Peter Coffee

I have good news and bad news. Recordable DVDs are about to double their capacity, with a further sixfold increase around the corner. Is that the good news or the bad? In my opinion, its both. Ill start with the good news. Current DVD technology is underexploited by first-generation recorders, which use only one of […]

JDeveloper 10g, Oracle Corp.s latest developer tool set, is a complete and responsive Java-based environment that eWEEK Labs ranks second to none. Its flexible licensing model is the finishing touch that earns it an enthusiastic Analysts Choice appellation. Click here to read the full review of JDeveloper 10g. 2 JDeveloper 10g, Oracle Corp.s latest developer […]

Will there ever be a point when it seems vaguely quaint to call oneself an application developer? Will knowledge of programming fundamentals soon be required, and assumed, in any job worth having—in the same way, for example, that reading and writing are taken for granted today as basic skills? The investments we make in training […]

Running Oracle Corp.s Database 10g on hardware ranging from high-end workstations to field workers laptop PCs, the Region 5 Superfund Division of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is integrating terabytes of images and measurements into efficient, comprehensive support tools for a growing range of tasks. Whether theyre analyzing pollution or developing responses to possible terrorist […]

“You have to swallow the red pill” and confront IT security challenges at the highest levels of enterprise management, said Moses De Los Santos, a vice president in the SSP-Litronic unit of SSP Solutions Inc., in Irvine, Calif. That doesnt mean throwing technology at the situation, which is costly but still politically easier than solving […]

Earlier this month, I convened a panel discussion on spam at the Los Angeles debut of Ziff Davis Medias Business4Site conferences. In preparing my charts for that session, I was forced to consider just how bad the situation has become for enterprise e-mail users during the last several weeks. I found data suggesting that some […]

If youre making decisions today about how youll use Java for enterprise projects in the year to come, read on: Your 15 minutes of fame may be at hand. With Comdex going into hibernation, JavaOne is now the trade show that generates my biggest incoming surge of requests from vendors seeking show-floor meetings. Theres got […]

I spend most of my life on the demand side, rather than the supply side, of the IT business; this made for an interesting change of pace when I was asked to keynote a morning seminar on Entrepreneurial Opportunities in Software for the Caltech/MIT Enterprise Forum, a joint venture of those two distinguished schools that […]

In consumer electronics, digital convergence makes multifunction products ridiculously cheap to build. Designers no longer seem to think twice about attempting high levels of integration—it just sort of happens. What concerns me is the all-too-easy extension of this thinking into enterprise environments that ought to have different priorities. Its compellingly tempting to hang a Christmas […]

My middle-school sons both want to see the movie, “I, Robot,” when it debuts next month. Fortunately, theres time enough between the last day of school and the first day of the movies opening to enforce our family rule: If you want to see the movie, you have to read the book first. And every […]