Tag: rick sutcliffe
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,…
by Rick Sutcliffe Technology News and Views Since 1983 Something Old, Something New December 2011 The Spy recently acquired a few surplus G5s, and in the process of setting them up to be useful file servers and replacements for even older G4s at his home and church, (re)-discovered some interesting things about memory, disk drives, and both hardware and software compatibilities. First is that all disk drives are not manufactured equal, quite apart from the Thailand flooding that means many…
by Rick SutcliffeNovember 2011 Presciencewas not foreseen by the Spy when he titled last month’s column, but said monicker now seems faintly evocative of a sad prophecy. The iCEO has not merely stepped down, he’s left us altogether. Steve Jobs’ legacy sees us all materially wealthier, for he had a unique talent for putting his finger on the pulse of the market two or three years down the road, then inventing the product to create the market his mind’s eye…
by Rick Sutcliffe Technology News and Views Since 1983 R.I.P. … October 2011 Hewlett Packard appears to have taken comments made here last month seriously enough to take defensive measures. But let’s be realistic. First, changing CEOs at this juncture (nearly 50% share value lost) is like tossing a single sandbag into the raging torrent pouring through a broken dyke. Second, hiring Goldman Sachs Group to plan a takeover prevention strategy is a whistling in the wind….
By Rick Sutcliffe The Good, the Quick, and the BigMay 2011 Apple bids fair to take over the electronic worldas iSteve’s little Cupertino company doubles revenues year over year, pushes profits to heights not previously imagined, and bids to continue on this path indefinitely. As previously predicted in this space, many of the purchasers of iProducts are now buying Macs as well, ensuring a growing dominance in that space as more and more people come to realize that it’s better…
Almost any series of commands which can be run in the shell can be run from a shell script. Tying in some of the last few posts I published here this is an example. Let’s say I wanted to run the gedit editor from the shell rather than from the dock/GUI… I would first have to locate the executable program. I happen to know it is installed in “/Applications/gedit.app/Contents/MacOS/gedit“. By running this program the gedit editor will start. Since it…
by Rick Sutcliffe Some Things Old, Some Things New March 2011 For the last two months the Spy has digressed from the reader’s usual fare to cover two endemic ethical issues–to wit, the misconduct of the spammer, and that of the rogue board member. For March, there are many interesting technology news items to consider. To complete the title, the Spy may borrow a rumour or two, and will certainly consider things Blue (-Ray, that is.) New products are now…
by Rick Sutcliffe Just as there are 10 kinds of people in the world– those who understand binary notation, and those who do not–so there are two kinds of people in the world, those who build, and those who tear down. The Spy prefers to be one of the former, and on the occasions when he becomes a critic, tries to be constructive about it, even when this is not easy. (There are two kinds of critics, the constructive, and…
2010 01 27 is now past and the iPad officially exists, instead of merely being the chief grist for the rumour mills, as for the last year. How did the Spy do on his predictions? Got the name wrong (was there a last minute iSteve change of mind because so many, including the Spy, guessed the original name correctly as iSlate?) He was right on the initial size (9.7 inch LED screen. It’s also very thin at 0.5 inch and…
Another month with the new Spell Catcher has convinced the Spy that it shall remain a denizen of his permanent tool set. The reader will recall from last month that this is an OS X version of a product that was installed as an extension under OS 9. Now it lives, like just about everything, as an application. However, it can be set (application specifically) as the input method and so be interactive in any or all applications. This allows…
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…
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…
