Archive

This week's column is about the nature of the software needed to go with the elections administration hardware laid out in last week's column. In brief, the idea was to ignore political reality long enough to imagine a system in which the voting support application runs on the local servers but capt...

Compare the vastness of the Internet with the microminiaturized world of subatomic structures, and you will get an idea of the potential that nanotechnology holds for industrial profit. Some analysts are predicting nanotechnology will become the biggest boost to the technology industry since the Wor...

Business is becoming increasingly virtual and decentralized, while real-time relationship management with employees, contractors, partners, suppliers and customers is becoming ever more crucial. Even within a single company, password-protected applications reside on different platforms, in separate ...

Last week I flew down to the launch of the new Starbucks music service and got far more out of the event than a cup of coffee and some free music. I got a sense of why Starbucks is as successful as it is and why HP is suddenly emerging as the company to beat in the technology space. I also went away...

Beige boxes may still be the norm for lots of desktop computer equipment, but people have been fooling around with design ever since they began making machines. While computer design has, by and large, stuck to the basic need for a protective enclosure, there have been some outstanding ideas and som...

Many an intergalactic sci-fi flick has showcased the "instant translator" -- the clever box that makes earthling speech intelligible to alpha-centaurians, and vice versa. Now something similar is helping Australian organizations bring legacy applications and enterprise knowledge up to date. Perhaps ...

Imagine a war in which the combatants are invisible and the weapons they bear are hidden in trickery and stealth. Now picture that war being waged on a battlefield consisting not of desert fields but of thousands of ragtag computers in bedrooms, dens and corporate cubicles across America. These batt...

Now that e-tailers have a few strong holiday seasons behind them, many have learned it is never too early to start planning for next year. Increasing levels of Internet use and greater comfort with online shopping among the overall population should make next year's critical November-December stretc...

On April 20, a NASA rocket will lift off from Vandenburg Air Force Base carrying one of the most remarkable physics experiments ever attempted. Gravity Probe B will try to answer questions raised by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, proposed in the early years of the 20th century. Whether Gra...

Amid budgetary constraints, enterprise application snafus, and vendors that are slick with their PowerPoint presentations but AWOL with their implementations, the put-upon CIO has become as common a high-tech archetype as the teenage hacker or the jeans-clad, headstrong, bullying CEO "evangelist." W...