Gregory Sullivan
Gregory Sullivan
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Facebook has been garnering all sorts of bad press lately about the iffy security and privacy of their users' information. Today's version of Whoops! for Facebook is a security lapse that allowed unauthorized strangers to see personal photographs posted in areas on Facebook that were supposed to be private. And I wasn't just making a cheap...
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Coming soon to a country near you! If you thought ISPs throttling Peer To Peer (P2P) file-sharing was intrusive, I don't think you'll want to hear what Japan's doing to police illegal file-sharing. Organizations that represent copyright holders simply identify IP addresses of users sharing their content to the ISPs. That's easy to do. You...
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Korea's MIU is out with a new UMPC, which they call a "HDPC," for Hybrid Dual Portable Computer. It's so very, very hybrid -- it looks like a hunchbacked fax machine mated with a tricorder. Equipped with a dual OS -- Windows XP or a Linux distro -- it tries to do everything. Qwerty keyboard, 800x480 resolution on a 4 inch display, and they...
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Sony has won the high-definition format war by backing the Blu-ray standard. Toshiba ran up the white flag over their rival HD DVD format, and things seemed settled. Not so fast. Professor Emerita Gertrude Neumark Rothschild of Columbia University told the US International Trade Commission that she believes she holds not only the patent on...
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There's an old joke about a young fellow that kills his parents, then asks for mercy from the judge because he's an orphan. Sony seems to be trying a weird version of that approach to sell laptop computers. If you agree to pay them an extra $50, Sony will wipe your new laptop computer clean of pre-loaded crapware, the resource-gobbling program...
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April 15th is not my favorite day of the year. I doubt it's yours, either. But the IRS is not the only acronym you need to start worrying about on that date. This year, your DirecTV digital video recorder will be getting the DRM treatment for pay-per-view content on April 15th. The days of recording and watching entirely at your leisure are...
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Seasoned web users are well aware that the websites you visit and the search engine queries you employ are monitored and analyzed in a general sort of a way to allow web companies to sell advertising targeted to specific subsets of people. Casual users are often surprised and unnerved at the amount and type of information that is gathered...
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There is no official report from AMD on the wires, but multiple news outlets are reporting that chipmaker AMD will show 5 percent of its workforce the door. AMD is slated to begin shipping quad-core Phenom 9850, 9750, 9650, 9550, and 9150 processors in the coming weeks, according to sources close to the company. The "50" branding scheme indicates...
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Adobe has come up with a Digital Rights Management security protocol for its ubiquitous Flash video format. It allows content generators to feel secure about letting viewers download video content instead of simply streaming it in a browser, but mash-up artists who like to fiddle with FLV files will have another hurdle placed in their way.Intended...
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VLC Player is a very useful media player, as it can play almost any sort of video codec you can name, and it's free. But if you like using VLC Player to look at the media files you acquire as you make your way across the video landscape, beware: the latest version of VLC has a big security flaw. The problem occurs when a someone loads a subtitle...
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Yahoo! has released an investor presentation that outlines the company's long-term financial plan. According to their press release, this financial plan was generated before Yahoo! received a hostile takeover bid from Microsoft. You'll forgive me if I have my doubts about that. Because unless Yahoo! cures cancer or has a secret unicorn farm...
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Limewire, the file sharing service where I'd be shocked, shocked I say to find pirated music, has launched a DRM-free digital music store offering half a million MP3s for as little as 27 cents per track. The good news? Pretty good sound quality and no restrictions. The bad news? You never heard of anybody on the list of artists.Users of the...
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Recently we reported that Steve Jobs had no use for Flash in the iPhone. Microsoft thinks, well, differently. Even though Microsoft is developing a rich-media alternative to Flash they call Silverlight, Adobe and Microsoft understand that for the time being, they'll both do better by licensing Adobe's Flash "Lite" for MS Windows Mobile. “People...
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As Doctor Venkman might say, it's human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria! When Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh was having trouble configuring automatic archiving of e-mails by his Macintosh computers, at first he tried contacting the company directly for support. When that didn't work out, he made an...
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Microsoft and Yahoo executives quietly met on Monday to talk over Microsoft's unsolicited offer to buy Yahoo. It wasn't the sort of meeting where hands are shaken and papers are signed; reportedly Yahoo executives just listened to Microsoft explain what would happen if Microsoft's bid was accepted. Yahoo has been thrashing around trying to...
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Doctor Irving Biederman is a neuroscientist at USC. He's been studying volunteers' brain activity while showing them a series of pictures of various subjects. His human guinea pigs had the greatest brain activity when shown a scene that "presented new information that somehow needed to be interpreted," and were offered in the format of a "good...
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In a somewhat surprising move, AOL has shelled out $850 million dollars to acquire social networking site Bebo. If you add Bebo's 40 million users worldwide to AOL's customer base for AIM and ICQ, AOL can now boast 80 million unique users. And AOL can show those 80 million users advertising while they're on their service. I imagine it's a...
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$986 million to be more precise. Why so much? It's the last one. That's the projection for the cost to Toshiba to close up shop and retool its production line to make something else. It's the final chapter for Toshiba's ill-fated attempt to offer its HD DVD alternative to Sony's Blu-ray high-definition disk player. Toshiba still turned a profit...
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The Consumerist featured a story a year ago about a woman that wasn't allowed to buy an Apple computer because she wanted to purchase it solely using Apple-issued giftcards. Stung by negative publicity, Apple relented and she got her computer. But instead of liberalizing their giftcard policy, Apple simply gave the one customer a computer...
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Google has cleared the final hurdle, the OK of anti-trust regulators in the EU, and will take over DoubleClick. DoubleClick is well-positioned to help Google consolidate its position in Internet marketing, advertising, and tracking customer surfing habits; and they specialize in multimedia ads that could possibly draw advertising revenue away...
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You have to measure the remarks of the Ericsson CEO about the future of Wi-Fi hotspot computing against the stake he has in the outcome of the race to serve the computing public on the go; but he does seem to be hitting the nail on the head when he predicts that Wi-Fi hotspots are "The telephone boxes of the broadband era." ... there's...
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Linux fans felt as though Wal-Mart's decision to retail inexpensive computers that use Linux for their operating system meant that the free, open source software would finally break out into general public. Oh yeah, and Ron Paul's going to be President. "This really wasn't what our customers were looking for," said Wal-Mart Stores Inc....
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