Scot Petersen

One year ago, at a key B2B conference, GroundZero No. 3, attendees were literally fighting for seats at the crowded Boston Park Plaza hotel to hear various vertical marketplace operators explain how they were going to take over the world or at least change it significantly. Six months later, in the midst of the dot-com […]

The good-news, bad-news story we published last week by Peter Galli was bound to ruffle a few feathers in the open-source community. Regardless of how well we positioned the news that a Linux DB2 configuration beat Microsoft SQL Server in TPC benchmarks, the accompanying news of Linuxs continuing struggles on the desktop will be what […]

I can live with long cab lines in 99-degree heat. I can manage making the interminable walk from the 100s of the Las Vegas Convention Centers North Hall to the 8800s of its South Hall in less than 10 minutes. I can even stand very little sleep for three straight days. But the one thing […]

Now that the second season of “Survivor” is over, what are the shows junkies to do? What we need is a high-tech industry version of the show. All of us, in one way or another, seem to be playing a game of survival, either getting voted out by layoffs or bankruptcy or sticking around a […]

New developments in storage over IP are signaling the end of Fibre Channels reign as the high-speed storage interconnect king. In three to five years, experts say, storage-over-IP networks based on the proposed iSCSI specification will push out Fibre Channel, which has suffered from high cost and interoperability issues—two problems iSCSI addresses. To help iSCSI […]

We all have come to take our simple household appliances for granted. Pick up the phone, make a call; put a slice of bread in the toaster, get toast; turn on the TV, veg out. Appliances in the computing world are another matter altogether. The NC—Network Computer—and other computing “appliances” have been pushed at us […]

I dont make a habit of clicking through the links on my default home page, MSN.com (which Im too lazy to change), but every now and then something catches my eye, like “Read Moby Dick in 1 minute.” And so I did. The exercise, produced by Disney.com, is part of the sites Fun for Families […]

It was as recently as last years RSA conference, in San Jose, that Microsofts security “strategy” was a laughingstock—literally. As a speaker tried to persuade attendees of what passed for security in Windows 2000 during an RSA session in January 2000, titters from the audience prompted him to say, “I know. I know. They are […]

Our page 1 story last week on business-to-business vendor woes may have been a bit harsh, but it was right on the money, in my opinion, and long overdue. The relative newcomers to B2B software development—Ariba, Commerce One, i2 and others—have for too long been playing a smoke-and-mirrors game with IT managers. It has finally […]

It took the globally debilitating “ILoveYou” virus and its link to vulnerabilities in the Outlook messaging software, but Microsoft Corp. says it has finally seen the error of its ways. As a direct result of the infamous virus that struck one year ago and wiped out Outlook users graphics and audio files, as well as […]