Author: Rick Sutcliffe
More on the fifteen inch retina MacBook Pro The Spy has had this machine a month now, and experience confirms his first impressions. The machine is computationally fast, though not spectacularly so. Having an SSD for a drive makes more of a difference than any internal changes. The display is crisp, better than anything he’s had in a portable before, and the glossy finish not nearly as annoying as such once were, but the improvements are not as revolutionary as…
Last Monththe Spy recounted his adventures with changing his Linux server to a bigger badder machine running a much more recent OS. This month, he bit yet another migration bullet, moving into a new laptop. Why an issue? Software. The longtime reader may recall the iconoclast Spy has continued to use good old reliable Eudora for his mail client, lo these many years. Well, cannot do that even with Lion, much less Mountain Lion. BTW, the new machine is a…
Under another hat, the Spy runs WebNameHost which is a small hosting company in business for a decade now, and offering professional hosting in a safe environment for Christian, authors, small businesses, and personal sites. This is less than a living business, but much more than a hobby, as his teaching demands that he be able to discourse with students on all manner of computing technology without seeming too much a fool or irrelevant. It also needs to break even….
What boundary is the link between young and old? Is the Spy old because he hits a significant-sounding birthday number on July 3? Perhaps. After all, two nations celebrate his birthday annually, albeit one two days early, and another a day late. And, next year will be the thirtieth since he first typed this column on his Apple ][. Yet, perhaps after all, age is a state of mind. His father was a young-looking man at sixty-five, retired that year,…
The Spy observes with each passing month that business and the economy seem driven, not by stereotypical hard-nosed logic surrounding bottom line considerations, but by inertia, emotion, and untrammeled greed. This applies to individual enterprises, industry sectors, and whole economies, and is reflected in actual success, stock and bond evaluations, and exchange rates (proxy instruments along with bonds for the equity of nations). Indeed, in the current environment, rhetoric around social agendas or even the general good, sound increasingly hollow,…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
by Rick SutcliffeNovember 2011 Presciencewas 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…
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….
By Rick Sutcliffe The Good, the Quick, and the BigMay 2011 Apple bids fair to take over the electronic worldas 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…
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…
by Rick Sutcliffe Just as there are 10 kinds of people in the world– those who understand binary notation, and those who do not–so there are two kinds of people in the world, those who build, and those who tear down. The Spy prefers to be one of the former, and on the occasions when he becomes a critic, tries to be constructive about it, even when this is not easy. (There are two kinds of critics, the constructive, and…
by Sean Henriques KillDashboard : a utility to disable the Dashboard on your Mac After seeing my lovely 4GB Macbook Pro come to a halt, I checked the Activity Monitor and was horrified to see that the Dashboard was taking up more than 1GB of Real Memory! I don’t know about you but I rarely pop into the Dashboard so I wrote up a utility to Kill the Dashboard quickly and posted on buzz. A request to share it soon…
The latest version of the popular Macintosh based Virtual ][ emulator has been released. Version 6.3.6 has a number of changes including: * The program now accepts “dsk” image files with 41 tracks (the maximum so far was 40). * A recent Snow Leopard upgrade broke the “Make Movie from Apple II Screen” feature. This has been fixed. * Cassette tape files now get file name extension “cass” instead of “aif”. As a result, the cassette tape icon appears correctly…
2010 01 27 is now past and the iPad officially exists, instead of merely being the chief grist for the rumour mills, as for the last year. How did the Spy do on his predictions? Got the name wrong (was there a last minute iSteve change of mind because so many, including the Spy, guessed the original name correctly as iSlate?) He was right on the initial size (9.7 inch LED screen. It’s also very thin at 0.5 inch and…
8BitSystem, famous for products such as the LittlePower IIc+, DoubleSeven, Switch-a-Slot and the LittleProto II, is now offereing their products through ReactiveMicro.com for reduced prices. With the prices being reduced by up to 30% on select items, the time is now to own these products for your own Apple ][ collection as this is a limited time offering. For more information, check out the ReactiveMicro.com website. About 8BitSystem 8BitSystem is a sole owner enterprise which builds custom order parts and…
