The Northern Spy

May 1 2012

The Northern Spy — Of Tools and their Wielders

The Spy’s tools

provide this month’s entertainment, both for his consistency and their diversity. You see, his two sons recently had their birthdays, and predictably, they got tools. After all the well-equipped householder needs his drills, saws, screwdrivers, hammers, power strips, sockets, the box to organize it all, a good work bench and proper ladders. Now, no matter that one is a software engineer, and the other a high school math and history teacher–how else can they get jobs done around the house?

The Spy himself has built two houses for his family, helped construct a church, and assisted said sons and others in reno projects on various scales, particularly with electrical work. He’s also done not a little auto and tractor maintenance. So he’s acquired hand tools, power tools, air tools, and mechanic’s tools; tools for building, wrecking, and repairing, for house, car, lawn, and garden; tools for plumbing, electrical, framing, finish carpentry, drywall, siding, brick laying, floor installation, shelves, and woodwork. His parts drawers number in the hundreds, yet most projects do seem to require at least one trip to the hardware department. Buy a few extra of that oddball machine screw why not, just in case. But at that, his shop is modest, even for a hobbiest. Home made router table yes, shaper and planer no, small compressor yes, framing nail gun no, compound sliding mitre saw yes, floor mounted drill press no, portable table saw yes, but professional cabinet maker’s version no, small tractor and tiller yes, front end loader and harrower no.

Now, to the point. Why does he have seven kinds of hammer, five staple guns, four drills, a dozen or more saws in both hand and power, numerous chisels, and more screwdrivers than you can count? Because in tools, simplicity and specialization matter. A good professional’s tool does one or two jobs better than any known alternative. If you want to do something else, use another tool. You don’t use a ball peen hammer for framing, a staple gun to loosen bolts, a reciprocating saw to make fine cuts in mouldings, a quarter inch drive socket on wheel nuts, a large propane torch for soldering a circuit board, welder’s pliers to press ethernet outlets, a garden rake for grass, a chain saw on gyprock, a Robertson bit in a torx screw, or a fine knife as a screwdriver or prybar.

A hammer drill has a different problem domain than a brace and bit, an impact driver, or a wood drill. Ditto a laser level and a bullet level, a wood chisel and a cold chisel, a machine screw, gyprock screw, deck screw, and indoor wood screw, interior and exterior paint (and stain), a putty knife and a taping knife, a notched flooring mastic trowel and a bricklayerâ€™s trowel, a finishing nail, spiral nail, ring nail and a common spike (bright or galvanized)–never mind that a half inch number eight wood screw and a number seven metric five centimetre machine screw ain’t the same wee beastie as a self drilling cap-style sheet metal screw or a set screw, and a lag bolt is a screw that isn’t even called a screw.

Yes and there are dozens of types and grits of sandpaper, nearly a hundred varieties of screwdriver bit, and more than that of sockets, the latter coming in metric and SAE for numerous bolt head measurements, four drive sizes, at least four different points, two or more lengths, and both impact and non-impact rated. Throw in articulators, hex style bits, stars, extenders, adapters, half a dozen ratchet handles and a breaker bar or two, and you’ve overflowed the largest roller chest drawer. Moreover, there are many other kinds of wrenches, not to mention pliers. In his parts drawers, the Spy must have at least thirty kinds each of roll bar, key, cotter pin, and o-ring, and half a dozen spray heads for his pressure washer.

It should be obvious that

by contrast to the simple speciality tool, bit, or part that is best at its one (sub-)job, general-purpose multi-tools are things you slip in your pocket or glove compartment for quick-and-dirty work in emergencies or going camping. They don’t rate precious space in your tool belt or box for serious projects.

Equally obvious ought to be that having multiple programming languages does serve a purpose, despite appearing like a zoo to the historian of such matters. Fortran still has a following, if for no other reason than its extensive numerical analysis, linear algebra, and other mathematical libraries. Likewise APL/J for its plethora of built in operators. Despite the diminishing problem domain, PROLOG is still useful in AI, and simple languages like Pascal, Modula-2 and Java for teaching. There may be more functioning lines of code in COBOL than any other language, and people still use JCL and RPG.

Ada failed not because it came out of the military establishment, but for the same reason as PL/1. By trying to be all things to all people, it failed the test of a focused, and therefore useful tool. C++ has a similar problem, and is today used only because of its enormous installed base and because it grew into its unmanageable complexity. Had it begun where it is now, it wouldn’t have been accepted. Even a general purpose language ought to be simple to learn, teach, and use. It should at minimum be reasonably orthogonal, reasonably context free–for the lack of which VBA earns honours as the least well-defined notation of them all.

The same is true for our computing hardware and software tools. In the long run, the Swiss-army-officer’s knife approach to computing can only be taken so far before it is doomed to failure. On the hardware side, this means that, despite some convergence and overlap, there will always be different uses for pocket devices, under the arm slates, portable computers, and larger iron desktops. Where we keep and use these different devices in part predetermines the problem domain for which they are capable of being useful.

One might tinker away at some writing on the airplane and in the hotel room, but for day after day serious writing of 10K words or more, the comfortable desk chair, ergonomic keyboard, large trackball, and the biggest, highest resolution monitor one can afford are so incomparably better they put the mobile little brother in the shade. On the other hand, web browsing shouldn’t even be done as work. Catching up on the news via a collection of RSS feeds into a reader is an ideal occupation to redeem a pot stirring, bus wait or train ride. And, a pad or pod is a perfect container for those twenty English Bible translations, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew with notes, and half a hundred references commentaries with which you dissect the sermon on the fly, instead of having to wait till you’re home and done Sunday dinner. Adding another hundred volumes weighs nothing in the briefcase, and if you’re on vacation, throw in a few dozen novels to while away the time while soaking up some rays. Who takes a desktop to either venue?

A medical professional making rounds in a hospital needs something bigger than a pod/phone, and the iPad (no other slates are worth mentioning) is the perfect replacement for the bound notebook, for it can connect to the hospital database, whose memory, unlike the human–another specialization) is at least usually more consistent, even if it may not always be correct if not updated properly by all involved.

Thus, there will also always be differences between pocket and professional operating systems and applications, and between varieties of applications for purposes that are only loosely similar. Writing letters, memos, and small documents ain’t the same problem domain as writing novels, or creating code, and its not likely that a text processor optimized for one will be comfortable for practitioners of another. It is even less likely that anyone could produce an application to do all three even passably well.

Indeed, this is why the Spy uses BBEdit for code production and web sites, NisusWriter Pro for the bulk of his general purpose documents, including this column, and Scrivener to write novels–and unless travelling to a board meeting, does all these things on a desk, not with an iDevice (yet performs much of his browsing on the latter). It goes to the heart of why he regards Excel as best in its speciality class, but cannot abide Word for its bloated and confusing attempts to be all things to all writers that render it mediocre at best for anything.

It probably explains (in part) the genius of Steve Jobs, who though he ostensibly dictated closed box one-size fits-all devices, actually differentiated his product line so that one size targeted all parts of a specific problem domain, but not every problem domain.

An iPhone isn’t an iPad isn’t a portable Mac, isn’t a desktop. Ditto apps. Converge features all you want, but there are several tools there, each with their own uses. Buy the ones useful for the kind of problems you want to solve, and leave the others on the store shelf.

The Fourth Civilization (wo)man,

is that semi-mythical someone the Spy has talked about many times before, most notably in his September 2004 column and in the article on the compleat human being at the Sheaves URL mentioned below. (Caution: the latter site contains graphic and explicit Christian language of a kind some readers may deem offensive. If in that category, rely on your memory of Heinlein’s discourse on the human being elsewhere and skip the Spy’s elaboration to the Christian Human being.)

In brief, Heinlein at some length described the Human being as a generalist, and concluded “Specialization is for insects.” The Spy offers a new version (now to be the Spy’s eleventh law) adapted for technology, whether low or high.

Effective fourth civilization professionals are educated as generalists. They train and specialize via their appropriate choice of tools.

Intentionality is assumed in tool choice–one reason why the Spy sides with Penrose rather than Minsky of the issue of artificial intelligence (computing tools will always be just as dumb as a bag of hammers). Note also the part on education. In general, this means a Liberal Arts education so the citizen of this age is a broadly literate, informed, and capable problem solver. In the specific instance of a programmer, it means that the one-language hacker who learned his skills at Joe’s computing school (meeting Tuesday nights above his garage and machine shop) may be able to work as low-level code slingers in the industry for a time, but will never perform like, promote so easily, or even outlast the liberal arts university graduate with a broad problem solving and software engineering mindset and a degree in computing science. That’s why the Spy plies his day job as professor of computing science and mathematics at Trinity Western University. Hey folks. It’s not too late to sign up for the fall.

–The Northern Spy

Opinions expressed here are entirely the author’s own, and no endorsement is implied by any community or organization to which he may be attached. Rick Sutcliffe, (a.k.a. The Northern Spy) is professor and chair of Computing Science and Mathematics at Canada’s Trinity Western University. He has been involved as a member or consultant with the boards of several organizations, including in the corporate sector, and participated in industry standards at the national and international level. He is a long time technology author and has written two textbooks and six novels, one named best ePublished SF novel for 2003. His columns have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers (paper and online), and he’s a regular speaker at churches, schools, academic meetings, and conferences. He and his wife Joyce have lived in the Aldergrove/Bradner area of BC since 1972.

Want to discuss this and other Northern Spy columns? Surf on over to ArjayBB.com. Participate and you could win free web hosting from the WebNameHost.net subsidiary of Arjay Web Services. Rick Sutcliffe’s fiction can be purchased in various eBook formats from Fictionwise, and in dead tree form from Amazon’s Booksurge.

URLs for Rick Sutcliffe’s Arjay Enterprises:

Arjay Books: http://www.ArjayBooks.com

The Northern Spy Home Page: http://www.TheNorthernSpy.com

opundo : http://opundo.com

Sheaves Christian Resources : http://sheaves.org

WebNameHost : http://www.WebNameHost.net

WebNameSource : http://www.WebNameSource.net

nameman : http://nameman.net

General URLs for Rick Sutcliffe’s Books:

Booksurge: http://www.booksurge.com

Fictionwise: http://www.fictionwise.com

URLs for items mentioned in this column

Heinlein and Sutcliffe: http://sheaves.org/sheavings/thecompleatchristian.html

BBEdit: http://www.bbedit.com

Scrivener: http://literatureandlatte.com

Word: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word

By rsutcliffe • Columns, The Northern Spy • 0 • Tags: nspy, rick sutcliffe, The Northern Spy

Apr 1 2012

The Northern Spy — To Build or Not To Build

There are 10 kinds of people in the world–
those who understand binary, and those who do not; programmers and users, the differentiators and the integrators; those who put people into categories and those who do not (which are you?)–and that’s as far as the Spy’s April Fools’ Day will go this year.
More important, there are the self-absorbed and the empathetic, the honourable and the dishonourable, the wise and the fools, the noble and the ignoble, the theoretical and the practical, the secure and the insecure, the saints and the sinners, the technophiles and the technophobes, the just and the unjust, the repentant and the defiantly self-righteous, the builders and the destroyers–one may categorize the the whole sweep of the human race (the only race of humans, BTW) in a series of such bifurcations. All of us are from time to time in one or the other of such polar opposites, or perhaps both at the same time. Such is the canvas of characters on which life is lived and from which novelists draw.

Shameless Self Promotion
And such is indeed the human pool from which the Spy has drawn (or dredged, depending on your viewpoint) his novels in “The Interregnum”–tales of alternate history and choices in technology–Christian science fiction with a decidedly Irish flavour. With the publication of “The Builder” in March 2012, this series has reached six volumes, and the Spy regrets to advise that the seventh may occupy more than one physical book (see below).
The basic premise of the series was provoked by a long-ago editorial in Analog magazine, in which the editor mused about the Fermi paradox–to wit, that given the vast number of solar systems in the universe, there must be many other intelligent races in the universe, so surely several have attained at least to the human level of technology and could be contacting us.

So–where is everybody?
Now, setting aside for a moment the perhaps quite reasonable possible conclusion that there never has been and is not now any other intelligent race that could contact us, let us consider this hypothetical question. Perhaps, goes the reasoning, no one wants to or is able to dial us up, send an eMail, or Tweet. Perhaps they already have, and this is what UFOs are all about. Or perhaps, there is no one out there any more because every sufficiently advanced technological society has the means of self-destruction readily available to sufficient individuals so that sooner or later someone pushes a button, whether chemical, nuclear, or biological. After that–poof! and no more civilization to contact anybody. Perhaps no more life on earth.

The latter idea posits an interesting question, because it is obvious (or ought to be) that the human race is either rapidly approaching such a state or is already there. A madman (or woman–the Spy won’t discriminate) could very soon, if not already, be easily capable of collecting the resources to destroy the entire human race. This might require co-opting a whole nation in the case of a nuclear “final solution”, or perhaps no more equipment than a kitchen sink and a few store bought ingredients for some of the others. In the former case, think of the Middle East where countries pursue “peaceful nuclear programs” while threatening to bomb Israel down to the bedrock. In the latter consider how easy it is already to set up a drug lab and distribute deadly substances on the streets. In either case, think of the true-believing terrorist who would earn a place in paradise by murdering the largest possible number of other people–whatever (s)he may define as “other”.

Now, those who know the Spy at all well, know that he is decidedly a minority contrarian on a few issues. (Read a column or two.) In the instance at hand, he is confident the human race lacks the authority to destroy either its collective self or the earth over which it was given stewardship–that power residing only in the hands of the Maker, and never having been delegated. Still, the question deserves an answer, independent of that conviction. Besides, quite a piece of awkwardness could be caused the survivors short of total destruction.

And, it is paradoxically in majority conviction that an answer may be offered. What restrains the hands of most people from “pulling the trigger” excepting a widespread conviction that it would be the wrong thing to do–if not morally wrong, perhaps dishonourable, or at the very least pragmatically inconvenient. Whatever one thinks of Judeo-Christian moral theory, until fairly recent times most in the Western world at least paid lip service to its behavioural (ethical) ideals, and this consensus has, in the Spy’s view at least, provided much of the glue that has kept or society from self-destructing. Oh, we have come close, and the twentieth century saw numerous would-be apostles of human wastage in the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and others of lesser renown, if no less ambition. But there were always those with a will, the means, and (seemingly at least) the Divine help (think of the odds before the Battle of Britain) to stay the hand.

So, in the Spy’s novels, a suggested alternate answer to the Fermi paradox question is indeed a general consensus for society around at least honour, if not morality, and around the idea that certain technologies are too dangerous to be used, lest such use be what permanently fouls the nest. His characters all pay at least lip service to the “Covenent of the Living”, adopted after the worldside eighteenth century collapse into chaos following biological and nuclear warfare.

Really? The eighteenth century? Well, in an alternate Ireland, Brian Boru survived the battle of Clontarf and established an enduring throne over a united Ireland with his rescuer(s) as succeeding him. That Ireland by calculated policy in turn assisted the Duke of Kent in 1066 to defeat the Normans, ensuring they would not take over England, and leaving fragmented into many fifedoms, thus guaranteeing Ireland alone would become the major world power. The scientific revolution began in Northern Ireland in the early 1300s, the industrial revolution occupied the next century and a half, Trafalgar and Waterloo were fought by 1440 with Ireland as protagonist, and by 1700 the whole planet was called Hibernia. But in the next hundred years after that nearly everything came apart as the use of technology very nearly ended all life. The remnant have rebuilt, but avoid contaminated lands, have a low birth rate with many mutations, a small population, and an absolute ban on all weapons except those that can be wielded without leaving the hand.

By choice, modern battles are fought with sticks and swords, with generals and politicians who authorize them at the forefront, and on foot. A throwing knife or sling can be exceptions, but can only be so used to prevent a cowardly or dishonourable use of weaponry by others. Use of a gun triggers a court martial, and unless sufficient provocation can be proven, a prompt death sentence results. The Spy tries out the idea of equality for women in the Royal Army. Are the consequences what you want? Oh, yes, and Brehon law prevails. It is a capital offense to practice law for money.

By the mid-twentieth century, the high nobility (in theory and traditional practice a meritocracy) supposedly polices compliance to the covenant, and the High King of Ireland provides a check on them. Alas, at the height of the “Three Worlds’ War” in 1941, a racist and power-hungry oligarchy of nobles deposed the king, and banned his family from the throne for a sixty year period called The Interregnum. Those six decades provide the meat of the stories–largely played out in conflicts between the elusive King James and his descendants on the one hand, and the xenophobic and racist MacCarthy clan on the other. Meanwhile, wild card Thomas Monde pursues banned genetic modification experiments, and the secretive Builders and elders of Meta (a third alternate earth of the six known) manipulate affairs of state in the background on all of them.

The Interregnum novels so far have been The Peace, The Friends (Best SF of 2003), The Exile, The General, The Nexus, and now, The Builder.
These novels follow scholar and military genius Mara Meathe, described by peers as an “elemental force of nature”, her supposedly deceased father of uncertain parentage himself, mysterious multi-Ollamh Rhiannon, her close friend, beautiful military poster girl General Cath Maguire, hard-nosed skeptical Roger Hanlon, the fly boy-engineer wanting to advance the prestige of his two military corps, his friend and committed Christian Mike, Tadgh O’Kelly the sometimes Senchus and always brilliant musician and forensic specialist, Donal XII, the former Sean Reilly, who’s sat on the chair of state longer than any dictator of the Interregnum by being the most devious manipulator of his generation, and Lord and Lady Kildare, heirs to two of Hibernia’s three wealthiest families. These interact with scores of saints, sinners, priests, soldiers, heros, villains, nobles, and hoi polloi in a complex series of story cycles that take us back and forth in the historical affairs of Hibernia, with occasional forays to Tirdia (our earth), Meta (Builders World), Babylon, Desert, and Waterworld (Ocean).

Into this volatile mix come a few characters from our own earth, including Mara’s close friend Nellie Hacker, angst-ridden orphan prodigy Lucas Caine, and Tiffany Friesen, who rescues from drowning in the Vedder Canal a man who is Hibernia’s most wanted man, and also clan MacCarthy’s only legitimate general.

Who is King James, really? (The Builder has a partial answer.) Will acclaimed pilot and engineer Roger Hanlon, who helped build a space railway and whom people call the Builder of Tara, save his city from destruction? Will he discover his true origin, or that of his friend? Will he be saved himself? Why does Mara defect to the MacCarthys? What is the Donal up to? What has happened to the new earth generated in the nexus of 2000, and then deliberately “lost” by Lucas in the Timestream. What will become of Ireland once what Mara already calls “The second battle of “Glenmorgan” is fought in the new year? What will be the Afghan Khan’s contribution to that battle? Where has The Builder of Meta vanished to? What really became of his daughter Eider, and his ward Lucas? And, what is this fantastic story of the first three nexi and the original builder of Meta that the daughter of his eleventh century successor (or is he?) wiggled out of him?

Oh, yes, and when both the “good” guys and gals and the bad ones (can you always tell the difference?) have access to Tirdia, nuclear weapons sometimes become available after all. And there is that high armory up there in orbit that temptingly contains a lot of them. All you would need to do is steal one of the latest model space planes and persuade a CRAF pilot to fly it up there…

Well, as author of this latest 305K tome (The Builder), the Spy hopes his fan has survived the five-year wait since the last volume, which was The Nexus (Tirdia divided and a new earth was formed, and it was all Lucas’ fault. Sorta.) The Spy wasn’t been well for a time, hence part of the delay. Publishers take their time, which explains more. However, there are lots of new stories here, and some major loose ends still to clean up for the final installment.

The Spy’s largely Mac-oriented audience will be particularly interested in the state of computing art on modern Hibernia. It does use a ten-state “dit” rather than a two-state “bit”, a ten-dit byte, storage capacity of data cubes has been in the ten terabyte range for decades, the planetary metalibrary is well-developed, and those sword hilt-cum-throat mike interfaces are quite nifty. Alas, it badly lags ours in other respects, for the seventeenth century standardized on something much resembling UNIX, there was no Apple to challenge this monopoly, and even though that very reliance on a single vendor was one cause of the Collapse, neither operating systems nor programs have changed much since, and programming is all but a lost art. See where we might have gone? Perhaps once Nellie Hacker imports Macs from Tirdia, she may begin a revolution. On the other hand (or is it the same one) outsider Mara Meathe has already introduced some startling technological innovations, and she’s not the only one with a flair for technology.

Where do you run to get these novels? The Spy’s books are readily available (first five in paper; all six as eBooks) from publisher Writers Exchange ePublishing, from Fictionwise, Smashwords (iOS, B&N, etc), Amazon, and other fine eBook retailers. For locals, the Spy can retail copies, and the TWU bookstore carries them. Expect to pay three to five bucks in eBook format, eighteen to twenty-five in paper. The Builder won’t be available in paper for another six months, and some retailers may not yet have it in eBook form yet. (It’s only been out for a couple of weeks as we type.) Note that the Spy does drink his own root beer. He’s been publishing in electronic format since a time when it was the wave of the future, and still is now that it’s the wave of the present. That’s where the majority of sales are these days. Head for your nearest keyboard or touch screen.

What comes next? The Throne, volume seven of The Interregnum, was planned a long time ago. This story cycle was to contain the tale of the conclusion of the Royal vs MacCarthy civil war and restoration of the monarchy in the hands of the winners (if any—second Glenmorgan was a really bad affair), a second journal following Lucas and partner on a quest to find the earth he lost, make amends to John Dominic, and try to find himself, and a third tale recounting the history of Hibernia from 1014 onward, and telling us more of her kings and queens.
Alas, the latter project was going well at one to three chapters every century and a half, with promising tales set in 1014, 1320+, 1500, the 1700s and the 1800s (in some order), and a couple more planned, when the Spy took an unexpected detour in the 1415-1441 era of tall ships, great armies and navies, and their battles over control of Europe at Trafalgar and Waterloo. That account alone (working title “Mother’s Girl”) is now 572K words and will top out at 600K. So…the book that was to be “The Throne” will likely become the simultaneous concluding volume of two series, rather than one. However, the good news is that his fan might see two or three of those new books in the next year, if the publisher lag time can be kept down.

Characters, once well-developed, have a tendency to get out of hand as well. By the end of The Builder, Mara wants to run away and join the circus, another character wishes he had, a third is pig-headedly going straight into life-threatening danger, two have died, and there’s been a grand triple wedding. The folks who won volumes two and three finalist status for “Best ePublished SF of 2003″ (The Friends won.) will all have to be rounded up for one more go, and the Spy isn’t sure how many will survive yet another story cycle.

And why write novels? To entertain of course. To provoke thought also—why make certain technology choices, and what are their consequences? What indeed would have happened if different ones had been made, and at different times? What of moral choices, and how they affect history?

Get your copies before the professor bumps them all off—excepting of course Nellie, who’s probably too ornery even for him to mess with. Oh, two warnings first. First, these books may provoke the reader to think. Second, they are Christian in orientation, so if mixing the Gospel with Alternate History Science Fiction is too unpalatable for you to conceive of for whatever reason, don’t buy them after all.

–The Northern Spy

URLs for items mentioned in this column
The Interregnum Series: http://www.arjay.bc.ca/Fiction/interregnum.htm
The Builder—Volume 6: http://www.arjay.bc.ca/Fiction/TheBuilder/TheBuilder.html
Series Reviews: http://www.arjay.bc.ca/Fiction/interregnumreviews.htm
WEE-The Publisher: http://www.writers-exchange.com/search.php?mode=search&sutcliffe
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_b/?search-alias=stripbooks&unfiltered=1&field-keywords=&field-author=Richard+J.+Sutcliffe
Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ricksutcliffe

By rsutcliffe • Columns, The Northern Spy • 0 • Tags: arjay enterprises, nspy, rick sutcliffe, The Northern Spy

Mar 1 2012

The Northern Spy — To Excel or Not To Excel

March 2012

The Spy has become a cautious adopter
rather than an early one. As the reader of this space well knows, he has been unwilling (and unable) to upgrade from Excel 2004 because of his very heavy dependance on macros, which the 2008 version lacked. This in turn meant that he could not use Lion, as 2004 would not run at all in that environment.

Nor was he willing to convert all those macros to one of the open source competitors, even though VBA is a textbook example of how not to design a language, if for no other reasons than its complete lack of orthogonality and wretched documentation. The 2011 version has been out some time now, with the macro facility restored, and this has to be run on an Intel system, of which he has two (out of nine total). Since his main spreadsheet file is production bookkeeping software, harbours mission critical data, and he’s had little time for experimentation, the process of certifying 2011 for this purpose was glacial.

The first time he read a copy of his four megabyte workbook file into 2011, the program reported a file error and possible data damage, but appeared to have read it intact despite the message. So, he saved another copy without making any changes, opened that in 2004, made some minor changes, and saved it again as a third copy, which read into 2011 without incident, everything still intact. Further detailed experimentation pointed the finger at a complex graph embedded on one page of the original, but could produce no clue as to what 201 originally flagged as wrong.

All macros have now been thoroughly tested, and appear to work. Files edited in 2004 and/or 2011 make the round trip intact, and everything appears to be in order. Further, 2011 appears to crash less often than 2004, which under Leopard routinely died after half an hour or more of data entry–possibly a memory de-allocation problem, which is common to C++ programs. At least when it did crash, the recovery file usually had most of the data intact, and rarely more than ten minutes was sacrificed rectifying the situation.

There was a recent incident where, following such a 2004 version crash, all the formulae on one page of the workbook vanished, and then only numbers remained, as if there had been a secret copy-all-paste-special-values-only operation performed on the entire page (all other pages were intact). This required a Time Machine rescue of the formulas from a backup. However, so far, few crashes and no data loss can be attributed to Excel 2011. The Spy has run it only under Snow Leopard thus far, and he also still prefers the older look and feel, but is so far satisfied that 2011 is the side grade that 2008 should have been, and that it strikes an compromise he can live with between the two in look and feel.

The spreadsheet, not the word processor, is the single most important small computer application. The original VisiCalc drove the Apple ][ computer to dominance. The ability to combine database functions, financial reporting, and forecasting with “what-if” scenarios into a single application was ground breaking. It created the small computer revolution, and is responsible for its development into a far more useful and versatile tool today, in which the spreadsheet plays a proportionately lesser role than it once did.

The Spy had one of the first hundred copies of VisiCalc produced, would later test and reject Lotus 1-2-3 as bloated, but adopt the Apple Puget Sound Program Library Exchange (A.P.P.L.E.) entry “The Spreadsheet” as his workhorse software for many years, switching to the vastly superior Excel when MS first released it for the Mac. It is quite possible that his current models still contain code from the late 1970s.

Excel was, until 2004, the best of category, and thus, in the Spy’s lexicon, the most significant (and the best) application across all software categories, despite the display, printing, and VBA quirks that require so many workarounds. He is cautiously optimistic that it has now by restoring the lost 2004 functionality regained at least a share that crown, but advises those starting out in spreadsheets to consider carefully the open source alternatives to save money. He will himself, should he ever be up to rewriting his many macros in a better language. (How does he know the open source language is better without using it? It could not be worse, even on purpose.)

He also expresses his concern that if MS were again to require seven years to complete an update, Excel would inevitably go the same was as Lotus 1-2-3, and for exactly the same reason. What indeed will happen if Apple changes to the A6 chip or similar for the Mac, as seems reasonably likely? Would MS be able to produce a new version, or simply abandon the effort?

The astute reader will note however, that the Spy’s high praise for Excel does not by any means extend to other MS products. Word, for instance, is bloated, non-intuitive, prefers a proprietary file format, does not exchange files well, and has difficulty with the very large files (300K words+) he often handles. He has tested dozens of word processors over the years, and of them all, rates it ahead of only the ill-fated, bug-ridden, and badly-written Word Perfect for the Mac (which he could never persuade to walk, much less run, for more than a few minutes at a time).

He has happily used Nisuswriter Pro (and the OS9 version before it) for many years now as his workhorse for the vast majority of small documents, and for final proofing of assembled large ones. It recently caught up with the pre-version ten Nisus product, and is marginally better today by now having collaborative editing facilities, mail merge, the ability to read some .docx files, and an improved macro facility in the most recent versions. Nisus also offers a stripped down Express version of the program for those with lesser needs and fewer dollars to support them.

However, Literature and Latte’s incomparably excellent Scrivener, with its support for multiple chapters, outlining, storyboarding, composition notes, research sections, multiple format export, thematic editing, and other composers’ tools for book and screen writing, is by far his choice (and deserves to be everyone’s) for the initial composition of large documents and books. Frankly, Word has nothing to offer someone who splits his time between Scrivener and Nisuswriter. Oh, and did you know? Literature and Latte has now released the program for that other OS. What is the world coming to?

As for browsers, Explorer was the poorest offering on the Mac by far before MS abandoned it as a lost cause, to the great delight of web site authors and users both. The same action is overdue on the PC, for Safari and Firefox are all a surfer needs.

Likewise, FileMaker Pro is the current champion of small-computer cross-platform database managers, and MS simply has never had anything comparable to offer. Finally, the Spy still prefers the long-in-tooth but reliable old Eudora to any mail program seen since, including all offerings from MS and even from Apple. However, when he finally does switch to Lion this summer, he will have to move elsewhere. Extensive research appears to give a marginal preliminary nod on Apple’s Mail over Thunderbird, with everything else far in the distance, though he remains reluctant to give up the tried, the true, and the working. (He’s had issues with Apple Mail in his consulting work, though most appear to have been resolved in current versions.)

As a last word, take W*nd*ws (please take it). The Spy has never been able to understand why anyone would use a cheap, buggy imitation of Apple’s slick OS when they can have the real thing. He, for one, cannot afford the down time. This, like the stock market, merely goes to show that decisions in the land of business are made primarily on the basis of emotion rather than reason.

And on that latter note, the Spy closes with a word of caution. He did think Apple’s stock undervalued in the $300 range. But $200 or more in increases later, at a PE ratio of over 15, and as a $500B company (sixteen times that of Dell) it appears to have excelled (sic) to the point that it is fully valued under current conditions. Since on the upside, investors buy on rumour and sell on fact, we should assume that the prospect of a dividend is nearly fully priced in, though institutional purchases would, in that event, support a high valuation for many years to come. Anything beyond the current price is all for future considerations, of which there could be many–eventually. (Not that he gives investing advice or would expect anyone to take it if he did).

Oh, and excellent fortune, if he may use the terms, to the about-to-be-launched iPad 3.

–The Northern Spy

URLs for items mentioned in this column
Microsoft Excel: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/
Nisus: http://www.nisus.com/
Scrivener: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/
Firefox: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/
Safari: http://www.apple.com/safari/
Filemaker: http://www.filemaker.com/

By rsutcliffe • Columns, The Northern Spy • 0 • Tags: arjay enterprises, nspy, rick sutcliffe, The Northern Spy

Jan 31 2012

The Northern Spy – Tempus Fugit

February 2012

or, “Time flies like an arrow,”
if we would marry Virgil’s observations on its irretrievability to the unidirectional dictum of modern physics. “Time’s a wasting,” is an apt observation in any day and age, and for all that a week now seems a relative eternity in Internet time, we assume that the flight of time still takes place at the same speed in some external time-inertial frame of reference, call it eternity or what you will.

Certainly investors seem to have concluded that time has already flown for RIM, which benighted company resolved to solve its market share problems by appointing a company insider to be its great helmsman, only to see its shares plummet. Excuse us, but the Spy fails to see how someone who’s been part of the problem these last several years can suddenly morph into the solution. It is for situations like this that the expression “changing deck chairs on the Titanic” was coined.

Frankly, the Spy doubts that Steve Jobs himself could save RIM now. If the greatest catastrophe that can befall a teacher or other person in authority is loss of respect, the greatest that can befall a high technology company when time is flying this fast is perceived irrelevance. The fifteen seconds of fame is over. The Spy’s Fourth Law implies a corollary. Loss of mindshare precedes loss of marketshare, but the lag time is much less. Months will tell the tale, and the most strenuous efforts can only delay the inevitable. You did read here first about the impending Kodak bankruptcy, did you not?

Speaking of which, the former film company’s woes (what is film, anyway?) have now been compounded by Apple’s claim to own the firm’s digital patents in view of joint work done on those projects. Kodak may not be able to raise much money under the circumstances, and is left hanging by a thread.

Oh, and there is a parallel aphorism that the Spy frequently uses in his classes to illustrate the difficulty of teaching the English language, with its confusing overlap of words sometimes used for nouns, adjectives and verbs in vastly different contexts. In the spirit of “Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo”, it goes:

…and Fruit flies like a banana.
which is likewise a propos of the slowly rotting MS hegemony, so well brought out in ironical relief by the Wisconsin decision to use money obtained from antitrust proceedings against MS, not to purchase more MS product at penitently self-serving reduced prices as they might have done a decade ago, but to purchase Apple product instead. The corpse of W*nd*ws is not yet cold from the self-inflicted wounds of arrogance and lack of innovation, but it’s already starting to putrefy. As RIM illustrates, the canonical next step is to fire the CEO and replace him with an insider who will say “We are already on the right track; all we need is a little time to do more of the same a little louder and people will re-embrace our vision.” Sorry, but the enterprises has begun to follow the general public and embrace Apple instead. The movement has become a mass migration.

Simply put, we’re getting little from anyone outside the Apple camp because there’s nothing much to give. Nemo dat quad non habet (sometimes loosely translated as “A Scotsman cannae give ye his pants.”).

Apple’s startling (to some) quarterly results and its consequent propulsion into first place in market capitalization (ahead of Exxon) is but further evidence that the cusp has passed. The Spy expects Apple’s share of the overall computing market to accelerate further over the next couple of years into the twenty percent plus range for desktops and laptops combined (though it will be far larger than reported if you call handhelds and pads computers).

The Spy does believe that Apple and the Google allies will have to come back together to negotiate patent sharing eventually rather than continuing to hand hundreds of millions to lawyers, but the cold hard reality these days is that Apple innovates and everyone else imitates. Microsoft got away with copying Windows from the Apple OS because of loose licensing, but the shameless coping going on now is doomed to failure.

Errare humannum est,
but to really foul things up it takes a computer. The Spy was recently chided at Church because a mailing of popular devotional books abruptly ceased (and he’s the guy who arranges such things.) Enquiry elicited the explanation that a Canada Post computer program checking address validity of the mailing list in question had inexplicably removed large numbers of correct addresses due to a “glitch”, and the mailer had no way of knowing which ones had been removed unless the affected individuals contacted them. Supposedly we’ve been added back in, but won’t know until we see them. Even if entirely true, the incident reveals an over-reliance on the computer software. There oughta be a backup scheme.

For the Spy, said redundancy is sometimes in the form of paper. He was reminded of the value of this recently when twice in a week he clicked on an old file only to discover that he had no program that could read it. Spreadsheets from before about 1997 can no longer be opened, and his older mark books kept in a proprietary program written in Pascal back in the eighties are also no longer readable. Good thing he has a filing cabinet full of paper copies, the ultimate backup.

And, lest you chuckle, consider the fate of data on other media such as tape, floppy disk, CD, and even Blu-Ray. The first two are gone, the third is going, and the last will never pick up all the business. Data, including music and video, is stored and retrieved from the cloud these days, not via physical media. The Spy does not expect any computers to have physical media readers five years from now, except for solid state “drives”, and they likely built in. What will that do to your backup strategy?

Nothing remains static,
including one’s software experience. (and if you were expecting a proverb that starts “the more things change”, it’s French, not Latin.) The Spy has previously praised commercial backup program GoodSync, and been cautious about donationware competitor Carbon Copy Cloner. However, he has discovered that the speedy former has slowed down with time, taking ever longer to complete a backup (can’t tell why), whereas the even speedier and much lighter latter has added features to the point where it is a worthier contender for backup honours than before. The only thing it now lacks is the ability to create jobs that can be run with a simple click (it has timed jobs, so this is a curious omission).

Likewise, things are shifting around a little among Bible programs for the Mac. Accordance is still the nine hundred pound gorilla, especially for scholars, but Logos is coming on, adding features and convenience. Their iOS reader took a huge step forward recently with the addition of the NIV to the basic package. The Spy uses that translation enough so that its omission made the package unattractive, compared with the better established (on mobile platforms) Olive Tree software. He still prefers the latter, especially for its ease in side-by-side comparisons. Being able to pull up the Greek or Latin on the same page as an English version is a great advantage. And yet…and yet, on his Mac, for basic quick searches when preparing his adult Bible class lessons, he uses the simple Online Bible, which plugs along after all these years just being…indispensable.

As to cost, Accordance and Logos will set one back a grand or so depending on which book package you purchase. The Logos iOS reader depends on your PC/Mac purchase and is of little value with out it. Olive Tree and Online Bible give away the reader along with assorted public domain Bible versions and other books, then of course charge for individually priced modern translations still in copyright. In the end, the latter model is far less expensive, even if less comprehensive.

One more caveat: The latest Olive Tree package for the Mac runs only under Lion, and the Logos package requires an Intel processor.

Speaking of change and processors,
have you got an office pool going on the date Apple will dump Intel as it did the PowerPC, and only sell hardware with A-series chips of their own design (and possibly manufacture)? The Spy has a sneaking suspicion it will be this year.

Do you have a pool going on the date Apple’s share price will pass $500? $600? The month Apple becomes a trillion dollar company? On the date Apple will announce a dividend? Buy or build a chip fabrication plant? Announce their own network? Introduce a radically new television product? Buy a slightly used country out of bankruptcy?

Finally, if all that Latin is Greek to you,
the Spy offers “Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur”–if you say something in Latin, it sounds profound..

–The Northern Spy

URLs for Rick Sutcliffe’s Arjay Enterprises:
Arjay Books: http://www.ArjayBooks.com
The Northern Spy Home Page: http://www.TheNorthernSpy.com
opundo : http://opundo.com
Sheaves Christian Resources : http://sheaves.org
WebNameHost : http://www.WebNameHost.net
WebNameSource : http://www.WebNameSource.net
nameman : http://nameman.net
URLs for Rick Sutcliffe’s Books:
Booksurge: http://www.booksurge.com
Fictionwise: http://www.fictionwise.com
URLs for items mentioned in this column
Carbon Copy Cloner: http://www.bombich.com/
Siber Systems (GoodSync): http://www.goodsync.com/
OnlineBible: http://www.online-bible.com/maconlinebible.html
Logos: http://www.logos.com/mac

By rsutcliffe • Columns, The Northern Spy • 0 • Tags: rick sutcliffe, The Northern Spy

Jan 2 2012

The Northern Spy – A Measure of Health

January 2012

Our persispacious reader
may have noticed that this column is a little late. Chalk that up to health issues, including bouts with a rather violent gastroenteritis over Christmas, ongoing sciatica that make standing up and sitting down difficult, and a nasty cold. The joys of getting old. Ah, but what’s a little pain? It never hurt anyone. The top line: brevity shall be the order of the month.

Corporate pain
seems the lot of once stalwarts Kodak, Sony, and RIM, all of whom have fallen on times that get harder with every passing month. Kodak seems to be unable to sell patents to save the company, and barring some last minute reprieve, appears destined for the bankruptcy courts. Sony, dragged down by the cutthroat TV business, has been unable to make a profit in nearly a decade, and has no immediate prospect of a turnaround. The inevitable reorganization and shrinkage is going to be painful, but the Spy feels that it has to happen in 2012 if it is going to happen at all. The investors must be getting restless.

Restless would be putting it mildly for RIM’s shareholders, some of whom think that replacing the twin CEOs will be the salvation of the company. In a word, the Spy says, “Not.” RIM has failed to keep up with the times; it’s lost too much mindshare to Apple, product delays leave no motive for customer loyalty, and so marketshare is evaporating like snow in the summer sun.

A friend purchased a Blackberry PlayBook as a gift for her husband, because of the steep discount to the original retail price, so the Spy got a look. The device seems well-engineered and solidly built, but we soon discovered that you cannot charge the battery unless within range of a Wi-Fi connection. (There were no instructions included, so no way to tell if this is normal or anomalous behaviour.) Sorry, but this is bizarre. These two functions are unconnected and have no reason to be tied. She decided to take it back–”too complicated,” she said.

Inflicting pain and abuse on others
in total self-absorbtion, and lacking a scintilla of empathy for those hurt, is the hallmark of the psychopath. What do you call a corporation that does the same?
The Spy doubles as a web host, as the reader no doubt knows. In this capacity, he was suddenly inundated by customer complaints that they were unable to send mail to Hotmail accounts. Connection attempts sent back an error message to the effect that the WebNameHost server was banned by policy from sending to Hotmail. It soon became apparent that this ban extended to accounts with MSN, Yahoo, and Live.com addresses, and there may be others. Hotmail is of course owned by Microsoft, and Yahoo is a close ally. This poses a particular problem with the Spy in his day job, as the student mail for his university is currently handled by Hotmail, though that is apparently about to change.

A note to Hotmail support got back a reply to the effect that such a block could be caused by various mail practices and issues at the server end, and recommended putting SPF records into the domains’ MX, checking mail list sign up and opt-out policies, spam detection procedures, blacklists, and looking at the “Sender Score” maintained by Return Path, Inc.
A further query after jumping through the requested hoops and asking for the ban to be lifted, elicited a snarky reply that no more help would be forthcoming, that Hotmail refused to discuss specifics about the ban, and would not reply further. They have maintained this resolve and now do not answer. The Spy notes that in his more than three decades in the industry, he’s never encountered such a reply. Perhaps they were hurt by his mild comments that cutting him off for what appear to be trivial reasons looks bad in the light of their own inability or lack of desire to respond to span and abuse complaints concerning mail originating from their customers.

Because of this intransigence and lack of hard information, the details of what follows are somewhat speculative, based on discussions with other webmasters bitten by the same nastiness, online discussions, checking out Return Path, and a detailed examination of server error logs.

Apparently, all four of these services rely on the Sender Score to determine the trustworthiness of a mail server. When it falls below some magic but undisclosed number, said server is cut off from sending to the MS allies. Gmail, another free service, and not without issues of its own, does not use this service and is unaffected. By contrast, most Linux boxes use their own scanning software to make more intelligent and local-condition-driven decisions about spam and blacklisting.

The Sender Score is supposedly based on (i) the percentage of mail accepted, (ii) complaints, (iii) volume from the server (iv) percentage sent to unknown users (i.e. bad addresses) and (v) spam trap hits. The algorithm used to compute the overall score of 81 from this is proprietary. On all these WebNameHost’s server scored very well, except volume (62%) and unknown users (52%). Why the volume rating is low is anyone’s guess. No more than ten to twenty messages a day went out to all MS allies combined.

All right, back to the error logs, where it becomes apparent that one of the Spy’s customers has a blog to which a person apparently subscribed with a typo in her address. Comments to the blog were mirrored back to her, and replies also went to the bad address. As soon as these reached a certain percentage of the total volume seen going to the MS allies, the bad reputation threshold was apparently triggered, and the server cut off. Note that the volume and unknown user ratios are apparently relative to other servers, not absolute. The total number of bad messages in question was less than twenty-five.

The bottom line: There is no repairing this reputation without waiting for the total lack of traffic to right the percentages, which apparently takes a month or more. Afterward, say other webmasters, it is even easier to be banned again. In the meantime, the Spy required customers to remove all MS-allied addresses from lists and personal email, check every one of them for validity once the situation does clear, and only then add them back in one at a time.

A very large raspberry to the whole lot of the MS-allied mail gang. This is an exceptionally bad way to make decisions, a worse system for rectifying them, and a truly wretched support backup–in sum, a good (or bad) example of the worst in our current Internet system. This is one reason why MS has such a bad reputation in the industry, and a good motive not to place one’s mail business with any of their gang. Run, do not walk, far away from involvement with the whole lot of them.

Should you go to gmail? They, after all, were unaffected. In short, No. Gmail may be more accepting of incoming mail, but is just as liberal with outgoing mail. The Spy had a problem with a notorious email abuser situated with them not long ago. He and others complained, but got neither reply nor action of any kind. The Spy recommends using Linux-based professional mail servers (the kind you pay for) where mail is scanned and scored, the customer can make decisions on what is allowed through, and the server owner will blacklist on request. Not that WebNameHost is trolling for a lot of new customers, but that’s how his business is run. The MS allies are giving all mail servers a bad name with their arbitrary and poorly thought out policies.

More than this, the affair illustrates that what ideas MS has come up with in recent years (and there are not many of them) are more likely to be bad ones than good. Yes, the company has money and a captive market. No, it does not have much by way of long term prospects, and those prospects are dimming with the passing years. To repeat a radical suggestion: An Apple licensing scheme could remove MS from the OS business in under three years.

For the New Year
the Spy wishes all his individual readers not only physical and spiritual health and prosperity, but also vigorous competition among lots of new ideas and products on the market to keep prices low. Contradictorily, he wishes manufacturers prosperity as well, though he notes that it will only happen if they pay close attention to the markets, the trends, and their customers needs. Those who do will prosper, those who do not will disappear. Look for some high-profile corporate and sovereign successes and failures in 2012. How about that for a prognostication? It can hardly go wrong.

–The Northern Spy

URLs for items mentioned in this column
Return Path: https://www.senderscore.org/senderscore/

By rsutcliffe • Apple Inc., Columns, The Northern Spy • 0 • Tags: rick sutcliffe, The Northern Spy

Nov 30 2011

The Northern Spy – Something Old, Something New

by Rick Sutcliffe
Technology News and Views Since 1983
Something Old, Something New
December 2011

The Spy recently acquired a few surplus G5s, and in the process of setting them up to be useful file servers and replacements for even older G4s at his home and church, (re)-discovered some interesting things about memory, disk drives, and both hardware and software compatibilities.

First is that all disk drives are not manufactured equal, quite apart from the Thailand flooding that means many aren’t being manufactured at all.. Two 250G Maxtor drives in an old G5 Quad, when inserted into a new (well, one year old) MacPro, could not be recognized. Evidently this is a known problem with this brand–they play well with some machines and not with others. ‘Course, the Maxtor name is gone now, absorbed by Seagate, but perhaps this finicky behaviour is one reason why.

So, the Spy went out to his local NCIX store and picked up a new Western Digital Caviar blue 500G drive for the Quad. No problem getting that recognized, partitioned, and loaded with software, and it worked for reading and writing files, but it couldn’t boot. Much experimentation led exactly nowhere, so that drive went back. The only one of a size in stock was a Seagate model ST500DM002-1BD142 (for thirty dollars less), which he brought home with some trepidation, given his experience with the Maxtor. Partitioned and formatted at 465G (they all exaggerate capacity) but works like a charm. Go figure.

By the way, he has two 2T and two 1T 7200RPM Hitachi drives that he can well recommend. Used six months to nearly a year now in his MacPro and Synology NAS box. Fast and reliable. He’s thinking about SSDs but hasn’t jumped yet. The Spy isn’t as much an early adopter as he once was. He notes, however, that Hitachi has agreed, for better or for worse, to sell its storage technology division to Western Digital.

Along the way, the low stock levels and a sign on the NCIX door told a tale of its own. Customers were limited to two disk drive purchases per day because of shortages. Expect drive prices to increase, but no sooner will the supply stabilize than SSD prices will drop enough to become competitive. Sorry, but Winchester technology is so…yesterday that it’s not yet retro.

The next adventure was memory. The single core G5s use PC2700 or PC3200, while the Quad uses PC4200 (pairs only). The first two must be low density slugs, whereas the latter will apparently take high density, though it mis-announces it as a much lower speed. After talking the matter over with the memory supplier, the Spy has decided to take their advice and switch it to the low density memory as well. We’ll see. Going from 2.5G to 4.5G of memory in the Quad did make a noticeable difference, however, as one might expect.
After that, he had to deal with compatibility issues, for the maximum OS those old G5s can run is Leopard, and a few manufacturers, including Apple, no longer distribute universal binaries, meaning their software won’t run on the PPC G5 under any OS, unless you revert to an older version. So, his applications disk now has a segregated section for Snow Leopard/Intel-only apps, including the latest DragThing, Firefox, BBEdit, Microsoft Office 11 (still being tested for compatibility with his vast collection of macros, but close to passing), plus all versions of Logos Bible Software and of backup utility Good Sync.

Leopard itself was not an issue, as he was still running that on his laptop, pending Office passing his compatibility tests so that he can lay aside the 2004 version (the last previous to support his multi-megabytes of macros). However, his first foray into file sharing (the idea was to use those old machines for backup) left him with the impression that the sharing facilities in both Leopard and Snow Leopard were unfinished and amateurish. For instance, an initial connect after a reboot or wake from sleep might require the serving computer to turn file sharing off and then back on before its disks could be mounted elsewhere. Also, bringing up the server’s window automatically tries to connect, and one has generally to wait until that connect fails before selecting either “share screen” or “connect as”. Finally, sleep does not work properly and the servers remain awake even if the machine sharing from them itself goes to sleep. Ah, but the Spy well remembers all the troubles Apple had with sleep over the years. He’ll be interested to see if it is fixed in Lion when he fires that up in a few weeks’ time.

Other blasts from the past needed to make all this work: more copies of Leopard and an Apple ADC to DVI converter to drive an Apple Studio Display (hey, it still works, so why throw it out?) from a machine with only DVI connectors. Good old eBay. Doesn’t nostalgia bring back memories? And, while on the subject of antiques, doesn’t it make you feel old to see things you have in your own house and use every day (dishes, for instance) on auction by antique stores and sites?

All the file and disk copying, and the lack of GoodSync on the Leopard machines did, however, lead to a re-evaluation of backup programs, and the Spy found himself much more impressed with current versions of the Carbon Copy Cloner shareware program than he was with earlier ones. A cautious thumbs up, pending further testing.

A good news story was occasioned by a partial failure of one of the Spy’s KVM switches. For the majority of readers who have no use for such things, these allow one monitor and keyboard to be used on several different computers at the press of a button. Well, almost. One must when switching first put the current computer to sleep, then make the switch before the sleep commences, else the act of disconnecting the keyboard will re-awaken it and confuse it when it finds no monitor attached. Then it goes into a nightmarish headless world that requires a reboot. This is, come to think of it, another Mac sleep issue. Those machines want really badly to be awake and working for their owners, but when they do sleep they can go comatose. Sigh. Only in computerland.

The Spy has a KVM switch on both home and office desks, and a while back switched (sic) from the older mechanical Dr. Bott versions to the electronic IOGear version. These are audio enabled, switching the sound as well as DVI and keyboard, and come with sets of bundled cables each about 2m long. Very convenient. Like most such “little boxes” they require 5V DC supplied by a little transformer. From one of the units, the Spy had noticed some video wavering, then substantial RFI, and finally the monitor began to flicker, until it was more off than on. Was the fault in the monitor, the switch, the cables, or…? Swopping around the individual bits and pieces eventually isolated the unit’s external transformer power supply, and a 5V unit from another piece of gear was temporarily substituted. Result: no more flicker or RFI, and the cleanest display in months. Got the culprit.

The good side? The Spy wrote up a complete description on a sticky note, signed on to the a chat on the IOGear site, and after a four minute wait, technician Larry Levi came on the virtual line. The Spy pasted in his description, complete with a “What say?” and his mailing address, etc. Seconds later came back the answer “I will send an adapter to you free of charge.” Kudos to Larry and IOGear for doing it right. This seems to be a classy company. Besides the GCS1764 which he has, and the company still makes, they also have some newer product in this line that will switch two monitors rather than just one. Nice, but pricey, and hard for the Spy to justify. He’ll keep one monitor always on his main machine and switch only the other.

Along the way, the Spy noted that IOGear now sells 3m and 5m versions of the cable bundle, and ordered one of each from an Amazon site, which had a better price than the manufacturer store. While he was at it he picked up some gender changers to make 4m cables from two 2m cables. Price point: a DVI gender changer is $13 locally, under $1.25 from several Amazon stores. Several lashes to Amazon.com, however, for not telling the customer until checkout that a product cannot be shipped to Canada. Far more lashes to the manufacturers and distributors who agree to territorial rights that prevent such shipments. Agreements like that should be challenged under restraint of trade and anti-trust laws.

Turning to last month’s quibble and a less than stellar experience with Apple’s support, the Spy finally got them to change his AppleID. They only wanted his billing info for security reasons, not to charge him, and settled for the last four numbers of his credit card for this purpose. Could have said this earlier in the game. No comment back on whether they would take his advice on fixing their own web site and the failed code behind it. No response back after over a month waiting for assets to be transferred from an old ID to a newer one. Twenty lashes for the poorest support experience in years, but at least he was finally able to upgrade to IOS5.

But discussions with his technicians at the university revealed deeper problems. There is no enterprise support, ostensibly because (as a rep is quoted) “our products don’t fail”. However, they do, and far more often than they used to, because the company has been using ever cheaper components and labour force. Indeed, Apple’s quality control is now middle of the pack, a big change from a few years ago. Yet the price differential (sometimes nearly double) asks one to believe the quality is still there (you do get more for the money, but not that much). The university will switch from iMacs as a default for all desktops (Win or OSX) to buying Macs only when requested. Twenty more lashes. Get your act together, Cupertino. Mind share can be lost as easily as it was gained. Ask Redmond.

Returning to the pre-mortems of the last two months the Spy notes that the news becomes grimmer by the week for beleaguered once-industry leader RIM. Sales are dismal, it’s tablet a failure, and its reputation for reliability in tatters. Could even a takeover and restructuring save it? Maybe, but time is running out. As noted above, the Spy’s Fourth Law is as cruel on the downside as it is beneficial on the up. Even if the mindshare space can be turned around, two to five years of declining sales will ensue before this can be reflected in the market. That’s an eternity in this business.

Keep in mind that the same is true of the bond market, currency fluctuations (where the lag is far less) and the stock market. Only heroic measures can save the Euro now, and no heroes have yet appeared on the scene. OTOH, the stock market appears to have fully priced in the macro consequences of a European financial disaster, and in the micro case, of Steve Job’s death. North American markets and Apple in particular, seem undervalued to this rank amateur (who is not giving financial advice). European ones my be overvalued.

News of The Interrregnum

Longtime (and very patient) readers of the Spy’s alternate history science fiction series “The Interregnum” (in which the Irish rule the worlds) will be pleased (or not) to learn that the sixth volume, entitled “The Builder” is in final editing, and awaiting only a last reading and the completion of the cover art. It should be available RSN, though at over 300K words, it is not an evening’s read. Unfortunately, whilst working on volume seven, “The Throne” which was supposed to have a plot sequence within the story circle comprised of shorts from each century of the Irish dominion since 1014, he got immersed in the fourteenth century, whose “chapter” is now up to 525K words, and will likely reach 600K by the time the yarn of Hibernia’s equivalents to Arthur Wellesley and Horatio Nelson (cum Thomas Edison) exhausts itself. Four books in a different series?

–The Northern Spy

URLs for Rick Sutcliffe’s Arjay Enterprises:
Arjay Books: http://www.ArjayBooks.com
The Northern Spy Home Page: http://www.TheNorthernSpy.com
opundo : http://opundo.com
Sheaves Christian Resources : http://sheaves.org
WebNameHost : http://www.WebNameHost.net
WebNameSource : http://www.WebNameSource.net
nameman : http://nameman.net

URLs for Rick Sutcliffe’s Books:
Booksurge: http://www.booksurge.com
Fictionwise: http://www.fictionwise.com

URLs for items mentioned in this column
Apple: http://www.apple.com/
IOGear : http://www.iogear.com/
NCIX: http://www.ncix.ca/
Carbon Copy Cloner: http://www.bombich.com/
Western Digital: http://www.westerndigital.com/
Seagate : http://www.seagate.com/
Hitachi : http://www.hitachigst.com/

By admin • Apple Inc., Columns, The Northern Spy • 0 • Tags: apple, apple inc, nspy, rick sutcliffe, The Northern Spy

Oct 31 2011

The Northern Spy — R.I.P. (2)

by Rick Sutcliffe
November 2011

Prescience
was not foreseen by the Spy when he titled last month’s column, but said monicker now seems faintly evocative of a sad prophecy. The iCEO has not merely stepped down, he’s left us altogether. Steve Jobs’ legacy sees us all materially wealthier, for he had a unique talent for putting his finger on the pulse of the market two or three years down the road, then inventing the product to create the market his mind’s eye saw. When the history of our time is written, Steve Jobs’ name will be far more prominent than any of the politicians whose images and dulcet tones saturate the daily media, more lasting than any entertainment idol, have more footnotes and records than any athlete. Jobs was unique. He passes to the next life to no one’s benefit and everyone’s regret.
Meanwhile, back at the iCompany, business carries on and will carry on for years to come much as it has in the past. The workaholic culture of excellence in innovation, of creative iconoclasty, of compelling marketing is deeply ingrained at Apple, and the company is by this time as much the child of iTim as it was that of iSteve. Apple has seized the wheel of the technology bus, rendering everyone else in the business a passenger or a chaser, waiting to see what the company disgorges into its marketplace at the next stop before doing anything. Computers, smart phones, pad devices, operating systems, software, and soon also television–all are beholden to Apple for leadership. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it sees to the Spy a pity that there has been so little innovation elsewhere these last few decades, and little either on the horizon. Can that entire market sector do nothing else but react and imitate? It seems not.
Indeed, though the Spy does not present himself as a financial analyst, the little dip in the company’s stock at Jobs’ death seems already past, and given earnings growth, the shares even appear undervalued, though at $400, or $40 000 for a standard 100-share block, AAPL is not for the small investor.

The Spy does have a few quibbles, however
with iCupertino. The commoditization of computer parts and the movement of manufacturing offshore seems to have contributed to quality issues of a kind once foreign to Apple. Drives, motherboards and power supplies fail more often these days–not as quickly by any means as the typical junkyard-assembled generic PC with the fancy brand name–but the trend does cast a cloud, and the Spy is no longer confident that a new Mac would outlast a new PC by two or three times as it would in the past.
Also, he has recently had a go-round with Apple support that left him breathless with….well, judge for yourself.
The Spy, who was a registered Apple developer back in the late seventies when he wrote software in 6502 assembler, has for many years now had what is today called an AppleID. But it was set up long ago, and is not an email address. However, iOS5 updates, among other things, require this. Time to clean up this little anomaly, and at the same time disentangle personal Apple business from the university–for he brought the Apple Developer account to it rather than vice-versa, and TWU should have its own ID in the system. So, first he set up another account for the U, then changed the address on the old one. The ID system then sent out verification emails, each with a clickable link. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line the URLs on those links were munged, rendering them unusable.
After threading his way through several “support” pages, he figured out how to get a ticket opened, and described the problem in exhaustive detail. As advertised, within 48 hours an answer came back, but merely telling him how to submit a ticket on a different page. He followed instructions, repeating his explanation, only to how to get a weakly worded explanation of how to have the system send out a verification email, which he knew, and was not the problem. Right, a complete misunderstanding of where the difficulty was, so he returned another explanation, to a similar result from a different agent, also in weak English.
Now the Spy runs his own mail server, so it occurred to him to go into that server, fire up Mailwatch, look at the messages as they existed there, click on the link, and make it work. All addresses verified OK. That’s good, right? Unfortunately, the next mail back, from yet another agent, though in much better English, still only instructed him to resend the verification mail. Ah, folks. Sending it was not the issue. The contents not playing nice with mail was the problem. Meanwhile, the Spy had moved on to attempting to have the AppleID changed to match what was now the primary and verified email address, but that also failed. The “submit” button ostensibly accepted the change, but did nothing with it, and returned no error. In any case, the ID could not be changed, even though there was a button specifically for reconciling it with the address.
So, back went another message to the support centre. This time he was told in better English still that the address he was trying to use was attached to some other account, not associated with iTunes, and with instructions on how to find the AppleID for that (theoretical) account so it could be changed if desired. But said page also required one’s exact name and address, which he supplied, but to no avail. Seems to the Spy, neophyte that he is, that if one knew that much info about an account one would not need to find whether it existed. As any rate, no such account could be found, not even the one that now had that very address as primary. Meanwhile, he discovered several discussions on Apple Support groups to the effect that numerous others had exactly the same problem–inability to change old, non-email IDs to new email-based ones, and the purported button to do so inoperative. Some had gotten caught halfway through an IOS 5 upgrade by the demand for an email-based ID, and their phones were bricked.
Somebody ought to know something. Back went another message to Apple Support. The next reply arrived from yet another agent, saying “I’m sorry but I was unable to determine the nature of your inquiry based on the information you have provided,” and asking for more detail–this despite that the entire chain of mail was in the message. The Spy has reworded his already lengthy explanations, confining the issues to three: the inability to change the ID, to locate any other account with the same address, and their inability to understand and communicate in a consistent way. He has asked that a supervisor take over the case. That’s it at press time after over a week of back and forth. More on the saga later.

Turning to other near death experiences,
though the Spy hastens to point out that he does not celebrate Oct 31, preferring instead the Dec version of that number, he notes that HP, under a freshly minted CEO, has changed course yet again and “committed” itself to retaining its PC division. Pardon me? First you say you’re going out of a business, then that you are staying in it? The only way the latter can now happen is if the vast majority of potential customers missed both news items. Those in the know will surely take their business elsewhere.
Meanwhile, beleaguered RIM suffered a near death experience of its own this past month, it’s high-reputation network having collapsed for several days. Those single-point-of-failure designs always come back to bite, and once they do, their appetite becomes insatiable.
Kodak is another interesting case. The company is frantically trying to reinvent itself as a too-late entry into the digital world. (Does anyone remember film?) To make their mark in the printer business (really the ink business) the company needs cash, and lots of it. Their only ready source is a trove of over a thousand digital patents. Given the hoard of buyers for IP these days, an auction should bring at least $2B and possibly as much as $4.5B, depending on whether Google and Apple go head to head, or Samsung makes it a three way battle.
Old electronics stalwart Panasonic appears to be yet another potential basket case. Losing money by the billions, the once prosperous Japanese firm seems, like Sony, to have lost its way in an increasingly low margin and cutthroat consumer electronics market, from which quicksand there is no obvious exit.

A modest proposal
seems in order, and in the tradition of both Jonathan Swift and the season, it may seem somewhat ghoulish, feeding as it does on the undead. But iTim has the same brashness as iSteve, so why not suggest it?
Given that Apple is now the unquestioned innovation, idea, and technology leader, not to mention the largest company in the world outside the oil industry (and catching up to the last holdout there too), and that a significant takeover might not go well with the anti-trust people, perhaps it is time to revisit the policy on OS and hardware licensing. When this was last attempted, it was from a position of weakness, the partners insignificant, and the whole affair didn’t go well.
Now, licensing would be from a position of strength. Apple could dictate the terms and could pick partners with solid past credentials, some brand recognition, assets to bring to the table, and good sales networks, yet a tinge of desperation for the future.
So, why not license iOS to RIM and Samsung and also MacOS and hardware rights to HP in return for access to all their patents, dropping any and all suits, and agreeing to exclusivity–they cease making Android and generic PCs and make only Apple-compatible hardware. Once the agreements are up and running, Apple’s OS share could nearly double in both markets, and they could sell the same deal to Nokia, Sony, Lenovo, and (gulp) Dell, doubling it again. The end of the story is the end of the Windows-only PC, and the cheap imitation knock-off OS it is forced to run (or walk).
This lacks the satirical cachet of Swift, for it smacks more of eating the old, but it certainly makes up for that in depths of irony. Apple could offer some cash inducements in the form of a modest stock purchase to generate capital for the changeover and retooling, but on the whole, such a pre-emptive strike would cost very little, and be a low risk strategy. Moreover, it would not only likely double, then quadruple market share, it would bring about the death of the PC much more quickly than merely allowing events to proceed slowly to their logical conclusion as they are now. Moreover, several decent companies whose only error has been to harrowingly hitch their wagon to the wrong tractor, one that can but keep repeatedly plowing the same field, would not only be saved from the scrap heap, but thrive. It would also put a whole townfull of patent lawyers out of work, and that alone might be worth taking the trouble, for it would add mightily to everyone else’s bottom line.
Hey, no use asking WWSD (what would Steve do) on this one, for such a dramatic policy reversal, if to the end of striking at the heart of Google and MS simultaneously, would at least tempt, if not intrigue him. And, today’s best thinking is often yesterday’s worse, but thought different. May Android and Windows rest in peace.
And while he’d offering free advice, why not swap the right to make a Kodak branded iOS device for those juicy patents? Like it or not, Apple is in the point and shoot camera market now, so what better partner? Well, Canon might be, but the cachet of an old name….. For that matter, if iTim wants into the TV market, why not make a deal with Panasonic for jointly branded consumer electronics of all kinds? Hey, an audiophile quality receiver/amplifier with an iPod built in would appeal to some, just as well as a big screen TV with an iOS interface, and there might be more kilometrage in a joint project with a firm having expertise in the field, and a tinge of desperation.

On more significant near-deaths,
the Spy notes that European politicians, their backs to the wall, their economic engines running low on gas, have touted yet another band-aid for sick man of Europe, Greece. The fifty percent haircut doled out to bondholders will still leave that nation’s debt at an impossible-to-pay roughly 120% of GDP, and will be regarded by ratings agencies as a default. (Contrast Canada where the same ratio is in the 30-55% range, and still thought to be too high, then worry about the US where it is in the 75-95% range, and Japan’s where it may be 200%–the exact figures varying by source, methodology, and terminology.)
Face it. TANSTAAFL has caught up with the Greek people. The free ride is over. The country is bankrupt, and has zero prospect of ever retiring its accumulated debt. Why not just say so and be done with it? Why not just let a few banks fail with the country, boot Greece from the Euro until it gets its act together, put up with the resulting dislocations, get on with it, and get over with it?
Interestingly, that nation’s total borrowings amount to about $400B, in the same ballpark as Apple’s market cap. One could fantasize Apple might buy a couple of modest sized chunks of zombied Greece for old-world manufacturing locations and executive retreats. But the neighbourhood has gotten run down, the really interesting buildings are all ruins, the bill collectors, stiffed once, will soon circle again, and the local character set isn’t even ASCII. On second thought…..

–The Northern Spy

By billm • Apple Inc., Columns, The Northern Spy • 0 • Tags: arjay enterprises, northern spy, nspy, rick sutcliffe

Oct 2 2011

The Northern Spy

by
Rick Sutcliffe
Technology News and Views Since 1983
R.I.P. …
October 2011

Hewlett Packard
appears to have taken comments made here last month seriously enough to take defensive measures. But let’s be realistic.
First, changing CEOs at this juncture (nearly 50% share value lost) is like tossing a single sandbag into the raging torrent pouring through a broken dyke.
Second, hiring Goldman Sachs Group to plan a takeover prevention strategy is a whistling in the wind. As the Spy said, they have transformed themselves from predator to prey. What remains to be seen once the various interested parties have done their due diligence is whether the takeover attention will come from a turnaround specialist, a breakup artist, or someone in the industry for whom the technology, talents, and patents have residual value.
Third, when you are but reactively defending against the consequences of your own errors and failures, you tend to create more new problems than you fix old ones.
Fourth, can HP (or whoever takes it over) really divest itself of its consumer products and go head-to-head with the now re-invented and well-positioned IBM in servers and services? The Spy suspects not. IBM saw a wave coming years ago, divested itself of small computers and decisively altered its entire business model. HP appears to be merely wallowing in doubt and indecision.
And fifth, it all seems too little and too late. The greatest damage is not so much to today’s business, but to tomorrow’s. HP has tossed away considerable assets of mindshare, trust–faith if you will. As the Spy has said here many times before, marketshare lags mindshare by two to five years. That’s as reliable a predictor on the down side as it is on the up side–perhaps more so once the slippery slope brings out the vultures in the press to devour the weak.
The new CEO at HP is reputed to be making only a dollar in salary and the rest in performance bonus promises. She could come very cheap indeed.

Which brings us to RIM, Nokia, and MS,
where the steady erosion of mindshare to Apple over the last few years is yielding the inevitable defection of customers and influx of short sellers today. RIM is in so much trouble that it appears ripe for a hostile takeover by a breakup artist. Perhaps Apple will buy the patent portfolio at auction. The only other asset of value there is the network and residual good will–no longer much. RIM’s tablet was ill-conceived, and the company did not itself know to whom it was being marketed. Colour it extinct.
Meanwhile, Nokia slides steadily toward oblivion, hurried along by the deadly embrace decision to adopt Windows in place of its own OS. Again, Apple could easily buy the whole company from spare change. But, why?
Microsoft was once able to get away with countering Apple’s innovation by imitating its OS and pawning off an inferior product as the choice for business to run on “IBM-compatible” PCs. Even that strategy would not work today, for technology is now mass market and consumer driven. In the current arena one can only counter innovation by offering better innovation the next day (or, better yet, the previous day.)
With Apple seemingly having a lock on technological creativity (or at least the perception of same) the purely reactive competing enterprise is doomed. Worse than that, one could well argue that none of these three former leaders has lately been very good at executing even a reactive strategy.
Ironically, the now resurgent IBM saw its market cap surpass that of Microsoft this past week, as it pushed past its floundering and leaderless former ally into second place in the technology sector.

Winners, on the other hand
can be found at Google (Android, now with over 40% of the smartphone market) and Amazon (the respected, if pedestrian Kindle). In one sense, Google seems to be trying to imitate the once-upon-a-time Microsoft route–lever connections with sufficient partners and throw enough marketing muscle behind a fairly good imitation with a few bells and whistles of its own, and you may succeed for a time. Is Apple up to meeting that kind of challenge? Ask rather whether the Pope is Catholic, though the Spy does note some slippage in Apple’s quality control over the last few years that might widen this small opening.
The case of Amazon is more complex, and for the longer term hinges around whether they can re-invent the Kindle–the most successful eBook reader yet made–as an iPad competitor. The Spy gives that prospect a definite maybe. Amazon has the infrastructure and the customer mindshare to pull it off. After all, no one else has come this close to a satisfactory electronic reading experience. But can they produce a superior product? Their first attempts at a kPad seem weak, but first attempts always are. Give it a year. If they cannot trump the iPad in that time, they never will. On the the other hand, could the news reports that Amazon is interested in buying WebOS from HP really be credible? The Spy’s first reaction is decidedly otherwise, but bizarre things seem to happen daily in the fantasy land that is the high-tech executive suite. Why would they want to? And on the final hand, Kindle is good but not great, so no one has yet gotten the electronic reading experience excellently right. Should someone else do so in the meanwhile, it is curtains Kindle.
That someone could be and should be Apple, but so far iCupertino does not seem interested in that market, for its software efforts on the iPad/iPhone/iPod have been anemic–no way to build mind share in this market against such a lead. Too bad. The paper publishing industry is sick unto dying, and ripe to have someone issue the coupe de gras.

The stock market is passing judgement
on more than just sovereign debtors and their misguided banks, but on the high-tech industry. Amidst a global rout, Apple’s shares have held their value, even flirting with the $400 level, while those of their competitors have tanked. This too is a mindshare barometer, a harbinger of sales a couple of years down the road. Expect things to get better for Apple and worse for the others. One is tempted to make comparisons between the high-tech losers and the sick countries of Europe, excepting that a failure by, say RIM, would discomfit only stock holders, not bring down banks and other nations’ economies as will that of Greece.

Other harbingers of note
include Apple’s decision to cease sales of boxed software for the download from its online store. This is more than a “create a new trend” decision–it makes business sense, it is green, and it acknowledges the inevitable. Boxed software sold over the counter in a brick and mortar store is going the way of the passenger pigeon, as will the paper publishing industry as soon as someone gets the eBook reader right. True, it may mean the demise of many small stores, but it’s a big win for both manufacturer and consumer, for costs will fall dramatically.
A mention of the (as of this date) upcoming October announcements from Apple seems in order for this section. Yup, first part of the month. Yup, iPhone products. You read it here some time ago. Right. consider it mentioned. Consider it doubtful it will be further discussed here after the fact, as such incremental upgrades to existing products, while they may further cash in mindshare to marketshare, do not fundamentally change a well-established market direction fed by previously earned mindshare. Such would require a dramatically new market entry, such as an Apple television, an Apple network, an Apple telephone company, an Apple chip design and manufacturing facility, an Apple book reader done right (say, complete with a seven-inch iPad form factor product), an Apple e-ink touch screen foldable into one’s pocket to obsolete newspapers and magazines, an Apple micro cloud for home and office (complete with a line of cloud enabled hardware of the kind that perhaps could be made by the remnants of what is today called HP), or an Apple foray into the services and server market (also purchasable via an HP break up auction or by merger with IBM if the anti-trust people would allow the latter.)
Oh, all right. That last crack was an ironic jibe at the company that could once have bought the whole of Apple for a song, but passed up the opportunity. ‘Course, Apple would never have become what it did under the steady but unimaginative hand of the pin stripe suits.
Moving right along, the Spy was quite interested in the Thunderbolt announcement a while back, but notes that though it may operate at dramatically faster speeds than any previous interface, its actual arrival on the market is one of the slower advents in recent years. Indeed, before much has even begun to be sold, we learn it can support optical cables that could be even faster than the previously announced speeds. But when can the Spy actually buy a new pocket drive with a TB interface (among others), a cable to hook it up, and an adapter card for his existing Mac Pro? How about a way to connect it to his laptop?

Personal note PS
Last month the Spy mentioned running for the board of CIRA (the Canadian Internet Registration Authority), a non-profit corporation set up to run the .ca domain here in the frozen north. In the preliminary round of voting he finished about twelfth in a field of nearly seventy, but for good or ill it wasn’t good enough as only eight or so will move on to the next round. Thanks for all the votes.

P.S. reprised from last month
What word did you use to fill in the title?

–The Northern Spy

By billm • Columns, The Northern Spy • 0 • Tags: arjay enterprises, northern spy, october 2011, rick sutcliffe, The Northern Spy

May 15 2011

The Northern Spy

By Rick Sutcliffe

The Good, the Quick, and the Big
May 2011

Apple bids fair to take over the electronic world
as iSteve’s little Cupertino company doubles revenues year over year, pushes profits to heights not previously imagined, and bids to continue on this path indefinitely. As previously predicted in this space, many of the purchasers of iProducts are now buying Macs as well, ensuring a growing dominance in that space as more and more people come to realize that it’s better to use a real operating system rather than a cheap, buggy knockoff. Eventually business will “get” it too, and when that tide turns, the whole industry will reach a cusp.

Perhaps this past quarter offered a defining moment of sorts, as Apple’s profit surpassed that of MS for the first time since the early nineties (by several hundred million, and no looking back). Given that Apple is a relatively high-cost hardware operation, and MS an extremely low marginal cost software house, this is a truly momentous kilometrestone.

Apple got to this point by being market-nimble with its products–either anticipating what will be needed or, more recently, defining the want by first creating the product. The “cool” factor now dominates the iProduct space to the extent that Apple could market oranges to rave reviews, long line-ups, and supply shortages–especially if they were painted white.

You see, many pundits have it wrong. There isn’t a “tablet market” out there, and there never was. There is an iPad market, and little else. It’s a space Apple created, and owns outright, one that is encroaching heavily on the low end laptop market (supplied by nearly everyone but Apple). There are no competing products, just feeble attempts to carve out a slice of Apple’s niche. Does no one else have any creativity?

And, we’re not talking about a new phenomenon here. Apple has all along either created or brought to the consumer market nearly every innovation in personal computing to see the light of day since the late seventies. It never was a company making toys as some claimed. Rather it was the leading edge of technology development, the definer of the market, the purveyor of quality and innovative gear regardless of what the rest were selling, the company not only where new things were happening, but whose products were making things happen in the broader society.

This has been iSteve’s genius–the ability to make products wanted by the masses (a deliberately ambiguous phrase that)–and it makes the questions about the continued growth of an iCook-led company legitimate. Aside: It won’t do to try to reserve or innovate around the word “Timmies” as that is reserved here in the frozen north for the premiere doughnut and coffee shop.

The Spy has another concern–that the very size of the company in the light of its own success could outrun it’s capability to continue delivering the goods. You see, big trades off with nimble, and with good. We see a measure of this with the latest iPad introduction, where Apple quickly found it could not make nearly enough product to meet demand, and indeed still has not caught up. The next iPhone iteration (world phone, new case design, available in black or white, on sale no sooner than October; you read it here first) is likely to have similar issues. Is it possible for one company to satisfy the demand for say, eight to ten million of a device on the first day of introduction, twenty million in a month? a hundred million plus in a year? Is it even possible to source the components for as many iProducts for which Apple can the create iWant? Each ramp-up in the scale of demand makes this more difficult–not impossible, mind, but poses an increasing risk of failure to deliver the goods.

And, when this enormous demand spills back into the computer marketplace, and upon the inevitable economic uptick, when the corporate world tech buyers realizes what everyone else already has, that the MacOS is not only better, faster and safer, but that Macs are even the best W*nd*ws machines, when Apple’s share of that market begins to approach similar percentages, can one company, however insanely great, manufacture and deliver enough of those to meet the demand? (See, a big sentence isn’t necessarily a great one, either.) These logistics have fared well thus far, but it may be fair to question whether the company is at greater risk for not having iSteve at the daily design helm, or by having iCook preoccupied away from supply management.

It will be interesting to see whether the coming iCloud service meets with similar success, for if it does, Apple’s data centre will quickly prove too small by far, and the existing network infrastructure inadequate to handle the traffic–and a fix will not take the weeks or months of an antenna tweak, but years of limping while building more infrastructure. Let’s make a generous assumption and on hope alone give Apple some credit for thinking such issues through ahead of time, but should iCloud meet with the same kind of enthusiasm as has the hardware that will use it, there may be rain on Apple’s parade if the company cannot meet expectations or suffers a failure.

It seems to the Spy that reinventing the Cloud so as to create an exclusive and perfect iStorm of data to and from Apple’s servers also requires re-inventing security for same. And, as twice previously mentioned in this space, a single data centre may do if you’re offering hosting and co-location, but it is worse than unsatisfactory if you are offering cloud services on a worldwide basis. A single locus of failure is a catastrophe waiting to happen, not to mention a juicy target. A web site is easily moved; a hundred thousand servers full of data are not. Thus that giant state-of-the-art data centre is too small even before the day it opens, and remains too small until it is cloned four or five times over and on at least three continents.

Like the DNS system run by top level domain registries, where redundancy is taken to extremes, failure in a sufficiently large and relied-upon enterprise is not an option. If one’s computer croaks, a new box can be running off a backup of the data in a few hours. If one’s cloud service dies for lack of multiple redundancy, it may never rise again.

Consider the parallel lesson learned by the recent failure of Sony’s Playstation server–some seventy-seven million people had personal data including passwords and/or credit card information compromised. If every Mac and iProduct user were on Apple’s iCloud, a physical or security failure would have the effect of a tsunami. More than any recent product intro, this one must be done right. There is no margin for error or failure. Customers may forgive a wonky antenna, but not the compromise of their personal information

Oh, and most pundits are touting Apple’s cloud as a music product. To that, the Spy offers some “yes, buts.”
Yes, but, what about books (especially textbooks), cloud data backup, and video–any of which have the potential to require at least as much disk space and bandwidth, in some cases far more than music. The iCloud is just the tip of a cumulus monster–one that Apple will own by right of redefinition, just as it does “app store”. Not all the import of last month’s column was in jest. But again, when a cloud gets large enough, it’s time to be wary of thunderstorms. Hail can ruin an apple orchard in minutes.

As a further cautionary word on one aspect of this subject, when the Spy asks himself whether he would trust critical data to the cloud, he must reply “not a chance”. The risk is too great. And, organizations that consider going this route had better consult lawyers, privacy experts, security gurus, disaster scenario experts, and not put a toe into these waters without assuming that everything will go horribly terribly wrong, at the worst time, and in the worst possible way, and have a plan for same. Still want to do it?

iCloud also lends credibility to ideas about the next MacPro
for, though the Spy had thought the current tower iteration seemed like the last, he now believes otherwise–that given Lion will contain the full Apple Server software suite, it makes more sense to tweak the tower slightly to a three unit wide box, and offer a mounting kit to allow the whole things to be turned sideways into a rack. Apple’s iCloud facility would of course be a principal consumer for such machines, which could be marketed as a better replacement for the departed XServe, as well as to professionals, with only slight disk, CPU, and memory configuration differences, thus allowing a better price in both markets due to increased volumes. He has since heard rumours to this precise effect, and given they accord with his thinking, he offers them a modicum of credibility.

Curmudgeonly rant of the month department
revolves around the Spy’s inability to relate to or even understand the whole silly notion of “celebrity”. From royals and entertainment stars/idols to industry moguls or trumps, to pastors who speak endlessly of “my ministry successes” to people who walk the streets dressed and painted in “hey, look at me”–in other words, the whole range of what appears on the surface to be our major societal preoccupation, the self-promoters who are the idols and emperors of billions’ affections–among the lot the Spy is constitutionally unable to perceive clothes, substance, “blue” blood, or the significance of fame. True, sports “stars” have actually done something, but does it warrant the salaries they get, the acclaim they receive? In the Spy’s HO, this too is obscenely overdone.

To be sure, he understands that one gives respect where respect is due, honour where honour is due, and obedience where obedience is due. The office a person holds is important, and so is the authority that comes with it. The person who routinely scorns all authority is at best an anarchist, and may be far worse. But one also gives worship only where worship is due.

Give the Spy instead that hard working student who finally “gets” calculus, becomes an engineer, and creates products or infrastructure that make a positive difference in people’ lives. Give him the corner grocery store owner who serves her customers with old fashioned courtesy and style. Away with self promoters, and up with the humble grinder toiling on the fourth line. Off the front pages with celebrity serial weddings (and their inevitable divorces). Let’s instead hear more of people faithfully married for sixty years to the same person and whose children and grandchildren are solid and productive citizens.

Down with the cheating stock promoter, the amasser of obscene fortunes on others’ backs, and up with those who add real value to real people’s lives (whether they are rich or not). Away with politicians and celebrity lawyers who turn the language into knots for their own ends. He’ll take the humble civil servant who offers the public real value, the grade one teacher who leads village children to read, or the pastor who preaches and practices the faith any day of the week over self-absorbed talkers. A Thomas Edison, a Grace Hopper, or a Billy Graham may be celebrities worthy of note; so are the secretary and janitor of a Moldavian orphanage, and the doorkeeper and toilet cleaner at the local Baptist church. Heroism is as heroism does, and most of the real thing goes unnoticed in this life in the glare of publicity over cheap, tinselly imitations.

For when this life is over, and the its deeds are tallied up, no one will care any more how much money someone made, what colour was their skin or hair, how well they, spoke, acted, sang, passed the football, looked when painted up, or persuaded others of their worth. (S)he who dies with the most toys, acclaim, or power wins nothing at all, still dies, and is soon forgotten. Enquire instead what legacy a person leaves in lives changed, society altered for the good, and people quietly served who cannot pay back, but are instead inspired to pay forward. At the end of life, will anyone say “well done, good and faithful servant”? Or will it be a case of “gone and best forgotten?” Real celebrity is value added, not parasitical.

Prediction of the month department?
As a few in the Excited States may have noticed, Canada is in the throes of a Federal election, brought about when the combined opposition created a “contempt of parliament” motion targeting the minority Conservative government. That opposition vote has been shifting around quite a bit in the opinion polls lately, but it begins to look like Canada is about to adopt “American style politics”, not merely with divisive attack ads and empty rhetoric, but also with a two party system. Stay tuned, but the story of the election could well be (per the polls, if you believe them) the razor thin Conservative majority he’s privately forecast all along (plus or minus seven seats) but now with the historic Liberals and the regional Bloc Quebecois both reduced to a rump.

Does this election have any significance in the technology space? The New Democrats (read “somewhat to the left of the American (old) Democrats”) have attempted to harvest results from social media as did Obama, but their perhaps temporary success is more to the credit of Quebecers apparently abandoning their separatism while retaining their socialism. The Liberals (read “somewhat to the right of the Democrats, but on fiscal policy only”) are an historic old party that seems lost in the modern era, with little to say to a technological society, and little to differentiate them from other parties on their wing. The Conservatives (read “well to the centre from Republicans”) are running on their record (vinyl) looking for a majority, but using the tried and true old-style politics and issues (economy, jobs, family-oriented social policy) with little apparent interest in technology issues. The Greens are not a factor (remote chance of one seat), and the Bloc (separatists) are a one-issue and one-Province party. Neither of these have put forward any policies of particular relevance to the technically minded.

In short, it’s not an election to excite anyone on the cutting edge. Now for the truly bold prediction. This will be the last time one can say that. The politicians may not yet have taken notice, but society has changed, and is changing further. Issues like technical literacy, the demise of privacy, the shortage of high-tech workers, the failures of the education business, multinationalism, social responsibility in post-industry industry, access to the metalibrary (what the Internet is becoming), the coming demise of many old industry stalwarts (pulp and paper, oil, dead tree publishing, and the post office, for instance), and the radically different modes of social and business intercourse will, perforce, all become front and centre in future elections, both as issues and for strategic reasons. Does anyone think the current style of campaigning and voting is likely to survive much farther into the information age? More, does anyone really think government needs to be as big and as centralized as it has become, when the issues that affect most people live at the local level?
The Spy will do his bit for democracy as a scrutineer on Monday, and by the time most people read this, the results will be known, but somehow the whole exercise this time has the feel of savage antiquity about it–somewhat like a typewriter, a dial telephone, a steam powered automobile, or a card punch machine. Past time to upgrade this system. It is possible to do participatory democracy now; representative democracy seems obsolete.

–The Northern Spy

URLs for Rick Sutcliffe’s Books:
Booksurge: http://www.booksurge.com
Fictionwise: http://www.fictionwise.com

URLs for items mentioned in this column
Apple: http://www.apple.com/

By billm • Apple Inc., The Northern Spy • 0 • Tags: apple, nspy, rick sutcliffe, The Northern Spy

Mar 1 2011

The Northern Spy

by Rick Sutcliffe

Some Things Old, Some Things New
March 2011

For the last two months
the Spy has digressed from the reader’s usual fare to cover two endemic ethical issues–to wit, the misconduct of the spammer, and that of the rogue board member. For March, there are many interesting technology news items to consider. To complete the title, the Spy may borrow a rumour or two, and will certainly consider things Blue (-Ray, that is.)

New products
are now in the stores, as Apple has released the expected iteration of the Mac Book Pro. The main item of interest, besides the number of cores in a portable, is the new high speed data channel–Thunderbolt, which incorporates and subsumes the display port. What does this mean for the longer term?
- that as usual Apple is a good year ahead of the pack in introducing new technology,
- far higher data transfer speeds, as manufacturers of disk drives adopt the new interface,
- Apple now seems unlikely to adopt USB 3.0, include eSATA ports, or continue developing or even using Firewire.
In other words, the announcement is as important for what technology Apples is moving away from as for the new thing it introduces.
But has anyone else noticed that clock rates receive much less attention than they used to? Apple abandoned the PowerPC chip a while back because it was perceived to be too slow, especially for portables. Yet the quad had a clock running at 2.5 GHz. The Intel chips are about that speed in portables, and very little above it in desktops. As the Spy has pointed out several times, current chip fabrication technology is probably at or near its speed limit for a single core, so the only way to get higher throughput is to use the multiple cores that we are now seeing.
As also mentioned here before, this strategy has its limitations, for at some point the processing overhead for switching cores becomes greater than the marginal gain from adding another core, and the designer is then up against a hard limit that will bear little more tweaking except on the communication bus and the heat production (the real bane of the PowerPC). Thus, the Spy’s current 8-core Mac Pro desktop is faster than his Quad PowerPC–a lot where the power can be taken advantage of, a little in most cases, and not at all in some situations. It was a solid upgrade (and needed because the Quad’s heat problems and fan idiosyncrasies had become a threat to his workflow), but it was not a spectacular one.
Yet another “not” is Blu-Ray. The Spy is beginning to think that Apple may skip this technology altogether and move instead to “no-moving-parts” storage (some indications already in SSDs). Some time back in a semi-tongue-in-cheek column, he speculated on true 3-D removable storage in the form of a one-cc data cube holding some 10T of decimal data (not binary). He now thinks that total could be pushed an order of magnitude higher.

What you care about in new products
coming from Cupertino in the next few months depends on your primary platform. On the software side, Lion is preparing to make the leap into the market in the Summer. WWDC participants will probably be served a large dose of hype along with a developer copy. Apart from the obvious expectation of some moves in the direction of iOS, the strong likelihood of an interface makeover, abandonment of all vestige of PowerPC support, and the probability of some minor new functionality, the Spy does not expect big surprises.
The most pressing Apple software issues are elsewhere–first, in an overhaul of the whole clunky iTunes interface. A change to a comprehensive iStore shell with iTunes as a section is long overdue. The current separate MacOS store is surely also a stopgap measure. Second, and in the Spy’s HO, iWork applications Pages and Numbers need some beef to make them enterprise-ready, though Apple may not care about the enterprise that much (see the rant below).
On the other side of the narrowing OS divide, the white iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches seem at the doorstep. Apple appears to be dithering on the display quality for the next generation of iPads, and may run through two generations rather than one this year. Most likely hardware change over the next year or two: a significant memory increase.
As for desktop hardware, the Spy is increasingly of the opinion that towers are about to topple. The iMac package is more than most people need, and a few high end configurations of it would likely satisfy the pros, obviating the need for tower platforms, cutting costs, and increasing profits. If the current towers are not the last generation of same, they may well be the penultimate.
On the gripping hand, as a fellow SF author is fond of saying, the Spy must give considerable credence to the rumours that Apple is planning to get into the TV set market. Even though Cupertino has no previous presence in this sector, this would fit the corporate direction like a glove. Such a move would see the AppleTV hardware bundled directly into a TV screen (let’s hope they leave the tuner as part of the box) besides being sold separately as now for those with non-Apple branded sets. Yet, starting up a screen manufacturing division seems fraught with as much peril as starting up a chip fabrication plant.
Best move? Use some of that mountain of cash to purchase Samsung, a company that would fit perfectly into Apple’s major moves toward the consumer entertainment market. Why not Sony? Because Samsung has noticeably better products. Catch for iSteve (still the brains behind, and don’t let anyone say otherwise)? Apple would thus perforce become a Blue-Ray vendor, as the players and home theatre products that include them could not be dispensed with. The corporate fit would need work, as the Samsung support reputation is spotty, their track record on software leaves something to be desired, and they have several products that would have to be dropped, but otherwise, this might be the ideal catch, for it also offers the potential for greater vertical integration by owning the screen manufacturer rather than being its biggest customer. Apple might have to move fast on this one, as Samsung is reportedly cozying up to Google.

The reader may recall
the Spy’s adventures a while back with his Time Vault, whose router section failed while barely still under warrantee and was replaced by Apple. He regrets to report now that the hard drive in the replacement unit has also died, and of course the warrantee is long since over. Moreover, the archive function was unable to complete its task, and all data that was on the machine is now lost. Oh, of course the Spy has six other backups of everything, and more of some, but the incremental ones now rest in peace in the great bit bucket.
This failure is clearly a design issue. The so-called “server grade” disk in the unit runs too hot to be sharing an inadequately-ventilated box with an already warm Gigabit wired and N wireless router. The combination generates far too much heat, so much so that the unit feels like a pot on a stove to the touch–almost able to burn the fingers. A slower and less power-hungry drive replacement might help (after all, the data cannot arrive fast enough even on a 1G Ethernet to overwhelm it), and he may yet repair this one with a Western Digital green drive.
OTOH, he may instead do fully what he probably should have in the first place–buy boxes for one functionality each, not two, so that if one fails, only that has to be replaced, and reliance on one vendor is reduced (no multi-function printer/scanner/fax/coffee maker for him). To this end, he had already purchased and put into service a “house server” based on a Synology NAS Model DS211+ and two 2T Hitachi drives configured as a RAID-2. (This product has multiple uses, and can handle multiple connections, so may benefit from faster drives.)
Initially, this was intended as a photo and video server only, but with the Time Vault’s capitulation he has now created a folder to be the Time Machine volume, so the Apple product, which lost that function, will probably not get it back. The next step (as soon as they are available in Canada) will be to order a Cisco-Linksys 4200 router (potentially much higher wireless speeds, more configurability), and Apple will at that point lose the other function as well, and the old Vault either be re-positioned with a new drive and the router off, or thrown out.
The Synology machine has a bewildering array of configuration settings and functionality, including serving photos, streaming video, security station, handling backups for multiple platforms, and acting as a web server (not exhaustive). Even for a long-time geek like the Spy, the documentation and software were hard to fully and accurately understand. (A dialogue he’s had too often over the years, either with self or a technician: “Do the instructions mean this or that outcome from an action? Then, after much research and possible several calls: Ah, no, they mean something else entirely unrelated to either. How could one ever deduce that meaning from the words in the manual? You mean it isn’t obvious? Only if you were already familiar with the product and didn’t need any instructions in the first place.)
This common quibble aside, the Synology runs fast and cool. Once set up, it just works. Time Machine backups take far less time than with Apple’s Time Vault (they should with a dedicated NAS), and the swappable redundant drives should mean that data is safer. For someone willing to spend a little money and time to get and configure a top-flight product, the Spy recommends the Synology line. With the DS211+, he bought in at the high end of the home range (or low end of the business one) but the company seems to have a product for almost anyone’s budget, its boxes are carried by numerous wholesalers and retailers, and the pricing, while it varies over the typical 25% retail range, seems competitive for the functionality. His only caveat is longevity. The design is patently superior to Apple’s, but one never knows how long a product lasts until it dies. Ask him again in five years.
But the Spy must now firmly recommend against buying the Time Vault, unless Apple re-upps it with much better ventilation and a cooler drive. For those who already have one, he can only weakly suggest not doing backups to it via wireless, thus avoiding stressing heat production to the max. He also doubts that may of these units will survive three years. Apple could do (and should have done) far better, and this sad outcome illustrates that sometimes jumping into a product line already well done by others does not always result in success (just most of the time in Apple’s case).

Is it just the Spy
or does the idea of Nokia abandoning its own cell phone platform to partner with Microsoft and Windows look altogether too much like a burning platform tying itself to a sinking ship? Choosing drowning rather than flameout as a mode of extinguishment scarcely seems like a survival strategy. The medium term result may be that Microsoft absorbs Nokia; the long can be of no value to either, for it is a non-innovator taking an innovator (albeit a failing one) out of contention. Bad for everyone, especially the parties involved.

To keep the negatives even handed this month,
the Spy also notes that for a company whose future in the enterprise heavily depends on higher education (people like to buy for business what they use in school), Apple’s track record in this sector is abysmal, and not getting any better. How about a university licensing system that makes sense, is not dependent on a minimum number of seats, comes at a reasonable cost, and with serious support? How about university partnerships to mutual benefit? After all, Cupertino, you are trying to gain market share in a sector where you once had dominance, then threw it all away, and are now making stealth gains that you should be trying to transform into deliberate ones. Doesn’t that suggest that your methods and terms of doing business should be better than the other guys’ rather than worse? Hey there iCEO Tim Cook. Time to “get” education, especially at universities. They are as much the key to the future as the consumer market, and moreso to the enterprise. Oh, and abandoning the server market didn’t exactly help your reputation. No one is going to use towers in a space-tight rack environment.
To really keep things even-handed, he ought to note that a typo last month caused the February column to go into virtual print with one of the very spelling errors he most rails against in pronunciation, and no one noticed until he did just now and corrected it, at least on this site. Tish tish. And we all thought the Spy never made mistrakes.

–The Northern Spy

URLs for Rick Sutcliffe’s Arjay Enterprises:
Arijay Books: http://www.ArjayBooks.com
The Northern Spy Home Page: http://www.TheNorthernSpy.com
opundo : http://opundo.com
Sheaves Christian Resources : http://sheaves.org
WebNameHost : http://www.WebNameHost.net
WebNameSource : http://www.WebNameSource.net
nameman : http://nameman.net
URLs for Rick Sutcliffe’s Books:
Booksurge: http://www.booksurge.com
Fictionwise: http://www.fictionwise.com
URLs for items mentioned in this column
Synology: http://www.synology.com/

By billm • Columns, The Northern Spy • 0 • Tags: arjay enterprises, northern spy, nspy, rick sutcliffe, The Northern Spy

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