Peter Coffee

As a content development and delivery operation, the Net has gotten big enough to support a large variety of finely differentiated, highly specialized services. In this Special Report, eWeek looks at the cost-reduction and quality-improvement opportunities created by proliferating service provider practices—exotic and mundane—and examines the management challenges involved in making the most of these […]

Security risks in enterprise IT systems have many technical elements. The magnitude of IT risk is largely determined, however, by nontechnical factors, including business relationships and IT users attitudes. IT vulnerability assessment therefore demands a multidisciplinary approach—especially since risk analysis shapes (or distorts) every subsequent aspect of an IT security process. As eWEEK Labs begins […]

About the size of a shirt button, the micro turbine motor was constructed down the river from eWeek Labs at MIT. With a few hours worth of hydrogen fuel, this device could become the heart of a 50-watt power pack with the capacity of a comparable military lithium sulfur-dioxide battery that weighs more than five […]

Sci-fi author John Brunner once listed the things that came into our lives between 1910 and 1960—including telephones, radios, TV sets, plastics, washing machines, stereos, even automobiles. I wonder if youll guess what I consider the only equally notable innovation since—and why I think Windows XP takes us in the opposite direction. We use radio […]

Fictional “Dallas” patriarch Jock Ewing once challenged his son, J.R., demanding: “When are you going to learn a little subtlety?” “Why should I,” J.R. demanded. “Because lack of it turns friends into enemies, and enemies into fanatics.” Microsofts behavior in the last few weeks has been decidedly unsubtle, and the ranks of the fanatics are […]

I was working on a story at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference last month when Microsofts John Montgomery, product manager for .Net Framework, sat down next to me and pulled out his cell phone. “Youve got to see this,” he said. Punching a few buttons, he pulled up a list of Seattle landmarks on the […]

Almost unnoticed in the Windows XP hoopla is the big bet Microsoft is making on wireless mobility. “Microsoft expects 802.11b to be present in most places where people spend time,” said Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates in his keynote speech at the companys Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles last month. That expectation […]

In a session at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference last month, Group Vice President Bob Muglia revealed the previously obscure meaning of the companys cryptic .Net label for its emerging services strategy. Following an ironic, self-deprecating video admitting that HailStorm was perhaps the worst software code name ever coined, Muglia discussed the licensing terms (www.eweek.com/links) […]

Magnetic tape and I go back a long way. Thirty years ago, I was mispronouncing “hysteresis” (the magnetically sticky behavior that makes it possible for tape to record stuff) while tuning my open-reel stereo deck to minimize analog hiss. Dolby hardware was beyond my means. I still have most of the tapes that I made […]

If your only tool is a hammer, its often said, all problems look like nails. What, then, does the world look like to someone who owns a hammer factory? Oracles Larry Ellison and Suns Scott McNealy each propose to define terrorist threats in terms of nails that their products can pound down. “We need a […]

If I make this one little change to the software, how much could it hurt the schedule? Impact Analysis in MKS Engineer Integrity, released at midmonth, offers application developers and team leaders a far firmer foundation for decisions on making late-breaking changes to software specifications. Analyzing source code structure in C, C++ and Java, Engineer […]

A former U.S. President may someday live down the quotation “It depends on what the meaning of the word is is.” His sympathizers might include those who devise natural language database query systems. To a speaker of Spanish, that presidential faux pas is just an observation that English makes one verb do the job of […]