Peter Coffee

The long-awaited debut of Microsofts Visual Studio Team Server, released in March, came just in time to fill the companys hand and let it lay down VSTS as a nominee in this years sixth annual eWEEK Excellence Awards. Named in April as an Excellence Awards finalist in the Application Development category, VSTS is part of […]

With todays release of the beta code of SQL Anywhere 10, Sybases iAnywhere subsidiary doesnt send one message. It sends four—and with the sun soon to set on tax season 2005, Id like to add one of my own. Message 1: Progress is parallel. Version 10 acknowledges the multi-CPU power thats now found in laptops […]

Considering how well our brains handle spatial relationships, its unfortunate that most information systems make little use of that ability to let us find patterns or anomalies in data. I first wrote that sentence as “its surprising and unfortunate,” but on reflection I had to admit that its not surprising—because, on the programming side, spatial […]

Red Hats acquisition of JBoss, like any good story, offers interesting views from at least three angles. The first angle is what it says about the industry. The second angle is what it says about the technology. The third angle is what it says about the craft of being a software development professional. What this […]

Its good news when distributed computing platforms let you allocate resources as easily as a teenager manages the playlist on an iPod. Its great news when that distributed solution gets important improvements to scalability, manageability and compatibility with heterogeneous development environments. Thats what were seeing on April 10 from Gigaspaces with its release of its […]

Its a sign of competent public relations when a companys actions are covered as news. Its brilliant PR, though, when those stories focus on the topic that a company would rather have covered, instead of paying uncomfortable attention to what a company hopes well ignore. This brings us to the subject of the latest delay […]

The transformation thats taken place in the market for development environments is also gaining momentum in operating environments. In much the same way that Borland elected earlier this year to move its distinctive life-cycle strengths to the playing field defined by Eclipse, virtualization technology provider Virtual Iron announces this week its Version 3 platform with […]

If this issue of eWEEK were dated April 1, you might think that Im just making up this news hook. Even in this less frivolous time frame, you might think that the flowers that bloom in the spring have been replaced in my garden by exotic varieties of hallucinogenic mushroom. I give you leave, therefore, […]

My blog post from late last week says most of what I believe can be said, and should be said, about last weeks disclosure of further delays in the broad consumer release of Windows Vista. Ill have further comments, for April 3rd, on the dramatic lowering of ambitions for the product itself thats taken place—compared […]

Id pay to listen to any conversation including Lawrence Lessig (a Stanford Law School professor and widely published scholar of copyright issues) and Greg Papadopoulos (Sun Microsystems CTO). Receiving a free transcript of their chat about digital content, courtesy of Suns midmonth Boardroom Minutes letter, is proof that e-mail is sometimes worth the nuisance. That […]