Peter Coffee

You may have thought that Microsoft Corp.s antitrust lawsuit was only a battle over software, but anyone who buys Intel-compatible computers can find cause for genuine anger in the June 28th Court of Appeals ruling in this case. Almost buried in pages of discussion of the Internet “browser wars” are a few short paragraphs about […]

When I saw this sign, I wondered if overenthusiastic translation had turned the English “My Mobil” to the Spanish “Mi Mobil”—ignoring the fixed association of letters and numbers on keypads. It turns out that punching “Mi Mobil” gets you Spanish-language service, a nice touch—but this sign points up other problems of user-interface translation. Is there […]

Centuries of scholarship and financial competition have been shaped by the fact that knowledge was scarce—that is, in the economic sense of being something that had to be paid for. Knowledge is power, power yields wealth, wealth enables access to knowledge: Its been a positive feedback loop, whether the knowledge in question was a map […]

Its perfectly logical that a public space should be viewable online by anyone whod like to know whats happening there. Even so, I felt a transient chill when I spotted this sign (“Activities in this Auditorium are streamed to the IBM Internet and are often recorded.”) at the entrance of an auditorium at IBMs Almaden […]

IBMs Almaden Research Center (www.almaden.ibm.com) celebrated its 15th anniversary this month, holding briefings that included key topics in nanotechnology—which Ill define as any process that manipulates atoms as individual objects. To clarify the difference between tomorrows nanotech and todays submicroscopic manufacturing, let me borrow from Ralph Merkle at Zyvex (www.zyvex. com/nano): Breaking through to nanotech […]

Improved microprocessors make other technologies more valuable. Mass storage, for example, is worth more if less expensive, faster processors can execute more demanding compression algorithms. Memory is worth more if high-bandwidth processors can sharpen and color-correct a video stream, to mention just one application, as easily as they used to optimize a single image frame. […]

Could it sweeten your day if someone you know could say, “Have an M&M”—and dispense it over the Net? Or what about a little doodle that suddenly appears on your desk to say, “Youre special”? This notion, formally termed “nonverbal communication via kinetic objects,” took shape in these and other prototype devices shown by researchers […]

College computer science programs will have the task, during the next few years, of digesting a cohort of incoming students who learned C++ as their first programming language. One wonders if remedial programming will overtake remedial writing as a drain on teaching resources. The college-level advanced placement computer science course switched from Pascal to C++ […]

The Compaq laptop battery pictured here is not especially dangerous by the standards of its genre. But have you ever done the numbers on the energy stored in one of these innocent-looking lumps of hardware? At the batterys bottom left appear the values 14.8 volts and 3.2 ampere-hours. Thats less than 50 watts for a […]

Whatever theyre drinking at Forrester Research, please keep it out of my water. The research companys report on May 17, envisioning what it calls The X Internet, misperceives the Internets advantages and ignores decades of research into effective data presentation. I shudder when I read comments such as, “Imagine a corporate buyer navigating a virtual […]

An application architecture should be like a grand hotel: It should accommodate the convention market of B2B and enterprise applications and also afford more personal convenience to productivity tools. In this hotel scenario, application developers play many roles: The mechanic in the basement, the concierge in the lobby, even the room service staff who leave […]

A sudden death by heart attack earlier this month has taken from us the wit of Douglas Adams, author of the five-volume trilogy (“increasingly inaccurately named,” as the subtitle wryly noted on Volume 5) that began with “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.” It was Adams who conceived the fictitious Sirius Cybernetics Corp., whose complaint […]