Peter Coffee

Lots of folks get all misty-eyed these days about the power of computers to help us express ourselves. The engineer in me recoils, though, from the use of so much power to wait for a user to think of something to say—as the 1GHz CPU of my laptop is waiting for me, right now, to […]

The need for accurate measurement and process control was a pervasive theme at this months Nanotech conference and trade show in Anaheim, Calif. I spoke there with Matthew Laudon, executive director of conference organizer Nano Science and Technology Institute, about the nanotech communitys convergence on this concern. In early years, Laudon said, there was much […]

Science fiction sometimes offers oddly flawed images of the future. Robert Heinleins 1953 novel “Starman Jones,” for example, depicted faster-than-light starship travel—with flight deck officers toggling binary numbers directly into their computers, using values they looked up in books. Heinleins scenario wasnt just an amusing failure of foresight. It says a lot about peoples expectations […]

With application developers bearing a growing share of the enterprise IT security burden, its necessary for development-tool budgets to provide for the scrutiny of code and support of rigorous process, as well as boosting traditional measures of developer productivity. Software quality assurance tools such as Parasofts Jtest 6.0 are adding security rules to their portfolios […]

Its been 10 years since IT gadfly Stan Kelly-Bootle called the PC spreadsheet “the Uzi of creative corporate accounting,” but too many decisions are still being made on the basis of point-value estimates at the hopeful end of the error range. Decisioneerings Crystal Ball 7.1, released earlier this spring, eliminates the excuses for getting along […]

If you look at the shape of a mountain range, its often difficult to tell whether the image spans just a few hundred feet or hundreds of miles. Any section of the shape has the same sorts of wiggles as the larger context from which it came. This is called “self-similarity,” and I felt as […]

Enterprise application developers are squarely in the cross hairs of the next generation of IT system attacks. As generic infrastructure security and user awareness issues are increasingly addressed, the most dangerous remaining and newly arising vulnerabilities are those in the applications that define any modern organizations procedures and controls. When perimeter security is lax, attackers […]

It was bad enough for retailer TigerDirect to find itself displaced in search engine rankings by Apples Mac OS X 10.4, with its own well-promoted Tiger nickname. (District Court to TigerDirect: “Get over it.”) Things are much worse this morning for anyone other than Microsoft and Sun with a pitch to make for federated identity […]

You couldnt choreograph a more ironic pas de deux than the debut of Apples OS X 10.4, with its Web-intensive Dashboard of data-tracking “widgets,” followed just nine days later by a multihour outage of several Google services. The first event illustrated, not just with a developer-conference demo but in an actual shipping product, the difference […]

Congratulations! Youve proved you could do it. Now you get to do it again and again and again … Thats the realization thats starting to sink in as enterprises come to terms with the success—which may not be the best word—of their initial completions of Sarbanes-Oxley Act audits. As the Greek King Pyrrhus said circa […]