Peter Coffee

If the brutal sport of boxing can call itself “the sweet science,” then eWEEK Labs OpenHack studies are the equally brutal branch of computer science. Like the boxer trying to stay on his feet after a blow that comes from nowhere, the site that dares the world to attack it will stand or fall in […]

There are things that computers do so badly that its almost, but not quite, funny. Language translation may have pioneered that category 30-plus years ago, when my “How and Why Wonder Book of Robots and Electronic Brains” included the same example still used today: It was claimed, in that book as in many anecdotes since […]

With last weeks shipment of Corel Corp.s Ventura 10, the polished production of structured documents from XML data sources becomes a two-horse race. Adobe Systems Inc.s $799 FrameMaker 7.0, released in May, was quicker out of the gate and can run on more courses, with versions for Mac OS and Unix as well as Windows […]

When someone wants to get my attention, “low power” is a good phrase to use. With a big-enough engine, you can make a barn door fly, but thats not an approach that leads to viable air transportation. Likewise for IT developers, who sometimes seem to forget that you have to be an electrical engineer—not just […]

The Hewlett-Packard calculator marketing site shown here is obviously “soft” to the point of being downright squishy, as witness the error message thats seamlessly interleaved with its dynamically generated content. Web services developers would do well to think about the failure modes that their sites, or the services sites on which they in turn may […]

Readers of my weekly newsletter know that I see e-mail as a mixed blessing. Yes, its a new and improved nervous system for our business and personal lives, but its also a path of least resistance to redundancy and confusion. But people ask me, “What would be better?” Fair question. One example of doing things […]

Like the cobblers children who go without shoes, an IT department may be fully engaged in equipping enterprise profit centers with the latest management tools and yet find itself without effective budgeting aids or processes. eWeek Labs, therefore, offers the following perspectives on how to get those priorities supported with funds and with non-IT management […]

When I hear a pungent exclamation coming from my familys computer-game room, I remind my sons that its much more cultured to swear in a foreign language. (Depending on the exclamation, the reminder is sometimes delivered in units of minutes off the machine.) In particular, they know theyll never lose computer privileges if they respond […]

If one were to list the technical challenges facing would-be Web services developers, the result would bear an alarming resemblance to the research agenda for productivity improvement in every form of software development—alarming because that list has not noticeably changed in a decade or more. If the Web is to be transformed into an open […]

Remember the scene in “Casablanca,” when a bazaar merchant is trying to sell Ingrid Bergman a set of lace napkins? In a matter of seconds, the original 700-franc price tag is replaced, not once but twice, with others bearing lower figures. “For special friends of Ricks, we have a special discount!”—and the price falls to […]

When we used to draw block diagrams of the PC architecture, back in that other century, the operating system would be a horizontal layer immediately above the hardware; the applications would be the next tier up, a row of adjacent blocks on top of the OS layer, having the status of peers with each other […]

If the Internet really were an “information superhighway,” wed need a legion of censors to stand guard at every offramp, manning checkpoints to block unsolicited commercial mail that might otherwise choke local streets and home mailboxes. If you wanted to make your own rules, youd have to hire your own mailbox monitor. But the Net […]