Peter Coffee

If you happened to be monitoring conversations in my home, youd often hear the phrase “lying robot.” We dont have humanoid machines doing housework or taking part in conversation, but when our dishwasher says that it will be done in 20 minutes, and 10 minutes later it says 19 minutes, we know its actually going […]

Were barely past the halfway point of 2006, but the most-cited article that eWEEK Labs will produce all year may already be possible to predict. The Labs deep-digging comparison of multiple top-to-bottom IT stacks will please the pragmatists and prickle the purists of both the open-source and proprietary-software persuasions. Im tempted to eschew summarization in […]

Most people with management training have heard some mention of the Hawthorne effect, often loosely summarized as the tendency of people to work better when they think that anyone is really paying attention. The actual outcomes, and the resulting insights, of Western Electrics productivity studies at its Hawthorne facility in Cicero, Ill., in the 1920s […]

As observed in the stories of fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, theres more than one kind of intelligence. In an 1893 story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter,” readers learn that Holmes admires his older brother Mycroft for having superior powers of observation and deduction—while at the same time saying that […]

I noted in my June 12 letter my then-upcoming talk at that weeks Ziff Davis CIO Summit, where I discussed service-oriented architecture and the future-enabling of enterprise systems. I stressed in that talk the distinction between Web services (the technology) and SOA (the potential achievement). Con-Way Transportation Services, for example, built an integration bus and […]

Planning skills are one of the final pillars of Homo sapiens claim to be something more than a naked ape. Watching behaviors regarding tool choice, and thinking about their implications for the planning thats taking place (or not), is a field of study that I commend to IT builders and administrators as well as to […]

During last months JavaOne Conference in San Francisco, Fortify Software convened a panel to discuss the role of application developers in software security and the need for appropriate development technology, without which genuine security is impossible to achieve. Invited expert panelists were Gary McGraw, chief technology officer of Cigital, of Dulles, Va., and a widely […]

Ill be in Napa this week to brief attendees at the Ziff Davis CIO Summit on the subject of service-oriented architecture as a strategy for “future-proof” IT. As often happens, the title for the talk was on the agenda before my name got attached to it: As readers of this letter know, I side with […]

Looking back at the evolution of the Internet, its development looks a lot like the history of New Yorks Manhattan Island. Both started as systems of addresses: a grid of streets and avenues in one case, a branching tree of numbered IP net and subnet octets in the other. Each of those open address systems […]

As several thousand developers head for Orlando to attend this weeks IBM Rational Software Development Conference, Im trying to get used to the idea of an IBM Web site using a turn of phrase like “cranking the volume up to 11, so you can hear whats shaking.” Its hard to believe that this is the […]

If a path crosses private property, and theres a long-standing habit of public use of that path, and the owner of the property makes no effort to demonstrate ownership—for example, by building a gate and closing it for one day each year—then the owner risks a judgment in law that a public right of way […]

Emphasizing the role of Java on mobile devices, and the worldwide explosion of wireless connectivity, Sun Microsystems President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz welcomed former Sun President Edward Zander—now CEO of Motorola—to the stage of the opening general session at this months JavaOne conference in San Francisco. “Mobile broadband is going to change the fundamentals of […]