Peter Coffee

It may be small satisfaction for IT professionals to know that security issues are no longer a matter of “What if?” That was the message from SANS Institute Director of Research Alan Paller, speaking at a conference convened in Anaheim, Calif., last month by Check Point Software. “A lot of you have trouble persuading senior […]

En route to weekend backpacking trips with my sons active Boy Scout troop, Im sure that Ive seen the well-placed warning sign for the tricky left-lane transition to Highway 5, just north of L.A. I had no idea, however, that this sign was the work of an independent artist, who designed and installed it as […]

Bill Gates is a tough act to follow, but Platforms Group VP Jim Allchin managed to raise the bar still higher in Microsofts drive to insult every possible party—including customers and partners, as well as the courts and its competitors—in the course of its antitrust defense. Two weeks ago, Gates testimony in the U.S. District […]

When people argue about the prospect of mandatory digital rights management technologies, like those proposed in Sen. Ernest “Fritz” Hollings Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (S.2048), the dispute typically turns on the conflict between the rights of content creators and the rights of free speech. But thats not the right ground on which […]

In court testimony last month, Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates asserted that the computer industry in 1983 was dominated by vertically integrated providers but that the industry now is far more competitive across every layer of the IT stack. To put it politely, this is a carefully drawn picture, unless anyone actually […]

Please rate your level of agreement with each of the following statements: Modern PCs have more power than they need for most of the tasks theyre used to perform; PC buyers give too much weight to the CPU clock rate as an indicator of overall performance; chip makers manipulate CPU designs to improve the apparent […]

What the spreadsheet did to propel desktop computing in the 80s, CRM is doing for enterprise systems in the 00s. Its the tool that sells more computation to companies, and its the raw material in which every vertical specialist wants to carve its own image of adding (or seeming to add) strategic value. We swept […]

Few high-profile IT labels have retained their glitz as long as CRM—customer relationship management, an umbrella title for almost every useful thing that can be done with enterprise IT systems. From our vantage point overlooking the universe of IT products and services, eWeek Labs finds it useful to define CRM as the effort to track, […]

Im sorry that this letter is so long—but if Bill Gates is willing to explain his views of the origins and prospects of this industry, in forty-two thousand carefully chosen words, how can anyone who cares about this business not take the time to read what he has to say? And take from it a […]

Wouldnt it be ironic if the processor became a peripheral to the storage device, instead of the other way around? I asked that question at the end of this column eight months ago, and users of Apples iPod are busily turning that conjecture into fact. Refuting many critics, the iPod is turning out to be […]

In court testimony on Monday, Microsofts Bill Gates asserted that the computer industry in 1983 was dominated by vertically integrated providers, but that the industry now is far more competitive across every layer of the IT stack. He illustrated the latter point with this chart. To put it politely, this is a carefully drawn picture. […]

Programmers and hardware, taken together, form a culture that hasnt changed since the Space War game debuted in 1960 at MIT. That culture wants to take a small amount of input and do interesting tricks to produce amazing output, and its been highly successful in following that inclination: Computer games have been the most recession-resistant […]