Peter Coffee

The only real problem I have with Sybase iAnywheres December 4 announcement of its RFID Anywhere 3.0 is that the products name is much narrower than its true scope. In a conversation that I had last week with Martyn Mallick, the companys director of RFID and Mobile Solutions, I suggested that they might do well […]

There are detailed guidelines that developers can follow to ensure their compatibility with Microsofts forthcoming Windows Vista. Many of those instructions can usefully be condensed to one simple statement: This operating system is large and in charge. PC programmers have spent two decades developing bad habits along with their clever applications. The PCs first decade […]

Gandhi is said to have told his followers, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” When it comes to ensuring network integrity, were moved to a bleaker view: “First it seems impossible, then its obscure, then its trivial, then its impossible after all.” Thats our reaction […]

A respected PC industry innovator has made his opinion clear: “The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago.” That judgment was delivered in 1996 by a fellow named Steve Jobs—whos still involved in the business, I believe, at a company that some would call one of Microsofts most significant competitors. Does […]

When our family room PC swung at its third and final strike a year ago, with failure to boot signaling the “Youre out!” instance of needing to reinstall Windows 98, I decided to get my teenage sons something more modern than the 400MHz Compaq Presario that had been their workhorse for seven years. An iMac […]

Even Microsoft partner companies acknowledge the substantial lag time for adopting new versions of Office. The president of one Virginia-based systems integration company was merely admitting what everyone knows when he told the Redmond Channel Partner newsletter, “A lot of [his customers] still use Office 97 and it works fine.” Enterprise IT pros who serve […]

Youd think that the deep-dyed techies of eWeek Labs would have been pleased by Novembers mainstream media coverage of popularly priced desktop supercomputing. Unfortunately, the supercomputer in question was Sonys PlayStation 3, and that coverage had more to do with stalled waiting lines outside big-box stores than with stalled instruction pipelines in the Sony game […]

Announcements this week from Swedens Telelogic and Alfresco Software in San Francisco address both ends of the process that brings the next generation of Web-based applications to reality. Telelogic announced Nov. 27 its release of Version 3.0 of its Tau model-driven design tool. I had a chance to review the details of the new version […]

There are detailed guidelines that developers can follow to assure their compatibility with Microsofts forthcoming Windows Vista. Many of those instructions can usefully be condensed to one simple statement: This operating system is large and in charge. PC programmers have spent two decades developing bad habits along with their clever applications. The PCs first decade […]

Its no longer possible to point at a rack of hardware—or even point at the door of a server room—and say, “My application runs in there.” Distributed systems may rely on multiple data centers, supply chain partners and third-party service providers to create and maintain key elements of an application or its performance-improving infrastructure. It […]