Peter Coffee

Bad things happen when ideal IT concepts bump into the realities of imperfect hardware. This time, Im talking about the slow-motion train wreck of BPL (broadband over power lines), a basically bad idea thats now the subject of a newly launched IEEE standard process. With lots of people wanting its benefits and few people understanding […]

If we dont make substantial gains in our practices of preserving, finding, and reusing code, we wont keep pace with the opportunities presented by continuing hardware improvement. More devices to do things, and more kinds of connection to share things, will be unfinished stories of what-might-have-been if they require vast new coding efforts—testing, deploying, and […]

When users and managers misunderstand what technology can do, IT architects wind up with two problems. The first arises when people overestimate the state of the art and expect more than any IT department can deliver. The second arises when people dont realize how much a technology has improved, or how quickly its still improving, […]

When an application depends on third-party data, a developer cant expect to redesign those data structures to meet the applications needs. GPS data, for example, is one size fits all. If you want to use GPS-based location data, youll either be relying on someone elses firmware, or interpreting the Global Positioning System data structures yourself: […]

Is enterprise IT management becoming the realm of the contracts administrator rather than the technologist? For the last several years, Ive been thinking IT looks more like corporate telecommunications management, with its focus on service relationships rather than product acquisitions and deployments. Now, however, Im having second thoughts: This may be a seriously incomplete perspective […]

Its great for users, although its traumatic for vendors, when information-based devices evolve from fixed-function appliances into open application platforms. Flexibility always wins in the long run, but an open platform needs to offer its users new applications all the time and also needs to give those users updates to the platform itself at critical […]

When someone asks where Java technology is going, its reasonable to ask in reply, “Which Java do you mean?” The attractive upsides and the offsetting issues are quite distinct for Java the deployment platform, Java the application interface portfolio and Java the object-oriented programming language. Each of these three aspects of the Java brand presents […]

Advanced interactive programming environments, such as LISP machines or Smalltalk workstations, were admired during the late 1980s for their extraordinary productivity, but they were also tarred with the brush of being impractically lavish in their demands for processor power and memory capacity and were considered suitable only for research environments. Moores Law trends during the […]

Only Visual Basic has been addressing the mass market of the corporate developer,” said Sun Microsystems Inc.s executive vice president of software, John Loiacono, in his remarks at the recent JavaOne conference, while introducing the production release of Suns Creator product in its Java Studio line of developer tools. Creator, a drag-and-drop tool using new […]

Far too much of whats on the Web is only tested for use with Internet Explorer, with only casual interest in fixing any problems that might arise with other tools. I find these IE-specific sites when my usual browser, Mozilla, or my backup browser, Opera, arent able to load a page. When that happens, if […]