http://business.theatlantic.com/2009/12/climategate_iii_the_mystery_of_the_missing_data.php

Ran across another “Climategate” (silly name) article on the net.  This one written by someone who believes in the consensus that global warming is man-made.  However, there are some really good points that the author (Megan McArdle) makes in her post.

Basically, these emails point out flaws not necessarily in the conclusion, but that the road to that conclusion was flawed in a way that makes the conclusion untrustworthy.

To convince someone that you are right, you don’t go around beating up anyone who says you’re wrong.  You convince them you are right by showing your conclusion, the base facts, and how you used those facts to create your conclusion.  Even an idiot like me can see that.  Deleting your source data (or losing it), and obscuring how you reached your conclusions would have gotten at most a “C” grade in my high school geometry class.  My geometry teacher was all about “show me how you got your answer, not just the answer”.  If a high school math teacher doesn’t accept the method, why should we?

As a U.S. taxpayer watching our national debt skyrocket (and my pocketbook shrink), I’m appalled that we’re using these seemingly unsupported answers to force possibly economically devastating laws such as cap-and-trade through congress.  Even worse, it seems that we’ve spent millions or billions (I never seem to see the same answer twice) of dollars funding those very same conclusions, and maybe spending billions more in the future.

I don’t know.  All I know is that these scientists don’t seem to have a clue, and I’m not sure we can trust any of them anymore.

Hole in ozone layer was a good thing after all.

Oh my, did I get a laugh out of this.  I’ve been quietly steaming over the whole “Man-Causing-Global-Warming” thing for a while now anyway, and the released emails and documents from East Anglia have just added fuel to the fire.  But this…it takes the cake, eats all of it in front of you, and burps in your face.

I hope I can find some more articles written by this Andrew Thomas.  Very funny read…unless you’re French.

Ok, I thought that title up, and then went looking for it, to be sure someone else hadn’t thought of it.

…naturally they did.  http://normaluncertainty.blogspot.com/2009/03/sy-why.html.  Oh well, guess what, it’s STILL a good title!  Claire pretty much makes every point I have about the switch from “SciFi”, to “SyFy”.  Still, it bears repeating.  Here, let me do it right…

YOU ARE THE SCI-FI CHANNEL!  SYFY MAKES NO DANG SENSE!  AND YOUR PROGRAM DIRECTOR SHOULD BE SHOT WITH BB’S UNTIL HE/SHE FIGURES OUT WHAT THE WORDS “GOOD PROGRAMMING” MEANS!

I mean, geez, let’s look at what’s been on in the past couple of months.  Mostly hack-and-slash horror flicks.  I mean, I like a good horror movie as much as the next guy, but “Saw” isn’t even Science Fiction, just Fiction!  At least get the genre right!  I guess they want to get away from all that SciFi crap.  It’s cramping their style.  They want to grow as artists, I suppose.  Maybe do poetry at the local coffee house.  Get a cappuccino and do some beatnik, bohemian crap.

Get this through your thick heads…SciFi MADE you the powerhouse you are today!  You don’t go alienating your core demographic and turn your back on what has made you strong in the business, just because you want to play “The Sound of Music” on Friday nights!  You start a spin-off company for that!

There have been some dim spots of goodness.  SG-U is a surprisingly good show, and the movie Wolvesbayne didn’t suck.  But most of those original shows and movies aren’t even “B” movies.  Maybe “D” movies…if you’re lucky.  I’m not sure SyFy execs would recognize a good script if it rolled itself up and played “The Stars and Stripes Forever” on a banjo.  The few glimmers of near-brilliance are immediately replaced with mediocre, or downright horrible programs.

And why am I seeing so many of these horror movies on there, anyway?  What happened to the “Science” in Sci-Fi?  “Saw” was just one of many.  Now, I know they’re doing this “31 days of Halloween” (a blatant ripoff of Fox Family’s old 13 days of Halloween–ABC should sue), but I’ve been seeing nearly nothing but horror on there for several months.  Seems “SyFy” execs think that “SyFy” means “horror blood/guts fest”.  Nearly 50 years of classic SciFi to air, and they give us “Children of the Corn 23:  They’re Back Again and Again”.  Do they give us “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, or campy  cult classics like “Battle Beyond the Stars”?  No, they give us drivel such as “Basilisk”, and “DinoCroc”.   Ugh.  Do I even see “Lord of the Rings”?  Nope, not here.  Gotta watch that on TNT.  You get to see “Manticore”.

“Why do you keep watching?”, you may ask.  Well, it’s kinda like watching an auto accident.  It’s horrible, but you can’t quite look away.  It’s fascinating in some sick fashion.

So I guess I’ll keep watching the death of a good channel.  Unable to look away.

The global warming consensus cools.

Bahahahahahahahahaaa!!!

Whooo, that felt good.  You know, everyone’s been so busy with global scre…I mean, Global Warming, that they haven’t taken the time to actually LOOK outside at the temperatures.  It doesn’t help that there’s conflicting reports from biased sources citing that the arctic ice is low, it’s high, it’s about the same.  Not to mention that it’s the hottest/coolest year on record.

I just think it’s complete hubris to think we do enough to actually affect weather.  No one has given me undeniable facts to support that man is causing a global meltdown.  And in fact, how can we know, when we only started gathering weather data about a hundred years ago?

In school, they told me that most climate changes occur over hundreds, or even thousands of years.  Were they wrong?  Who knows, we haven’t been keeping records long enough to tell!

I was cleaning out a closet tonight, and I found a couple of copies of Novell Netware 5.  It got me thinking about Novell, and how great a server it was at the time.

Now, I was never a Novell engineer or anything, but we had several clients that had Novell servers, so I got to mess with them on a regular basis.  For those who don’t know or remember Novell, it was an awesome file and print server back when Microsoft was still struggling with the whole “network” thing.  There were a few file and print sharing systems at the time, including Novell, Banyan Vines, and Windows NT.  The difference between them was that NT was a bootable OS, while Novell and Banyan ran on top of DOS.  This had the advantage that if something happened to the network server’s partition, you could still boot into DOS and run recovery tools.

Of the three systems, I liked Novell the best.  Granted, I came into it late (’98), but I still was working on Novell 3.12, 4.11, NT 3.51, and NT 4 systems.  We did have one customer that had a Banyan system, but I only worked on it a couple of times…and that was more than enough for me!  NT systems usually couldn’t stay up for more than a week or two before it needed to be rebooted.  In fact, at the time, Microsoft recommended a reboot at least once a week.  Not to mention it would freeze a lot.  Granted, quite a bit of that instability was from the poor quality windows software, but a lot of it was still due to the OS.

On the other hand, it was nothing for me to go to a Novell server, and see an uptime of months.  I believe the longest uptime I saw on a Novell server was 1.5 years.  Compare THAT to a Windows system!  Now, you can get IBM mini systems like the System36, or AS400 systems with uptime in the years easily, but Novell was a system that was being deployed on commodity hardware, was relatively inexpensive, and in some not-necessarily prime locations (like a hot garage).  For the price, you couldn’t beat the stability, and security of a Novell system.  And not once did I hear of a Novell virus.  Not once.  You could drop a virus onto a Novell volume from another station, but it wouldn’t affect the Novell system itself.

Unfortunately, Novell fell to the M$ juggernaut.  It didn’t seem that way at first.  In the early-to-mid 90′s, it was a tie between Novell and Unix systems on servers.  NT came a distant third.  Novell did everything NT did…but better.  File and printer sharing and file security was much more robust on a Novell system.  Novell even had a comprehensive network directory system (called Netware Directory Services) when Active Directory was flailing.  But as Windows 2000 started gaining ground, it was obvious that Novell wasn’t innovating fast enough.  Small businesses were quickly moving beyond needing just file and print sharing.  They needed internet connection sharing, email services, and firewalls.  At the same time, software designers were moving away from the client running all software, and only data on the server, to the server running some kind of service that the client connects to.   Novell either couldn’t or wouldn’t keep pace.  Novell attempted to add these services, but couldn’t do it for the same price as competing Windows products could do it.

After the release of Windows 2000, Novell’s fall went fairly quickly.  Novell tried to rally by buying Suse Linux back in 2003, but it was too little, too late.  By that time, Windows had pretty much trounced them.  Despite a clear (and by all accounts smooth) upgrade path from Netware to Suse Linux, customers continued to migrate to Windows.  Now, very few installations of Novell remain.  It’s a little sad, but the current market simply outgrew what Novell could provide.

I still have a copy of Novell Netware 5, though.  You never know when you’ll need it.