Rob Fixmer

Maybe you think that unless your company runs an e-commerce Web site, the conduct and policies of consumer ISPs is of no concern. Think again. As high-speed home connectivity expands, your companys productivity and marketing will become increasingly dependent on it—and increasingly vulnerable to policies and performance issues over which you have no control. Consider, […]

Even with detailed directions, Equinixs vast, new operations center is nearly impossible to find. Cleverly hidden in plain sight among warehouses, wholesale outlets and industrial parks in Secaucus, N.J., the building is so devoid of signage that I took its main entrance for a fire exit. But the Internet business exchange inside offers enough capacity […]

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 […]