Peter Coffee

The Web-browser actions of “back” and “reload,” along with a history of visited locations, have become widespread user interface metaphors. Browser-style buttons invite us to explore file systems, review online documents and access digital media—whether or not were on a network and whether were viewing resources that are local or remote. It figures that just […]

The problem with having data and the analytic power to crunch it is that options and policies that were previously infeasible can suddenly become quite practical—but also, perhaps, controversial. For example, California regulators and insurance companies are now in the throes of an argument about the variables that ought to go into calculation of automobile […]

My top-tier task this week is a barely-touch-the-ground visit to Minneapolis, there to keynote the Agile 2006 International Conference that addresses many aspects of agile software development. Prior to the event, Ive had the privilege of an early look at a survey of the state of agile practice adoption, conducted during the past year by […]

Microsofts July 19 announcement, enumerating 12 principles for guiding future Windows platform development, amounts to a public confession that “Yes, weve stopped beating the wife.” Remember all those impassioned statements that Windows was a creative work whose integrity needed to be preserved? Remember the insistence in testimony (here as a PDF) before Congress that Windows […]

When I blogged last week on the end, at last, of further Microsoft updates to Win 9x, the spectrum of reactions ranged from resignation (“Well keep on keeping on with 98SE until the last electron dies”) to contempt (“If you use a Win 98 machine on legacy hardware, you are slow and inefficient”). Most noteworthy, […]

When economists call something scarce, they dont mean that theres too little to go around. A good is economically scarce if lowering its price would increase its consumption. If something is scarce in the informal sense, with people unable to get as much as theyd like to buy at the current price, then the price […]

When eWEEK Labs encounters what seems like an especially clever trade name, it sometimes turns out that were working too hard: What looked to us like an ingenious pun is often unintended. Were fairly certain, though, that Klocwork, in Burlington, Mass., intended its name to be a double play on words. It combines the abbreviation […]

When desktop computing resources were measured in tens of kilobytes of memory, and processors clocked in MHz rather than GHz, the attention of software developers was appropriately focused on making their code small and fast. A modern PC offers developers an embarrassment of hardware riches that should ease these low-level concerns, but the growing complexity […]

If you happened to be monitoring conversations in my home, youd often hear the phrase “lying robot.” We dont have humanoid machines doing housework or taking part in conversation, but when our dishwasher says that it will be done in 20 minutes, and 10 minutes later it says 19 minutes, we know its actually going […]

Were barely past the halfway point of 2006, but the most-cited article that eWEEK Labs will produce all year may already be possible to predict. The Labs deep-digging comparison of multiple top-to-bottom IT stacks will please the pragmatists and prickle the purists of both the open-source and proprietary-software persuasions. Im tempted to eschew summarization in […]