Peter Coffee

SQL Anywhere 10, whose Beta code eWEEK Labs looked at this past April, is now on my test bench in the form that buyers will see in September—and it shows the results of the three-year effort thats gone into updating iAnywhere Solutions flagship product. My review of SQL Anywhere 10 will appear at about the […]

When a complex system is finally deployed, the last thing that its financiers want to hear is that its costs have barely begun to take flight. The time to think about your next-generation system, though, is certainly no later than the day that the current state of the art goes live—and there are good reasons […]

As I walked into the lobby of the San Francisco Hilton last Wednesday, it certainly didnt feel like the dog days of ITs summer. The hotel was hosting the Shared Insights conference on Customer Self Service technology and practice, where I gave an afternoon session on security issues for customer- and partner-facing sites—which I summarized […]

When president Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair got caught with their microphones on in July in St. Petersburg, Russia, The New York Times blogger Virginia Heffernan posted a clip of CNN video that included their conversation on the soundtrack. Most of the subsequent comments posted on The Times site concerned peoples thoughts on […]

Were coming up on the seventh anniversary of John Hennessys clarion call to coders, telling them that their skills are exhibiting a slower rate of improvement than the hardware that one might think would take longer to turn over. The Stanford University professor, a pioneer of early RISC chip design, gave a stirring keynote speech […]

It cant be much fun to be a vendor of a mainstream desktop operating system. On any given day, one might face reports of a new security vulnerability. One might be accused of harboring, or even authoring, spyware. One might hear complaints that ones pace of innovation had slowed, with more time elapsing between less […]

When I heard last week that Oracle is “losing patience” with key providers of virtualization technology, I confess that my first reaction was something like, “Whats to lose?” Ive never thought of patience as Oracles defining characteristic, and I say that more as compliment than as critique. The company has always struck me as having […]

Hewlett-Packards new wireless data chip, the so-called Memory Spot that the company disclosed in a press conference in July, squeezes a remarkable number of mistakes into a space about the size of a grain of rice. Im not talking about the chips ability to perform its intended function. Im sure that HPs legendary research skills […]

At eWEEK Labs, we know Hewlett-Packard, and we know Mercury Interactive. Soon, well need to know the combination of the two beyond just the sum of the parts, following next quarters consummation of a $4.5 billion cash transaction that will fold Mercury into the HP Software business unit. Much has been said about the companies […]

Last week found me (briefly) in Minneapolis to keynote the Agile 2006 International Conference that addressed many aspects of agile software development. In some ways, the conference organizers made my task more difficult by recognizing in the conference charter the need to look at more than tools and methodologies: Their broad net encompassed “techniques and […]