Articles by John P. Mello Jr

There are two utilities that I've found essential in my day-to-day operations with Windows. One is a clipboard extender -- a program that archives anything cut or copied to the Windows clipboard. The other is a screen capture application Screen capture programs allow you to create images from whatever is displayed on your screen. Their function are...

Delivery of television programming over computer networks using Internet protocols showed signs of a maturing market this week when nine major players supporting the technology announced the formation of a consortium to develop important standards for it AT&T, Ericsson, France Telecom, Panasonic, Philips, Siemens, Samsung, Sony and Telecom Italia o...

Cybersquatters, typosquatters and domain tasters were targeted by Microsoft Wednesday in a series of lawsuits filed in California, Washington and the United Kingdom "Domain name abuse is a growing global challenge, and so Microsoft is expanding its efforts in this area for two reasons," explained Microsoft Senior Attorney Aaron Kornblum in a video ...

I've never been a big fan of Post-it notes. On occasion, though, they have proven to be a convenient vehicle for procrastination When someone with priorities diverging from mine pins one to my computer screen, I can toss it on the rug....

If you want to avoid being a victim of information highwaymen on the Web, you may want to pay attention to the domain names of the sites you surf to According to a study released Monday by security software maker McAfee, the Web is no different from the physical world when it comes to safety: there are safe neighborhoods and safe Web domains, and t...

Consumer reaction to downloading movies and TV programming from the Internet has been less than enthusiastic. For some, it's a hassle to move entertainment content from their PCs to their living rooms In recent months, the gadget industry has focused a lot of its resources on cooking up solutions to bridge the PC-TV gap. Yet another such solution w...

Of the three pillars of digital lifestyle applications -- video, photos and music -- music remains a bit of a mystery to many users. That's ironic because sharing digital music files was one of the first applications byte-stylers flocked to However, while many users have graduated from merely sharing videos and photos to creating polished projects ...

Warner Bros. Entertainment, Universal Pictures and Digital Cinema Implementation Partners (DCIP) announced Tuesday a joint venture to launch a new system for distributing digital movies to theaters DCIP is a joint venture by AMC Entertainment, Cinemark USA, and Regal Entertainment Group....

It's not often that in this gee-whiz age any technology can be accused of being under-hyped, but that's the case with mobile marketing, according to a report released this week by IDC, a research firm based in Framingham, Mass "IDC believes that mobile marketing is one of the instances in which the current hype actually underestimates the full pote...

Like many home keyboard jockeys, I view my wireless network as a black box. I set it up to share my broadband Internet connection. It does that. So I leave well enough alone That doesn't mean, though, that my curiosity isn'taroused from time to time, and I feel an urge to poke around with the network. Usuallyit's an urge that I resist, but a slick ...

Online predators will again be the target of legislation filed in Congress this year Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) filed a measure last month aimed at protecting children from pornographers, predators and list brokers....

For the first time ever, Wikipedia last month cracked into comScore's top 10 hottest properties on the Web, largely due to the exposure the online encyclopedia receives from search engines such as Google During January, comScore reported that Wikipedia and its affiliated sites garnered 42.9 million unique visitors, which earned it a ninth place ran...

Giving digital images an artful twist isn't anything new in the computer world, but leave it to Alien Skin Software to take the technique to another level of elegance For those of you unfamiliar with Alien Skin, the company makes high-quality plug-ins for PC and Macintosh image editing programs....

The software industry isn't what it used to be. Open source software, globalization and outsourcing have irrevocably changed the sector and the skills needed by those who choose to work in it. That's the reason given by the Western branch of a major Eastern university when it announced last week a new degree program that gives its students the necessary skills to succeed in the brave new world of software...

More than one third of the Web analytics market will be upgrading, replacing or deploying systems in the next 12 months, which will create new opportunities for application vendors, according to a report released Tuesday by Jupiter Research The survey of executives found that 12 percent of respondents said they plan to upgrade or replace their Web ...

With Apple grabbing all the headlines of late with its iPhone, it's difficult for other spiffy mobiles to garner any mindshare in the market. That's a shame because a recent offering by Samsung deserves some attention The new cell phone -- Samsung's answer to Motorola's Razr -- is called the Sync (a.k.a. SGH-a707) and it contains quite an array of ...

Last November, the Librarian of Congress adopted half a dozen exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), among them one that might give cell phone phone users greater freedom to move between carriers with their mobile devices That exemption allows users to legally unlock their cell phones, according to two attorneys with Banner & Wi...

For the past three years, a Chicago consulting firm has assumed a Grinch-like role with its annual estimate of worker productivity losses attributable to the Super Bowl. Those losses, though, may actually be gains for many businesses, according to the firm's top executive Money lost due to productivity declines during the two weeks leading up to th...

Some bloggers amaze me -- not by what they say, but by how much they say. It seems to me sometimes that a lot of these guys must be sitting in front of their keyboard 18 hours a day filling screen after screen with their prose Maybe the moles of electrons they produce every day is better described as typing than writing, but their dedication can't...

Consumers got their first official look Tuesday at Microsoft's new operating system Vista. Businesses, though, have been able to eyeball the software since November of last year, and eyeballing seems to be all they're doing with the new OS "Among my colleagues, none have installed Vista, which is understandable, because it is a new operating system...