Peter Coffee

General-purpose technologies spin off task-centered tools. The trick is to know the right time to set off in that direction. Do it too soon, and you produce an amusing relic; do it too late, and you become one. The Fall Processor Forum, held at the beginning of this month in San Jose, Calif., offered well-timed […]

Perhaps Im getting too good at seeing the glass as one-tenth empty, instead of nine-tenths full—but Im wondering, you see, what someone might pour into that remaining empty space. Web services technologies offer exceptional power for crafting enterprise IT architectures, but I sometimes wonder if they have what it takes to survive out there on […]

With October comes the annual announcement of the Ig Nobel Prizes, awarded by the Annals of Improbable Research (www.improbable.com) for “achievements that cannot or should not be reproduced,” in the words of Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals and chairman of the awards Board of Governors. What put this years Ig Nobels on my radar […]

The folks at Google are getting a lot of attention lately with their in-your-face recruiting of the worlds most competitive geeks. The companys billboards ask mathematical questions whose answers are URLs that lead to job-applicant Web sites; its pull-out Aptitude Tests appear in more than one of the magazines that I get at home. As […]

Computer security has two fundamental problems. The first is that computers dont know very much. The second problem is that people forget the first. Vulnerabilities like the one reported this week involving possible pathways for abuse in Microsofts ASP.Net illustrate the result of this combination of flaws: They remind us of what happens when ignorant […]

Costly waste of user time is the worst effect of workplace spam, according to an interactive poll of several hundred participants in a Ziff Davis Media eSeminar late last month. Almost three-fifths of seminar attendees named employee distraction as their top concern, ranking it far ahead of IT department burdens or legal issues such as […]

If you point toward a place where food is hidden, a chimpanzee will get the hint only about once in every four trials. If you reach out toward the bananas hiding place yourself, though, as if to take whatever might be there, the chimpanzee is twice as likely to get the idea—and go after the […]

As much as it might seem a purely hardware event, I always think of the autumnal chip-head convocation in San Jose, Calif., as being an important indicator to software developers as well. The hardware models offered to developers, such as RISC and VLIW, define the backfield in the game of crafting productive programming tools. The […]

Whether or not one accepts the idea of patents on software concepts, there are plenty of targets that one could choose in shooting down the claims of Kodak versus Sun. So far, it appears that we have at most a finding of fact that Sun did things that were covered by patents held by Kodak: […]

Today must mark some sort of milestone in online news. Feeding the single word “fat” to news.google.com on Thursday produced a top-ranked list of stories concerning a file system instead of an obesity epidemic. What could say more about the broad (ahem) reach of low-level PC technologies into everyday life? Todays “FAT” headlines concern a […]

The value of a thing is whatever it will bring. So goes the proverbial definition of fair market value, and fair markets are exactly what we need if were going to build any kind of sensible economy based on information as the scarce good. Thats why I disagree, collegially but firmly, with the position taken […]

We speak routinely of software crashing, but we dont give those events nearly the level of scrutiny that we give to real-world crashes. An airplane crash triggers a painstaking investigation. When software fails, the user is told to hope that it works the next time. Is this any way to run an airline? This jarring […]