Peter Coffee

Application developers have been fighting an escalating war against chaos in IT stacks of ever-growing complexity. Utility computing, with its highly distributed systems, must make a final assault. The problem surfaced in 1965, when the Univac 1108A appeared on the scene as the first multiprocessor computer. That machine introduced a new low-level computer instruction—the test-and-set […]

Its easy to think of source code as a product. Energetic and skillful people go into a room; tired people and lines of code come out. People routinely measure and even agonize over the lines of code produced per unit of programmer effort or calendar time. They truly seem to feel that writing more code […]

I thought that everyone had read, by now, Robert Fulghums classic book, “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten”—newly released in an expanded 15th anniversary edition, which Amazon.com unaccountably failed to mention when I searched that site for “kindergarten” combined with the authors name. Many thanks to the readers of the e-mail […]

When technologies move from the laboratory to the enterprise IT stack, they must make the transition from dancing bear to chorus line. Research projects can claim success if they dance at all, whether or not they dance well, but an enterprise solution must dance consistently—and well enough to go almost unnoticed in the background of […]

The cover of the Jan. 15 issue of the prestigious science journal Nature is striking. Viewed from above, a tennis player swings her racket toward a contour map of concentric ovals, representing her estimate of the location of the ball, as it streaks toward her. The caption archly inquires, “Anyone for bayesian integration?” If I […]

Grid computing is an overnight success that has been almost four decades in the making. Last months announcement of the WS-Resource framework, enabling grid resource management with standard Web services protocols, completes a convergence that began with the 1965 introduction of the first multiprocessor computer. Libraries full of bleeding-edge research have since paved grids way, […]

Every few years, I find it worth my time to re-read Ken Thompsons August 1984 article, “Reflections on Trusting Trust,” based on his 1983 Turing Award lecture that described what he called “the cutest program I ever wrote.” The lecture does not merely describe the anatomy of a clever hack: it demonstrates the need for […]

The prolonged course correction at Eastman Kodak, whose cutback of 22,000 jobs in the past five years will be followed—as announced late last month—by the loss of 15,000 more by 2006, is a powerful statement of the sea change thats taken place in imaging technology and practice. The much-hyped tip-over in consumer camera sales, with […]

Technology transformation can bring forth life in two different ways. The big-bang plan puts everything in place and only then says, “Let there be light.” The primordial-soup plan takes whatever happens to be on hand and jolts it with the lightning bolts of innovation and competitive self-interest. Mere mortals have a better shot at success […]

When people want to tell me what theyre against, I usually counter by asking what theyre for. Only in politics can we say that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”: in technology, its much more difficult to find compatible friendships when the only common ground is a shared dislike. Unsolicited commercial e-mail, or […]