Peter Coffee

Extensis Portfolio suite for digital asset management combines intuitive media storage and retrieval with cross-platform flexibility and enterprise-scale database handling. For Windows and Mac OS users, the $199.95 Portfolio client turns a disk full of photos into a readily searchable archive with extensive metadata capabilities. The 7.0.4 update, released last month, keeps the product abreast […]

When information warfare experts want to set the proper base line for whats “secure,” they point out that the only completely protected machine is one thats disconnected from the network and preferably turned off. Application development security begins from an equally useless zero point: The only completely secure application is one that accepts no input […]

Information technology has a well-hyped reputation for exponential rates of improvement, but productivity growth in delivering IT-enabled services has fallen short of whats been achieved in less glamorous sectors of the economy. As services come to dominate global markets, its critical for U.S. systems scientists and professionals to find ways to apply capital and technology […]

The eWEEK Excellence Awards for 2004 are now accepting entries. Developer productivity is critical to achieving next years IT goals, and developer acceptance is vital to the success of any IT platform, so I hope to see developer tools well represented in the field of entries that well be judging as the new year begins. […]

Its ironic that Mathematica 5.1, an intensely mathematical software workbench, delivers improvements over Version 5.0 that are vastly out of proportion for a .1 upgrade. The Mathematica 5.1 environment released last month allows users to incorporate Web services functions into calculations, as well as to work with previously unsupported mainstream data types in a way […]

Im as guilty as anyone of using “information technology” as a catchall phrase, even when it comprises two quite different kinds of tools. There are systems that deliver entertainment, and there are systems that enable decisions. I prefer not to see those tasks confused. Unfortunately, irrelevant entertainment is pushing its way into decision support environments, […]

A programming aid should always shorten a programmers list of problems. Many tools fall short of that goal, merely replacing familiar coding tasks with the nuisance of instructing an intrusive, clumsy assistant. One welcome exception is Agitator 2.0, a capable and intuitive test environment for Java developers, delivered this month by Agitar Software Inc. Click […]

Youve gone as far as youre going to go in your organization by “building bit buckets.” That was the admonition of Michael Moon, president and CEO of Gistics, when addressing an attentive ballroom full of content creators and managers in Los Angeles earlier this month. On the plus side, Moon continued, there are millions of […]

As a member of eWEEKs editorial board, Ive been one of a group of voices thats jointly encouraged the industry to keep the Internet a patent-free zone—or at least, a fee-free zone, with any patented technologies adopted on the Internet only on the grounds that they become freely licensed to all users. Weve urged that […]

Whats worth almost any price to protect if its the only one you have, but is almost worthless as long as even a single other copy exists? The answer: source code for a critical enterprise application or for firmware in a manufactured product. The corollary: You and your insurance company had better share a common […]

It sounded like the worst sort of sophomoric parody, worthy of the most rabidly anti-Microsoft blog, but it turned out to be the literal truth. A team of three inventors, two of whom are publicly identified as “members of the Visual Basic team,” has applied (in a filing published late last week) for a U.S. […]

When you hear the phrase “flying in formation,” you probably think of the dazzling maneuvers of an air-show team such as the Thunderbirds or Blue Angels. You see another example, though, whenever you drive on a freeway: vehicles moving at high speed, in close proximity, pursuing similar but independent goals with only each vehicles movements […]