Peter Coffee

This week’s sold-out Eclipse Summit Europe, in Esslingen, Germany, will include a presentation on the Topcased project, an effort driven by the French National Center for Aeronautical and Space Technology Research to construct “an open-source CASE environment [to] perpetuate the methods and tools for critical embedded system development.” The goals of Topcased include “high-quality open-source […]

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. I’ve 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 […]

Looking at the prospect of a Google office suite, and at how that package might fare in competition with Microsoft’s Office, requires at least a five-point examination. A credible competitor for Microsoft’s Office must offer good answers to questions concerning application design, user training, enterprise process customization, data control and client computer support. Whatever Microsoft’s […]

As I walked into the lobby of the San Francisco Hilton last Wednesday, it certainly didn’t feel like the dog days of IT’s summer. The hotel was hosting the Shared Insights conference on Customer Self Service technology and practice, where I gave an afternoon session on security issues for customer- and partner-facing sites—which I summarized […]

It’s often said, and I agree, that “‘Better’ is the enemy of ‘good enough’”–but I’m not prepared to declare myself the loyal ally of one or the other. There are times when I’m prepared to hold the line against the assault of “better,” but there are also times when “good enough” really is not. Developer […]

To exploit emerging java-based technologies, developers enjoy an expanding arsenal of tools that increasingly rest on one of two open-source foundations: Eclipse and NetBeans. This year’s JavaOne conference in San Francisco marked significant advances for both of these developer offerings, and eWEEK Labs found proponents of both efforts in surprising agreement that their work is […]

At the apogee of software challenges are the rigorous demands of robotic deep-space missions. NASA’s July 4 success in hitting a bullet with a bullet—specifically, hitting a comet nucleus with a probe about the size of a coffee table at a relative speed of 23,000 mph—updates the archive of these high-profile tests. Ironically, such missions […]

If it’s not what you do for a living, it’s something you should think about paying someone else to do. Configuring, maintaining and updating a development team’s life-cycle management tool set seems like an excellent example, and Rally Software Development Corp.’s forthcoming Rally Release 5 looks like an attractive option for improved process quality — […]

During a Ziff Davis Media Inc. eSeminar on desktop prospects for 64-bit computing March 9, attendees wondered what they’d get from the advent of Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s AMD64 or Intel Corp.’s EM64T machines with their 64-bit superset of the familiar x86 platform. Windows users at the seminar learned of Microsoft Corp.’s March 3 promise […]

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. […]

When application developers open the stark black box containing the four CDs of Apple Computer Inc.’s “Panther” OS, they’ll get more than the newly polished end-user experience of what’s already the world’s most widely used version of workstation Unix. That fourth CD contains Xcode 1.0, Apple’s integrated development workbench for AppleScript, Java, and native C/C++/Objective-C […]