Peter Coffee

I invited you all to tell me if, and why, you still prefer “intel inside.” I got answers on both sides of the (pardon the expression) heated debate, with issues of temperature tolerance being high on the lists of the Pentiums proponents. Many of the Intel fans (not to be confused with their Pentiums fans) […]

The terrorist attacks of last september permanently changed the terms of debate for subsequent discussions of IT security and the technical response to potential terrorist threats. Almost no imaginable attack can now be dismissed, and it is no longer a confession of incompetence to acknowledge that at least some attacks will succeed. Some technologies were […]

Its one thing to be looking for a needle in a haystack; its another, far more difficult thing to be looking for an abnormal piece of hay. Our overflowing e-mail in-boxes make the haystack bigger every day, without doing anything to help us focus our attention where its needed. Sending e-mail has become the path […]

In this post-Arthur Andersen era, it was ironic to see an auditors signature over the benchmark figures in AMDs Athlon XP 2600+ processor announcement last month. This makes them more believable? Moreover, those audited numbers offer no direct comparison against competing CPUs. Who cares if the numbers are accurate if they dont help you make […]

Ive never understood the reluctance of top-tier PC builders to incorporate AMD chips in their enterprise-oriented machines. When Hewlett-Packard announced last week that its putting AMD Athlon processors in its Compaq D315 Business PC series, my immediate reaction was “Its about time.” I cant find a solid number for the market cap that Intel has […]

You work all night to finish the code, it passes the final regression suite, its just what your users need—and what the smart ones even knew enough to want. Then you send the bits out to be frozen on plastic, stuffed into packages, schlepped onto trucks, rolled into big aluminum tubes with wings and wheels, […]

Its been said that anyone who doesnt already know about Mathematica may safely ignore news about its updates, since “nearly anyone whod have a use for it would have heard of it” (in the words of MacAddict reviewer Ian Sammis). Theres a grain of truth in that comment, but still we beg to differ. This […]

Whenever Im out of the loop for a week or more, I wonder what kind of time warp Ill experience when I return. When I began this month by taking five Boy Scouts on a 30-mile backpack trip through Donohue Pass, on the east edge of Yosemite, we came down from the mountaintops to find […]

As parallel computing moves from special cases (such as image processing) into the mainstream of both desktop and enterprise IT, application developers have to start thinking less like pinball players and more like soccer coaches. Instead of following the bouncing ball of control flow through a single-threaded virtual machine, developers need to keep track of […]

Massive reels of magnetic tape are a long-standing visual cliché. Those spinning reels are almost as popular as walls of blinking lights when a movie director needs to tell the audience, “Here is a big computer.” So it could remain for decades to come because magnetic tape (with or without those photogenic reels) refuses to […]

Packaged software vendors have traditionally claimed to provide a “productivity solution” rather than just a document creation tool with specialized functions. With 21st-century software users safely assumed to have an active Internet connection, were finally seeing the fulfillment of that promise in products such as Autodesk Inc.s AutoCAD LT 2002—which is much more than just […]

When I saw an eWEEK story late last month on new business continuity and disaster recovery services, it made me think about the problem of persistent objects. Let me explain that leap. Suppose that all of the people in your firm suddenly vanished: no damage to your offices or factories, no loss of critical data, […]