Articles by John P. Mello Jr

If you're ever starved for conversation at a cocktail party, bring up the subject of computer support. It's sure to start a buzz in the room, since almost everyone has a horror story to tell about the topic The reason everyone has a terrible tale is that customer service in the PC industry is at a woeful state, according to David A. Milman, CEO and...

As a legendary poet-songster once insightfully intoned, you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, but it helps if you have an Oregon Scientific regional weather station The Tualatin, Oregon-based company pulled the wraps off its latest meteorological information center in January at CES, the annual show of shows for GadgetSphere...

Some 25 million households in the nation have a wireless network, and that number is growing. So, too, is the number of home networks without a lick of security on them, according to a report released last week by ABI Research in Oyster Bay, N.Y That's because, for most consumers, activating the security features included with their WiFi hardware i...

Concern that a dearth of external e-mail accounts at the FBI will effect the agency's ability to fight crime and terrorism is "overblown," according to Coleen Rowley Rowley is a former principal legal advisor with the bureau known for blowing the whistle on oversights it made prior to the World Trade Center attacks on Sept. 11, 2001....

At the risk of revealing my age, I can remember when a 10 gigabyte hard drive seemed enormous. Of course those were the days before PCs became vaults for music collections, family photo albums and home video libraries Now, it seems, no matter how much hard disk space we have, we always need more, which is why software makers continue to make progra...

A coalition of some 600 organizations opposed to a scheme by America Online and Goodmail Systems to "tax" e-mail claimed on Monday that supporters of the plan have a long-term agenda to make everyone pay for exchanging electronic missives over the Net Referring to an op-ed piece by Esther Dyson, an investor in technology start-ups and editor of cne...

Three computer researchers created a stir Wednesday when they released a paper at a conference in Pisa, Italy, describing how to infect Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags with a computer virus, but the likelihood of a digital disease rampaging through the world's supply chains is slim, at least for now "The likelihood of something like this...

Let me set the record straight. I've never been a fan of tablet computers. If the urge to write on an LCD strikes me, I've always found my Palm Tungsten handheld sufficient for that desire. Nevertheless, when Motion Computing of Austin, Texas, introduced the LS800 tablet, it tantalized me For one thing, it's a real tablet, not a laptop with a swive...

The Amazons and Wal-Marts of the Web understand the importance of a good on-site search engine, but for smaller concerns the technology can be problematic. Oftentimes those businesses don't make the connection between site search and customer satisfaction and even if they do, they don't have the money to develop a robust technology for themselves T...

A majority of Web sites fail to meet the search desires of their visitors, according to a report prepared by Cambridge, Mass.-based research firm Forrester Research "Although consumers value search as a standalone function, search functionalities within company Web sites are not delivering satisfactory results," said the report, a copy of which was...

Clipboard extenders are among the most useful applications in the Windows world. How many times have you overwritten something in the clipboard that you later wish you had available? Clipboard extenders solve that problem by saving everything you cut or copy from your screen and letting you access it when you need it There are more than a few clipb...

The four anchors of the open source world -- Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl/PHP/Python, or the so-called LAMP stack -- proved most reliable in a study released Monday by Coverity, a San Francisco-based maker of source code analysis tools With the release of the study, which is part of an ongoing US$1.24 million project funded by the U.S. Department ...

As an industry, delivery of television programming into the home over broadband connections is barely off the ground, but it's already showing signs of consolidation A continuing series of acquisitions in the IP video market will ultimately result in a smaller number of vendors, according to a report released by ABI Research on Wednesday....

With Apple adding video to its iPod line of digital media players, the scramble is on to provide watchers with content to occupy their eyeballs One way to obtain content is to pay for it. Since the introduction of its "vidpod," Apple has been steadily adding to the video library at its iTunes store. In addition to movie trailers, music videos and P...

Broadband penetration of the nation's rural areas has more than doubled since 2003, but it still lags behind urban and suburban areas by a substantial margin, according to a survey released this week by the Pew Internet & American Life Project By the end of 2005, surveyors found, 24 percent of rural Americans had broadband Internet connections, com...

Despite some chest beating by the entertainment industry Wednesday over the shutdown of one of the biggest index servers on the eDonkey network, a raid by Belgian and Swiss police seems to have had little impact on file-sharing traffic "We have seen no effect on the eDonkey traffic levels," Andrew Parker, chief technical officer at CacheLogic, a UK...

Somewhere between no-frills Craigslist and intricate eBay lies the new e-commerce offering introduced by Santa Monica, Calif.-based TagWorld last week TagWorld, a high-energy social networking space launched last November, is combining the new service of free online classifieds, which includes images and personalized storefronts, with auction featu...

Internet companies doing business in countries that suppress civil liberties need a code of conduct to soften the controversy they're fueling by doing business with authoritarian regimes In an open letter sent to Sen. Gordon H. Smith (R-Ore.), whose Congressional subcommittee held hearings Wednesday on the conduct of Internet companies in China, th...

Nico Popp can see the day when proving who you are on the faceless Internet will be as easy as using a picture I.D. in the real world Popp is the point man for a new authentication program launched Monday by VeriSign, which runs the Net's largest domains, .com and .net, its biggest certificate validation service and the root product code database f...

If there's anything that can be called heresy in free-for-all cyberspace it's the notion that people should pay for e-mail, but that didn't stop a few heretics this week from announcing monetized e-mail initiatives Although Yahoo and AOL took the lion's share of the limelight with their "certified e-mail" proposal, a feisty start-up in the Netherla...