Scot Petersen

I dont want to give terrorists any credit, but from the strikes against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to the anthrax letters scare, whoever is behind these events has been remarkably efficient. Efficient in crude means and effects: Attack innocent lives, and, as a bonus, shake the foundations of our economic infrastructure and […]

Weve heard the acronym/motto kiss: keep it simple, stupid. Buried in that philosophy is another maxim of the IT manager: If it aint broke, dont fix it. For administrators and end users alike, living by these credos can mean enduring things like the instability of Windows 9x and the annoying Microsoft Office mate Clippy (now […]

Back more than a few years ago, in the dark ages before digital technology, a roommate of mine used to buy a record album and play it only once. In playing it, he would record the pristine vinyl onto a brand-new cassette tape, thereby saving any wear and tear on the record and prolonging its […]

Its truly tiring sometimes to hear the way we overuse the word “innovation” when it comes to IT. I think its because weve been conditioned by certain parties to think that giant, memory-sucking media players embedded in Windows are particularly innovative, if not essential. But in business today, innovation is so much more about processes […]

Many of us will give up some conveniences of daily life to stop terrorism. Living without skycaps and waiting in line for hours are trivial nuisances when compared with the possibility of boarding an unsafe plane. But what about retinal scans, fingerprints and government ID cards? How far are we willing to go? The government […]

On my 5-year-old sons dresser, there usually stand, in order, small metal statues of Chicagos Hancock Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower and the Twin Towers. He and his brother play with them daily, often engaging Lady Liberty and the Twin Towers in casual conversation or in hand-to-hand combat. Then, the Twin Towers […]

In this long national nightmare known as the Microsoft-DOJ case, weve learned not to count on the software company from Redmond, Wash., to do the right thing. Now is the time to change that perception. We wanted the company to settle out of court before the case went to trial. Even before that, we wanted […]

Lawrence Lessig doesnt appear to be a happy man. I dont know him personally, and Im not saying hes depressed or anything. But the cyber-law expert is unhappy about a lot of things, starting with his profession and all the way up to the chiefs of American business, about what is happening to the Internet. […]

Now that were in September, its “officially” back-to-school time, though it seems like weve been gearing up for it for months. The July-August advertising blitz weve been subjected to now rivals only the urgency of the year-end holiday rush. Its as if no self-respecting student could live without a new computer, software, stereo, TV and […]

As Rudyard Kipling said, “if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs. … Yours is the earth and everything thats in it.” In present-day terms, “everything” may not be a wise investment. But “something” is what a force of nature named Andrew “Flip” Filipowski is busy building out of the […]