Tag: The Northern Spy
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…
Introduction All right, Nellie, today the Spy puts on his teaching hat for a primer on Internet history and usage. He was there, an early Internet user, but has forgotten a lot of this stuff himself, and has to ask you to look up some of it on the net for a reminder. Disclosure statement The Spy’s Arjay Enterprises owns Arjay Web services http://www.arjayweb.com which in turn runs a domain name registration service at http://www.webnamesource.com and a web hosting…
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…
The History Lesson Hands up everyone who remembers the Super Bowl ad for the original Macintosh computer, the one that aired in January 1984–that utopian, libertarian, iconoclastic production that scared the Apple board silly, then ushered in new eras for both computing and advertising. Now, keep your hands up if you actually used one of those computers that very month. What if you had your hands on a Fat Mac on January 24, 1984? “Wait a minute,” the history buffs…
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…
Back in the late seventies and through the eighties, the quintessential user group was the Apple Puget Sound Program Library Exchange (A.P.P.L.E.) later known as TechAlliance. Based near Seattle (hence the name), A.P.P.L.E. provided its members with Apple ][ software collections at low cost, held informational seminars, and published the magazine Call-A.P.P.L.E. Steve Wozniak was an enthusiastic supporter, and the club prospered for a number of years. In 1990, many of its functions were taken in house by Apple, and…
Apple’s recent product announcements have a one-shoe ring. True, Macworld saw a redesigned iMac (with an already heavy back order book), the new iPhoto software, and an iBook with a 14 inch screen. The iPod is also doing well. and today’s announcement of a desktop Mac speed bump will satisfy others whose heeds are more to the heavy-duty side. I may buy one of the latter myself. But it’s not enough beef, not by a longshot. On the desktop, the…
This month marks the first anniversary of the all-electronic Northern Spy. To commemorate, I’ve recycled a title last used as “Prognostics 1985–The Hardware Industry (Computek March 1985)”. As a long-time watcher over the fruit industry, I’ve every reason to ask what buds the Apple tree is putting out these days. After all, their desktops have been stuck under 1GHz far longer than is comfortable in view of P*nt**m speeds starting to push the 2GHz mark. As the platform wars wage…
Back in the late seventies, I often received software in copy-protected format. The idea behind all these schemes was to prevent a second useable copy of the original disk being made. It was a bad idea. Those five inch floppies didn’t last long before they wore out, so savvy users made copies, filed the original in a safe place, and only put a copy in their drive after that. Any disk whose data could be read into the computer could…
I needed (wanted) external FireWire drives on both my TIBook docks. This way I can have multiple locality backups of my important files and storage for local files as well. The household being Mac-centric, yet another such unit was required at the same time. We decided to get three IBM 61.6G 60-series ATA 100 IDE drives at local (Vancouver) parts supplier Atic ($260 CDN plus taxes, but prices change daily) and to obtain firewire cases to mount the drives. For…
The feedback sessions at WWDC provide some of the most interesting and informative times. The VP event this year was a highlight. Many of the questions centered around education, and Tim Cook, Senior VP, Worldwide Operations took much of the heat. Why? Understanding higher education goes past price and compatibility issues. There was once a weight of Apple presence at the university level, but no longer (especially in Canada), and this is the nub of market share loss. You see,…
When is a fireside chat not? When the fire is played on a giant video screen and the intimate setting includes thousands of software developers occupying every chair in a space large enough to be an airplane hanger. The jCEO did announce an end to CRT monitors, price reductions on the current LCD models, a new 17″ version, and lots of rah rah for OS X, much of it, I think, justified. Perhaps the only surprise was that OS X…
May 2001 We’ve got a PowerBook 540C that’s been all over the world on trips to standards meetings. It turned heads many years ago on a European junket, but despite 12M of memory, a 1.2G hard drive and a Power PC 117MHz processor upgrade, a machine of this vintage can’t do more than walk programs like PowerPoint any more. The thrashing back and forth to the virtual memory gets on one’s nerves, and the audience becomes inclined to snicker–until I…
February-March 2001 I decided it was time to upgrade my trusty old 8600/200/(G3 card of course) machines with Firewire/USB PCI cards, in anticipation of the technology’s bright new future. Call it an adventure. After spending some time browsing the links right here on The Northern Spy, I settled on two Orange Micro cards, a SCSI+Firewire combo and a Firewire+USB combo, with a 30M pocket VST Firewire/USB drive as the first consumer on the 1394 food chain. The Orange SCSI card…
December 2000 Glad you asked, Nellie. With Apple’s stock down, the whole North American economy slowing, market share in the doldrums, the educational rep fiasco, and inventory a tad on the high side, the naysayers have been snapping at brand-new CEO Steve Jobs’ heels like a pack of punk piranhas. Things will get worse now the company’s announced a projected loss. But fact is, the company’s worth more than its market valuation just now, so if I had a few…
by Anna O’Connell, P.E.MacTech QuarterlySpring 1989 – Page 10 “Artificial intelligence,” depending on how you look at it, is a set of useful tools for building smarter, more powerful applications, or a philosophical concept that threatens humanity, or simply an oxymoron. In this article, Anna O’Connell examines the plethora of AI languages and development platforms that have been introduced for the Macintosh in the past two years, and discusses how AI techniques can be employed to build more intuitive, easier-to-use…
“Hey, sir, look at this!”. That is one thing that you can rely on about Nellie Hacker. When she has something to say she just bursts right in. “I thought you were typing up one of my articles tonight.” I shot back to the other end of my lab where Nellie sat hunched over the computer keyboard. “Oh don’t worry, I keep track of my time. I’m finished, so I thought I would boot up this disk I got from…
