Peter Coffee

As October ended with the , I and other attendees with inconveniently long memories were comparing our recollections of promises past. In particular, some of us were trading thoughts on the sizable gap between the promised WinFS in Longhorn and the previously promised object-oriented storage of the unified model code-named “Cairo.” Stop me if youve […]

Wireless connections are changing the shape of our IT universe, shifting the handheld computer from satellite to center. Its increasingly common for new information, not just brief e-mail but substantial documents, to come to our handhelds first. As a result, we must redesign whats around us—displays, printers and other connections—to accept output from a variety […]

When application developers open the stark black box containing the four CDs of Apple Computer Inc.s “Panther” operating system, theyll get more than the newly polished end-user experience of whats already the worlds most widely used version of workstation Unix. That fourth CD contains Xcode 1.0, Apples integrated development workbench for AppleScript, Java and native […]

Newly rolled out of Google Labs, the define: search prefix deftly handles one of the most common but frustrating types of Internet search: the one whose goal is a current, accurate definition of an emerging piece of IT vocabulary. I tried the command “define: Wi-Fi” as my first example, and now Im sold. Compare the […]

Discuss This in the eWEEK Forum Back in the late 1900s, land-warfare experts—like the NATO generals who co-authored “The Third World War“—joined in agreeing that modern technologies favored the defense. When a soldier with a shoulder-launched TOW missile could plausibly take out a tank, conventional measurements of force superiority lost their value. More recently, though, […]

Discuss this in the eWEEK forum. If you were designing a human language from scratch, you probably wouldnt wind up with English, observed AMD CTO Fred Weber in his keynote speech this month at the Microprocessor Forum, in San Jose, Calif. Even so, Weber continued, that doesnt make it the wrong language to choose today […]

When the subject is software, the concern for today and tomorrow is quality. IT community concerns are apparent, for example, in the current draft program for next months International Conference on Quality Software, scheduled to take place in Dallas on Nov. 6 and 7. Presentation topics during those days will include test-case generation from software […]

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY iRise Application Simulator 3.0 Far more successful than any other attempt weve seen to enable application design by nonprogrammers, the 3.0 release of iRise Application Simulator gives business unit stakeholders a clear idea of Web application appearance and behavior while communicating their requirements to downstream development staff. Application Simulator 3.0 costs $250,000. KEY […]

If Microsoft Corp.s Visual Studio .Net doesnt already give a developer enough knobs to turn and buttons to push, Compuware Corp.s DevPartner Studio Professional Edition 7.1 should fill the bill nicely with its extensive array of coding quality assurance aids that are aimed at the new opportunities—and challenges—of the .Net platform. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY DevPartner Studio […]

Its no small trick to make software source code analysis a pleasure, but the excellent design and open-ended flexibility of Parasofts Jtest 5.0 combine to eliminate a developers excuses for releasing anything but the most refined grade of Java. At different stages of a project, a developer can mean different things by the simple word […]

When developers arrive this week in Los Angeles for their annual feast at the Microsoft table, theyll get more appetizers than entrees. Considering the ravenous appetites in this crowd, its surprising to see them flocking to a place where the sign reads “Dinner will be served in three years”—which is when the “Longhorn” version of […]

When application developers open the stark black box containing the four CDs of Apple Computer Inc.s “Panther” OS, theyll get more than the newly polished end-user experience of whats already the worlds most widely used version of workstation Unix. That fourth CD contains Xcode 1.0, Apples integrated development workbench for AppleScript, Java, and native C/C++/Objective-C […]