Articles by Brian R. Hook

Still looking for the perfect gift for that special someone? If that person is a fan of technology, you might want to consider giving him or her one of the latest gadgets to hit the market. Many new products have been released this holiday season. To help you narrow the search, TechNewsWorld talked with several technology vendors to help spark some gift-giving ideas...

During the past several years, light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, have been cropping up in places where traditional lighting technology has dominated. It seems this trend -- which gathered steam years ago with the incorporation of LED technology into consumer electronics devices -- has begun to accelerate into other consumer areas An LED is a semicond...

The computer mouse has come a long way since Doug Englebart and his colleagues at the Stanford Research Institute invented the first one back in 1964. Consumers first started using the mouse on the Macintosh. Now almost every operating system relies on a mouse. But some in the technology industry think the days of the mouse could be numbered. Will...

Today's PDAs are getting more and more powerful. But will superpowered PDAs eventually lead to the death of laptop computers? That's highly unlikely, at least according to many tech users who use both PDAs and laptops regularly. TechNewsWorld interviewed several people in the industry to get a feel for where the mobile computing marketplace is headed...

Various instant messaging (IM) products are readily available around the Internet, and because of the wide variety of options, the Internet has the potential to turn into a modern-day tower of Babel, with everyone using different IM products. Programmers, however, are busy working to fix this potential problem with all-in-one software applications that allow users to communicate with friends and colleagues who use different platforms like MSN, AOL and Yahoo...

The iBOT mobility system, called the Ferrari of wheelchairs, is now helping disabled users break through physical barriers. The iBOT can climb stairs, bump up curbs, glide through gravel and even elevate a seated passenger to reach the top shelf at a grocery store To help get the iBOT out on the market, the Food and Drug Administration expedited th...

Windows is often the whipping boy when it comes to server platforms. But many in the industry now admit that Windows Server 2003 offers some significant breakthroughs over earlier versions of Microsoft's server software -- a change that could help Microsoft compete more effectively against Unix and Linux servers Windows Server 2003 is engineered wi...

Commercial search-engine providers could soon face a serious competitor if the vision of some open-source developers materializes. A team of open-source programmers recently launched a project called Nutch to provide search-engine software for free Doug Cutting, president of the Nutch Organization, told TechNewsWorld that Nutch eventually will prov...

Processors continue to get faster and faster, but the frontside bus (FSB) remains one of the biggest bottlenecks on system performance. Most major manufacturers, including Intel, Motorola and AMD, are trying to develop methods to sidestep FSB limitations As one of the most important processing channels, the frontside bus is the primary interface th...

Keeping paper documents intact for years and years has become a matter of routine for historians and archivists trying to keep a record of history. But saving digital information is turning out to breed its own set of unique challenges Because digital files depend on their context -- such as the operating systems in which they are stored and the ap...

Flash animation -- once widely derided as a bells-and-whistles annoyance -- is quickly becoming ubiquitous, thanks to the prevalence of broadband connections and a freely distributed plug-in for nearly every major computing platform. In fact, Flash technology, developed by Macromedia, has become so widespread that many companies are starting to think of it as a platform unto itself...