Articles by Gene J. Koprowski

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, work on federal contracts fueled the development of the high-tech industry, from communications satellites to mainframe computers However, from the 1970s to the late 1990s, long after the initial government-funded push had faded, the computer industry's main source of revenue came from dev...

Real-time data mining -- powered by neural-network technology -- has begun to remake the way large corporations manage customer accounts. The technology has been helping companies gain deep insight into customer purchasing patterns. While the technology is just now beginning to gain appeal, research to develop neural networks was started years ago...

Microsoft's long-anticipated operating system -- code-named Longhorn -- has been hard to lasso. The company has been carefully controlling disclosures about the new OS, which is slated to be released in 2005. Even developers are keeping mum, for the most part. Extreme Logic's Paul Hernacki, like other software developers, spoke cautiously about Lo...

Imagine a completely networked home -- a smart home, if you will -- in which every appliance has its own Internet address and can be remotely managed from anywhere on the Internet with a simple Web browser. Did you forget to turn off the coffee pot before you left for work? Simply log on to your home's network and shut it off remotely A few years a...

Version six of Internet Protocol -- or IPv6 -- was approved as a standard many years ago, but the high cost of rolling it out has been too severe for the slow economic recovery. After all, implementing the required networking technologies associated with rolling out the protocol en masse requires replacing routers and other equipment geared to the older standard, IPv4.

In the film "The Recruit," Colin Farrell portrays a CIA agent who escapes a double agent by removing a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag placed on him and surreptitiously placing it on the collar of a dog he stops to pet on the street Alhough most of its uses are not as dramatic as those shown in "The Recruit," RFID tags are being used toda...

Under an interdisciplinary project collectively known as the Semantic Web, computer scientists around the world are working on ways to revolutionize the Internet. The researchers -- from Europe, Asia and the United States -- are developing standards, protocols and technologies that will advance the development of a more meaning-oriented Web "The ai...

Last year, the growth of the Internet backbone slowed dramatically as network providers around the globe, including KPNQwest, Carrier1 and Energis, reduced bandwidth capacity and, in some cases, brought down certain data pipelines altogether Washington, D.C.-based research firm TeleGeography noted that since the birth of the Web browser, internatio...

Software agents are beginning to emerge from their initial status as a computing and communications curiosity, and are providing customer service on the Net for major companies like Microsoft and Symantec. Beyond consumer applications, agents are even routing and scheduling warplanes on aircraft carriers in the Indian Ocean While the popular concep...

A truck gets a flat tire on Route 65, somewhere in Indiana, and the driver doesn't know his exact location. He phones the dispatcher, who looks up the trucker's locale with a vehicle location system that relies on global positioning system (GPS) technology Overcoming its beginnings as a niche application for high-end automobiles, telematics technol...

In 1965, Gordon Moore, Intel's cofounder, predicted that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every 18 months. In some eyes, that law -- which has become somewhat of an accepted axiom in the computer industry -- has been losing veracity. There are some -- Moore included, according to several accounts -- who think there a...

A military planner at the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia, watches a battle unfold without taking his eyes off the computer screen. The software is tracking a million vehicles spread over the Southeast Asian terrain -- the most ever tracked in a military simulation Modeling and simulation have made momentous strides in recent years, and t...

Hailed as the "next big thing" in computing during the 1980s, optical technology was supposed to revolutionize everything from networks to processors. But the pace of research cooled when materials used to make optical chips -- which convey light, or photons, rather than electrons, as in traditional semiconductors -- failed to emerge The computer i...