Peter Coffee

Parasofts Jtest 8 represents, I hope, a new trend in software developers testing tools—a shift in emphasis from merely impressive cleverness to actual development productivity improvement. Jtest 8s résumé includes a commendable slate of automated analyses for good Java practices. The products radar now detects course deviations in Hibernate, Struts, EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans), servlet, JSP […]

When Intel debuted the “Intel Inside” branding in 1991, the MBA side of my brain sounded alarms for all the PC makers whose short-sighted greed for co-marketing dollars overcame their common sense. Ive heard multibillion-dollar estimates for the brand-name equity value that those PC OEMs yielded to what had formerly been a back-door supplier of […]

I just ran across my charts from a talk that I gave in 1995 with the title “Futures of Computing.” I was struck by the differences between the 10-year forecasts that I made then and the capabilities (and price/performance ratios) that are actually available now. In my talk, I started with two data points for […]

The proliferation of parallel processing hardware is creating a fast-growing need for multithreading skills. A developer who cant write safe and efficient concurrent code may waste up to half the power of the dual-core CPUs already found in laptop PCs and up to three-quarters of the power of the quad-core CPUs that Intel announced it […]

The paradox of programmers tools is aptly captured by a passage from Neal Stephensons 1992 novel, Snow Crash, in a scene where a hacker is stranded on a life raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean — and thanks to the miracle of laptop computing, is hacking nonetheless. ““When hackers are hacking, they dont […]

The cracking of the German Enigma cryptosystem has inspired a host of books, including and sometimes combining both history and fiction. Its a compelling tale for technical professionals because that World War II effort required a combination of both brilliant people and breakthroughs in computational hardware. After seeing this past summer the Michael Apted movie […]

Continued controversy over U.S. military spending makes it a useful allegory of issues that arise in allocating IT resources. In the same way that defense planners find billions for high-tech systems but fall short in simple tasks like armoring soldiers, IT planners may be constructing vast new server farms that offer up key intellectual property […]

The impending demotion of Hewlett-Packard board chair Patricia Dunn, wholl step down from that post in January (although shell remain on the board), ought to trigger at least three separate conversations about the roles and mechanisms of information security in the enterprise and in any other organization that handles sensitive data. First, Dunn got in […]

In last weeks column, I started to build a bridge between the things that are working in online retail today and the changes that Id like to see tomorrow. This week, Id like to finish the thought. Last weeks column challenged online sellers to build the kind of site that they most fear. The site […]

At the time that Intel chose to explore the path that led to Itanium, the popular but complex x86 architecture was looking to many chip designers like a technical dead end. As things turned out, the admittedly twisty road to a 64-bit x86 was smoother and faster than it initially appeared, and it certainly led […]