Peter Coffee

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]