Peter Coffee

No one would tell me the answer to the obvious question “Why pears?” But this whimsical wireless node, shown at Comdex last month, is a member of Galtronics newly launched Pear Wireless line of 802.11 gear (www.pearwireless.com). This compact decorator enclosure houses a desktop access point and a Universal Serial Bus client adapter. The company […]

Chip-to-chip connections should be as easy to scale as connections from city to city. The HyperTransport Technology Consortium (www.hypertransport.org), with royalty-free licensing of its high-speed, input/output hardware specification, gives system builders the same kind of packet-based flexibility inside the box that the Internet has brought to large-scale networks. OEMs using HyperTransport may soon be able […]

Literally towering above the Comdex show floor, this specimen from antenna tower maker Sisttemex (www.sisttemex.com) is a reminder that wireless networking doesnt come without hardware problems of its own. “There is a serious shortage of qualified tower technicians,” warns the Society of Broadcast Engineers. We can see why: Typical position descriptions, according to SBE Chapter […]

Small enough to fit on an infants fingertip, the 15mm-squared intel 4004 ran at 108KHz (yes, we mean a tenth of a milligigahertz) and addressed only 640 bytes of memory when it debuted in 1971. Thirty years later, the level of integration of its 2,300 transistors falls far short of todays expectations: If a Pentium […]

Perhaps the worst thing about the post-Sept. 11 environment is the abandonment of cost-benefit analysis, or any analysis at all, in the rush to prove that one has taken every possible precaution. The result reminds me of descriptions of the Prohibition era: The rules become the problem, and people begin to sneer at both the […]

It sounds like a plot synopsis for an unconvincing TV movie, rather than a real news story, but Hewlett-Packard claims that a former employee tampered with hard disks and wiring in a Superdome server prior to benchmark tests—lowering scores and therefore possibly harming sales of HPs high-end Unix hardware. For all the talk of computers […]

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 […]