Peter Coffee

When a retailer sells a gift certificate, the buyer (that is, the gift giver) makes that vendor an interest-free loan and often recruits a new customer as well. These supply-side benefits travel well into the world of e-business. As Jay Leno said last month, “Why spoil the impersonal feel of a gift certificate by actually […]

Its time to say goodbye. As of March 12, IBM will cease to offer the OS/2 Operating System. The tea leaves have been there to read since the middle of last year, when IBMs “OS/2 Strategy for 2002” document contained a key piece of advice under its fourth subhead, “What are IBMs recommendations?” Three sentences […]

NASA and NORAD, the space folks and the air defense folks, respectively, pretended (I think) to have a bit of a turf war during Christmas week. After years of issuing an annual press release concerning its tracking of Santas round-the-world flight, NORAD bristled at the news that NASA now proposes doing the same. “Tracking Santa […]

Its been argued that the leading edge of processor power has gotten too far ahead of the usability curve of enterprise software; that tomorrows most powerful machines will therefore be greeted with indifference, rather than being hailed as much-needed solutions to pressing problems. As much as I agree with this view of most desktop and […]

Thinking back over 2002, strictly from a developer perspective, it seemed to me that the biggest dog that isnt barking is C# (“C sharp”), arguably the native language of the .Net platform. For Windows developers, C# offers most of the strengths of Java while retaining more access (for good or ill) to programming models that […]

Its easy to offer a single vision of how things ought to be; its harder to build a coalition of compatibility. Borland Software Corp.s JBuilder 8 shows the strain of that competitive burden, which faces the Java development community as it confronts the monolith of Microsoft Corp.s .Net platform. Released in November, JBuilder 8 offers […]

Despite industry doldrums and the glacial pace of IT spending, 2002 saw continued innovation and technology adoption at every level of the IT stack. From processors to worldwide networks, crucial transitions—such as those from 32- to 64-bit computing and from intermittent to always-on connections—gathered momentum. Acceptance of these and other new technologies may even have […]

In our end-of-year discussions about the coming years it issues, someone mentioned government concerns about training in computer security. “The more people take these classes, the more people know how to hack” seems to be a growing concern at No Such Agency and its District of Columbia brethren. Lets kill this thought before it multiplies. […]

Remember the classic scene from “L.A. Law,” when the direct-marketing expert is urging the high-priced divorce attorney to go for volume with a video aimed at women considering a split? “You want women ready to talk about divorce? I can give you women over 40 whove just applied for credit in their own names! I […]

When CNN Headline News reporters asked me for comments on the Ptech incident, Ill bet they were anticipating a reassuring reality check. Id guess, based on the way they framed the questions, that they thought I would say the notion of software back doors being built in by devious developers was an exaggerated risk. If […]

Having despaired last week that mindless idiots control the movie business, its ironic that I should be inspired this week by news of animated characters with brains. The special effects software called “Massive,” which controls the battle scenes in the “Lord of the Rings” film trilogy, reminds me of what drew me into computing in […]

Ive always wanted personal computing to help me with personal organization. I bought my first laptop, in 1988, to run Ashton-Tates Framework III. With one command, I could search all my current work, all my recent e-mail and anything in my desktop library. It was worth the $8,000. Fourteen years of Moores Law progress have […]