Computer Infections Clobber Public Health

globeandmail.com: Canada’s National Newspaperglobeandmail.com: Public Health Agency computers infected by worm
It is interesting to note that the Public Health Service takes the cybernetic equivalent of hand washing seriously — not. I have been in too many businesses where despite written policies about personal use of computers it is too common to see staff surfing in [...]

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Bees, Frogs, now Bats … and Us?

I am not sure how many folks read the article in the New York Times today about bat die-offs. It is the latest in a series of species decimations that are characterized as ’strange, puzzing, with no smoking gun’. The dead and dying bats are decorated with patches of white — possibly a fungus. I [...]

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WHo Is Right… Some Thoughts on Planned Obsolescence

Watched a video about deploying Vista today. Over an hour of folks talking about all the great new features and how large the computers were that they had to buy to run it properly. And one almost rant about how unacceptable it is that folks always complain about new operating system releases but eventually accept [...]

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Mainframe Survival

Interesting little article in the New York Times today about ‘Why Old Technologies are Still Kicking’. Having started shredding 80 column cards on an IBM 360 a very long time ago, seen the rise of Unix-based machines and then the flood of PCs (of all sizes), I have heard the cry ‘thats just obsolete, any [...]

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Language, Thought and Ideas

For some reason I woke up this morning thinking about how language makes it difficult to discuss aspects of the world that we do not really understand (re – yesterdays rant about climate…). This brought to mind the work of an American linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf in the early days of the last century. If [...]

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Arctic Ice and Change

The Globe&Mail had an interesting article about the latest NASA ice thickness measurements today. Seems they say that the older ice is getting thinner much more rapidly than expected — so even if the coverage looks ok there is much less there.
So far this is not new news. We have been seeing reports of this [...]

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Solar Dawn

Last night we watched a program on Nova about solar technology and its benefits and costs. One thing that struck us was how different the approach is between the US and Canada. In the US there are tax benefits and subsidies that encourage individual homeowners to deploy alternate energy solutions to reduce demand on the [...]

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Old Computers?

Reading an article in today’s Globe and Mail about where technology gadgets should go to die made me think about life spans vs useful lifespans and how technology vendors encourage a cycle of waste. Back when I was a software developer we used to joke about the tradeoffs between good/cheap/quick — and management could get [...]

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Food vs Fuel

The BBC webnews today was writing about the drought in Australia and its impact on grain supplies. Seems that Australia, as the second largest grain exporter (after the US) is in the worse drought in a century. A normal wheat harvest would be around 25 million tons but in 2006 they only harvested 9.8 million [...]

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Government and Energy

Recently there have been news items both in Canada and the US about government and industry groups trying to pass laws to displace zoning, ecological protection and other inconveniences from the rush to implement wind turbines — the current snake oil solution that will save western civilization from itself.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am [...]

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