Peter Coffee

People often misquote Murphys Law as stating, “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” This misses an essential element of the Law: one that ought to be part of our thinking about what it means to build good systems. Murphys mantra comes to mind with the special appearance of Edward A. Murphy III, son […]

The ultimate instrument of torture in the late Douglas Adams novel “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe” was the Total Perspective Vortex—a chamber in which the victim was forced to see “the entire unimaginable infinity of creation” with the victims tiny self shown to accurate scale. A software developer firing up a copy […]

Digital media creation, delivery and management are growing at roughly three times the pace of all other IT needs, estimated IBM Vice President for Digital Media Warren Hart when we spoke earlier this month in Los Angeles after his keynote speech at the ContentWorld conference. The nature of those tasks—intense computational workloads during content creation […]

The digital media revolution often seems to be centered on the badly managed migration of traditional entertainment to the Net. Theres plenty of drama in the music and video wars, but thats not where the enterprise opportunity lies. The same technologies can create new customer relationships, develop new supply chain alliances, and use cost-effective computing […]

One attendee described this months “foo camp” as “two hundred people, all certain that everyone else there is smarter than they are.” This inaugural “Friends of OReilly” (“foo,” get it?) event was literally a campout: many of us brought tents and pitched them around the edge of the yard behind the OReilly campus in Sebastopol, […]

I apologize to any readers of these letters who bristled at my critical comment, last week, on the California recall election. I tried to make my intentions clear in the revised version of the column, after receiving several notes protesting what must have seemed like an inappropriate excursion into politics: my focus, I do depose, […]

SAN JOSE—Surprising many long-time attendees, Intel Corp. chose not to present at this years Microprocessor Forum, held here this week. Its presence was implicit, however, in many of the keynotes and technical sessions during the forums first half day. Keynote speaker Greg Papadopoulos (as seen in photo above), CTO of Sun Microsystems Inc., invoked Intels […]

SAN JOSE—Security algorithms moved toward mainstream hardware implementation with a Tuesday morning announcement by Glenn Henry, (as seen in photo above) president of Centaur Technology, here at this weeks Microprocessor Forum. Henry described the addition of basic security operations, such as random-number generation and AES encryption, to his companys line of X86-compatible microprocessors. The new […]

SAN JOSE—In a surprise announcement at this mornings opening session of the Microprocessor Forum, Transmeta Corp. CTO David Ditzel (as seen in photo above) demonstrated forthcoming power-management technology that he promised would dramatically increase lifetime of portable devices. Dubbed LongRun2, the new approach adjusts low-level transistor characteristics hundreds of times per second to minimize power […]

At a time when many buyers wonder if the PC platform has run its course, its good to see industry standards bodies moving forward with key connectivity improvements that can make our PCs dramatically faster and more flexible. These developments create new design opportunities for system builders but also challenge buyers to envision new applications—not […]

If a homeowner installed a steel-reinforced front door, then added a surveillance camera and even posted a 24-hour guard, one might hope that a helpful neighbor would ask, “But what do you have out in back?” One must assume that weaker points will quickly become the targets of new attacks. Californias Database Breach Security Notification […]

In a month that includes both the Microprocessor Forum and the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, its convenient to live in California—despite the embarrassing spectacle of this weeks ill-conceived recall election. Im naive, Im sure, in hoping that readers will let me critique the recall process without regard to politics. Trust me, please: Im not talking […]