Peter Coffee

If your kitchen is being overrun by ants, you dont kill them one at a time. “You find their nest,” say the engineers at IronPort Systems, who offer a similar approach to the problem of unsolicited commercial e-mail—or spam, as its more commonly called. IronPort has launched a real-time e-mail monitoring site called SenderBase (www.senderbase.com), […]

Theres a wonderful irony in going to New York City to promote technologies that try to make us independent of location. Being a Manhattan native myself, Im allowed to call that island a monument to the idea that being in a particular place is worth any amount of cost and nuisance–even as Intels Centrino announcement, […]

Forces That Shape IT If the enterprise IT stack were a physical structure, its architecture would not be described by a list of its rooms. To understand how that building could support the activities of an enterprise, one would need to know the sizes of the rooms, their equipment and special facilities, and their connections […]

When Microsoft wants to promote a new way of doing things, the companys toolmakers know that application developers demand a well-paved path of least resistance. The latest version of the Tablet PC Software Development Kit is an excellent example: A developer can now offer Tablet PC optimization, enabling convenient pen-based text input, custom gesture recognition […]

Two weeks from this Thursday, Ill be convening a panel discussion at the Software Development Conference and Expo in the Santa Clara Convention Center. The topic will be Web services; the panelists will represent IBM, Sun Microsystems, BEA Systems, and toolmaker M7 Corp. (whose M7 Application Assembly Platform is a finalist in the Expos traditional […]

My family members expect the unexpected when I say, “Take a look at this!”—but I produced a satisfying double take from my 11-year-old son when he saw a Windows 2000 desktop, running in a window of its own, on what he knew perfectly well was my new Apple G4. When I unpack a new machine, […]

If changing the oil in your car might cause the radio to stop working, or maybe even lock you out of driving in reverse, then preventive maintenance wouldnt be as obviously good an idea. That was the gist of a comment I saw in an online discussion of end-user maintenance tasks, and tools, for personal […]

Platform choice is a terrible reason for picking one computer over another. If theres one thing that a computer simulation should be able to mimic to perfection, its any Von Neumann system. The insanely powerful processors in both servers and personal systems today make the overhead of a virtual machine acceptable for many applications–we run […]

It takes time to do good work but only moments to destroy it—whether by accident or by intent. The key difference between a “power user” and others, therefore, may be not the ability to do but to undo. I made a classic error, for example, when downloading photos earlier this month from three memory cards. […]

Its been about 30 years since Ted Nelson wrote, in his book “Dream Machines,” that computer graphics would become the cutting edge of every field, changing the way we approach almost every task. When I look at the processing power thats being applied to graphics, the size and quality of displays, the effectiveness of compression […]

MIT students were startled to see dining-hall charges appearing, late last month, on their records for dates and times when they knew they had not used those facilities. It turned out that several cash registers, having lost their network connections, had quietly been accumulating charges for several months and had posted the charges when their […]

I didnt buy my first 32-bit PC to run 32-bit applications. The year was 1989, I spent most of my workday in DOS and my decision to consider only 386-based laptops narrowed the field to two high-priced machines—but products such as Qualitas 386Max made it seem like false economy to buy a 16-bit system that […]