Peter Coffee

When new technology comes along, generation zero merely replaces components. Old solder jockeys may remember solid-state modules that plugged into vacuum tube sockets. Eventually, though, entire devices were redesigned around what new hardware enabled, and our expectations became broader as well as higher. Were finally seeing the comparable transformation of e-business. Generation Zero e-business merely […]

In William Gibsons definitive cyberpunk short story, “Burning Chrome,” the narrator is a hardware hacker called Automatic Jack. As the story begins, Jack describes the attack console used by his partner: “I knew every chip in Bobbys simulator by heart; it looked like your workaday Ono-Sendai VII, the Cyberspace Seven, but Id rebuilt it so […]

Of all the surprising events to find at a glitzy Hollywood resort, the i-comm trade show would have to be one of the most incongruous. What could be less glamorous than industrial handheld computers? Even so, this conference (hosted last month by Intermec Technologies Corp.) was just one of several recent events that should draw […]

The biggest risk to future distributed systems, said James Gosling, is the combination of high-speed networks, powerful PCs, pervasive standards, insecure consumer electronics protocols and smart people who have lots of spare time on their hands. “When consumer electronics companies start to attempt networking, its frightening,” the Sun vice president told his keynote audience at […]

If you ask a group of enterprise it professionals how they feel about software patches, youd better be wearing flame-resistant clothing if you want to survive their replies. When eWeek Labs asked our Corporate Partner advisory board to assess the growing impact of these constant updates and software repairs on their day-to-day workload, we were […]

I just got back from Switzerland, to use the most popular metaphor at this years Borland Conference, held late last month. The conference actually took place in Anaheim, Calif., across the street from Disneyland, but Switzerland kept coming up as the model for Borlands neutrality in the development mind share wars. Like neutral Swiss bankers, […]

Attendees at the Borland conference here had ample opportunity to sharpen their Web services knowledge—and fine-tune their skepticism about adopting and deploying the technology for anything but internal or demonstration projects. The conference consensus: Business-to-business Web services, especially those involving process integration across more than one companys systems, are not a “this year” proposition for […]

While once-vaunted corporate research labs such as Xerox Corp.s Palo Alto Research Center Inc. struggle, Microsoft Research continues to grow steadily in reputation and size under Richard Rashid, senior vice president of research at Microsoft Corp. Rashid, who founded MSR 11 years ago, led the development at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh of the Mach […]

Its bad enough that “the new HP” is going against my judgment, but when it defies Consumer Reports—well, that may be an even worse sign. Im talking about the first disclosures of which product lines will survive and which will die as HPs and Compaqs mostly parallel portfolios are combined. One announcement said, “The Compaq […]

Im going to begin this letter with a nasty, nitpicky example thats definitely a case of throwing stones from inside a glass house. I know that the sin Im about to chastise is one that we sometimes commit ourselves at eWEEK, but thats just too bad: The example Ill now cite of someone elses carelessness […]

Wireless communication forces us to bridge the “goldilocks gap”: the expensive territory that lies between two inexpensive but unattractive extremes. With this months reported successful tests, in Italy, of the first microscopic, solid-state, terahertz laser, we can hope that we may soon be offered a wireless menu that includes the choice “just right.” At one […]

For almost a decade, its been illegal in the United States to sell a radio receiver (except to telecommunications companies and government agencies) that can pick up cellular telephone transmissions between 816MHz and 902MHz. But the “scanner law” failed to make all full-coverage receivers disappear. For that matter, do a search for Web pages containing […]