Articles by Gene J. Koprowski

Intel and rival National Semiconductor this week announced they are going green with their manufacturing processes Santa Clara, California-based Intel said it will, later this fiscal year, begin shipping new chips that have 95 percent less lead than its current chips. Cross-town competitor National Semiconductor today disclosed that it, too, plans ...

Microsoft this week released a portion of its source code through an open-source license, posting the code on SourceForge, an online source-code repository, in its most high-profile code disclosure ever The move is designed to help the company improve the toolset's documentation and to allow the open-source community to find the bugs in the product...

A slew of new senior appointments at Sun Microsystems comes as confidence in the recovery of the U.S. economy and technology industry is growing. Santa Clara, California-based Sun last week named Jonathan Schwartz as its new chief operating officer, and on Monday announced that John Loiacono has been appointed as the new executive vice president of software, perhaps as the final stage of a restructuring effort there...

With financial and technical support from Hewlett-Packard, Foundry Networks and other leaders in Silicon Valley, students at the University of San Francisco (USF) this week launched a grand project to create an instant, do-it-yourself supercomputer. But technical problems with some of the PCs disabled the effort to link 700 computers, using Linux,...

Two years in the making, the Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) this week debuted online, providing the public with a constantly updated catalog of the Internet's ever-changing security vulnerabilities. The project is sponsored by Digital Defense and Winterforce and is available at osvdb.org....

The European Union this week heard arguments from lawyers for Oracle, which is seeking to acquire PeopleSoft, but won't rule on the issue until May 11th, TechNewsWorld has learned. Regulators are looking at the financial and human-resources software market throughout Europe -- a business applications software niche dominated by Oracle, PeopleSoft ...

Want to download pop songs in MP3 format with impunity and without fear of prosecution? Move to Canada. The refuge for Vietnam War draft dodgers of the 1970s is now an asylum for intellectual-property pirates A federal court judge in Canada this week ruled that swapping songs on the Internet for "personal use" does not violate copyright law or infr...

Want to download pop songs in MP3 format with impunity and without fear of prosecution? Move to Canada. The refuge for Vietnam War draft dodgers of the 1970s is now an asylum for intellectual-property pirates A federal court judge in Canada this week ruled that swapping songs on the Internet for "personal use" does not violate copyright law or infr...

Industrial policy has long been discredited as an economic strategy in the United States, but not in Asia. The government of Japan, for example, has always worked closely with companies in IT and consumer electronics to influence corporate winners and losers, but the results have been exceptionally spotty....

A new study released this week by a Nobel Prize-winning economist dispels doubts raised by demagogic politicians on the campaign trail -- and in Congress -- about the impact of outsourcing on the U.S. economy, stating that outsourcing actually increases jobs and pay for IT workers The report was released by the Information Technology Association of...

Keystroke loggers and spyware developers may soon be silenced, as Congress is debating a bill that would outlaw the intrusive software and declare it akin to trespassing on private property "It's my computer. It's my private property," said Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Montana), during a public hearing in the U.S. Senate earlier this week, talking about hi...

The debut of a diminutive motherboard from Via Technologies this week at the CeBIT computer show in Europe is serving as a catalyst for conversations throughout the computing industry about the return of the concept of the thin-client PC The thin-client computer, in theory, is a device that is just as powerful as a conventional PC, but with a size ...

An unsolicited e-mail arrives in your in-box from Marc Racicot, chairman of the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign, asking you to donate "using our secure server," at www.GeorgeWBush.com/Contribute/, a total of $2,000, $1,000, or a smaller sum, to keep TV ads exposing John Kerry's miserly defense spending record on the air Political spam, like this message, ...

A router maker starts receiving complaints from customers -- around the world -- that the ports on a particular networking device are not working properly. IT professionals, scrambling to cope, attempt to close the faulty ports with technology equivalent to electrical tape They are able to redirect the data flow to other parts of the device, but th...

Proposals by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and state agencies to use data-mining techniques to track terrorists are floundering, encountering criticism from civil liberties activists and technologists who blast the plans as too "theoretical" and not technically feasible The FBI last week petitioned the Federal Communications Commission ...

Nokia -- like the rest of the wireless telephone industry -- has suffered in the public eye of late. First, the tech downturn harmed wireless phone sales around the world, not just in the United States. Then came allegations that Nokia's wireless phones were exploding due to negligent manufacturing and were causing personal injuries to users The co...

A new, national report by comScore Networks indicates broadband Internet access is ready to overtake dial-up access as the top online subscription service in major metro markets in the United States The study, released this week in the Reston, Virginia-based company's fourth-quarter market-share report, states that in many of those major markets, l...

Law enforcement officials are moving forward with a controversial antiterrorism database on the state level as the federal government is expanding the amount of information collected and retained about private citizens This week, authorities disclosed that the state of Wisconsin had joined the Multistate Antiterrorism Information Exchange, known by...

With John Kerry almost certainly destined to emerge victorious from the Democratic primary fray, he is turning up the heat on the hot-button topic of overseas outsourcing -- and the Bush administration is preparing to respond in earnest. The overall US$10 billion IT outsourcing market still makes up less than 3 percent of global spending on inform...

Key the words "free porn" into a search engine on your home PC. Most likely, you will obtain a list of more than 6 million URLs, the government's top lawyer said this week "Internet porn is persistent and unavoidable," Solicitor General Theodore Olson, the lawyer for the Bush Administration, in cases before the federal courts, told the U.S. Supreme...