Category: Technology

I’m glad someone is finally calling bullshit on this meme.  There is no shortage.  There hasn’t been since the .com bubble burst, and the Y2K issue got cleared up.  I know plenty of scientists who have Ph.D., and are well respected in their fields, who are having a hard time finding work in this market.  Pharmaceutical research jobs have been hard to come by for almost a decade.  I left computer hardware engineering because jobs in information technology paid a lot better, and IT managers don’t work to the same types of unrealistic deadlines that software and hardware people often have imposed on them.

If there were really a shortage, salaries would be going up in response, and jobs would be easy to come by.  That’s not the case.  There is no shortage, except in the minds of politicians.

Hat tip to Instapundit

My mail host is having difficulties that have been exceedingly difficult to diagnose.  If you’d have troubles e-mailing me, I do apologize.  My mail service is through my friend Jason’s Mac, and we’ve been trying to figure this problem out for the longest time.  Basically what happens is postfix decides to stop recognizing local users, and starts rejecting mail saying the user doesn’t exist.  Restarting postfix seems to fix this, but it usually comes back within a few hours.  Even more oddly, rebooting the host sometimes fixes it for weeks and months.

The real trouble with figuring this one out is not having a good google search term.  There are lots of very simple problems with local mail delivery, and this isn’t a very simple problem.  Finding good information through all the reams of people who just don’t have their mail server configured properly is rough.

Hopefully we’ll figure this out soon.  In the mean time, if anyone has experienced anything like this with Postfix running on MacOS or BSD, let me know.

So I’m thinking about getting an iPhone 3G tomorrow.  Why drink the kool aid when you can chug it?

UPDATE: No iPhone for me.  I went to the AT&T store at lunch, and they told me they had sold out of them before 9:00 this morning.  I did, however, reserve one.  I should have an iPhone in a week’s time.

New York Times need to learn that neurosurgeons are not cancer experts or cell phone experts:

Last week, three prominent neurosurgeons told the CNN interviewer Larry King that they did not hold cellphones next to their ears. “I think the safe practice,” said Dr. Keith Black, a surgeon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, “is to use an earpiece so you keep the microwave antenna away from your brain.”

These are people that operate on brains.  They are not experts on things that cause cancer.  Their opinions should carry little more weight than any reasonably educated person you pull off the street, which is to say very little.   They do get this right:

Cellphones emit non-ionizing radiation, waves of energy that are too weak to break chemical bonds or to set off the DNA damage known to cause cancer. There is no known biological mechanism to explain how non-ionizing radiation might lead to cancer.

That is pretty much it, end of story.  Basically, cell phones use a weak microwave transceivers to get signals to and from a cell tower.  If microwaves cause cancer, we’re doomed, because they are all around us, all the time.  Cell phone transmit microwaves at fractions of a watt.  A typical civilian marine radar transmits microwaves at 4000 watts of power.  Yet you don’t typically hear concerns about fishermen getting cancer from the boat’s radar unit, or people living near airports getting their brains cooked by the tower’s radar dish, which is even more powerful.

Hat tip to Instapundit

I’ve decided it’s high time to get rid of some of my old hardware I’ve been keeping around for sentimental reasons, and not much else.  Here’s what I have:

• Two NeXT Monochrome Mexapixel Displays.  They both work, the natural rubber pads on both have gooed off by this point.
• Three 68040 25MHz NeXT Cubes.  One has a bad SCSI HD, the other is missing RAM.  One boots up, but needs to be booted into single user mode and have all the Netinfo crap turned off.  None of them have the Dimension color board.
• One 68040 Turbo slab, monochrome.  Missing RAM.
• One Mac IIcx, no monitor.  Seems to work.
• One Mac IIsi, w 12″ monior.  Missing HD.
• I seem to have keyboards and cables to go with all this stuff.  I think I have some NeXT software and optical disks too.  No clue whether the optical drives are still functioning.

If anyone wants them, they are free to a good home if you want to come pick them up.  If you want them, but don’t want to pick them up, let me know where you are and I can see if I plan to be by that way any time in the NeXT year (ha!), and I might be able to deliver.

UPDATE: Looks like Tam and TD are interested.  Now I just need to figure out how to get the machines to them.

Apparently global warming may not increase hurricane frequency.  I am not a climate scientist, so I don’t claim to be an expert, but I do have a pretty good grasp on science in general, and have a fair amount of knoweldge of complex systems, but most of the claims as to the effects of global warming have never passed the smell test.  We do know that CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, and we know atmospheric levels of it are rising.  We also know that computer models show more CO₂ in the atmosphere leads to warmer temperatures.  Are the computer models right?  Maybe.  But I’m skeptical that a complex system like climate can be predicted with even a modicum of certainty.

I work in the pharmaceutical industry, and we do a lot of complex systems modeling, particularly how ligands bond to proteins. In fact, what I do for a living is build and maintain supercomputer clusters so these types of calculations can be done.  There have been many good scientists who claim that certain methods of doing this kind of modeling are the greatest thing to come along since sliced bread.  People want to believe in what they are doing, even if it’s not really good science.  I’ve seen too many people collectively buy into a lot of these fads to believe that consensus is always good science.  It hasn’t been always in the pharmaceutical field.  I’m skeptical of any claim that climate science is also not collectively prone to the same errors.

I’m not saying global warming isn’t happening, or it isn’t something to be concerned about.  But I remain highly skeptical of people who claim to be able to model a complex system to such a degree as they can tell you global warming will lead to more droughts, rainfall, hurricanes, or mass extinctions.

Tam has a great article on how the Mac faithful haven’t been quite so happy since their product has gone main stream.  I have been a Mac user since 1992, so I’ve been working with this platform for a while.  Of course, the truly geeky among us know that we have not witnessed the Triumph of the Macintosh, but have in fact witnessed NeXT take its rightful place in the world of computing!  The original Macintosh died in 2001, and what everyone has been using since then is really a jazzed up version of NeXTStep that now runs on a very expensive and stylishly designed Intel PC.

Clayton asks an important evolutionary question:

I mentioned a couple of years ago the fossil evidence that life existed at least 3.4 billion years ago–and the presence of an oxygen atmosphere suggests photosynthesis was already at work (thus implying life) 3.8 billion years ago. I also mentioned that this creates an interesting problem for evolutionists–how in the heck did this happen so quickly?

The answer to this is quite easy.  We all know that Ronnie Barrett is a well known time traveler.  In order to secure a future market for his terror rifles, he merely traveled back in time and sneezed into the primordial ooze.

Life on earth is the most dasterdly and insidius gun blobber plot yet!

I’m keeping our organization at XP until forced to upgrade.  Looks like some users are pissed off enough to go for a class action.   In the mean time, via Instapundit, Apple couldn’t ask for better free marketing.