Articles by Gene J. Koprowski

The U.S. federal government is moving forward with civil -- and possibly criminal -- cases against major makers of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips The cases are being investigated on both coasts....

A new study by a researcher at Cornell University indicates people are more likely to be truthful in e-mail communications than in other media or even in face-to-face conversations. The report, to be unveiled in detail at a human-computer interface conference in Vienna, Austria, this spring, is believed to be the first study to examine truthfulnes...

A proposed federal lawsuit by a woman in New Jersey alleging racketeering by major music labels is "preposterous" and has little chance of prevailing, entertainment industry lawyers tell TechNewsWorld The forthcoming lawsuit by Michele Scimeca, said to be a countersuit against members of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), comes a...

Music fans who download songs from the Internet and share them with friends via P2P technology are still at risk for a copyright infringement claim -- and massive financial damages -- from the recording industry A ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia late last year heartened many users of Kazaa, Morpheus and oth...

Remember that weekend trip you took to Palm Springs five years ago with your friends? No? Well, the U.S. government probably does. Most airlines outsource their domestic reservation databases, known as Passenger Name Records (PNRs), to organizations with clever names like Sabre, Amadeus and Worldspan.

Leading intellectual property lawyers are suggesting that a U.S. District Court ruling earlier this week, which stated the word "windows" is generic and cannot be trademarked, is incorrect and probably will be overturned on appeal U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, in the ruling released this week in a case filed by Microsoft in Seattle against r...

Two new standards approved this week by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are poised to provide consumers with content more appropriate for their needs, enabling computers to locate relevant information on the Internet more quickly than was ever possible before The consortium disclosed Tuesday the new standards -- the Web ontology language (OWL) ...

The new offering by Sun Microsystems -- StarOffice 7 for the Solaris x86 desktop platform -- might be embraced by some corporate users as a way to provide leverage in future negotiations with Microsoft, computer industry analysts said. The move also could pave the way for Sun's planned Java-based desktop product for the x86 architecture. Sun's Sta...

Spammers are now targeting mobile phone subscribers throughout Asia, sending text messages through the ubiquitous short message service (SMS) system. The practice is generating concern at major technology companies like Microsoft and NTT DoCoMo about a potential emerging tsunami of unwanted e-solicitations Market research firm TNS Consulting indica...

Three times during the last week -- first in his State of the Union, then in his weekly radio address on Saturday, then during a campaign stop at a Baptist hospital in Arkansas on Monday -- President Bush touted technology as a way to reduce healthcare costs "By computerizing health records, we can avoid dangerous medical mistakes, reduce costs and...

Waiting for a PC to boot up can be quite boring. Who wants to sit there and watch the Microsoft Windows hourglass graphic for a seemingly interminable amount of time? This problem has plagued the PC industry for years. But a solution could be at hand, at least for entertainment PCs -- those PCs built around Microsoft's new Windows XP Media Center E...

A new program offered by IBM could have a major impact on Windows users' move to Linux, industry insiders speculate IBM on Tuesday announced it is offering training to its business partners, gratis, on migration from Windows NT to Linux. The company also is providing financial incentives to move from Windows NT. Those incentives will consist of dis...

On a recent Sunday afternoon, Brian Olson went online at Dell.com and custom-designed a PC, a variant of the Dell 8300 series, for himself and his wife. "I had a Dell laptop when I was with EchoStar," said Olson, who is now a marketing executive at Video Professor in Lakewood, Colorado. "It was a great computer. I had an IBM ThinkPad before that.

After closing the controversial merger with Compaq engineered last year by CEO Carly Fiorina, HP has become one of the world's largest technology companies, with US$71.8 billion in annual sales But does HP really lead the world in any new technology fields, and does it have the right technology strategy to sustain it through the coming years? Or ha...

Graphics technology leaders ATI and Nvidia have been rolling out new innovations at a steady pace in the past several years, competing for desktop partnerships and mind share. The two companies have often been compared to Intel and AMD in the way they've battled furiously, but ATI and Nvidia don't have quite as much animosity toward each other Some...

Jeff Schwartz recently received an inquiry from a senior executive at a major wireless telephone carrier, asking if he could provide some product information about the software his company produces "So I e-mailed it," Schwartz told TechNewsWorld. But it never arrived. "I sent it two more times," he said. Still, the message didn't make it through.

Mainstream computer users soon will see a lot of new developments -- thanks to the vision of haptics technology pioneers. Haptics technology, mainly developed to assist the blind when using computers, is bringing the sensation of touch to the Internet and the desktop, and enabling computer users at remote locations to "grasp" objects. Simply put, haptics is leading to a new stage in the computing experience, one that will move the traditional computer interface beyond simple sights and sounds...

Oracle's takeover bid for competitor PeopleSoft -- which dominated trade press headlines during the dog days of summer -- has somewhat obscured the company's technology rollout strategy. But that's about to change. This week at the OracleWorld 2003 conference in San Francisco, the database giant has revealed more information about its long-heralde...

Sean North, president of North Notes, LLC, earlier in his career worked for five years on a computer help desk, supporting employees who didn't have proper computer training and didn't know a PC from a portal "It does seem like one needs to be certified in IT just to be able to use a PC or a laptop these days," North told TechNewsWorld....

During the late 19th century, shortly after creating the light bulb, Thomas Edison founded the company that eventually became General Electric Although the company does not generate the headlines in the computing press that Microsoft, Apple or IBM does, it has been a behind-the-scenes, trend-setting high-tech innovator. Specifically, GE's technolog...