Peter Coffee

The Bernard M. Gordon Prize, presented last month for the first time by the National Academy of Engineering (www.nae.edu), recognizes the need to build bridges between engineers and the disciplines that surround them. Its a gold medal and a $500,000 cash award, the latter divided between the recipient and his educational institution—for the prize is […]

We amateur astronomers have a particular fondness for the phrase “order of magnitude.” For us, merely agreeing on the number of digits in a number is often a major step toward consensus. I bristled, therefore, when the president of Reactive Network Solutions abused this meaningful and valuable expression. Discussing DDoS (distributed-denial-of-service) attacks, Reactives Edward Komissarchik […]

Java, once the latest cool thing, has matured into a key enterprise building block. That solid status should only increase, even with Microsoft Corp.s .Net looming in the rearview mirror, thanks to several important security attributes—not least, the greater maturity—of the Java platform and the technologies that surround it. Thanks in large part to Microsofts […]

When I posted my review of Microsofts Visual Studio .Net on our Web site, I included an interactive poll to learn more about your interests and concerns. (You can review many of our poll results at www.eweek.com/poll_archive.) I asked readers to tell me what gave them greatest pause as they contemplated the climb up the […]

Ok, we admit it: our own eWeek online polls omit a crucial datum by not showing the number of responses from which the percentage scores are calculated. Review our more mature data sets at www.eweek.com/poll_archive. And if youre not sure how to estimate the uncertainty that you should attach to your own statistics, check out […]

An aggrieved eWeek reader wants to know why hardware vendors waste their money—not to mention their customers time—by merely going through the motions of trying to solve a product problem. “I sent in an e-mail request for a fix to a printer driver last week,” his e-mail began. “The first three solutions Ive rejected, since […]

I was looking over recent changes to Java and Visual Basic, and I found myself thinking about the meaning of the word, “assert.” Its not an academic question. Names matter. What we call something says a lot about what we think it is, how it works, and how it is different from other things. A […]

With the formal presentation of our eWEEK eXcellence Awards taking place in Boston this week, Id like to call your attention to some of the outstanding entries that didnt receive Finalist or Winner honors—but that still deserve your consideration. If I could have expanded the excellence category list along only one dimension, I would have […]

When Microsoft announces that it will stop writing code for a month, devoting its attention to a bottom-up review of what it ships now, I hope that every organization is inspired to similar measures. Reading your current production code and asking, “Why does it do that?” is just the initial goal that may expose a […]

In my last newsletter, I discussed the limits of the Common Language Infrastructure at the core of the .Net promise of language-neutral programming; some readers accused me of beating up on Microsoft without any real reason. Within that same week, however, I discovered that the limits of the CLI are even tighter than I had […]