Amy Vernon
Amy Vernon
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Pretty much everyone has caved and bought a universal remote at some point or another. Somehow, it never seems to be truly universal and ends up in a pile with the other remotes and you have to paw through the pile every time you want to turn on the boob tube. Logitech today swears the Harmony 900 is the last one...
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Microsoft promised a federal judge it would stop designating Internet Explorer 8 as the default browser on express installations by today.This was part of its antitrust settlement compliance report, in response to an accusation in May by Mozilla and Opera that the software giant was changing users' default browsers back to IE8 when they used...
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Watch out Amazon, Sony's got the Kindle in its sights.Sony today announced two new Readers - the Reader Pocket Edition and the Reader Touch Edition - that will come out at the end of the month and cost less or the same as the older, more established Kindle. The Pocket Edition has a five-inch display, comes in several colors ("including navy...
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Verizon's betting that more and more television viewers want to Tweet and update Facebook while watching their favorite shows, movies and sporting events. Now FiOS customers can do just that through widgets developed for Verizon's TV services.With this new addition, perhaps Comcast will have one less "don't fall for FiOS" FUD point that...
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Mac users who've been smug for years over how secure their OS is, could be in for a rude awakening if news out of the Black Hat Security Conference is true.As Macs have slowly gained market share on PCs — 9 percent of the market in the second quarter of 2009 and growing — the interest in hacking them has increased. The advances in security...
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The rise of social networking has given rise to a whole new species of cyber criminals, experts warn.When people sign up on Facebook, for example, they tend not to think twice about putting in their birth date. But combine that with all sorts of other personal data in your profile — contact info including phone numbers and e-mail addresses,...
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Here's a survey result that should surprise no one who has fallen in love with a useless but fun USB gadget: the interface is the most popular and most used on both home and business computers.For cell phones, Bluetooth pretty much tops the list.Flash drives topped the list of devices connected to computers via USB, followed by printers and...
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In an attempt to arrest MySpace's ever-faster decline into irrelevance, News Corp. is transforming the social network into an online gaming destination.The company, owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, had to do something, after all, once MySpace lost major ground to Facebook in June, posting smaller U.S. numbers than the latter — Comscore...
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Companies that allow employees to sign into Facebook on the clock are losing 1.5 percent of total employee productivity.So says a survey by Nucleus Research Inc., which interviewed 237 randomly selected office workers about their Facebook use. Admittedly, that's not the most scientific sample, but it does give a snapshot.Of those interviewed:•...
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C'mon - you know you've always wanted to be able to carry 54 DVDs in your pocket. Kingston Technology Europe has come out with a 256GB USB flash drive, which can hold a LOT of stuff. How much? Try 51,000 images. Or how about 365 CDs (one for every day of the year)? A database of documents that, if printed out and piled up, would reach 1 kilometer...
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It seems as if you have to come up with a new password with upper and lower case, symbols and numbers every five seconds. So the idea of having a secure external hard drive that needs no password seems rather intriguing.Freecom came out with a relatively small external drive that uses a keycard instead of a password to keep your data secure....
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Since announcing the inception of TV Everywhere last month, Comcast has managed to line up a whopping 23 networks to agree to provide their content online.It started simply, with an agreement between the cable company and Time Warner (owner of TNT and TBS and, interestingly enough, a cable company as well) to provide shows online, on demand....
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In another "Really? Someone paid to do a study on this?" news, the Michigan State Medical Society announced today that text messaging while driving is dangerous. The news here, however, is exactly how dangerous it is. Apparently, if you text while you drive, you are six times more likely to become distracted and cause an accident. It is, apparently,...
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Face it. A USB flash drive can be a really great way to carry around data you need to get your hands on when you're away from your computer or network.Problem is, you're not gonna put anything too sensitive on it for fear of losing it.Which brings you back to square one, getting access to important files on the go.Check this out: IronKey S200...
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Finally, your Twitter skills might come in handy.Teimlo, a British mobile phone content provider, wants to hire a marketer. But here's the catch: Job applications are being accepted only via text message (OK, so that's 160 characters instead of Twitter's 140, but think how much more verbose you can be with those extra 20 characters). Text...
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What appears to be the first mass-produced 3D web camera looks like a friendly robot. It's actually two cameras that record, according to Hammacher Schlemmer, "slightly differing images" that are then put together as a stereoscopic image. It even comes with five pairs of 3D glasses (those funky cyan/red glasses that used to come in comic books)...
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The day many gamers have been waiting for has arrived: Classic first-person shooters have come to the iPhone.Sure, a jailbroken version of Quake came to the iPhone and iPod Touch last summer and there had been rumors of Doom making its way to the smartphone market for a while, but now it's official.Doom Resurrection became available for download...
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It probably comes as no surprise, but it seems most people ignore routine computer maintenance and only think about it when disaster strikes. You know, like falling victim to more than 3,000 viruses. At once. A survey done of Staples "EasyTechs," indicated that more than 80 percent of the chain's customers don't bother with routine maintenance...
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Everyone who has a cell phone has, somewhere, a drawer filled with old chargers from long-gone handsets. Those days soon will come to an end in Europe, where all the top mobile phone producers have agreed to make all their data-enabled sets use the same chargers. The European Commission, according to Reuters, announced the pact today. EU Industry...
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A Playstation on your cell phone? The notion might not be so far-fetched. The latest news out of the Japanese electronics and gaming giant is that it's "considering developing a cellphone-game gear hybrid" on Sony Ericsson phones.Once the superpower in portable music - the Walkman, launched about 30 years ago, was revolutionary and became...
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Though AT&T won't officially give you a way to use your iPhone to tether your laptop to an internet connection, it is looking the other way while an iPhone enthusiast has created a workaround. Good thing too, now that Apple accounts for more than two thirds of all mobile traffic in the United States. According to stats released by AdMob...
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Fans of The Closer, My Boys and Tyler Perry just got another way to watch their favorite shows: Online.Time Warner Inc. and Comcast Corp. yesterday announced a partnership to "develop broad principles for the TV Everywhere model to guide the distribution of its television content online."The basis of TV Everywhere are these principles:Bring...
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