Articles by John P. Mello Jr

Anyone who has ever bought a car knows that one of first hard choices they must make is how to service it. Do you stick with the dealer who sold it to you, or do you take it to one of the 495,000 businesses providing after-market service to auto owners? However, as vehicles become more and more dependent on computer systems, consumers have found fe...

For a long time, while Apple computer users enjoyed the advantages of an integrated multimedia software suite, Windows users who wished to experience the i-life had to be satisfied with standalone applications or meek integrated products. Then Roxio Easy Media Creator 7 entered the picture EMC 7 is a suite of Windows applications for working with i...

How small can a full-feature consumer camcorder get? Sony is certainly pushing the limits with its latest entry in its digital Handycam family of products The new unit, the DCR-PC55, not only fits in the palm of your hand, but you can practically hide it there. At 1.1-by-4.0-by-2.9 inches, it's smaller than a compact cassette recorder and it weighs...

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has responded to criticism that its system for approving patents is flawed That reproof was reportedly leveled at the office last week by IBM Vice President for Intellectual Property and Standards Jim Stallings at a media event in New York City....

An tech industry organization advocating interoperability has asked a European court to allow it to join the European Commission (EC) in defense of its antitrust decision against Microsoft The five-member group, made up of IBM, Nokia, Oracle, RealNetworks and Red Hat, goes by the name European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS). It filed a ...

Laptops are loveable computers Their clamshell design resonates efficiency. Open up a unit and everything's there to fire up a computing session: display, keyboard and trackpad....

The United States appears to be digging in its heels on the deadline for its rules requiring visitors to its shores to have passports containing biometric information The rules, which have already been postponed once, are set to take effect on October 26. They require that after that date, nations in the U.S. Visa Waiver Program issue passports wi...

Fall River, Mass., is an old textile town sprawled along the hillson the banks of the Taunton river, its salad days more than a century behind it. Although located only some 50 miles south of Boston and its high-tech "Golden Horseshoe," Fall River has never been associated with the phrase "state of the art" -- until last week That's because, in a d...

Earlier this year, the new Napster was given a bit of a fright when reports began circulating that its recently introduced subscription service had been "hacked." Those reports stung Napster in two ways They suggested that the service, which in its original incarnation was shut down by the music industry as a rat's nest for tune nicksters, had, how...

More than 1,000 individuals and groups have signed a letter urging the U.N.'s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to open its meetings next month on global patent and copyright policy to more government outsiders The forums to be held in Geneva, Switzerland, are expected to set the tone for future action impacting the economic growth of...

The thinking inside the box for producing a personal computer for users with shallow pockets is to start subtracting features from a more expensive model until you reach the price point you want, then toss the works into the same dull cabinet as the pricier offering Apple has shown over the years that it doesn't have a penchant for such in-the-box ...

When Dell Computer announced last month that it would begin shippingnotebook computers incorporating a chip to make the units more secure, itsent analysts scurrying to their calculators. That's because Dell'sinclusion of "trusted computing" hardware into its machines would be givingthe technology a big boost in the coming year According to the late...

Could the American spy community improve its intelligence activities throughblogging? A captain in the U.S. Army Reserve thinks so and says as much inthe March issue of Wired magazine Capt. Kris Alexander, a millitary intelligence officer, argues in an essay that blogsshould be incorporated into the intelligence community's classified computernetwo...

American companies have always had to worry about their overseas facilitiesbeing red, white and blue bull's-eyes for terrorists, but now their offshoringpartners may be in the crosshairs of subversives, too A reported raid last Saturday by police in Delhi, India, in which three menwere killed and another arrested, uncovered plans to attack software...

Comments by a powerful U.S. senator sent a shudder through the cable andsatellite television communities this week Ted Stevens, the Alaskan Republican who heads the SenateCommerce Committee, reportedly told a group of broadcasters what must have sounded likesweet music to some of their ears: He wants to extend the rules forindecency that apply to t...

Supporters of file-sharing programs Grokster and StreamCast scourgedthe entertainment industry yesterday following the filing of briefs with theU.S. Supreme Court in a case that could be Armageddon for the peer-to-peersoftware industry The High Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in the dispute on March29. Entertainment industry groups are at...

Has Nanosolar found the Holy Grail of solar energy? For years, the price of solar energy has been so high that, without some form of subsidy, it has beenunable to compete with power from the electrical grid. Now Nanosolar, a Palo Alto,California, start-up claims it has developed a "commercial-scale technology"that cuts the cost of delivering solar ...

As a judicial panel heard arguments this week on a scheme to fight thepiracy of digital television broadcasts, a civil libertarian group in SanFrancisco launched a guerrilla program to undermine the plan The scheme is the so-called "broadcast flag," a digital rights management(DRM) system for controlling what consumers can do with digital televisio...

Caution: Click-through agreements may be hazardous to your rights of privacyand free speech Those are the sentiments expressed in a white paper released by theElectronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) as part of a campaign to raise consumerawareness of some of the dangerous terms found in End User LicensingAgreements (EULAs), commonly found on the Inter...

The University of Calgary is at it again The Canadian school gained some notoriety two years agowhen its computer science department launched a course on computer viruses,which included, as part of the coursework, writing a virus....