Peter Coffee

There is a vital distinction between business intelligence and other aspects of data processing or productivity application development. The difference lies in the benefit of identifying changes in business opportunity or challenge, rather than merely meeting business needs. In this package, eWEEK Labs examines several products aimed at helping enterprise users ask important new questions […]

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY PowerAnalyzer 4.0 Building on a foundation that won eWEEK Excellence Awards finalist honors this year, Informaticas PowerAnalyzer 4.0 improves ease of learning and convenience of data integration while retaining the products breadth of capability and balance between flexibility and structure. Prices start at $50,000, rising on a per-CPU and per-user basis. KEY PERFORMANCE […]

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY QlikView 6 QlikView 6 Offering users a high degree of integration in viewing data from many common sources, QlikTechs $39,900 QlikView 6 emphasizes intuitive exploration and a high degree of flexibility in making new associations or narrowing the focus to a particular area of interest. The QlikView toolbox is comprehensive and quickly learned, […]

Its easy to get blasé about the power of hardware improvement to make slow processes get faster. Why optimize code for any one task when the hardware designers will do the job for all of us? Once in a while, though, its worth looking up from our microprocessor road maps to realize that advancements in […]

At Comdex last fall in Las Vegas, national Semiconductor President and CEO Brian Halla confidently predicted that the growth rate of semiconductor spending would hit a new peak this year. I regret to note that the date he mentioned was five weeks ago. It looks as if Hallas projection, even though based on an impressive […]

Apple Computer Inc.s iChat AV instant messaging software, and the companys concurrently introduced iSight compact digital camera, demonstrate Apples usual synthesis of top-to-bottom platform integration, novel and intelligent industrial design, and an intuitive user experience that encourages the adoption of new capabilities. The cameras physical design is almost at the theoretical limit of simplicity, little […]

I see that the latest thing in laundry equipment is GEs Harmony washer and dryer set: a system in which the washer tells the dryer whats coming, and sets the dryer appropriately for the load thats just been washed. Im glad their engineers are keeping busy and out of trouble, but pardon me if I […]

When I want to see a technical professional turn pale, I quote Neal Stephensons vision of a world in which “weve brain-drained all our technology into other countries,” as described in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash.” In a near future when knowledge, capital and even natural resources have become increasingly mobile across national boundaries, Stephensons […]

Application developers and PC buyers should take note of Intel Corp.s plans, disclosed earlier this month, for hyperthreading support in forthcoming mobile versions of the Pentium 4. This will bring multiprocessing capabilities—if only in the virtual sense of single processors that mimic dual-core designs—to almost every tier of the IT stack. Even personal productivity and […]

The problem with putting more “I” in “IT” is the cost of paying people to do it. The initial cost of human data entry is high; the costs that result from data entry error are worse. When data are captured infrequently, or with long delays, or with dubious accuracy, the systems that depend on that […]

As of July 1, Californias Security Breach Information Act mandates disclosure of data security incidents. By promising more than it delivers, by inducing more customer concern than increased confidence and by ultimately making people less sensitive than they are now to warnings of data insecurity, the act is likely to demonstrate the law of unintended […]

Whether for engineers or financiers, creative problem solving begins with finding new ways of asking insightful questions—but once the paradigm shifts, value in practice depends on pursuing those insights quickly and on a massive scale. The latest release of Mathematica, from Wolfram Research Inc., takes the products current users further along their problem-solving paths than […]