Peter Coffee

It takes time to do good work but only moments to destroy it—whether by accident or by intent. The key difference between a “power user” and others, therefore, may be not the ability to do but to undo. I made a classic error, for example, when downloading photos earlier this month from three memory cards. […]

Its been about 30 years since Ted Nelson wrote, in his book “Dream Machines,” that computer graphics would become the cutting edge of every field, changing the way we approach almost every task. When I look at the processing power thats being applied to graphics, the size and quality of displays, the effectiveness of compression […]

MIT students were startled to see dining-hall charges appearing, late last month, on their records for dates and times when they knew they had not used those facilities. It turned out that several cash registers, having lost their network connections, had quietly been accumulating charges for several months and had posted the charges when their […]

I didnt buy my first 32-bit PC to run 32-bit applications. The year was 1989, I spent most of my workday in DOS and my decision to consider only 386-based laptops narrowed the field to two high-priced machines—but products such as Qualitas 386Max made it seem like false economy to buy a 16-bit system that […]

When legislators make foolish laws, or courts enforce laws foolishly, they teach people to justify doing whatever they want. In particular, when teen-agers spend their formative years acquiring contempt for laws that are made by the ignorant at the behest of the selfish, I fear for the consequences when those young people become our next […]

Its especially pointless to argue about a glass being half empty, or half full, if the man behind the bar is still pouring. Thats my message to those who wrote to ask about the jarring juxtaposition of last weeks letter, which praised the breadth of development tools available for open-source platforms, against an eWEEK news […]

Frustrated by the challenge of controlling access to enterprise assets, IT architects are embedding encryption at every layer of the stack. Theyre not just encrypting traffic between one perimeter and another but are also encrypting data repositories inside the perimeter—and even encrypting the flows of data between processors and other subsystems. While we applaud the […]

With Intels midmonth announcement of a Linux version of its VTune Performance Analyzer (see www.intel.com/vtune), the company faces—and even embraces—the open-source threat to the Wintel axis. Spending time with VTune, looking under the hood at whats happening to code when it runs, makes a person recognize two things. First, a Pentium-family chip is an extraordinary […]

Last week was filled with news on the Linux front, with every major IT provider trying to warm itself near the fire of enterprise interest. IBM claimed to have a billion-dollar business based on the open-source operating system and pointed to the companys own progress in replacing its Windows and OS/2 servers with Linux systems; […]

XML-based software strategies offer the hope of longer lifetimes for software assets. When business logic manipulates self-disclosing XML expressions, instead of working with idiosyncratic binary data structures, IT builders may become more likely to improve systems incrementally, rather than by “rip and replace.” If software lasts longer, any good business accountant will tell you that […]