Peter Coffee

LOS ANGELES—Companies are deluding themselves if they think that they can postpone wireless deployments until the technology is stable and secure, warned Hewlett-Packard Americas Richard Stone, manager for Enterprise Mobility Solutions, in his keynote speech on Wednesday at the Pocket PC Summit conference here. “What are the two things that you do on Monday after […]

Even the six million dollar man was once assigned to track down stolen microchips. Tech theft has been a mainstream topic since the 1970s. But as this month began, almost 300 boxes of chips—fresh from South Korea—were stolen from a warehouse near Londons Heathrow Airport. Reported value, about $5 million; prospects for recovery, negligible. At […]

Firewalls or “Fire Logs”? The latter is the unkind nickname for firewalls so poorly configured that “they might as well not be there,” as shared by Bob Dacey, director for information security issues at the U.S. General Accounting Office, during the annual Control and Audit of Information Technology Conference Oct. 8 in Washington. Dacey reviewed […]

Theres poetry in the process of turning our ideas into machine instructions. Of all the types of product that I get to review at eWEEK Labs, high-level language compilers are therefore my favorites–especially those whose output options include machine-code listings, with the high-level language statements interspersed as comments. I wish that more of our technologies […]

If you ran one of the handful of companies that will soon be able to build a billion-transistor chip, youd also work hard to build demand for such a device. With the opening keynote speech at Microprocessor Forum 2002, Intel started the early advance work in that campaign–but also tipped its hand as to its […]

Like the boxer trying to stay on his feet after a blow that comes from nowhere, the site that dares the world to attack it will stand or fall in full view of both its fans and its detractors. The frame-by-frame study of the bout will show when the sites guard was dropped or when […]

In almost 20 years with some kind of pointing device on my desk, Ive never had the adjective “cordless” on my mind—nor have I ever wished for more than three simple buttons. Mouse, track ball, notebook PC touch-pad, one button on a Mac or two on a PC: Ive been OK with anything, as long […]

When I construct a spreadsheet in Microsofts Excel, I typically use only one layer of formulas and data. When I save the result, I often “Save As” an Excel 2.1 Worksheet, rather than take the default of saving a more complex Workbook of multiple Worksheets (all but one of which would be empty). In a […]

What does the “Tickle-Me Elmo” animated doll have in common with the Boeing 777 airliner? Both are cited as examples of softwares growing role, not as just an automation tool for back-office functions, but as the technology that either defines a product or creates a crucial competitive advantage. Your own strategic enterprise application may have […]

In the SpaceWar computer game, developed 40 years ago at MIT, PDP-1 programmer Steve (“Slug”) Russell initially made his simulated torpedoes realistically unreliable: No matter how carefully you aimed them, their paths were perturbed by slight random variations in speed and direction. “The hackers denounced it,” narrated Steven Levy in his 1984 book “Hackers.” Levy […]

Rate the following statements on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 is “piffle” and 5 is, “How could it be otherwise?” 1. Proponents of new media channels need to drive demand for content by subsidizing hardware sales. Example: Microsoft Xbox. Counterexample: CD players. 2. Consumer electronics makers need to drive demand for hardware […]

When you think you know whats happening, conventional statistical software can help you decide if youre just imagining things. In enterprise settings, its more common to have a pile of data and to wonder if useful insights are buried within—a situation that demands a different approach to software design, as attempted by SAS Institute Inc.s […]