Peter Coffee

My letter of last week, urging that systems be designed to doubt themselves, generated a surprising amount of reader mail for a week when so many offices were closed and so many people were taking time off. Three themes emerged. i) Systems cant be designed to be idiot-proof, at least not at any reasonable cost, […]

My son looked at the minuscule trunk of the rental car, then at our stack of luggage—made larger than usual by an extra suitcase full of Christmas gifts, on their way to their place below the tree at his grandparents house. Politely, but firmly, he said, “No way, Dad.” And something was clearly wrong, because […]

Those who dare to make year-ahead predictions should remember Bill Gates accurate 1997 observation: “There is a tendency to overestimate how much technology will change in the next two years, and a similar tendency to underestimate how much things will change in the next 10 years.” Most predictions of whats ahead look wildly optimistic 12 […]

Every December revisits the (mostly) good-natured debate over holiday letters: those page-length greetings, ranging in tone from a chatty but generic personal letter to a message from a corporate annual report, that families send along with their Christmas cards. If your stack of end-of-year greetings included, in between the cards from the Webers and the […]

Remember Robert McCloskey’s story of Homer Price and the doughnut machine? The thing made doughnuts beautifully, but they couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. Complications ensued, and elementary school teachers wound up with an example that they could use to teach principles of supply and demand. Homer and his Uncle Ulysses, just trying […]

Extensis Portfolio suite for digital asset management combines intuitive media storage and retrieval with cross-platform flexibility and enterprise-scale database handling. For Windows and Mac OS users, the $199.95 Portfolio client turns a disk full of photos into a readily searchable archive with extensive metadata capabilities. The 7.0.4 update, released last month, keeps the product abreast […]

Employers can make rules about technology use in the workplace, but they cant tell employees whats in style. Thats a problem as personal technology continues to evolve—from what we have on our desks to what we carry to meetings to what we wear all day. Science-fiction writers got there first. In March 1987, Analog magazine […]

Information technology has a well-hyped reputation for exponential rates of improvement, but productivity growth in delivering IT-enabled services has fallen short of whats been achieved in less glamorous sectors of the economy. As services come to dominate global markets, its critical for U.S. systems scientists and professionals to find ways to apply capital and technology […]

When information warfare experts want to set the proper base line for whats “secure,” they point out that the only completely protected machine is one thats disconnected from the network and preferably turned off. Application development security begins from an equally useless zero point: The only completely secure application is one that accepts no input […]

The eWEEK Excellence Awards for 2004 are now accepting entries. Developer productivity is critical to achieving next years IT goals, and developer acceptance is vital to the success of any IT platform, so I hope to see developer tools well represented in the field of entries that well be judging as the new year begins. […]