Gregory Sullivan
Gregory Sullivan
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Everybody wants a raise. But substantial wage growth depends not only on the value of the work you're doing, but also on a local shortage of people that can perform that work. It appears there's lots of IT work in Australia, and not enough people to do it, as IT salaries have gone up almost 12% in the last year alone."The survey taken over...
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Google didn't want Microsoft's ubiquitous PowerPoint presentations to be the only way to put people to sleep in a business meeting, so they've come out with their own version of the slide software they call Presentation. "The new program will be included in Google's free software bundle, called "Docs," which users must be online...
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A European Court has ruled in Microsoft's appeal of an antitrust order from a lower court, and ordered Microsoft to stop giving away Windows Media Player with every copy of Windows. Oh, yes; they have to show their competitors their source code for any communications applications. Oh, one more thing: they'd like 613 million dollars, please....
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SpiralFrog, a free online music download service, launches today. The service hopes to make a go of it with the holy grail of RIAA haters -- ad-supported free music downloads. Founder Joe Mohen predicts they'll need 10 million users per month to make enough money to pay the licensing fees on the music. Is it really that hard to give away free...
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Samsung reports that along with Micron Technology, Nokia, Texas Instruments, Ericsson, Spansion, and STMicroelectronics, they've agreed to create and adhere to an industry standard format for flash memory data cards, anticipated to be in place by 2009. "For makers, the open common standard will help them cut...
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Halo 3 is scheduled for release on Septemeber 26th, and I can't recall a more anticipated game launch. It's already got a million pre-orders, and Microsoft is likely figuring to get a collateral damage goose in X-box 360 sales during the holiday season. You know you're really sombody when you get placed in Madame Tussaud's wax museum. Halo's...
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Yesterday Microsoft introduced a nifty new wireless mouse for your laptop. The Mobile Memory Mouse 8000 includes 1GB of flash memory, and since it transmits wirelessly, people who need USB ports for other things should love it. It works on Bluetooth enabled notebooks as well by flipping a switch on the underside of the unit and connecting...
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Sprint Nextel announced today that you can shop online or compare prices for up to 7 million products from 30 retailers, using their Mobile Shopper Service. The service is offered free as an enticement to get Nextel customers to use up those precious web access minutes. "It said it will not charge mobile users extra subscription...
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When you think of supercomputers, you usually imagine a bunch of IBM looking fellows and ladies wearing white lab coats and clutching clipboards in a clean room next to a big rack of silicon. But that's old-fashioned thinking; New Zealand computer scientist Peter Gutman did some calculations, and the most powerful supercomputer in the world...
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Sony announced four new models of Blu-ray disc recorder/players today. The new models have big capacity -- up to 16 hours of hi-def programming on 50 GB discs. The most expensive model has a 500GB hard drive, to boot, but you'll pay for it -- $1752. Note to Sony: the room I watch movies in didn't cost that much to build. "With...
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In many ways, the video game business is a zero-sum game. The amount of time that gamers can spend going virtual places and killing imaginary things is huge, but it is limited. So video game producers always keep one eye on the competition and one on the market. Electronic Arts is the largest independent video game maker in the world, but...
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Last week Skype internet phone service didn't work for more than a day. This week, it's delivering a worm to users through a counterfeit IM buddy message, which -- surprise, surprise -- offers to show you a picture of a young lady with her clothes off. If you click it, it loads the worm on the user's computer, and sends the worm to everyone...
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I have a soft spot for Netscape.com. AOL purchased the brand name back in 1999, probably trying to get a little goodwill from people like me that remember when Netscape was THE web browser. The Netscape.com portal has used a"social news" format for submitting and voting on the prominence of news stories for over a year now, but parent AOL...
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The slide rule/tin foil hat set is having a "Singularity Summit" to discuss artificial intelligence, and they all seem a bit worried. Worried that information technology is getting very powerful very fast, and that might mean that machines will soon be smarter than their makers. They seem to be suffering from an overdose of Gene Roddenberry,...
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So Apple cut the price on the iPhone to just a leg. The iPhone is never going to get more than a few percent of market share for phones anyway. We all know what its really competition for: the Blackberry. Slate's Paul Boutin examines the real tussle for the iPhone, which is getting people that type with their thumbs to switch. He takes a fair...
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Virtual learning has been a big hit with time-starved adults who have jobs and other obligations and still want to continue their education. Now it's becoming more common for students from grades Kindergarten through twelve to get their education, or at least part of it, through virtual classes. Estimates of elementary and secondary...
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If you're running Intuit's popular QuickBooks Online Edition, the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team is warning you that your ActiveX controls might be stabbing you in the back,at least if you visit a malicious webpage. Computer Emergency Readiness Team? That's what CERT stand for? Are they like code ninjas? Does someone project an html...
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In a report that has a certain odor of "duh" about it, Electronic Entertainment Design and Research tells us that video games that have an online capability are much more profitable than those that don't. They examine 219 retail titles for the Xbox, the Playstation3, and the Wii, and see who's making what when their users go online --or don't....
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The wire services are abuzz today with the news that a Texas-based company, EEStor, has patented what they term "technologies for replacement of electrochemical batteries." The replacement they are referring to would be so profoundly earthshaking, and has been worked on so long by so many people, that many are skeptical.Of course, HotHardware...
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Time Inc. has pulled the plug on their Business 2.0 monthly magazine. Like most things with 2.0 appended to the end of its name, nobody knew or cared why it wasn't just 1.0. Now it's 0.0. Interestingly, Time did not sell the magazine, even though they had offers. Wishing your beloved was dead rather than in the arms of a lover seems very...unbusinesslike...
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Everything gets automated eventually. At first, businesses strive for efficiency in workers, and then when the work becomes too boring and repetitive, they go all the way to having a machine of some sort do it. But that could never happen to writing software code, could it? Charles Simonyi thinks it could, and his company Intentional Software...
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Sharp electronics has come up with a LCD screen that incorporates an optical sensor in each pixel of the panel. Current popular touchscreen items like the iPhone handle touchscreen commands with a layer of film bonded to the display panel. Sharp's breakthrough means decreased thickness for the screen, higher image quality, and makes an LCD...
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