Simple solution to a very annoying computer problem

My iPhone has been getting more and more difficult to set up as a hotspot.  I ignored the advice on Apple to reset the network setting and went to ATT chat.  Daniel walked me through several things, but I couldn’t do any of them without breaking the connection to my MacBook Air which was linked to AT&T via a hotspot.

I did follow his advice to reset network settings, and I am back to quick connection to the hotspot.

After I had things working my wife mentioned defragging, a term from our bad old days on mainframes.  Periodically we would have to move pieces in memory around to have enough big pieces to do what needed to be done.  We never thought of Powder Milk Biscuits to give us the strength to do what needs to be done.

With more and more storage on our devices, it is easy to forget about the problem of fragmentation of memory.  As the pieces of memory get smaller, it takes longer to put together larger pieces.  In "ancient" history, 64KB was a lot of memory.  Now with 64GB we assume we will never run out of memory.  Surprise!

A note from the past

I have quite a pile of notes going way back.  One really old one was “(M)agreeable liquidation plan”.  It is a list of all the steps to close down my one-person company, (M)agreeable software, inc.  I did that in 1998 and 1999.  One of the items is “Jan 1999 File final taxes”.

(M)agreeable software was one of the many things I am glad I did but glad I am not doing it now.

BYOD and corporate efficiency

"Call it a movement of sorts, but employees are increasingly ditching their company issued computers and smartphones in favor of using their own devices to get work done. One big reason: Their company's tech is, well, terrible."
- "BYOD or bust: How bad tech hurts companies", Cadie Thompson, CNBC, 2013-10-24.

However, read the full article about all the complexities companies face when employees use their own devices.

Computers: How the times change!

Twenty-eight years ago last month, I left Univac to form my own software company based on the new microcomputers.  Partly I felt Univac was stuck in old paradigms of big boxes, and partly I wasn't doing very well myself on creating new ideas.

A few years after that, Burroughs bought Univac and called the new company Unisys.  Unisys continued making mainframes for a few years and slowly moved to being more of a consulting company.

Before that really happened, I moved to using Macs only and haven't stopped since.

Now, Unisys is now considered a "technology services specialist", and some Motley Fools think that Apple and Unisys may reach some agreement to help Apple seek enterprise and government contracts.

Also, once companies started adopting personal computers, the "gold standard" became PCs and Microsoft.  The Mac was a toy and not a business computer.  Now "Apple's Tim Cook [acting CEO] says the iPad is being deployed or piloted in 80% of the largest corporations today, and 88 of the Fortune 100 companies are testing or using the iPhone."

See "3 Stocks Ready to Roar", Motley Fool

And older readers may remember all the predictions of Apple's demise in the 80s and 90s.  I read somewhere that Apple now has more market value than Microsoft.

And as I've said many times before, we ain't seen nothing yet in technology.