Peter Coffee

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]