Peter Coffee

When legislators make foolish laws, or courts enforce laws foolishly, they teach people to justify doing whatever they want. In particular, when teen-agers spend their formative years acquiring contempt for laws that are made by the ignorant at the behest of the selfish, I fear for the consequences when those young people become our next […]

Its especially pointless to argue about a glass being half empty, or half full, if the man behind the bar is still pouring. Thats my message to those who wrote to ask about the jarring juxtaposition of last weeks letter, which praised the breadth of development tools available for open-source platforms, against an eWEEK news […]

Frustrated by the challenge of controlling access to enterprise assets, IT architects are embedding encryption at every layer of the stack. Theyre not just encrypting traffic between one perimeter and another but are also encrypting data repositories inside the perimeter—and even encrypting the flows of data between processors and other subsystems. While we applaud the […]

With Intels midmonth announcement of a Linux version of its VTune Performance Analyzer (see www.intel.com/vtune), the company faces—and even embraces—the open-source threat to the Wintel axis. Spending time with VTune, looking under the hood at whats happening to code when it runs, makes a person recognize two things. First, a Pentium-family chip is an extraordinary […]

Last week was filled with news on the Linux front, with every major IT provider trying to warm itself near the fire of enterprise interest. IBM claimed to have a billion-dollar business based on the open-source operating system and pointed to the companys own progress in replacing its Windows and OS/2 servers with Linux systems; […]

XML-based software strategies offer the hope of longer lifetimes for software assets. When business logic manipulates self-disclosing XML expressions, instead of working with idiosyncratic binary data structures, IT builders may become more likely to improve systems incrementally, rather than by “rip and replace.” If software lasts longer, any good business accountant will tell you that […]

With my 25th college reunion approaching this summer, theres a sense of having come full circle. My goal as a Carter-era undergraduate was to take on the problem of energy; now, a quarter-century later, more than 500 IEEE Fellows rank “energy development” at the head of their lists of problems demanding technology input during the […]

As the U.S. government nears opening day for the Homeland Security Department, IT buyers and users may wonder how the landscape of computer and network security will be changed by the governments actions—as well as by continuing development of attackers methods and security vendors innovations. The previously separate worlds of public safety and foreign intelligence […]

Unlike information technology domains in which anything between book covers is suspected of being obsolete, security is a discipline in which seasoned experience still has value. Three titles released this year offer different approaches to meet different needs. “Security in Computing” Charles and Shari Pfleeger; Prentice Hall PTR; $79 Now in its third edition, “Security […]

At a dinner meeting last week, someone asked me what I was going to do about “Intels outrageous sales pitch” for Itanium versus “proprietary Unix systems.” I havent since found an example of Intel actually using that phrase, although I did find Microsoft VP Cliff Reeves calling Windows/Itanium “a nail in the coffin of high-end […]

My e-mail newsletter ended last year with a look at the progress of Microsofts C# .Net language. One reader then asked why Microsofts forthcoming enhancements to that language werent part of the first release. He wondered, “Why do we have to keep reinventing these wheels?” Certainly, the family tree of the proposed C# improvements seems […]

Its easier to chronicle the past than keep track of the present, let alone anticipate the future. Its therefore no surprise that the end of 2002 saw a spate of articles crowing about the 20th anniversary of the Internet, as defined by the cutover from the ARPAnets original NCP to the modern combination of the […]