Tag: arjay books
By Rick Sutcliffe Last month The Spy detailed issues with his university-owned mid-2015 MacBook Pro. He had thought nothing of the fact that the keys were beginning to imprint on the screen (it could be wiped clean), but when he realized that the machine would no longer stand on its own four feet, but was wobbling unsteadily on a bump in the lower case, he realize it had the dreaded swollen battery condition. So in some trepidation (a first timer…
By Rick Sutcliffe Record Breaking Heat in numerous parts of the world has been a staple of the news for several recent years, including 2018. Shifting weather patterns and a steady general temperature increase have combined to see some locales with record-breaking heat waves and produce devastating wildfires, most notably in Canada Greece, and the western U.S. But weather and fires are not the only hot topics. Apple has a long history of heat problems with its devices. The switch…
First mentioned here back in 2005, and oft referenced since, the Spy’s Fourth Law: Marketshare lags mindshare by two to five years. has proven a robust marketplace staple, applicable to both entire technology companies and individual products. On the way to becoming the global technology giant, Apple earned mindshare with meticulously designed and executed hardware and software. Not everything Apple did was truly innovative, but their products worked better, lasted longer, won people over, made friends who then bought their…
The Spy’s garden is kinda dusty these days, as this past month has been the driest May on record here in the West of the frozen North. Apple has its own problem with dust–in its MacBook Pro keyboard switches. Seems once it accumulates sufficiently, the butterfly switches cease functioning. Good thing the Spy thought of that possibility and bought a JCPAL keyboard overlay when his machine was new. True, the extra printed information was one motivation, but he’d had dust…
May 2018 The Spy has oft noted the old proverb “He who dies with the most toys wins”, and responds with “Wins what?” But in any manufacturing space, and confined to this life only, the company making the most toys wins-at least for a while, at least for the immediate bottom line. At one time, this was IBM, but that venerable corporation, which could once have bought Apple Corp. for $1B, ditched its small computer line and tried to reinvent…
The Spy notes and passes on verbatim with little comment (it is its own commentary) the following advertisement: Is your target audience completely persuaded? Let Vologda Analytica do it for you. Our extensive data sets and state-of-the-art algorithms can analyze any target population and build your campaign. Whether your product is political, household or industrial goods, or your services, our techniques have proven effective with a wide variety of clients and situations and will work in yours as well. We…
Wrong about the iPhone XWell, it has happened before…back in ’83. See, from a feature point of view, the iPhone 8 look doomed beside the X. But price points do come into play in such matters. Apple is curtailing the production of the X, and the Spy assumes it will be discontinued once the X year is done. As the physician said to the 12-year old Spy when he came into his office looking like scarlet fever: “Allergic to the…
December 2017 Under his hat as a sometimes web hosting and domain name provider (Webnamehost.com and WebNameSource.com) the Spy must monitor the spam arriving at his server. Numerous filters and subscriptions to spam services cut the volume of mail by forty percent in a slack month and as much as ninety-five precent during time when the BlackHats think they’re on to something new. Usually, this is a good thing. But recently, spam sent out from another server at the data…
Technology News and Views Since 1983 November 2017 The soft sound of a pair of occupied boots landing on the table behind me as I toiled over this column alerted me to my visitor. Good thing she doesn’t wear spurs when she comes here,” I thought. “Nice of you to drop by, Nellie. What’s up?” “You mean besides the rookie goof-up you just made in your code?” “Eh? Shame on you Nellie Hacker for looking over my shoulder. I tested…
by Rick Sutcliffe September 2017 unless it reflects reality All real world activity generates observable data, and such data is the necessary starting point for information. The term “fake data” is an oxymoron, for alleged data not rooted in real wold activities and events simply isn’t. In his long and hopefully not too misspent life, the Spy has occasionally encountered people who believe they possess data that is no more than their imagination working overtime. Even by people who…
August 2017 Of Technology are relative to an individual’s “normal”. Just now, the Spy has finished his annual task of pressure washing the house, then put some water on the squash and cucumber patch. To someone living in Western society, small engine machines like pressure washers, string trimmers, generators, chain saws, lawn mowers and tractors are low technology–even to a city slicker who may not have heard of, much less used any of these. Seen in use, all would be…
Birthdays engender delays, which is why this tome is a few days late, being written on the third of July. Canada Day number 150 falling on a Saturday this year, meant the national holiday substituting for it fell on the Spy’s own birthday. Nice of the country to celebrate for me, but really… ‘Course, that other fractious country to the south has its birthday tomorrow. In view of recent national and other elections, the questions of course for pundits and…
June 2017 In a reprise of previous comments on the subject, the Spy has resolved his issues with his Synology 4-bay 1815+ NAS, that he purchased for home use (yes, yes, overkill, but one cannot have too many backups, especially when one of them fails). This unit worked worked well for over a year, but became flakey, started to beep, and when the Spy investigated, he found the volume had crashed. Attempting to turn it off and on again yielded…
I heard someone plop in one of my chairs and creak it back. A pair of boots heels thumped on my table. “Hope you’re not wearing spurs today,” I said without turning. Nellie Hacker is…rather informal. “That table is for helping my students with their assignments. Gouges would be counterproductive.” “Calculus, no doubt. What’s the topic de jour? Lemmie see. ‘Given an elliptical cross section with axis lengths 10 and 15 centimetres, the formula for the depth of the water,…
Technology Drivers March 2017 What came first– the social egg or the technology chicken? It is patent that the two exist in a feedback loop, the societal context engendering technological change and the technology, once sufficiently widespread, radically altering society. While one can argue that the first society was agrarian, it was so only in the sense that there was no hunting, and gathering could be done with little travel, for Eden was already planted. The technology of the hunter-gatherer…
The Spy (metaphorically) pens this on Wednesday, February 1, 2017. Those two are the most commonly misspelled and mispronounced words on the calendar. That’s English for you, though. After all there are more than twenty correct pronunciations of the letter combination “ough” in English. No wonder students from other countries have such a tough time learning what we native North Americans absorb and store in our memories from infancy. Memory and storage have come a long way from the industry’s…
Sierra’s problems as of version 10.12.2 appear to have been ameliorated on most fronts of specific concern to the Spy. The missing system calls that prevented Online Bible from being run have apparently been resolved, and the product is relatively stable on other fronts as well. Your kilometerage may vary, however, so install with caution, having previously cloned a backup of your boot partition. He is not at this point yet prepared to endorse Safari, however. For several versions now,…
December 2016 Sierra’s problems continue, as the Spy receives other reports of programs not functioning besides the ones cited here last month. To be fair, the Olive Tree folk managed to get their Bible Study program working on Sierra, reducing the number of fails by one. On the other hand, he now has multiple reports of Sierra installs killing off or corrupting the keychain, and some of SSH, ITunes, and other apps failing, or running very slow. There are also…
The Spy described himself last month as “still breathing”. In view of the worst cold to afflict him in many years, that is not a quality statement, just a bare fact. Good thing he isn’t trying to dictate this column. VCON-41 was this past weekend (why he delayed writing this) and the Spy was scheduled for four panels and a reading. After struggling through Friday afternoon and evening, he awoke Saturday with no voice at all, and had to cancel…
The Spy like everyone else still breathing, is always learning new things–or re-learning old ones–especially so as a new crowd of students (and many more old ones) is about to descend on campus. El Capitan falls into both categories, for it has a few extremely annoying bugs that he has not had to deal with for several OS X iterations. One of the worst is the tendency to forget it has ever heard of Bluetooth. The menu bar icon turns…
