Peter Coffee

Programmer training, user support, and the famous “Eliza” psychologist simulation all entered into your many replies to my letter of last week. When I asked how we should address the problem of using IT to answer peoples “real” questions, or for that matter finding out what those questions are, your comments—many of them long and […]

For anyone who fondly remembers the good old days of the Cold War, the geopolitics of Web services platforms offer a grimly entertaining substitute. All the antagonists espouse the ideals of standards-based interaction among loosely coupled modules, but each craves the status of first among equals—and the power it confers to define the path through […]

If software reliability were to be the weakest link in tomorrows IT systems, we could live with that. Recognizing softwares limitations, we could compensate with parallel computations using different algorithms and hardware to provide reality checks; we could prove the necessity, and therefore justify the cost, of human oversight for critical processes. Whats much more […]

A mid-July google search on the phrase “Web services” returned almost 2 million hits. A follow-up search, however, on the singular “Web service” returned one-fourth that number. In short, the idea enjoys enormous buzz, but concrete description of an actual example seems to be harder to find—even though the ideas involved are actually far from […]

How long does it take to find the factors of a really big integer? Before you ask, “Who cares?” let me translate that into IT terms: “How secure is your encryption, and for how long will it stay that way?” At the beginning of this month, the integer produced by multiplying 3,079,640,632,433 by 33,450,397,200,631 (primes […]

In the process of attempting to inform people via IT, its ironic that we may be misinforming or disinforming them more than ever before. Were helping people find the most popular sources of whats often inaccurate or misleading data; were answering peoples questions, instead of questioning their implied assumptions. Were applying the ever-more-impressive technologies of […]

Ive heard from dozens of readers in response to my July 1 column, describing my search for a complete disk defragmentation solution for my Windows NT and Windows 2000 machines. Executive Software Internationals DiskKeeper (www.executive.com) was most often mentioned, with its boot-time options to deal with problems on startup that cant be addressed once the […]

It would be, at best, a gloomy satisfaction to be the person who wrote the report—released on September 11, 1998, if youre looking for painful ironies—that predicted a “catastrophic” intelligence failure if American agencies funding priorities werent substantially revised. Last weeks report from the House Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security found the resulting systemic […]

In the real world of the physical signals that actually carry our data, usable bandwidth depends on the ratio of signal to noise. When noise is nonexistent, the smallest variation in the signal can carry useful information: If I can reliably measure signal strength to the nearest thousandth of a volt, a single pulse in […]

I got e-mails by the dozen on the subject of my newsletter of two weeks ago, and I apologize for the delay in my replies: I spent the week of July 1 on the island of Catalina, off the coast of Los Angeles, with a troop of Boy Scouts in what I can only call […]

Both current Macintosh users and prospective Macintosh developers may be intimidated by the minefield of code words that surrounds the core of Mac OS X (X as in 10), the Unix-based operating system that elevates the Macintosh to a new level of credibility as an enterprise or workstation platform. Classic, Carbon and Cocoa are the […]

Codewarrior 8 Keeps App Focus”> Humpty Dumpty correctly described the choice facing buyers of application development tools. “The question,” he said in Lewis Carrolls Through the Looking Glass, “is which is to be master—thats all.” Is the platform the master and the application only a window into (pun intended) a platforms distinctive services? Or is […]