Peter Coffee

This is the first year in my 16 years of November trips to the desert that people actually seem surprised Im making time to go to Comdex. The show wont be painfully crowded this year, but neither will it be a ghost town, and the floor will feature long-absent logos including those of both Intel […]

When people say “wireless,” they usually mean infrared or radio for connection over distance. The capacitive coupling used by IBM, in its Collective Intelligent Brick storage prototypes, is wireless, but it is not for remote control. CIB depends on actual contact between the faces of stackable enclosures. Capacitive coupling lets engineers push an electrical signal […]

If Microsofts professional developers conference were a baseball game, Microsoft would have gone three for three: good base hits, though none of them home runs. The portfolio of technologies shown at the conference in Los Angeles late last month was substantially standards-based, appropriately compatible with what has come before and capable of changing the way […]

Concurrent with last months release of other components of Microsoft Corp.s , the company released a 2003 version of Project that is aimed at improved interaction with mainstream Office tools and data stores. In eWEEK Labs review of Project 2003, which starts at $599, with upgrade prices beginning at $349, we found an impressive effort […]

As October ended with the , I and other attendees with inconveniently long memories were comparing our recollections of promises past. In particular, some of us were trading thoughts on the sizable gap between the promised WinFS in Longhorn and the previously promised object-oriented storage of the unified model code-named “Cairo.” Stop me if youve […]

When application developers open the stark black box containing the four CDs of Apple Computer Inc.s “Panther” operating system, theyll get more than the newly polished end-user experience of whats already the worlds most widely used version of workstation Unix. That fourth CD contains Xcode 1.0, Apples integrated development workbench for AppleScript, Java and native […]

Wireless connections are changing the shape of our IT universe, shifting the handheld computer from satellite to center. Its increasingly common for new information, not just brief e-mail but substantial documents, to come to our handhelds first. As a result, we must redesign whats around us—displays, printers and other connections—to accept output from a variety […]

Newly rolled out of Google Labs, the define: search prefix deftly handles one of the most common but frustrating types of Internet search: the one whose goal is a current, accurate definition of an emerging piece of IT vocabulary. I tried the command “define: Wi-Fi” as my first example, and now Im sold. Compare the […]

Discuss This in the eWEEK Forum Back in the late 1900s, land-warfare experts—like the NATO generals who co-authored “The Third World War“—joined in agreeing that modern technologies favored the defense. When a soldier with a shoulder-launched TOW missile could plausibly take out a tank, conventional measurements of force superiority lost their value. More recently, though, […]

Discuss this in the eWEEK forum. If you were designing a human language from scratch, you probably wouldnt wind up with English, observed AMD CTO Fred Weber in his keynote speech this month at the Microprocessor Forum, in San Jose, Calif. Even so, Weber continued, that doesnt make it the wrong language to choose today […]