Peter Coffee

In the debut of desktop computing, general-purpose microprocessors opened the door to affordable single-user systems. The limited power of those early CPUs meant that almost every advance in chip speed—or expansion of address space—yielded substantial improvement in visible and relevant performance. Every year, announcements at the Microprocessor Forum told the industry what new chips would […]

Open-source efforts will gain equal standing in Java technology development with Tuesdays announcement of significant changes to the Java Community Process agreements. “Starting Tuesday, it will be mandatory that licenses provide for the possibility of a clean-room implementation,” said Onno Kluyt, manager of the JCP Program Office. “A specification leader must offer a test suite […]

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 […]