Scot Petersen

You may have seen our review of Mac OS X. You werent seeing things. By my research, the last time we ran a story about Apple on our front page was Aug. 11, 1997. That story detailed how Steve Jobs sold his soul to Bill Gates and Microsoft in an effort to right the foundering […]

Sometimes this business can seem like participating in, or at least watching, a Samuel Beckett play. Absurdities rule the day, and despite all the mumbo jumbo about “innovation,” in the end we are left pretty much where we started. Technologically speaking, that means we get promised a lot more than is ever delivered. The tech […]

When we speak of the open-source culture/movement/business (or threat, if you are Microsoft), many of us may not be aware of its roots. Open source is a relatively new, updated term for the principles around which early hackers created programs for the first computers. Today, what we mean by open source is essentially shared application […]

In the post-World War II United States, one of the driving principles of capitalism, so to speak, was “Whats good for General Motors is good for America.” Behind it was an implicit justification of whatever GM accomplished in the name of getting the country moving again. In the late 90s, the statement was amended by […]

We are all worried, justifiably, by the economic slowdown, and in the technology sector in particular. But theres one thing we do know for sure: Things will get better. Call it the economic corollary of gravity; whatever goes down, must come up. That axiom may not apply to certain dot-com stocks hovering around 50 cents […]

It was one of my first assignments for the newspaper formerly known as PC Week. The first days of June 1995, I tagged along with then-Executive Editor of News, John Dodge, to interview then-CEO of Lotus Development Corp., Jim Manzi, who discussed the bright days ahead for his company. A few days later, IBM bought […]

Weve come almost full circle in the never-ending battle against computer viruses. A year ago we oudly blamed Microsoft for the Swiss cheese architecture of its Outlook e-mail clients exploitation by the ILoveYou virus. Then we switched to blaming the IT administrators for improperly filtering attachments and setting up clients so they could not execute […]

Some months back I wrote about the phenomenon of privacy on the Internet. I say “phenomenon” because thats what it is, a notion whose definition is highly dependent on ones perception of it. Something like when a former Supreme Court Justice said about pornography, “I cant define it, but I know it when I see […]

Working in the press room of Linuxworld in New York this month, I found myself checking e-mail on, of all things, a desktop PC running Windows 98. Actually, there were a couple of Linux stations in there. But most of the desktops ran Windows, and the Linux machines were always occupied. And I was so […]

Ive often told people that if I ever had an “American Beauty” moment—that is, a midlife crisis like the kind Kevin Spacey had in his Oscar-winning movie, in which he ditches his dead-end job for one flipping burgers—I think I know what Id want to try as an alternative career. I always thought it would […]