Peter Coffee

Wireless links and cheap processing power make mobile robots increasingly practical for industry and public-safety applications. Originally inspired by the fictional R2-D2 “droid” of the “Star Wars” movies, iRobot co-founder Helen Greiner now equips U.S. troops in Iraq with battlefield-grade PackBot units that can be thrown through a window to explore a potentially booby-trapped building. […]

At last weeks OReilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, two of the most concrete sessions dealt with some of the threats—whether merely commercial, or actually dangerous or criminal—that face forthcoming products and services. Monday offered a half-day tutorial on reverse engineering by Andrew Huang, author of “Hacking the Xbox,” whose work I profiled in […]

Utility computing, the IT vendor pitch of choice for selling more hardware and services this year, is often misperceived—or actually misrepresented—as either a technology or a business arrangement. Its true that the utility model is enabled by new technologies and that it promotes the development of innovative service provider relationships. However, utility computing itself, whether […]

When medical imagery data created explosive growth in demand for digital storage, Project Manager Midori Kawahara, of the British Columbia Cancer Agency, needed prompt and reliable access to those files for doctors and patients throughout that Canadian province. In the subsequent year and a half, 5 terabytes of online capacity—about 1.7 terabytes of data with […]

Application developers have been fighting an escalating war against chaos in IT stacks of ever-growing complexity. Utility computing, with its highly distributed systems, must make a final assault. The problem surfaced in 1965, when the Univac 1108A appeared on the scene as the first multiprocessor computer. That machine introduced a new low-level computer instruction—the test-and-set […]

Its easy to think of source code as a product. Energetic and skillful people go into a room; tired people and lines of code come out. People routinely measure and even agonize over the lines of code produced per unit of programmer effort or calendar time. They truly seem to feel that writing more code […]

I thought that everyone had read, by now, Robert Fulghums classic book, “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten”—newly released in an expanded 15th anniversary edition, which Amazon.com unaccountably failed to mention when I searched that site for “kindergarten” combined with the authors name. Many thanks to the readers of the e-mail […]

When technologies move from the laboratory to the enterprise IT stack, they must make the transition from dancing bear to chorus line. Research projects can claim success if they dance at all, whether or not they dance well, but an enterprise solution must dance consistently—and well enough to go almost unnoticed in the background of […]

The cover of the Jan. 15 issue of the prestigious science journal Nature is striking. Viewed from above, a tennis player swings her racket toward a contour map of concentric ovals, representing her estimate of the location of the ball, as it streaks toward her. The caption archly inquires, “Anyone for bayesian integration?” If I […]

Grid computing is an overnight success that has been almost four decades in the making. Last months announcement of the WS-Resource framework, enabling grid resource management with standard Web services protocols, completes a convergence that began with the 1965 introduction of the first multiprocessor computer. Libraries full of bleeding-edge research have since paved grids way, […]

Every few years, I find it worth my time to re-read Ken Thompsons August 1984 article, “Reflections on Trusting Trust,” based on his 1983 Turing Award lecture that described what he called “the cutest program I ever wrote.” The lecture does not merely describe the anatomy of a clever hack: it demonstrates the need for […]

The prolonged course correction at Eastman Kodak, whose cutback of 22,000 jobs in the past five years will be followed—as announced late last month—by the loss of 15,000 more by 2006, is a powerful statement of the sea change thats taken place in imaging technology and practice. The much-hyped tip-over in consumer camera sales, with […]