Peter Coffee

MIT math professor Arthur Mattuck once famously began a lecture by saying, “Suppose we have a 1-by-1 matrix, also known as a number.” I dont believe he had software engineering in mind, but Im going to hijack the thought to argue that systems should be built to handle general cases, unless this means unreasonable extra […]

Ive recently used this space to warn of the perils of building real-time systems that dont feed a real-time decision-making process. To look at the input side of that equation, and at the strengths that a system must have to make real-time decision making a plausible goal, Id like to share some things I heard […]

This weeks Worldwide Developers Conference, hosted by Apple in San Francisco, introduces an Enterprise IT track in addition to more familiar Macintosh material like graphics and hardware. Enterprise track subtopics include Java development and system administration, as well as sessions more specific to Apples application frameworks. Apples Java commitment, like Suns new Java.Net forum for […]

Real-time information systems are seductive because they offer so many ways to quantify what they can do. This creates a powerful temptation to focus on technical comparisons among competing offerings. But that can be a distraction from more meaningful comparisons. For example, its easy to compare the update time for analytic results, following arrival of […]

When confronted with a haystack full of needles, especially golden needles, its nice to have some expert guidance on exactly where to look. Thats what JavaOne attendees got last week in one of the first-day keynote sessions, when one of the charts (Im sorry, but I didnt note which of the several speakers displayed it) […]

If youre headed to San Francisco, as I am, for this weeks JavaOne conference, you probably share my sense that this baby has grown beyond all reasonable expectations since it was born in 1996. The Java tutorial book I wrote that year, following the debut JavaOne event, covered most of what you could do with […]

Call me old-fashioned, but a byte used to be worth eight whole bits, and every one of those bits represented a choice: yes or no, present or absent. OK, maybe not actually a matter of good or evil, but nonetheless a value proposition. And the eight bits in a byte, combining to represent 256 distinctly […]

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY JBuilder 9 JBuilder 9 is a surprisingly significant upgrade to Borlands exemplary Java development environment, incorporating project life-cycle management technologies acquired by the company since the last release of the product and also improving support for many application server platforms. KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS USABILITY EXCELLENT CAPABILITY EXCELLENT PERFORMANCE GOOD INTEROPERABILITY EXCELLENT MANAGEABILITY EXCELLENT […]

The average CIO holds that position for 18 months but has to project at least six months further into the future, observed BMC Software CIO Jay Gardner during remarks at the GigaWorld IT Forum, held last month in Phoenix. “In January, I was 17 months into the job, and I started to worry,” Gardner recalled, […]

On June 23rd, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will receive the first round of proposals for the development of “LifeLog,” which it describes as a system that will “trace the threads of an individuals life in terms of events, states and relationships.” I imagine ears pricking up all over at the thought of this […]