Peter Coffee

When I look back at 2003, I expect to find that my two most valuable days of the year were spent at Septembers Messaging Anti-Abuse Conference in Santa Barbara, Calif. No other everyday IT issue overshadows the waste of time and money, and the threats to system integrity and availability, that have come with this […]

Building software and systems that actually work is a battle that needs to be fought with rifles, not with shotguns. The targets of developer effort need to be identified precisely and picked off positively, leaving not a single problem behind to destroy the reliability of the system. To think about software problems in terms of […]

If you want to know where applications and platforms will enable us to go in the future, look at the best-paved paths of software development today. For example, Borlands new C#Builder and the development life-cycle tools that come with it will go a long way in helping developers along the road to the Microsoft .Net […]

We can probably agree that software components are more useful when they can discover each others capabilities, and can negotiate with each other to do things that their authors didnt have to anticipate. Without this capability, its hard to see how grid computing systems can become more than the sum of their parts, or how […]

With wi-fi access points projected to double by 2005 and a pro- jected 9 million users before the end of this year, the electromagnetic environment is becoming much more energetic. These Gartner Inc. projections beg the question, however, of popular acceptance of radio- frequency energy in the workplace and other venues. Cellular telephone energy, with […]

Its been a bad month. weve learned of critical loopholes in recent versions of Windows and in even more versions of Microsoft Word. A month like this—a month of drawing up budgets for many—gives IT managers fair warning that future problems of this kind may well occur and that its part of their job to […]

When it comes to computer and network security, Im moving toward the doctrine adopted by Sangamon Taylor for nighttime bicycle safety. “I assume Im wearing fluorescent clothes, and theres a million-dollar bounty going to the first driver who manages to hit me. And I ride on that assumption,” says Neal Stephensons fictional toxic-waste vigilante in […]

Solid-state memory cards are getting faster and tougher, enabling their use in more severe conditions and for more demanding applications. Last month, SanDisk started shipping Ultra II CompactFlash cards. The Ultra II line, 50 percent faster than the companys previous Ultra cards, promises write speeds of 9MB per second and read speeds of 10MB per […]

With powerful and intuitive tools for business analysts, technical professionals, and math and science educators, Maple 9 lives up to its 20-year heritage of extending the frontiers of numeric and symbolic calculation. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Maple 9 Growing far beyond its 20-year-old roots as a symbolic-math computing tool, Maple 9 combines enhanced industrial-strength number- crunching power […]

The challenge of writing software lies in figuring out how to do things. But sometimes, the best enterprise software is distinguished not for what it does but for what it doesnt. Rights management features in end-user applications, such as those apparently planned for a forthcoming version of Microsoft Office, are the kind of technical achievement […]