Gregory Sullivan
Gregory Sullivan
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Apple computers are generally more expensive than their competitors. Apple enthusiasts have long accustomed themselves to shelling out a premium for Cupertino bling. But Dave Winer was surprised to find out that not only does Apple charge a hefty $160 to replace a 80GB hard drive, they refuse to hand over your defective disk after you've paid...
Read more...
My mistake. That's Open Source. In a bid to get the European Union off their back after their stunning defeat in the EU's anti-trust trial, Microsoft has now licensed some of its proprietary code to the company that developed "Samba," software that allows operating systems other than Windows to communicate with a Windows client.So basically...
Read more...
Toshiba and Sharp are fierce competitors. Both based in Japan, they manufacture and sell flatscreen LCD TVs, among many other things. They've decided to cooperate with one another, and have announced that Toshiba will purchase LCD panels over 32 inches from Sharp, and in turn Sharp will purchase chips for use in their TVs from Toshiba. Toshiba...
Read more...
A very bright and enterprising 13-year-old boy launched a blog a few years ago dedicated to rumors about Apple. A true manifestation of the Apple fanboy mentality, Think Secret was a big hit with Apple enthusiasts who liked to hear any scuttlebut about upcoming Apple products. Steve Jobs hated it, mostly because it was very accurate,...
Read more...
Some very clever people at Stanford University have devised away to modify lithium-ion batteries with silicon nanowires to expand the capacity of the batteries and allow them to deliver electricity for ten times as long as they currently do before recharging. "It's not a small improvement," Cui said. "It's a revolutionary development."The...
Read more...
I have a rule of thumb. Whenever I read anything about alternative energy of any kind, I simply skip over everything and look for the one thing that matters: Is it cheaper than oil and coal? Nothing else matters, really. Burning coal and oil to make energy to produce goods and services to tax to redistribute as subsidies to alternative energy...
Read more...
Got 113,000 Japanese yen burning a hole in your pocket? That's 495 British Pounds. The money pound, not the weight pound. At any rate, if you've got about $1000 American, you can now afford 100 GB of flash storage, courtesy of Buffalo Japan. Awesome.The company's new SHD-UHRS series of SSDs goes on sale at the end of this month, starting with...
Read more...
2007 is shaping up to be the first year when spending on cellphone services surpasses the cost of land line phones, according to a study by the US government and backed up by industry information. Anybody with a teenage girl at home has known this was coming for quite some time. "What we're finding is there's a huge move of people giving...
Read more...
Arkansas based Alltel Wireless is offering a service that converts your voicemail messages to plain text. Great for multitasking, you can now view your messages even when it's not convenient to listen to them, and forward them as e-mail. It's based on technology developed by Great Britain's Spinvox. “Our customers will appreciate the fact...
Read more...
In late November, the Justice Department announced that they'd lived our dream: they got their hands on eight people that had infected unsuspecting computer users with Trojan Horse applications. InfoWorld profiled each of the perps, and it's fascinating to see the various ways they committed their crimes -- and the reasons they said...
Read more...
Is sixty years a long time? I guess, but it's not ancient history. On December 16, 1947 at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, the world's first transistor was born. Ever since the people at Bell got over wondering just what they needed those little semiconductor amplifiers for, when they had perfectly good vacuum tubes hanging around to...
Read more...
I'm a big fan of Wikipedia. It's easy to find foolish or inaccurate things on it of course, but on the whole it's a fantastic and useful utility. If you do a lot of websearches on Google, you'll notice that Wikipedia has become a sort of default top of the page result for a lot of queries. That might be set for a big change, now that Google...
Read more...
Palm has been taking a beating recently. The smartphone market they compete in was already crowded before the iPhone appeared to steal marketshare, and their ill-starred UMPC bombed so badly that the product was withdrawn. Now Palm is laying off about 10% of their workforce of 1150. Merry Christmas. Palm's statement said the restructuring,...
Read more...
Well, not exactly, but pretty close. The Turing Test is a proposition first offered in the 1950s that tests a computer's ability to fool a human into thinking it's another human, using only natural language text interaction. Well, now there's a Russian website named Cyberlover.ru that sells a software utility that engages women...
Read more...
Opera software doesn't think it can compete with Microsoft in the European Union, and has filed an anti-trust suit with the European Commission. The EU has shown a willingness to listen to complaints about Microsoft in the past, levying an enormous fine and demanding Microsoft unbundle utilities like media players from their Windows Operating...
Read more...
Are you watching analog television? Somewhere between 13 and 21 million households still are. By federal government mandate, all TV broadcasting must switch over to digital by 2009. To ease the transition, the government is offering up to two coupons worth $40 each to buy converter boxes. Big box retailers like Best Buy and Wal-Mart are...
Read more...
The slim form factor of your average flatscreen, plus its widescreen dimensions, coupled with the rat's nest of wires and other components that you generally need to watch what you want to watch has yet to be elegantly integrated into the living room. The TV armoire is dead, and we're left to display components out in the open, generally....
Read more...
Everex is planning to offer a competitor to Asus' nifty EEE PC. The "Cloudbook" UMPC (ultra-mobile PC) will be available in early 2008. All you open source fans out there will be interested to hear it will ship with the gOS Google Apps optimized Linux distro. Like the EEE PC, the Cloudbook will use a 7-inch WVGA (800x480) LCD display,...
Read more...
Ask.com is the fourth most popular search engine in the United States, accounting for 4.7 percent of all web searches. They've decided to differentiate themselves from the rest of their competitiors by offering AskEraser -- a widget on their service you can use to direct the search engine to discard information like search term, user's Internet...
Read more...
Well, not exactly. But IBM is claiming that Taiwan-based Asus is infringing on several of their patents, and wants the United States International Trade Commission to ban the import of Asus Computer products into the US until they get their pound of patent flesh. This could get very interesting, because Asus makes computers under their...
Read more...
A lot of people, businesses included, have more or less decided to skip upgrading their OS to Microsoft Vista. Windows XP works for them, is well supported for foreseeable future, and many feel they can skip a generation and wait for Vista's successor, dubbed "Windows 7" to come along. Gartner Research VP Michael Silver thinks that might be...
Read more...
Just kidding. But his box spring is probably made from gold bars. Maybe not. But one thing's for sure: Apple is swimming in cash. $15 billion in cash, to be precise. You'd have to be crazy to think that won't grow a lot with Christmas right around the corner. Unlike companies like Microsoft, Apple doesn't pay a dividend to their stockholders,...
Read more...
