Peter Coffee

Application developers and PC buyers should take note of Intel Corp.s plans, disclosed earlier this month, for hyperthreading support in forthcoming mobile versions of the Pentium 4. This will bring multiprocessing capabilities—if only in the virtual sense of single processors that mimic dual-core designs—to almost every tier of the IT stack. Even personal productivity and […]

The problem with putting more “I” in “IT” is the cost of paying people to do it. The initial cost of human data entry is high; the costs that result from data entry error are worse. When data are captured infrequently, or with long delays, or with dubious accuracy, the systems that depend on that […]

As of July 1, Californias Security Breach Information Act mandates disclosure of data security incidents. By promising more than it delivers, by inducing more customer concern than increased confidence and by ultimately making people less sensitive than they are now to warnings of data insecurity, the act is likely to demonstrate the law of unintended […]

Whether for engineers or financiers, creative problem solving begins with finding new ways of asking insightful questions—but once the paradigm shifts, value in practice depends on pursuing those insights quickly and on a massive scale. The latest release of Mathematica, from Wolfram Research Inc., takes the products current users further along their problem-solving paths than […]

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 […]