Peter Coffee

If Borland Software Corp.s JBuilder 9 was a single flower of java- focused development technology, the companys August debut release of its new C#Builder is an entire rainforest of enterprise application life-cycle tools. The result is a complete system with a tool in every niche. However, C#Builder is not a product that lends itself to […]

Weve all worked with people who refuse to begin thinking about the answer to a question until they have all the facts; they want to be left alone while they think, rather than accepting new information as it arrives. But if I may paraphrase management guru Peter Drucker, its a terrible handicap to insist on […]

DRM is a complex technical challenge, and the IT industry tends to assume that challenges point the way to business models. Digital rights management may be the exception—it may be a problem that cannot be usefully solved, technically or otherwise. In many ways, DRM is the IT equivalent of chemotherapy: It tries to kill the […]

Whether were talking about a single city in New Hampshire, or about three major Asian powers, the notion of having a “Microsoft exit strategy” seems to be spreading almost as fast as the SoBig worm. Customers are increasingly taking the measure of both the direct costs of software upgrades, especially the “Longhorn surprise” that might […]

As children head back to classrooms, after what I hope were memorable vacations, I wonder if we as IT professionals are setting appropriately inspiring examples of the need for lifelong learning. If someone asked you to prove that you were really an IT professional, would you be able to offer more than the title on […]

Regardless of any other network management strengths that a virtual private network may offer, any VPN is fundamentally an encryption-based aid to network security. The entire case for any VPN is the belief that encrypting data makes it safe to send across a public network and that, furthermore, the security thus gained is worth the […]

When I left you all in charge of our infrastructure for three weeks, while I took one group of Boy Scouts on a 36-mile mountain backpack trip and took another group to summer camp, I didnt think Id come back from that vacation to find things in such dreadful disarray. Between the Blaster worm on […]

During my five years with Exxon, I was often in the position of seeking bids from companies that built unusual equipment at hideous expense. I sometimes found it useful to perform the reality check of asking myself, “What would it cost to do this with an army of people instead of buying this big piece […]

eWEEK Labs Technology Editor Peter Coffee recently moderated a roundtable discussion with members of eWEEKs Corporate Partner Advisory Board to gauge their IT priorities for the coming year. The forecast is for continued flat technology budgets in 04, but spending is opening up in certain areas. Click here to find out where. Coffee: Id like […]

Application performance is perhaps the most sought but least effectively pursued quarry of the enterprise developer. Its easy to be distracted from the real chase by IT providers, who are eager to play a part in the hunt–whether by turning up the clock rate on the processor or by speeding up the storage, not to […]

The blessing, and the curse, of being a software developer is that theres almost no limit on what would be useful to know. As software merges into every product or service, extracurricular knowledge will be the mark of the developer with a career path–not just a job slinging code. Some have tried to list the […]