Peter Coffee

What about cutting project design time by 30 percent, cutting project documentation costs in half, and paying for the system that achieves these results in less than two years? All while completing 140 facility renovations with a team that used to do 20 projects in the same length of time? Do I have your attention? […]

Companies are deluding themselves if they think they can postpone wireless deployments until the technology is stable and secure. As happened in the 1980s with desktop PCs, employees are driving the process forward, and eWeek Labs has been looking at products that help IT staff support the resulting diversity of wireless wares on company networks […]

Its ironic that Microsofts antitrust victory, as this month began, was not first disclosed by a well-timed, after-hours announcement; it became public knowledge through Internet newsgroups reporting that the documents were online. Attorneys in the case were supposed to receive the decisions at 4 p.m., with Web publication at 4:30 EST. A dutiful technician had […]

Im still assimilating pages of notes, and hours of recordings, from two full days at Microsoft last week. Youll see some of what we learned there, including comments from almost an hour of Q&A with Steve Ballmer, in eWEEK on Nov. 18–but right now, Id like to share some things that probably wont be featured […]

When I first saw Microsoft Word 2.0, with breakthrough scripting facilities for an end-user application, I told readers that Microsoft wanted its Office suite to become the framework of enterprise task automation. With last months emergence of beta copies of Office 11, the company continues to track that moving target, and the question is not […]

I wasnt impressed when the settlement terms in the Microsoft antitrust case were merely “proposed,” a little less than one year ago, so it shouldnt be hard to predict my reaction to the pair of rulings that finally came down this past Friday evening. In short words, the company broke the law–and got away with […]

Last week, I mentioned the Section 508 mandates for information accessibility in federal IT and noted the growing influence of these rules on software design. Coincidentally, I find these requirements being cited on the hardware side as well, in a technical paper that I saw this past week from Adomo Inc.–whose AdomoMCS appliance adds voice […]

With its dubious victory this month in a U.S. District Court, Southwest Airlines won the right to continue its practice of 20th-century Web site design that wont meet future needs for feeding content to diverse devices–as well as to diverse users. The company would be wiser to behave as if it had lost. The court […]

Of all the predictions Ive heard as people look for ITs role in economic recovery, the silliest may be No. 1 on the list of 10 released earlier this month by Gartner: “Bandwidth becomes more cost-effective than computing.” The timing of that statement is ironic since I just returned from the Microprocessor Forum, in San […]

What looks like an insurmountable problem may just be a well-disguised assumption. The problem of data bandwidth across the border of a microprocessor chip may just be a symptom of the assumption—that the so-called central processor has to be at the center of the machine, with memory as a peripheral. What would happen if memory […]

In the debut of desktop computing, general-purpose microprocessors opened the door to affordable single-user systems. The limited power of those early CPUs meant that almost every advance in chip speed—or expansion of address space—yielded substantial improvement in visible and relevant performance. Every year, announcements at the Microprocessor Forum told the industry what new chips would […]

Open-source efforts will gain equal standing in Java technology development with Tuesdays announcement of significant changes to the Java Community Process agreements. “Starting Tuesday, it will be mandatory that licenses provide for the possibility of a clean-room implementation,” said Onno Kluyt, manager of the JCP Program Office. “A specification leader must offer a test suite […]