Peter Coffee

With budgets largely flat or even still shrinking, IT professionals are looking for value at every tier of the enterprise stack—but theyre not making radical changes to core technologies. Members of eWEEKs Corporate Partner Advisory Board are eyeing the potential of new technologies and tools, but theyre also polishing their political skills to build momentum […]

The prospect of putting surveillance cameras on high-crime streets in Los Angeles is unappealing, it seems, to Ramona Ripston, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Southern California. Ripston was a guest last month on Pasadenas KPCC radio program “Air Talk” when she invoked “the expectation of privacy” that a person should have […]

Its rarely a term of praise to compare an IT system to a quilt. In an IT context, I usually see the “q” word with a prefix like “patchwork” or even “crazy”—labeling a system as combining all sorts of independently developed elements with no coherent overall design. With several quilters in my family, though, I […]

Octobers advent of wireless weapons suggests a new and scary meaning of the phrase “disruptive technology.” The month began with a worldwide wave of cell phone blockers appearing in churches, theaters and university examination rooms. Things then took a turn for the absurd with the Oct. 19 shipment of a $15 key-chain-fob device that will […]

I was talking with someone about this years presidential election, when I said that it was silly for polls to report anything other than predictions of the Electoral College votes. I argued that a poll purporting to measure, for example, “a 51-to-49 lead” for one candidate versus another was meaningless—since theres no such thing as […]

Enterprise storage might look like a problem thats been solved in principle, requiring only continued refinement of proven technologies combined with the careful management thats needed to minimize costly data glut. IT system builders must look ahead, however, to the dead end on the path of hard disk evolution and start to think now about […]

From a long tradition of unfortunate code names comes “Paparazzi,” the family name announced last week for a line of wireless data devices from the dynamic duo of Microsoft and Swatch. Whether you like the name or hate it—my stand, Im sure, is apparent—these devices represent more than their obvious challenges to developers. I have […]

People resent involuntary risks. In studies of the unconscious trade-off thats made between acceptable risk and reward, it appears that an imposed risk seems roughly a thousand times worse than the same risk assumed by choice. If information systems designers dont know this or dont care, then they will build systems that people dislike and […]

Few phrases have seized enterprise mind share to the same degree as “service-oriented architecture,” or SOA. Buyers want to spend money building SOAs, and vendors want to position themselves as being part of those plans. As is so often the case, its enterprise developers who are on the grinding edge of the resulting phenomenon: Its […]

Free and nearly infinite bandwidth sounds like a futurists dream, but its almost the present-day reality of dark fiber—vast numbers of fiber-optic channels in the ground but as yet unlit by lasers and network protocol encoders. Combined with the plummeting price and improving interoperability of midtier CWDM (Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing) hardware, dark fiber is […]