Category: Columns
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….
Just the other day, Marc S. Ressl released the latest version of his Apple II emulator for Mac OS X. OpenEmulator, written by Marc S. Ressl, is the most exciting new Apple II emulator around. Designed to replicate down to the littlest details the experience of using real Apple II hardware, this free, open-source emulator succeeds in providing the full effect! The latest version, 1.0.3, adds emulation of the Apple II Plus and J-Plus computers, as well as the Disk…
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 introduction of Passbook in iOS 6 this month was interesting in that it brought Apple up to the level that many companies have already been at with their offerings. While this introduction was good in one respect, it also left me once again pondering what this means for the world of personal information security. It has a number of us actually pondering what Apple is thinking about other than ease of use. Passbook gives the user a really easy…
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,…
By Bill Martens With Apple poised to introduce the Apple iPad 3 or it’s equivalent, we decided to sit down and write a short laundry list of items we figure we will see today. Many of the rumors running the mill this week have been everything from the outlandish to the absolutely hilarious and it is time to put a bit more of a cap on it all and bring the rumors back to a bit of reality. The first…
Ken Gagne and Mike Maginis’s Open Apple Podcast issue #13 is now available on the Open Apple website. This month’s issue includes a discussion with Marinetti curator Andrew Roughan. They discuss a host of issues int he Apple ][ world including the forthcoming Kansasfest as well as Brian Fargo’s current attempt to re-create the Wasteland franchise with a kick starter project. Other topics include the Uthernet, Lim Thye Chen’s Apple ][ programmin iBook and Kim Howe’s software reclassification. You can…
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…
The trademark dispute in China between Proview, a bankrupt supposed owner of the iPad name and Apple, the known manufacturer of the iPad, is now widening to a point where Apple is being black mailed for 2 Billion USD by Proview. While Apple purchased the rights to the name several years ago, Proview is now arguing that that sale did not cover mainland China where the iPad is made. Apple was initially being asked for 1.6 Billion in addition to…
by A.P.P.L.E. Staff This past week, the controversy over the price of an iPhone App has once again raised its ugly head. Many people seem to think these days that all apps should be free or as close to free as they can be. Apple did not help this thought this month when they introduced their iWorks application for a mere 9.95 for the iPad. The 1000 dollar BarMax seems to set the standard for apps when it comes to…
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…
Apple had a slam dunk, in your face type of quarter in quarter 1, 2012. It’s profits were beyond that of any belief. The stock price jumped to over 455 USD a share at one point after profits were announced. The number of iPhone 4S’s sold were more than 4 million units beyond that of even the most optimistic analyst. It was a huge success, but there are cracks in the mirror. Supply is an issue for the iPhones, hard…
This morning, Apple announced their new initiative to make education one of their highest priorities. This announcement has not really changed their stance on the subject of education, but the way in which they did it deserves merit. The first thing that Apple did is to eliminate the physical books and the cutting down of trees to print those books. This alone will save Billions of dollars each year and definitely help save the forests that are so important to…
On January 19th, 2012, Apple Inc. is scheduled to have an education related announcement in the heart of New York City. While many in the world are speculating that apple is trying to “destroy the textbook industry”, We suspect that they are just following up on several lines of thought. First, Texas was the first in the nation to embrace to totally digital textbook idea. It currently saves the state 2 billion USD per year in text book costs. If…
The Open Apple Podcast, produced by Apple ][ fans Mike Maginnis and Ken Gagne, is now available on the Open Apple Poscast website. This is the 11th edition of Open Apple and features guest host David Greelish of the Retro Computing Rountable Podcast. This month Ken and Mike run through a host of news items including Steve Jobs’ passing, the 175,000 Apple-1, the 1.6 million dollar apple document, and the John Scully Interview done by David Greelish, as well as…
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,…
At 10:00 am EST, Apple made a move that will send shock waves through the world of computing forever. They opened their biggest and brightest store yet, right smack dab in the middle of Grand Central Station. Long, the center piece of the New York existence, Grand Central serves more than a million people every day. Even though MacWorld Expo 2002 in Tokyo boasted some of the highest numbers ever for an Apple based event, coming in at 198,000 attendees…
The only Apple ][ related podcast currently available is now in its 10 edition. The December version of the show has been posted to the Open Apple website according to this note from Mike Maginnis: This month on the Open Apple podcast, Mike and Ken are joined by Rob Kenyon, a two-time KansasFest attendee as well as a professional programmer and 30-year veteran of the Apple II. We talk about how great it is to be a part of the…
