Peter Coffee

Traditionally, a major new mass-market operating system release sends a “refresh” command to the hardware base as well. Users have accepted the costs of more memory, more processor speed and more graphical horsepower as enablers of new capability and convenience—but Microsoft seems uncharacteristically hesitant about the ability of Windows Vista to trigger the next such […]

In a week when the tech communitys attention is focused on the notion of an “attention economy,” notably in sessions at the OReilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, its no small coincidence that AOL is opening its formerly limited-access instant messaging network to third-party application developers. Its been said, probably first by Turing Award […]

As this month began, it became public knowledge that Apple has filed two patent applications under the title “Gestures for touch sensitive input devices.” That title, of course, is wrong: The “invention” is not the act or manner of gesturing but, rather (as the applications later make clear), “methods and systems for processing touch inputs,” […]

When I got the invitation to keynote this months Software Security Summit in San Diego, I proposed “Mediocrity Is Malpractice” as a title for my remarks. I was thinking of this as a general statement about rising expectations. As it got to be time to prepare the talk, however, I realized that I should take […]

When doctors want to know where somethings going inside a patient, they tag it with some kind of tracer that lets them track that progress. We might learn a lot by doing something like this with sensitive data as well. Richard Moulds, a VP at security infrastructure vendor nCipher, got me thinking along these lines […]

NetBeans IDE 5.0 is a substantial step toward bringing open-source, multiplatform Java tools up to the standard of toolmaking that is arguably defined by Microsofts Windows-only Visual Studio. Click here to read the full review of NetBeans 5.0. 2 NetBeans IDE 5.0 is a substantial step toward bringing open-source, multiplatform Java tools up to the […]

Olympic speed skater Chad Hedrick, one gold medal in hand and others likely to follow, reminds us that talent first seen on one platform may find its best outlet somewhere else. Raised on roller skates, Hedrick only started skating on ice three years ago—but his unorthodox technique propelled him to an all-around championship and new […]

Development tools that are programmer-friendly but hardware-intensive, notably LISP, have long been a staple of research domains such as artificial intelligence—but have not been thought suitable for mass-market applications due to difficulties in packaging the executable bits and running them on end-user hardware. Web-facing applications, whose running code resides on servers, shift those trade-offs and […]

As January drew to a close, Microsoft proposed to meet European courts demands for documentation of key interfaces by disclosing source code to competitors. Company counsel Brad Smith called this “the ultimate documentation” of the technologies. Its useful to understand why that is not so, because the same question could come up in your own […]

The January release of Franzs Allegro Common LISP 8.0 puts developers on notice that “exotic” programming tools, long relegated to research environments, are becoming more viable options for mainstream applications. LISP, PROLOG, genetic programming and neural nets are among the technologies increasingly ready for Web-facing roles. Allegro CL has had two major updates since the […]

It sure would be easier to keep corporate information assets secure if people didnt actually try to use them. Thats an ancient paradox, of course, but lately its taken on another dimension: It sure would be easier to keep a service-oriented architecture coherent if developers didnt keep creating and composing new services into innovative applications. […]

When people make choices about technology adoption, it seems to me that they often compare their options against a base line thats ideal rather than real. For example, people observe—as I have observed myself—that software as a service is a proposition that creates substantial security risks. And, of course, theyre right. The question, though, ought […]