Peter Coffee

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 […]

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 […]