Tag: rick sutcliffe
December 2013 Following up on comments in this space last month, the Spy still has had none of the issues reported by others who’ve adopted Mavericks. Apart from the need to upgrade a handful of programs, all continues smooth. However, iTim’s elves are busy at work releasing betas of the first incremental upgrade to fix issues some have seen. Of greater interest might be what they’re doing with system XI. And, the reader will recall the troubles reported here with …
The wave of Apple’s future was supposed to be a simplification of the user interface, a de-skeuomorphism of visual elements, and a unification of MacOS and iOS. The most recent version of the latter went a long way toward this mark However, MacOS 10.9, a.k.a. Mavericks, is, on the whole, a stay-the-course mild enhancement of Mountain Lion 10.8, nothing radical. Thos who want radical change will have to wait for MacOS 11. The important changes are in the upgrade process…
October 2013 “Hi Nellie.” I didn’t need to turn around. The sound of her cowboy boots and a certain air of eau de geek that pervades her space tipped me to her presence. “What’ya workin’ on?” “This column.” “Still into self referentialism as always, so no doubt you’ll quote us quoting us.” Lest we get tied up in logical knots, I ignored this sally. “So what’s got your shirt in a knot today, Nellie.” She rarely visited unless she wanted…
September 2013 A very long time ago even by non-Internet standards, the Spy advised people owning stock in typewriter companies to sell. In that same era he opined “collect postage stamps young woman, for soon they won’t make them any more”. To the former, anyone under thirty-five might today say “what’s a typewriter?” The Spy was right. But to the latter, he was only half so. True, anyone under ten today is likely to say the same thing about stamps…
In the aftermath of WWDC, the Spy notes his reader saw it here first–a modular multi-core MacPro, that is, a closed box with all expandability through external ports. He thought an all-in-one design possible, and didn’t foresee the cylinder, but rightly saw the demise of the tower more than a year ago. Doubled Thunderbolt speed will be nice, and it will be great to get the desktop machine back on the desk from the floor. With that kind of connection,…
When all is said and done with the usual caveat that most is said and little done, people make decisions with their emotions and guts, not their brains. This has been noted here before in connection with the stock market and the purchase of cheap imitation PCs (rather than the real thing–Macs). Last month’s Provincial election here in British Columbia illustrates the same principle in the practice of politics. (Note: in Canada, municipal, Provincial, and Federal elections are independent of…
A sudden spate of email from last October last week should have been a clue that not all was well with the Spy’s own company virtual server, where he has most of his mail accounts and the billing system for Arjay Web Services (WebNameHost and WebNameSource). Unfortunately, he failed to investigate until the following day, after customers complained about receiving bills they had already paid, even having their accounts suspended (all they on his big dedicated production server). A few…
There is no truth to the rumour – that Apple has become a third bidder in the suddenly interesting battle to gain control of Dell. Michael Dell himself began the process by trying to take the company private under his own personal leadership, but has hit a roadblock in the form of a second suitor who would likely show him the door. Apple was said to be ready to close the company, wind up its affairs, turn the assets into…
The great shift in the computing devices market is well under way, with sales of desktop units tanking, even of laptops flattening out (sic), while those of iPads (there is no tablet market) boom. In this milieu, there are some interesting byplays. First, sales of Windows machines have been hit far harder than those of Macs, and Windows 8 has not helped either Microsoft or the generic box assemblers. Indeed, uptake appears worse than that of Vista, when it first…
Even before I heard the boots clunk on the table behind me I didn’t need to turn around to know who’d dropped in. Some people carry an unmistakable air about them. Besides, regular people knock, even though the door’s always open. Not Nellie Hacker. She, BTW for the new reader, helped me found this column back in the day. Well, at least she doesn’t wear spurs. “Hi, Nellie. It’s been a while since you popped by to see your old…
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…
The Android version of the Mini vMac Emulator has been updated to version 3.2.3, bringing it inline with the current version of the Mini vMac emulator for other platforms. The emulator is available in two versions, Macintosh Plus which is a free download and the Macintosh II, a $1.99 download from the Android Marketplace. You can also download the current source code for the emulator for free as well. Gil Osher has more information about the emulator on his website…
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…
