Rob Fixmer

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, “business as usual” often seems trivial, even petty. But life must go on. Here in New York City, where Ziff Davis Media has its headquarters, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani counseled that the best way to help heal the city was […]

As Attorney General John Ashcroft fielded reporters questions last Tuesday about the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, one journalist asked if a new computer worm, discovered only hours earlier, was in any way related to the terrorist strikes. It was not, Ashcroft assured the nation – or at least, there was […]

World War III wasnt supposed to work like this. For decades, we based survival strategies on high-tech assumptions about our foes and ourselves. We unleashed the atom and spent billions devising ever more sophisticated systems for delivering its destructive power. We rattled our high-tech sabers all the way to the moon. We unleashed the digital […]

Every industry has its share of falling stock prices and earnings warnings, but you can always smell blood in the computer and Internet markets when companies suddenly start shunning certain words or terms that have come to be associated with outright failure or simple fatigue. Over the years, “push,” “portal” and “intranet,” along with terms […]

Computer science lost an intellectual cornerstone this week with the death of Michael Dertouzos, the distinguished Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor whod led the schools Laboratory for Computer Science since 1974. Far more sadly, the world lost a vigorous advocate for the planets underdogs – a tireless humanitarian determined to repair what he saw as […]

As I escorted him to the elevator after an interview in 1998, Gordon Eubanks, then president and CEO of Symantec, made a casual observation that forever changed my perspective on open source software. At a time when the worlds No. 2 computer security company realized almost all its revenue by protecting machines running Microsoft and […]

Its clear now that the hangover from our five-year tech-sector binge is not going to dissipate as quickly as many had hoped. What began a year ago as a simple nagging headache has grown into a painful systemic disorder that threatens to leave hundreds of thousands of people jobless as it ripples through other market […]

Each day, it seems, we are asked to depend ever more on the Internet for our professional and personal well-being. Yet each week seems to introduce a new computer worm capable of boring into and through our networks, clogging pipes, corrupting data and, in the worst cases, destroying months or even years of hard work. […]

A lot of people might think this is a bit premature, but Im struggling to figure out which company will inherit the “evil empire” mantle from Microsoft. Right now, Im betting it will be AOL Time Warner, but Ive been fooled before. The evil empire is the company that, in any given era, happens to […]

No one would argue that Microsofts newly announced concessions to computer makers mark an end to the monopolist threat posed by the Windows operating system. But critics who insisted last week that the concessions were nothing more than a cosmetic change in the companys policy clearly dont understand their full implications. Microsoft has not only […]