Joel Hruska
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
It has been over six years since Intel first unveiled its Atom CPUs and detailed its plans for new, ultra-mobile devices. The company's efforts to break into smartphone and tablet sales, while turning a profit, have largely come to naught. Nonetheless, company CEO Brian Krzanich remains optimistic. Speaking to...
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Most of the time, when we hear about data breaches, it's because companies have either been compromised or failed to properly protect data. This time around, however, it's the United Postal Service in the limelight. Data on as many as 800,000 employees may have been stolen along with data on customers who called the...
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When people think about Internet security, they still think of the various bugs, flaws, and malware that pervade the online world as a Windows problem. Macs have long enjoyed special status thanks to limited market share, while smartphones aren't generally considered to be an attack vector, no matter which OS you...
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The concept of net neutrality has been a hot-button topic over the past few years, particularly as evidence by fundamental ISP misconduct that has grown more prevalent. In addition, an increasing number of customers have found themselves caught in the crossfire between two huge corporations (ISPs and content providers especially) with little...
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There's a fine line to balance when it comes to providing users with a comprehensive backup service and providing that service in a manner that fundamentally compromises the security of the people it's supposed to be protecting. According to security researcher Jeffrey Paul, iCloud has thoroughly breached that barrier...
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The PC laptop market is a funny place. Good laptops are fairly easy to find, but great laptops are staggeringly rare. This is true even at the boutique end of the market, where manufacturers have a tendency to choose powerful components, but cram them into a chassis that can't handle the heat without sounding like a jet turbine, or pick...
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We've covered the battles between ISPs and various large-scale content providers multiple times before. From deliberately throttling Netflix users to older spats that prevented Time Warner customers from watching cable channels they'd legally paid for, these kinds of disagreements are common in America these days. A...
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ARM has announced its next generation of graphics hardware (codenamed Mali). The new GPUs are meant to highlight a significant improvement in energy efficiency, with ARM claiming that its next-generation GPU architecture will be a whopping 45% more power efficient than previous models. The new GPUs are also meant to address a broad array of...
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When Apple debuted its A8 SoC, it proved to be a modest tweak of the original A7. Despite packing double the transistors and an improved GPU, the heart of the A8 SoC is the same dual-core Apple "Cyclone" processor tweaked to run at higher clock speeds and with stronger total GPU performance. Given this, many expected...
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It has been a few weeks since Microsoft released its Technical Preview of Windows 10 -- which means we've had enough time to walk around the vehicle, kick the tires, and investigate the product in its current form. After the drubbing that Windows 8 took in the tech press and from angry users, Microsoft badly needs this new operating system...
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It was a mixed set of announcements from AMD last night, with some positive news for the chip manufacturer, but some long-term projections that sent investors skittering. This was Lisa Su's first quarterly announcement after taking over the CEO position barely a week ago, and she opened with good news -- not only did...
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Earlier this year, VPN provider Golden Frog (creators of the VyprVPN service) debuted front and center in the debate over net neutrality. One of their customers, Colin Nederkoorn, published a video showing how switching to VyprVPN increased his network performance by a factor of 10. Full Disclosure: I've run my own...
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Lockheed Martin Claims Breakthrough In Fusion Reactor But Scant Details Imply More Sizzle Than Steak
Yesterday, Lockheed Martin made major headlines across the Internet with claims that it was developing a new compact fusion reactor that could be deployed within the next decade. This is a bold claim -- researchers have been able to create fusion in a lab for decades, but the problem isn't creating fusion -- it's...
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For the past few years, Intel has promised that its various low-power Atom-based processors would usher in a wave of low-cost Android and Windows mobile products that could compete with ARM-based solutions from its major competitors. And for years, we've seen no more than a trickle of hardware, often with limited availability and/or...
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Zero-day exploits are a nightmare for end-users and vendors alike as both groups have to scramble to patch and resolve problems. Today, Microsoft got tagged with one of the worst types of disclosures -- not only is there a vulnerability in every single shipping version of Windows, the vulnerability has been exploited...
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Earlier this week, Apple's partner for sapphire display technology, GT Advanced Technologies, filed for bankruptcy claiming that it could not continue operating in its present state. Today, some of the documents originally filed were unsealed and we got a closer look -- including GT Advanced Technologies plan to...
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One of the downsides to the news cycle is that no matter how big or hot a story is, something else inevitably comes along. The advent of ISIS and Ebola, combined with the passing of time, have pushed national security concerns out of the limelight -- until, that is, someone at the NSA helps out by reminding us that...
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A new interview with Assassin's Creed Unity senior producer Vincent Pontbriand has some gamers seeing red and others crying "Told you so!" after the developer revealed that the game's 900p framerate and 30 fps target on consoles is a result of weak CPU performance rather than GPU compute. "Technically we're CPU-bound...
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When NVIDIA launched the powerful GTX 980 and 970 last month, it was obvious that these cards would be coming to mobile sooner rather than later. The significant leap forward that Maxwell offers in performance-per-watt means that these GPUs would shine in mobile contexts -- maybe even more than in desktop. The mobile Maxwell die Today, NVIDIA...
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When Star Wars: The Old Republic made news in September, it was for announcing that one of the mythos' most enduring antiheroes, the onetime Sith Lord Revan, would be making an appearance in the MMO. Now, a new bug could wipe some of that goodwill off the map. Modder and TOR enthusiast SWTorMiner has created a video...
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Buried in the details of Microsoft's technical preview for Windows 10 (look for our own discussion in short order), is a bit of a footnote concerning the operating system's requirements. I say footnote because this news -- that Windows 10 will have exactly the same requirements as Windows 8.1, which had the same...
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Today, at ARM TechCon, AMD is kicking off the conference by launching its new embedded ARM platform (codenamed Hierofalcon) and its associated ARM Cortex-A57 chip, codenamed Seattle. This new solution is debuting inside the first ARM-based network function virtualization platform, and is meant as a proof-of-concept...
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