Rob Fixmer

The free market is a darwinian marvel, built on trial, error and persistent competition and fueled by self-interest, a process at odds with consensus-based standards. Unless a more efficient mechanism can be developed, the result will be growing chaos in the marketplace as standards bodies fall further and further behind the exponential growth of technology. […]

Remember the new economy? Turned out to be nothing more than a barnacle on the butt of the old economy—painful but probably inevitable. Human progress seems handcuffed to human error. At any given moment, its hard to distinguish vision from delusion. Unfortunately, the distinction is becoming more urgent because as the time between generations of […]

Its fascinating to observe how technology companies have responded to the recession. A string of earnings reports and new corporate strategies announced this month offered us a gauge not only of management quality but also of corporate vision and character. For example, Microsoft, at long last, showed signs of maturity. But Sun took yet another […]

The Crusoe processor happened along at the right time for Christopher Hipp, a graphic designer turned systems entrepreneur who had recently founded a server company, RLX Technologies Inc., in The Woodlands, Texas. Inspired by the efficiencies of early Cobalt rack configuration, Hipp and his venture capital partners anticipated a blade design built around Intel Corp.s […]

The only things rising faster than the temperatures in corporate server rooms over the last 15 years have been IT departments electricity bills. Both can be traced largely to a persistent and growing use of ever-more-powerful processors in the workplace. Since 1985, the appetite of Intel Corp.s top-of-the-line processors has soared from the single watt […]

In a recent column, I brought down a hailstorm of protest by asserting that a voluntary national ID was all but inevitable in a shrinking world full of growing perils. Predictably, the theme of the responses was a deep distrust of government. While some letters were rife with the vitriol of political extremists, many were […]

In the Fall of 1998, Erick and Linda von Schweber, founders of the Infomaniacs think tank, published an article in eWeek predicting the evolution of “a new wave in computing—one that we believe promises within the next five years to deliver almost limitless cheap computing power and to change the balance of power among technology […]

Computers, which mimic human behavior a little more with each step in their evolution, are now connecting for brainstorming sessions. The resulting pooling of processing power could lift enterprise computing to new levels of performance in a few years. The collaborative, network-based model known as grid computing enables the sharing of data and computing cycles […]

Frankly, Ive been surprised and a little disappointed lately by the number of people who ask, when the subject of 10 Gigabit Ethernet comes up, “Who needs all that bandwidth, anyway?” What surprises me most is which folks are asking. Often, they arent your typical corporate Luddites—the CXOs and bean counters who are paid to […]

The time has come for a reasoned, national dialogue on the merits and dangers of a national ID. What is at stake is not just an improvement, however slight, in domestic security but vastly increased convenience in an ever-more- digital culture. Unfortunately, the debate is currently dominated by a din of paranoia and knee-jerk ideology—often […]

John Moore is arguably the person most likely to influence widespread acceptance of smart cards in the United States. Thats because he is the program analyst for the General Services Administrations Office of Electronic Government, in Washington, and he is overseeing a federal effort to supply 3 million smart-card IDs to the nations military personnel […]

Ten days after terrorists transformed passenger jets into bombs in attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison touched off a technological and political furor by suggesting that airline travel could never again be safe until everyone in the United States—citizen and guest alike—was required to present a national ID […]