Peter Coffee

With hyperthreading, Intel Corp. offers the cost-effective performance of multithreaded execution without the infrastructure costs of multiprocessor systems. At the same time, by opening formerly internal hardware to use by applications, Intel invites developers to write code specifically for Intel hardware—reducing the value of being merely “X86-compatible” at the likely expense of Advanced Micro Devices […]

A tuple is neither an exotic fungus nor an adults-only entertainment. Defined with misleading simplicity as “a series of typed values,” the tuple can be to distributed computing what a base pair is to a molecule of DNA: Tuples carry information and provide their own form of organization—in a manner that may seem inefficient—but they […]

To have a long, lucrative criminal career, you have to be hard to find. Technology, therefore, determines how well crime pays—and todays IT trends clearly favor the bad guys. Preachers and philosophers might like to think theyre the ones who inspire good behavior, but engineers and economists are closer to the truth. For example, look […]

Youve surely heard the conjugation “I am firm, you are obstinate, he is pigheaded.” Similarly, IT architects often seem to be saying, “I am in the loop, you are a system bottleneck, he is an error-prone manual operation.” The proper task of IT depends on which of these descriptions actually fits the situation—from the viewpoints […]

At the end of 1999, when Intel became a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, I chastised that financial reporting company for reducing the value of this once-respected measure of economic health. “Exxons oil in the ground and refineries above the ground will hold their value far longer than Intels soon-to-be-obsolete chip fabs,” I […]

The 20-year-old PC looks a lot like a 20-year-old PC user: Its bigger than when it was born. The 160KB, single-sided floppy disk has grown at 80 percent per year to become the 20GB hard disk more common today. Memory has grown at more than 45 percent per year, from 64KB to a typical 128MB […]

In the 1700s, a British citizen could not legally emigrate if he knew how to design and build textile machinery. An ambitious 21-year-old named Samuel Slater, having just finished his apprenticeship in the textile industry, called himself a farm worker and went to America—where it suddenly turned out he remembered all hed been taught. Slaters […]

Microsofts forthcoming Visual Studio .Net development suite, especially its Enterprise Architect edition, will refocus developers efforts and expectations more than any previous generation of programming tools or application design/maintenance systems. Yes, I know that this is lofty, sweeping praise, but most of the discussion about this long-awaited package has focused on Internet technologies rather than […]

Skeptics have accused bluetooth of being a solution in search of a problem, but this years IEEE Computer Society International Design Competition shows that Bluetooths strengths can address real needs—beyond eliminating wires in our personal area networks. My favorite is the third-place winner, The Poket Doctor from Brigham Young University. Imagine a paramedic team arriving […]

At what point does a technical preference turn into a jihad? I felt as if Id been dragged across that line when this full-width bumper billboard exited the parking lot ahead of me. Regardless of the merits of competing operating systems, the death of Windows would have about the same effect on IT that the […]

Debates concerning e-privacy usually focus on the risk of deliberate abuse. Perhaps its more important to protect our personal data against incompetence, rather than malice. Eli Lilly, maker of the antidepressant Prozac, didnt mean to disclose the e-mail addresses of 600 users of that drug. But when the company discontinued an e-mail reminder service to […]

When I saw this ruggedized wireless terminal at the local home depot, I had two reactions. The first thing that came to mind was that wireless data devices are truly ready for real-world applications when they can survive in the hostile environment of a hardware store, surrounded by paint, sawdust and other unfriendly stuff. My […]