Peter Coffee

Twenty-five cents wont buy you a decent cup of coffee, but it will cover the license fee for putting an IEEE 1394 connection in a digital device. Thats a good deal. The high-speed serial connection of IEEE 1394a carries up to 400M bps; the forthcoming 1394b will deliver 3,200M bps over either a 4.5-meter cable […]

Shipping this month, Motorolas Bluetooth Phone Module looks like nothing more than a slightly thicker battery cover for the companys Timeport cellular phones. The Bluetooth transceiver concealed therein will let the phone serve, for example, as a relay node for Internet access: The phone will make the Internet connection, but the user will be able […]

I recently challenged the continuing relevance of the “waterfall” model of software development in a column for our eWeek Labs e-mail newsletter (enewsletters.ziffdavis.com). An old friend and fellow LISP hacker fired off a rebuttal that began, “I guess the industry will just never learn.” Can he persuade you? My friend objects to the suggestion that […]

During lunch at the International Python Developers Conference this month, I found myself at a table with several application developers who work for medical service providers. We were talking about handheld devices, following that mornings announcement that a version of the Python scripting language was now running on Palm OS. I suggested that it was […]

Network convergence will be driven to its next level by the profit potential of high-value applications, not by network cost reduction. So said Intel Vice President and Dialogic President Howard Bubb in his keynote speech at this months Computer Telephony Expo in Los Angeles. “If you just tie things together with gateways,” Bubb told his […]

When the Napster online file-sharing service was ordered March 5 to block the exchange of copyrighted material, a Los Angeles radio station called me to ask what people would do next. The interviewer seemed to expect a list of other music-sharing Web sites, but the essence of my answer was that digital music is now […]

Announcing the formation of the Python Software Foundation, the inventor of the popular Python scripting language welcomed this month more than 300 attendees to the Ninth International Python Conference in Long Beach, Calif. The foundation “starts life with a nice collection of intellectual property,” said Python progenitor and conference chairman Guido van Rossum in his […]

Food gets eaten. Machines wear out. Software lasts forever. Unlike other commodities, which get consumed (directly or indirectly) in the course of producing other goods, software—at some point—becomes good enough to keep. (I realize this is speculative, but work with me. It could happen.) What could frighten a software developer more than satisfied buyers, once […]

In the early days of air travel, danger and glamour went hand in hand with the novelty of the experience. But as jet-set exclusivity turned to tourist-class ubiquity, passengers came to take safety for granted. So, too, must the security of e-business transactions cease to be a high-profile customer concern; only then will the online […]

Go to any coders convocation, such as this months International Conference for Java Development in New York, where I gave a keynote address, and the textbooks table is guaranteed to have a crowd. Programmers read. Search the Amazon. com site for books that relate to Java, and you—ll find 1,398 matches—at least, as of the […]

About 2 inches long, this chunk of plastic looks as if it came from a Cracker Jack box, but its actually the remote control that comes as standard equipment with an Olympus C-3030Z digital camera. Apart from its practical value (no more rushing to get into a group photo before the timer fires), its a […]

Earth, like the larger planets, has a complex system of rings. Being blessed with intelligent life (or at least, complex, tool-using life), Earth didnt need natural processes to create those ornaments: Earths rings are man-made litter. Legacy software, especially the vast installed base of DOS-era code thats been carried along to Windows 9x, reminds me […]