Peter Coffee

On this past Friday morning, one headline at the Cryptonomicon.net site read, “Text of Bill Gates RSA Keynote Available.” Running down the left margin of that page were Google-generated sponsored links, including “Automatic gates”; “Iron gates and fence, no welding”; even “Custom aluminum gates.” If I were paying for one of those supposedly context-driven links […]

With open-source eclipse gaining ground as a foundation for nonpartisan software development, SlickEdit Studio 2.0 from SlickEdit Inc. demonstrates the opportunities and challenges that Eclipse presents to toolmakers and their customers. The versatility and power of SlickEdits proven source code editor find a comfortable new home in the Eclipse integrated environment, and the included GNU […]

Adobes FrameMaker 7.1 offers corporate librarians an expanded arsenal of tools for two-way migration between XML repositories and publication-quality layouts. The January update addresses a weakness in the promise of two-way XML capability that I noted following the May 2002 release of FrameMaker 7.0. Unfortunately, Version 7.1s interoperability with Microsofts Word continues to disappoint, and […]

I just turned on my electric shaver by dialing my cell phone. This was not a Stupid Bluetooth Trick. I just happened to notice my Norelcos battery lights blinking when I put the phone down on my desk at the end of a call. I found that if I made the phone ring, I could […]

Even free-trade advocates are starting to tiptoe around the subject of tech-job outsourcing. In a presidential election year, its dangerous to suggest that the overseas export of any voters job is a long-term gain for the U.S. economy. But for IT pros, the important trend is not the loss of jobs in slinging code or […]

An e-mail application is the hub of many users lives, especially in the workplace, with action items coming in and work going out through that universal connector to the world. Because it has to handle anything, an e-mail client indiscriminately accepts just about anything, hence our problems with mail-borne malware. Since its not an integral […]

Wireless links and cheap processing power make mobile robots increasingly practical for industry and public-safety applications. Originally inspired by the fictional R2-D2 “droid” of the “Star Wars” movies, iRobot co-founder Helen Greiner now equips U.S. troops in Iraq with battlefield-grade PackBot units that can be thrown through a window to explore a potentially booby-trapped building. […]

At last weeks OReilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, two of the most concrete sessions dealt with some of the threats—whether merely commercial, or actually dangerous or criminal—that face forthcoming products and services. Monday offered a half-day tutorial on reverse engineering by Andrew Huang, author of “Hacking the Xbox,” whose work I profiled in […]

Utility computing, the IT vendor pitch of choice for selling more hardware and services this year, is often misperceived—or actually misrepresented—as either a technology or a business arrangement. Its true that the utility model is enabled by new technologies and that it promotes the development of innovative service provider relationships. However, utility computing itself, whether […]

When medical imagery data created explosive growth in demand for digital storage, Project Manager Midori Kawahara, of the British Columbia Cancer Agency, needed prompt and reliable access to those files for doctors and patients throughout that Canadian province. In the subsequent year and a half, 5 terabytes of online capacity—about 1.7 terabytes of data with […]