and start mucking around inside. While Creative calls it a...
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YouTube may rule supreme in the melded world of online video and social networking, but Microsoft has a new trick up its sleeve that it hopes might steal some eyeballs away from the competition. Launching today in 20 countries and 12 languages is Microsoft's Messenger TV service, integrating online video directly into Microsoft's Live Messenger...
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How exactly do major ISPs determine which types of traffic to let through unhampered and which types to throttle or block? With deep-packet inspection devices, such as the $800,000 Procera Networks PacketLogic PL10000. Ars Technica reports on the latest ammunition in ISPs' arsenal:"The PL10000 can handle up to 5 million subscribers and can...
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Just in time for the (delayed) release of the Windows XP SP3 update, Parallels updates its Mac virtualization application, Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac. As recent as last week, a Parallels representative stated that an XP SP3-compatible update to Parallels Desktop was as much as a month away. Perhaps what he meat to say was "next month,"...
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