Gregory Sullivan
Gregory Sullivan
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Sandia is a US Department of Energy research and development laboratory run by Lockheed Martin. They're presently gearing up to add some zeros to amount of calculations a supercomputer can perform. Sandia developed the first teraflop (one trillion calculations a second) computer a decade ago. They've decided to take it up more than a notch....
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Seventeen people ranging in age from seventeen to twenty-six have been rounded up by police in raids carried out in a dozen towns across Quebec. They're charged with participating in an international computer hacking ring. The hosers.Police raiding parties also sealed and carted away dozens of hard drives and other computer components from...
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Keith Fife and his colleagues at Stanford University have come up with they call a "multi-aperture image sensor," which allows digital pictures to collect and store depth-of-field information. Unlike other 3D camera setups, the data is gathered at the chip level, so no expensive and complicated multiple lens setups are required. Instead of...
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The New York Times looked at the Pew Internet and American Life Project's profile of young Internet users, and to their surprise, they discovered that teenage girls outnumber teenage boys in writing blogs and webpages, and building or working on social networking sites. The only category of Internet activity where boys lead is posting...
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San Francisco-based Emotiv has developed a headset that that can read and interpret brainwave activity and translate it into video game commands. It's called the Epoc. It is hoped that the device will make the emotional responses of characters to situations in games and virtual worlds more realistic. "If you laughed or felt happy after killing...
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All the volatility in the credit and stock markets have consumers, investors, and corporate heads nervous, but Hewlett-Packard is no indicator of any downturn. HP raised their forecast for the year after reporting excellent results for the first quarter.“In the U.S., at the end of the quarter, we saw a little more caution in the consumer segment...
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Apple has applied for patents on a series of single and multiple touch gestures that will undoubtedly show up in some iteration on their Mac OS X sometime in the future. Of course Apple already uses a limited number of touch commands on some of their hardware, but the series of gestures outlined in the application indicate an enormous...
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It was mildly interesting to watch the board of Yahoo indulge in a bit of "Microsoft is teh evil" posturing when presented with an unsolicited $44.6 billion bid for their prominent but listless business. There was a lot of discussion predicting anti-trust problems, but that's silly; Microsoft/Yahoo would be better competition for Google, not...
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There seems to be one last detail we need to take care of before we put the fork in the HD DVD format: The hard drive for the Xbox 360. It appears Microsoft is preparing to offer an Xbox360 with a stand-alone Blu-ray drive as early as May of 2008.Michael Ephraim the Managing Director of Sony Computer Entertainment said: "We would welcome...
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The day has finally arrived when the few remaining analog cell phones still in use will probably stop working. February 19th is the day the FCC announced that cellular providers could cease their analog service and go to all digital. Verizon estimates that less than one percent of their cellphone customers had an analog phone last year,...
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If you're a software engineer fresh out of college, most people would think you'd be interested in going to work for the biggest, most stable company you could find, and pay off those student loans. It's not necessarily the case. The fight over the best talent in the industry is being won by small, cutting edge startups that promise more intimate...
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Google's unofficial motto is "don't be evil." It's an ambiguous, almost loopy thing to say. But when you get on that high horse, people expect you to ride it. Users have interpreted the motto all sorts of ways, and in the Internet world it's come to be mean: don't be like a real live business and assault me with advertising. But Google is...
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Most people deal with limited storage along with their almost unlimited desire to save pr0n things. In the digital world, the problem is compounded by the speed at which various storage formats become obsolete. Even if you can lay your hands on a 5.25" floppy disk you have valuable things stored on, do you even have something that will...
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Web-enabled businesses (are there any other kind any more?) are always on the lookout for security breaches, and rightfully so, as hackers are working day and night to find overlooked vulnerabilities and exploit them. But office information security managers might be forgetting one fairly large exposure to the risk of stolen information:The...
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Now here's a sport we can all enjoy: Speedcabling. Contestants are given a rat's nest of six tangled ethernet cables and are timed as they try to unravel them. The very first speedcabling event was held in an art gallery in Los Angeles. Matthew Howell is my new hero. Very Zen in his technique. "The finals were brutal - 12 ethernet cords,...
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Like Basil Fawlty telling everybody not to mention The War, while doing it himself over and over, Microsoft has a new media playback protocol called PlayReady, and it's not a DRM platform! You could waterboard a Microsoft executive but he won't utter the acronym. Don't mention the DRM platform!PlayReady has some interesting features that might...
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Russia has climbed into second place, behind the good ol' US of A, in producing junk e-mails, according to the security firm Sophos. One in twelve junk e-mails in the world is sent from Russia. China takes third, with 4.2 percent of the trash in any given inbox. "Countries that continually remain among the top spam-relaying countries...
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Proposed legislation in Great Britain would compel Internet Service Providers to cut off Internet access to downloaders who access copyrighted material. Users suspected of wrongly downloading films or music will receive a warning e-mail for the first offence, a suspension for the second infringement and the termination of their internet...
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IDC reports that Internet advertising revenue grew by 27% in 2007 from the same period the previous year, totaling a whopping $25.5 billion overall. One interesting tidbit in the report is that Google's net market share in the United States declined 0.5 percentage points, the first decline in two years for teh industry leader....
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Nvidia is a very successful graphics chip maker. Two years ago they purchased PortalPlayer, who make chips for Apple's iPod, for $357 million dollars. Many in the industry wondered where Nvidia was going with the acquisition. Wonder no more. They've introduced their APX 2500, a computing chip designed for today's multimedia-ready/web-browsing ...
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Seattle has been a boomtown a half-a-dozen times over the years. Looks like it is again. The entrepreneurs of the digital age seemed to have settled on the Seattle area as the next big thing - the overcast version of Silicon Valley. “The Seattle start-up ecosystem is vibrant, and growing rapidly,” said Oren Etzioni, an artificial-intelligence...
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Yahoo's board of directors is reportedly meeting today to consider what to do about Microsoft's unsolicited $44.6 billion buyout offer. There's been quite a bit of advice, unsolicited and otherwise, offered to Yahoo to avoid being taken over. The offer so far exceeds the value of the stock involved that the board would likely be blamed for...
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