Tag: arjay books
June 2016 The Spy spotted an article this month (which he won’t loan credibility by providing a link) suggesting Apple was becoming the next Blackberry, doomed to fail because it is falling behind the times. Perhaps so, but that doom seems a long time off yet. The good news is that WWDC, upcoming in two weeks, is likely to see a plethora of incremental upgrade announcements to please the faithful (though the Spy is giving it a pass again this…
May 2016 The Apple haters and doomsayers will slither from beneath their rocks in force now that Apple has suffered its first quarterly year-over-year decline in revenue in thirteen years. No company can grow its sales indefinitely, so this day had to come. Mind, the company still had revenues of over $50B, so it’s not about to become a corporate food bank client. This does mark a watershed for the iPhone business, however, as it may indicate, if not market…
Sweet Sorrow April 2016 Parting can be tough when you’ve had a faithful machine for so many years. But the old model 180 was getting long in tooth and was no longer reliable. True, some of the problems were mere cosmetic scuffs, but others ranged from annoyances that had to be worked around to serious impairment of functionality. So, when the Spy’s local dealer announced an introductory (and deeply discounted) sale on a brand new (to the frozen north; they’d…
March 2016 This column is being (metaphorically) penned on Leap Day, a day similar to Sadie Hawkins Day (November 13) in which historically the ladies may ask the men without violating polite norms–hardly an issue in our day, though originally somewhat sexist. It’s also spang in the middle of the great American ask/catch–candidates trolling for primary votes, while the rest of the world watches a system seemingly self-destruct in vitriol, venom, slander, and name calling. Ahem. wasn’t democracy supposed…
Why is it that supposedly hard-headed evidence-based fact-found business and IT decision makers seem so driven instead by emotional and personal considerations? Take the stock market, for instance. The one predictable thing about it is that it always overreacts, whether on the up or down side. Never has this been more apparent than lately, where every titbit of “news” sends it on a wild gyration, up several hundred points one day, down likewise the next, with no time or effort…
December 2015 At long last The Spy’s series The Throne is starting to see the light of day. The first book, Culmanic Parts was published in June. Now, the second, Rea’s Blood or Navy Girl is available from publisher Writers Exchange. See the URLs below. The third book Tara’s Mother is in publishers’s editing as we write, and the fourth The Paladin is undergoing second proofing before being made available to the Spy’s volunteer reader/correctors. These books are background…
A Word or Two November 2015 Apple’s sales saga continues to flummox many pundits. They forecast earnings estimates too low or too high, and when they miss, they criticize–not themselves, but Apple–as if it were Cupertino’s fault they aren’t more prescient. The latest take on this is that because Apple’s iPhone sales generate so large a percentage of the total income, and aren’t breaking records by a very wide margin these days, the company is somehow in trouble, and…
by Rick Sutcliffe Back Up To The Old Tricks October 2015 Much has happened worth commenting upon in the months that this space has been devoted to explicating some of the features of Modula-2 R10 that make it safe, reliable, and extensible as a problem solving tool. For one thing, a few errors were noted in the June article. R10 uses NOT, but ~ is not a synonym, [DESCENDING] was removed for FOR loops and replaced by FOR selector–, and…
by Rick Sutcliffe Technology News and Views Since 1983 Modula-2 R10 Templates September 2015 Modula-2 R10 has been the Spy’s meat and potatoes in this space for a few months now. It is the fully modern dialect of Niklaus Wirth’s Modula-2 that he and Telecom engineer Benjamin Kowarsch have developed to address serious software engineering issues of safety, security, reliability, and extensibility. This month we consider the use of Generic templates to reach toward the software engineering grail of reusable…
Technology News and Views Since 1983 Modula-2 R10 Blueprints August 2015 In these last three months the Spy has introduced the fully modern dialect of an existing notation he and Telecom engineer Benjamin Kowarsch have developed to address serious software engineering issues of safety, security, reliability, and extensibility. This month he shows how to leverage Blueprints to enforce the rigour involved in planning code before executing it. Modula-2 R10 allows the programmer to develop Abstract Data Type (ADT) libraries that…
May 2015 Why is it that so many software projects fail? Here in the frozen north, we routinely see one government and enterprise IT project after another delivered late, and not working, to the opprobrium of all the putative users. Government catastrophes run into the tens of millions. Notable failures in the United States include the IRS ($8B), FAA ($2.5B), FBI ($500M), McDonalds ($170M) and Denver airport ($560M) projects, to select a very few. And yet, though there is no…
The Spy has it on good authority that iTim is about to iCook up a major purchase–one that will rock merely the high-tech sector, but the entire business world. What follows is a partial transcript of a larger interview, with the Spy’s sometime erstwhile assistant, coder extraordinaire, workhorse novel character, and chief head banger Nellie Hacker, speaking with a source she declines to name. The Spy has omitted some of her comments as unnecessarily…provocative, and some of the subject’s answers…
Cash away the old year passes as Cupertino has to be a happy place given the wild success of the iPhone 6. Only now are wait times reverting to normal after the most successful product launch in tech history. Apple is once again in ascendancy, Samsung and other rivals descending. The question is, what does iTim do to keep the momentum going, or will 2015 be a relative disappointment by comparison? Try iPhone 6s and 7, refreshes of Apple TV…
With the release of OSX 10.10.1 the Spy decided to take another try with Yosemite and installed it on one machnine. Seeing none of the problems he experienced with the beta at WWDC, he eventually installed on three machines–a late 2007 MacBook Pro seventeen inch (emergency unit), a 2013 Retina MacBook (main one at work), and a Westmere tower MacPro (home). So far all has gone well, though there has been no opportunity to test the fusion space where Mac OX…
by Rick SutcliffeNovember 2014 The new iPhone six plusis just about everything Apple has touted–sufficient screen real estate, speed, snazzy design, plus runnable iOS enhancements to last for…well, the next year or two for some folk, though the Spy will make his serve far longer. Delivery took over a month from the order date, and except for a last minute glitch where the truck returned it to the depot (quitting time apparently arrived before the UPS driver did) was near…
by Rick Sutcliffe October 2014 iOS8 was introduced at WWDC with much hoopla but actually arrived with some problems, and has needed two updates since, the current one being 8.0.2. Also many users find it is too large to install without deleting a great deal of material from their iPuds. Hint: Use iTunes for the update. Given the usual spit and polish Apple puts into new releases, this whole episode seems odd, even a little Microsoftish–as if something has slipped there….
iSchool, or the Pitter Patter of little feats September is supposed to be back to school, but here in British Columbia of the frozen north, the public school teachers union and the Provincial government are so far away from each other in their contract positions that the mediator they consulted walked away from the dispute because his involvement had no prospect of success. It doesn’t help that after a previous government gave the union a sweetheart deal on class size…
May 2014 but, what are those somethings? Rumours continue to swirl about Apple and its certain/probable/possible/mythical/impossible product introductions for 2014 (some may be all five at once). Given Apple’s recent history, and that we’ve made it this far into the year without any major introductions, the Spy is convinced (has managed to convince himself–Nellie) that WWDC will be the venue for some significant product announcements. Our reader may recall that by delaying two minutes after 0900 on ticket sale day…
by Rick SutcliffeApril 2014 Wearable computing technologyhas been the “latest” buzz longer than most ideas (indeed longer than some ideas endure from conception to death), generating endless speculation about who will bring out what product in the genre and when. As often the case, the Spy has the inside track. Mind, he does not deal in speculation or rumour. However, he does keep his ear to the ground, his eye on the horizon, his nose to the grindstone, his hand…
Being insanely proprietary can be both a strength and/or a weakness. On the negative side of the leger, HP, Xerox, and IBM, by not being more particular about their in-house inventions and IP, all lost opportunities to dominate the personal computing market. Oh, yes, IBM did for a while, but because the software was controlled by Microsoft, and wasn’t exclusive, clones eventually turned their boxes into commodities, and they exited the market rather than compete on a consumer level–much to…
