Peter Coffee

During a briefing on RFID tags at Sun Microsystems Menlo Park, Calif., facility late last month, Director of Advanced Development Juan Carlos Soto passed around a vial containing 150 nearly microscopic tagging chips, barely visible as sandlike grains on the bottom of the container. These are, of course, the passive type of radio-frequency identification tags, […]

Environmental effects of computer manufacturing and disposal will soon become part of the price of maintaining the enterprise IT portfolio, under legislative efforts gaining momentum throughout the world. Manufacturers face technical challenges, and buyers may need to reconsider accounting methods and timetables for equipment replacement as ITs environmental costs come home to roost. In its […]

More information enables better decisions. Isnt that the premise behind almost every IT pitch? Yet adding data can actually worsen the decision-making process. Understanding how this can happen and knowing how to avoid it is the kind of thing that makes someone a real CIO—instead of just being a head of IT with a CxO […]

One might think Id be delighted to report last weeks OASIS Standard acceptance of the Web Services Security specification set, including the much-needed SOAP Message Security 1.0. Previous absence of security from the Simple Object Access Protocol has been on my personal radar for almost four years. Because SOAP messages have the form of ordinary […]

A little less than a year ago, I remarked in this space that seat belts werent always standard equipment in cars but that we expect them today as a basic safety feature. Its nice to be able to note that the same sort of transition is finally gaining momentum in mainstream IT, with crucial platform […]

Many IT security efforts fail in the short run by ignoring or even conflicting with IT users, or fail in the long run by burying IT operators under an avalanche of bewildering and disorganized details. We were therefore pleased when two new books that avoid these errors crossed our threshold, within days of each other, […]

WINNER Celequest Corp.s Celequest 2.0 Activity Suite Celequest Business Activity Suite, winner of this years Excellence Award for Analytics & Reporting, attracted the judges attention with its event-driven approach. It abstracts information from operational systems and data warehouses to put time- sensitive numbers in context, and it combines developer-friendly tools with user-friendly monitors and alerts. […]

WINNER Microsoft Corp.s Visual Studio .Net 2003 Considering Microsofts dominant role in tools and languages, its surprising that this is the companys first Excellence victory in this strategic category. Looking back at judges comments over the last several years, we find that previous entries have triggered concerns about whether the company was pushing too quickly […]

Now making their fourth annual appearance, the eWEEK Excellence Awards have become the gold standard for recognizing value in enterprise infrastructure innovation. Considering only products and services that are genuinely new and genuinely available, each years screening of hundreds of entries produces a valuable shopping list—not only a guide to whats good but also an […]

Is speech recognition a stupid computer trick, or a much-needed feature that finally works? Thats the question that developers need to answer in the wake of last weeks launch of Microsofts Speech Server 2004. The question must quickly be narrowed down into more specific terms. Speech recognition can mean almost anything. At one extreme, it […]