Peter Coffee

As any reasonably experienced photographer can tell you, a tightly framed long-lens photo may suffer from shallow depth of field. Developer tools and application platforms represent a similar trade-off: Its traditionally been hard to zoom in on part of a complex application, or to achieve tight management of a particular slice of an application stack, […]

An announcement due out today from MIT will report initial results from work with “III-V compound semiconductors”: composite materials, in particular indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs), which have shown the ability to handle 2.5 times the current of silicon devices and to provide high performance at voltages as low as 0.5 V in devices on the […]

Sure enough, I no sooner a United Nations study re-affirms something I said four years ago — and that I reiterated just this past October. When you look at the value that’s in real Web content, and at the ease of packaging that content in presentation-neutral formats that let the client device decide how to […]

This is really and truly my 116th blog post, but it looks instead as if I’m brand new to this medium — because the history of my comments across two preceding eWEEK Labs blog platforms is regrettably being left behind as part of the move to this new venue. My past comments remain accessible on […]

The only real problem I have with Sybase iAnywheres December 4 announcement of its RFID Anywhere 3.0 is that the products name is much narrower than its true scope. In a conversation that I had last week with Martyn Mallick, the companys director of RFID and Mobile Solutions, I suggested that they might do well […]

There are detailed guidelines that developers can follow to ensure their compatibility with Microsofts forthcoming Windows Vista. Many of those instructions can usefully be condensed to one simple statement: This operating system is large and in charge. PC programmers have spent two decades developing bad habits along with their clever applications. The PCs first decade […]

Gandhi is said to have told his followers, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” When it comes to ensuring network integrity, were moved to a bleaker view: “First it seems impossible, then its obscure, then its trivial, then its impossible after all.” Thats our reaction […]

A respected PC industry innovator has made his opinion clear: “The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago.” That judgment was delivered in 1996 by a fellow named Steve Jobs—whos still involved in the business, I believe, at a company that some would call one of Microsofts most significant competitors. Does […]

When our family room PC swung at its third and final strike a year ago, with failure to boot signaling the “Youre out!” instance of needing to reinstall Windows 98, I decided to get my teenage sons something more modern than the 400MHz Compaq Presario that had been their workhorse for seven years. An iMac […]

Even Microsoft partner companies acknowledge the substantial lag time for adopting new versions of Office. The president of one Virginia-based systems integration company was merely admitting what everyone knows when he told the Redmond Channel Partner newsletter, “A lot of [his customers] still use Office 97 and it works fine.” Enterprise IT pros who serve […]

Youd think that the deep-dyed techies of eWeek Labs would have been pleased by Novembers mainstream media coverage of popularly priced desktop supercomputing. Unfortunately, the supercomputer in question was Sonys PlayStation 3, and that coverage had more to do with stalled waiting lines outside big-box stores than with stalled instruction pipelines in the Sony game […]

Announcements this week from Swedens Telelogic and Alfresco Software in San Francisco address both ends of the process that brings the next generation of Web-based applications to reality. Telelogic announced Nov. 27 its release of Version 3.0 of its Tau model-driven design tool. I had a chance to review the details of the new version […]