Tag: The Northern Spy

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…

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…

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 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…

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…