Peter Coffee

Microsofts shift in its compensation plans, from granting stock options to giving employees actual shares, holds up a mirror to the IT industry and challenges it to admit that theres a little bit of distinguished gray at the temples. Once a business with nothing to lose and everything to gain, IT has become a domain […]

Software installation is what most defines a computer, but its become one of the worst parts of enterprise computing. Complexity, inconsistency and risk of collateral damage entail substantial costs to IT vendors, administrators and help desks. Improving our IT experience depends at least as much on installation tools, management systems and higher-quality updates as on […]

With the arrival two months from now of Apple Computer Inc.s new desktop machines and their 64-bit CPUs, the race to the next generation of mass-market processing power suddenly has a third horse running hard. Intel Corp.s Itanium, Advanced Micro Devices Inc.s Opteron and Athlon 64, and now the IBM PowerPC 970 (or G5) processor […]

Emergency management is becoming a high-profile topic in government agencies, at industry sites and even on college campuses. In all of these settings, IT developers should take an active role in assuring the readiness of both infrastructure and applications to handle information under far from ideal conditions. Getting accurate data at the scene of an […]

With 67 Java specification requests at the stage of final release and 31 more in earlier stages of review, the Java platform is still very much a work in progress—mostly in a positive sense. The JavaOne conference in June showed encouraging signs, moreover, that the vigor of continued Java platform evolution is being tempered by […]

I suspect that the human brain is wired, at its lowest level, to take more notice of speed than of size. This makes sense as a matter of survival: A thrown rock is more dangerous than a mountain. That may be an unfortunate legacy, though, if it means that were too easily fascinated by supercomputers […]

MIT math professor Arthur Mattuck once famously began a lecture by saying, “Suppose we have a 1-by-1 matrix, also known as a number.” I dont believe he had software engineering in mind, but Im going to hijack the thought to argue that systems should be built to handle general cases, unless this means unreasonable extra […]

Ive recently used this space to warn of the perils of building real-time systems that dont feed a real-time decision-making process. To look at the input side of that equation, and at the strengths that a system must have to make real-time decision making a plausible goal, Id like to share some things I heard […]

This weeks Worldwide Developers Conference, hosted by Apple in San Francisco, introduces an Enterprise IT track in addition to more familiar Macintosh material like graphics and hardware. Enterprise track subtopics include Java development and system administration, as well as sessions more specific to Apples application frameworks. Apples Java commitment, like Suns new Java.Net forum for […]

Real-time information systems are seductive because they offer so many ways to quantify what they can do. This creates a powerful temptation to focus on technical comparisons among competing offerings. But that can be a distraction from more meaningful comparisons. For example, its easy to compare the update time for analytic results, following arrival of […]

When confronted with a haystack full of needles, especially golden needles, its nice to have some expert guidance on exactly where to look. Thats what JavaOne attendees got last week in one of the first-day keynote sessions, when one of the charts (Im sorry, but I didnt note which of the several speakers displayed it) […]

If youre headed to San Francisco, as I am, for this weeks JavaOne conference, you probably share my sense that this baby has grown beyond all reasonable expectations since it was born in 1996. The Java tutorial book I wrote that year, following the debut JavaOne event, covered most of what you could do with […]