Peter Coffee

What does the “Tickle-Me Elmo” animated doll have in common with the Boeing 777 airliner? Both are cited as examples of softwares growing role, not as just an automation tool for back-office functions, but as the technology that either defines a product or creates a crucial competitive advantage. Your own strategic enterprise application may have […]

In the SpaceWar computer game, developed 40 years ago at MIT, PDP-1 programmer Steve (“Slug”) Russell initially made his simulated torpedoes realistically unreliable: No matter how carefully you aimed them, their paths were perturbed by slight random variations in speed and direction. “The hackers denounced it,” narrated Steven Levy in his 1984 book “Hackers.” Levy […]

Rate the following statements on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 is “piffle” and 5 is, “How could it be otherwise?” 1. Proponents of new media channels need to drive demand for content by subsidizing hardware sales. Example: Microsoft Xbox. Counterexample: CD players. 2. Consumer electronics makers need to drive demand for hardware […]

When you think you know whats happening, conventional statistical software can help you decide if youre just imagining things. In enterprise settings, its more common to have a pile of data and to wonder if useful insights are buried within—a situation that demands a different approach to software design, as attempted by SAS Institute Inc.s […]

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 […]