Category: Columns
Well another month has passed, and it seems that every month we get a will later in later in the production process. The this month we have a few special items in the magazine, including reviews of iListen, by emulator, and various other software packages. In the world of innovation, Vince Briel has been working on a new version of the replica one. The latest version will include a USB connector as well as power connectors for the newer ATX…
If word of what’s really going on ever got leaked by the media, it would trigger a world panic. It would immediately destroy the economy of every country in the world. Every business would close down. Money would become worthless. Highways would become impassable. Food stores would quickly be stripped by mobs. Power would shut down, taking water supplies with it. All communications would end. No radio, TV, telephones, mail, Fed-X, UPS, and so on. Would this mess cause fewer deaths than…
Apple recently astounded developers (some of whom had made plans, including hotel reservations) by moving WWDC from San Jose to San Francisco and postponing the affair by a month. This after the date had supposedly been set a year in advance. Ostensibly this was done in order to place into developers’ hands copies of the new version of OS X, code named “Panther”. However, there is apparently much more going on at One Infinite Loop than meets the eye. What…
OS X Ramblings The Spy has mentioned problems and concerns with OS X in this space several times. Applications quit suddenly, permissions get unglued, and updaters fail to solve the problem. Recently the Applications folder on a new 1G TiBook got a mind of its own: Any attempt to move an application to it or to a subfolder caused the finder to quit and restart, the attempted action not performed (a self-taught folder action). No problem with text and other…
“Hey, Professor, how’s it going?” “Oh, hi, Nellie,” I replied, sparing her a mere nibble of attention from the article I was writing. Then I did a doubletake. She shouldn’t be here. When I turned around, Nellie had claimed a chair and was perusing one of my Macintosh magazines. (Of course I read the competition.) “What are you doing here on a Monday morning? Aren’t you supposed to be working?” “Worm”, she announced laconically, flipping to the game reviews. “What…
The introduction of the one Gigahertz version of Apple’s TiBook, closes the gap between the high end laptop and desktop units. Compared with the 500MHz model of two years ago, the new units have twice as much of almost everythingÑspeed, cache, video and main memory, and disk drive space. Both the video memory and the 1M L3 cache are DDR, which ought to improve throughput on many common functions. The main memory is PC-133S. There’s also a Super Drive in…
‘The time has come,’ the walrus said, ‘To talk of many things: Of shoes– and ships– and sealing-wax– Of cabbages– and kings– And why the sea is boiling hot– And whether pigs have wings.’ –from The Walrus and the Carpenter Lewis Carroll appropriately introduces this annual (four times at least) roundup of next year’s happenings, especially since this is the second anniversary of the all-electronic, eclecticly meandering Northern Spy. The Spy fared well last year as some forecasts for 2002…
The Spy has written and spoken many words concerning the fourth civilization or, as some term it, the information age. The universal availability of information via the Metalibrary that is its paradigm and premise is not yet been fully effected, but is clearly nascent in the primitive web we now have. Availability provokes some to worries about information ownership, accuracy and security, and there have indeed been some unpleasant incidents surrounding these issues. But far more pressing are the concerns…
The usual shill suspects (say that quickly) at the various Mac mag rags universally laud the advent of Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) as though it were the Olympic 100m, the Stanley Cup, and the return of Elvis rolled into one. The Spy has an alternate view. Throughout the OS X era thus far, I’ve regarded the new look as experimental, running it only on one of my four machines and staying with 9.1 or 9.2 on the others (depending…
“An (abstract) metalibrary is the entire collection of a society’s data, information, and techniques, together with the means by which it is stored, accessed, and communicated. The Metalibrary of the fourth civilization is the complete, electronically linked and accessed version of its abstract metalibrary.”—from “The Fourth Civilization–Technology Society and Ethics” by Rick Sutcliffe “What kind of title is that?” Nellie Hacker demanded, looking over my shoulder at the beginnings of my latest Northern Spy column. “Everybody knows you can’t…
About the author: Richard J. (Rick) Sutcliffe, is Professor of Mathematics and Computing Science at Trinity Western University in British Columbia. He represents Canada on international computing standards committees, and has written two textbooks and more than fifty papers, articles and reviews. He has been a columnist, software author, and active in electronic publishing. He has also been an invited speaker at numerous churches, educational and computing conferences, and technical symposia at local, national, and international levels. He presently resides…
There have been many flavors of Unix type systems for many platforms over the years, but there have been few for the Apple II. However in this world of bleak shortsightedness, there has been one project that gained the recognition of many in the Apple world. GNO/ME What is GNO/ME? It is a nice Unix style system for the Apple II GS which ran on top of the Apple II GS OS allowing multitasking of text based windows and was…
This month, I am writing “The Editor Bytes Back” while Val Golding takes a short hiatus. In trying to figure out what to write, it occurred to me that no one ever talks about the early software companies that rose up out of the Apple II world. With this revelation, I figured I’d attempt it, having been one of those teenage programmers that the Apple II world so readily reflected in the 1980s. The day the music died Like all…
Introduction We’re not talking about “bibles”, say about some piece of software or the Mac platform here, Nellie. The software under review this month relates to the real thing–front ends to search the Scriptures in the original languages and multiple translations. These packages are for the person who wants to move into the twenty-first century from the massive old paper versions of Strong’s and Young’s concordances, Nave’s Topical Bible, interlinear Hebrew-Greek-English, and parallel KJV-NASB-NIC-RSV that can consume vast resources of…
Over the years, I have watched the computer industry grow, from the little world that the 1960’s and 1970’s hobbyists had built, into the multi-trillion dollar industry it is today. In 1977, we had about three or four choices as to the type of computer that we could buy and really only one or two of those choices were realistic. Today we have hundreds of choices of platform, style, size and capability. Yet, even though the 1990’s brought the computer…
This month we take a look at the internal workings of A.P.P.L.E. over the last several weeks. While most people are downsizing in this day and age, we actually were upsizing. We have migrated our systems to a brand new Cobalt 4 server, which gives us a good bit of power and hard disk space for our future plans. The new server once configured and completely installed will be the cornerstone of our efforts here. We have spent over 150…
A.P.P.L.E. Glimpses is where we introduce new Apple and Macintosh products. Each month, we will be writing about items that we think are noteworthy here. Although items are listed here, it does not mean an endorsement. It only means that we figured the item was interesting enough to be noted to the Apple community. This month we have a nice variety of items. We hope that you will find them as interesting as we did. If you do decide to…
Mystery Monologue Having written these past couple of months on A.P.P.L.E.’s accomplishments in various fields brings us to this month’s harangue\\ …er, monologue. Today, we’ll talk about A.P.P.L.E. software. Lest the reader go away thinking we have done nothing but pat ourselves on the back, we should set the record straight. For the benefit of those of you who are hearing about the club — A.P.P.L.E. (Apple PugetSound Program Library Exchange) and the later A.P.P.L.E. co-op and Tech Alliance –…
When I started programming in 1976, the computer world already had several programming languages. There was Fortran, Algol, Cobol, PL/1, Assembler, and half a dozen others. Apart from the scientists and engineers that used these languages, there was the one language which was supposed to be for the common man. BASIC. Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. The language, which anyone could learn and understand in short order. The BASIC of those days was simple, useful and could perform complex tasks,…
Every month there seems to be some new toy which just absolutely must be had. For us in the Macintosh and Apple world, those toys have come from Apple Computer, Inc. for the most part. Good, Bad, or indifferent, we have always awaited the announcements from Apple concerning the latest little gadget or computer that has been run through the rumor mill. This month has been no exception and just to settle some of the hype, we have included a…
