Mark Sullivan

Remember a couple weeks ago when we discussed Ivy Bridge CPUs running a lot hotter than Sandy Bridge CPUs when overclocked? Well Loyd Case found a site that did a little experimentation and solved the mystery. (Hint: it's the awful thermal compound Intel uses.)

We're joined by Facebook expert Mark Sullivan to talk about the impact of Facebook's IPO, which should happen today. I think we're all in agreement that the company is way overvaulued, and will start snapping up other companies when the big flood of money comes in. With any luck, they'll avoid Yahoo's object lesson in how not to spend money.

PCWorld has released a new ebook detailing the various tech amenities available to tech-using travelers in the nation's largest airports.

“If the product is free, you are the product.”

At first glance that little maxim might seem cryptic, but it’s an apt description of the nature of Facebook’s service, and a needed heads-up for anyone who uses it. Although Facebook is a free service, the social networking site acts as a mechanism for capturing highly personal user information--Facebook's real product. That's your information. You are the product.

Dedicated mobile hotspots have been around for a few years now, but they've gotten progressively easier to use. And with the advent of 4G service, they’ve become notably faster, capable of connecting to more devices, and just a lot more useful.

We decided to compare the latest and greatest mobile hotspots from the two national 4G LTE providers in the United States, AT&T and Verizon. We lined up Verizon’s new MiFi 4620L Jetpack LTE hotspot against AT&T’s Mobile Hotspot Elevate 4G (by Sierra Wireless) to see which one worked better.

At CTIA in New Orleans today Sprint announced a first-of-its-kind mobile hotspot, the Tri-Fi Hotspot, which contains a CDMA radio and both a Wi-MAX and an LTE 4G radio.

This is a tailor-fit solution for Sprint, which is in the middle of a big project to upgrade its 3G CDMA network, build a new LTE network and keep its existing Wi-MAX network in operation. Sprint says the upgraded CDMA and new LTE networks will launch this summer.

Click to view our full-page map with the testing results.In our April 16 article "3G and 4G Wireless Speed Showdown," we reported the results of our exclusive 13-city tests of the four national wireless services: AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon. Our study is the largest and best-known independent test of wireless service in the United States.

Here, in Part Two of our story, we drill deeper into the massive amounts of data that we collected over six weeks in February and March of this year. Whereas the first article reported the 13-city average speeds of the carriers, in this story we detail the carriers' performance in each of the ten testing locations we visited in each city.

How to Use the Map: We tested wireless service in 13 cities, and in each city we tested in ten locations. The map below displays our test results for each location.

To zoom in on a city, use the navigation controls at the upper left of the map, or click repeatedly on or near the group of map pins.

Wondering which carrier to tie yourself to for the next two-year contract? If speed is a factor, you'd definitely want to check out our 3G and 4G wireless speed tests. On the podcast, Mark Sullivan gives us the lowdown - which carriers are fastest in the real world, and how we tested to determine that.

Ed Albro also discusses the four versions of Windows 8. In realitiy, there are only two you will ever have to choose from, plus one that will come preinstalled on ARM-based tablets and another that is for big volume enterprise customers that develop custom deployments.

Photograph by Robert CardinIt's been a year since we looked closely at wireless service in the United States, and in the interim that service has changed considerably--mostly in positive ways. The industry is in the midst of another major technology transition, this time moving from a 3G world to a 4G one while trying to grasp the implications, realize the opportunities, and deal with the growing pains. All of this should be good (even fun!) for consumers, and it could lead to a lot of cool, superfast, reasonably priced devices.

In this year's study, we took snapshot measurements of wireless service in 13 cities--Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.--across the country to get a real-time view of how the 3G-to-4G transition is progressing, and of which companies are currently delivering on the promised faster speeds.

What happens when your favorite Web host decides to go out of business and ice the content from thousands of users like you? Does all of that data just disappear, never to be seen again? It can happen, easily.

Under current law, a cloud or hosting site has a pretty much unlimited right to decide whether the content that people put on its pages remains available or vanishes. And a site that chooses to delete content is under no obligation to preserve the data or even to give the data's contributors advanced notice of when the purging will occur.