Peter Coffee

From the next room, I hear a conversation: “I know hes busy now, but he needs that training if were going to do that project in the next cycle.” It sounds like any meeting of IT managers discussing one of their key people, but its two of my sons playing Xicat Interactives PC game “Cultures.” […]

Only 4 by 8 by 1.3 inches, the 10-ounce origami multifunction device combines camera, Web terminal, MP3 player and (with a Bluetooth-linked Mobile Gateway module) videophone capability—just fold it into the shape that suits the task at hand. Shown at Comdex last month by National Semiconductor, the proof-of-concept prototype was co-developed with CoCom International to […]

My latest visit with CBS News was not to chat about antitrust, privacy or e-business. They wanted to talk about game machines: The Toy, The Tool and The Platform, as I call the three contenders in this holiday seasons biggest fight for your wallets. The Nintendo GameCube, Sony PlayStation 2 and Microsoft Xbox each represent […]

In this series on enterprise security, eWeek Labs has so far explored the elements of assessment, prevention, detection and response, each of which requires a variety of tools, products and services. In this concluding segment, we focus on the strategies that can quietly prevent a world of security threats from becoming costly and disruptive breaches. […]

Law enforcement agencies see a growing share of communications moving from traditional channels to the Internet. In their effort to respond with new collection and monitoring measures that balance security with the expectation of privacy, these agencies face the same dilemma that marked the punishment of the mythical Tantalus, who was condemned to hang from […]

If radio-frequency wireless links are too insecure for your taste, why not move up the electromagnetic spectrum to nearly intercept-proof point-to-point laser? This Freespace Lite laser node, shown at Comdex by British vendor Akhter Computers (www.akhter.com), is ready to keep you connected at Ethernet speed across distances of up to 1,000 feet; high-end Freespace Turbo […]

No one would tell me the answer to the obvious question “Why pears?” But this whimsical wireless node, shown at Comdex last month, is a member of Galtronics newly launched Pear Wireless line of 802.11 gear (www.pearwireless.com). This compact decorator enclosure houses a desktop access point and a Universal Serial Bus client adapter. The company […]

Chip-to-chip connections should be as easy to scale as connections from city to city. The HyperTransport Technology Consortium (www.hypertransport.org), with royalty-free licensing of its high-speed, input/output hardware specification, gives system builders the same kind of packet-based flexibility inside the box that the Internet has brought to large-scale networks. OEMs using HyperTransport may soon be able […]

Literally towering above the Comdex show floor, this specimen from antenna tower maker Sisttemex (www.sisttemex.com) is a reminder that wireless networking doesnt come without hardware problems of its own. “There is a serious shortage of qualified tower technicians,” warns the Society of Broadcast Engineers. We can see why: Typical position descriptions, according to SBE Chapter […]

Small enough to fit on an infants fingertip, the 15mm-squared intel 4004 ran at 108KHz (yes, we mean a tenth of a milligigahertz) and addressed only 640 bytes of memory when it debuted in 1971. Thirty years later, the level of integration of its 2,300 transistors falls far short of todays expectations: If a Pentium […]

Perhaps the worst thing about the post-Sept. 11 environment is the abandonment of cost-benefit analysis, or any analysis at all, in the rush to prove that one has taken every possible precaution. The result reminds me of descriptions of the Prohibition era: The rules become the problem, and people begin to sneer at both the […]

It sounds like a plot synopsis for an unconvincing TV movie, rather than a real news story, but Hewlett-Packard claims that a former employee tampered with hard disks and wiring in a Superdome server prior to benchmark tests—lowering scores and therefore possibly harming sales of HPs high-end Unix hardware. For all the talk of computers […]