thegeekpea

Also on IBM’s cat-sized-brain-simulation materials list: 143 terabytes of RAM, miles and miles of cabling, a million watts of electricity, 6675 tons of air conditioning equipment, and an acre of floor space.

Cats: they’re kinda dumb. They only seem smarter than dogs because they’re not so friendly, and our society judges kindness harshly. It’s true! an interesting theory! Which is why, after mice, simulating a feline-sized brain on a BlueGene/P supercomputer was next on IBM’s to-do list. But for all the kitty talk here, this project wasn’t specifically about creating a computerized house pet; it’s part of a larger, ongoing project to eventually simulate a full human brain. The cat equivalency, derived from the number of virtual neurons and synapses the simulation can manage, at 1.6 billion and 9 trillion, respectively, just gives a sense of how far along the project is: today, despite being the biggest simulated brain ever, it’s only capable of simulating the human visual cortex, or as PopMech so delicately puts it, “the wrinkly outer layer” of the human brain.

So how long before a supercomputer can simulate (roughly—since these computer simulations don’t have the same neural patterning and learning capabilities of a real brain, among other things) an entire human cortex? Weirdly soon, says the project’s lead scientist:

To [simulate a human cortex], he’ll need to find 1000 times more computing power. At the rate that supercomputers have expanded over the last 20 years, that super-super computer could exist by 2019. “This is not just possible, it’s inevitable,” Modha says. “This will happen.”

People need to stop getting worked up about the future, honestly: Before we have to worry self-aware robot uprisings, we’re going to have to deal with decades of extremely dumb, extremely expensive fake pets. Enforced caution, I believe this is called. [Popular Mechanics]

Send an email to John Herrman, the author of this post, at jherrman@gizmodo.com.

via feeds.gawker.com

By Danny Allen, 12:10 PM on Thu Sep 17 2009, 4,157 views (Edit, to draft, Slurp)

Appreciating the look of garbled images isn’t usually the top priority if your monitor or TV freaks-out (unless it’s scrambled porn). But the new book, Glitch: Designing Imperfection, celebrates artists who manipulate these short-lived disturbances. Take a look:

Glitch took four years to come together, and the 200 or so artists it profiles were pulled from over 900 submissions. The images are grabbed, composited, and sometimes shaped into something altogether different, but always derived from malfunction.

Kinda trippy, and definitely techy. I’m using the first example below as my new desktop background—it sorta reminds me of an Amon Tobin album cover. The book comes out in September, and you can pre-order at: [Design Imperfection via PopSci via ffffound]

Beautiful Computer Screen Glitches

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via feeds.gawker.com

Many DC area consultants use flowcharts and work flows in their jobs. If you’re interested in following the diagnostic process of computer repair specialists, take a look at these flowcharts by Morris Rosenthal. They illustrate many of my thought processes when fixing a computer problem.

Boot Failure Troubleshooting

The most comprehensive of these flowcharts is the Boot Failure Troubleshooting Flowchart which encompasses several smaller flowcharts. You can see that it is PC focused, asking you to run scandisk and FDISK on your hard drive. Still, the principles apply to any computer.

Many of these troubleshooting repair processes are illustrated individually in an easier to read and print format:

Power Supply Diagnostics

Power Supplies commonly break, especially if they are hit by a power surge (too much power, such as when hit by lightning), blackout (no power), or brownout (lower voltage power).

A power supply can die over time (booting occasionally) making it trickier to diagnose. Be sure to get a high enough wattage power supply, especially if you have a power hungry graphics card.

CPU, RAM and Motherboard Troubleshooting

RAM problems can be vexing because they might only appear when a particular part of the RAM is accessed. This can manifest itself through strange computer behaviors that are often mistaken for viruses.

Motherboards, known as Logic Boards in the Mac world, hold the RAM and CPU. Without replacement parts, it can be difficult to determine where the problem lies between these three components.

Hard Drive Failure

With spinning disks and moving heads, hard drives will eventually fail. Many of today’s laptop hard drives have accelerometers built-in so that they can protect the hard drive when you are moving the laptop. But the moving parts will eventually break. Studies show annual hard drive failure rates to be 2-13%, depending on usage and particular model used. Over the next 5 years there is expected to be a transition to primarily using solid state drives (SSDs) that can potentially last longer and use less energy.

This flowchart assumes the use of IDE hard drives, which are older than the standard SATA drives in today’s computers.

CD and DVD Troubleshooting

Again, this chart assumes that you are using an IDE connector, not today’s standard of SATA drives.

Other steps in drive diagnosis include:

1. Listening to the drive. Bad hard drives and CD drives might actually sound bad, with grinding, straining, or clicking noises.
2. Looking in the Windows Device Manager for driver issues. These may be fixed with new drivers, or might (for older IDE drives) require you to remove or change the setup of other devices.

Video Card Diagnostics

These video card diagnostics assume that you are using a discrete video card, not a motherboard with integrated video which are common in today’s lower cost computers.

Network Troubleshooting

This is another case where it is useful to have other computers available to determine if the problem is related to the network (cables, router, switch) or the computer.

Fixing Computers

These and other flowcharts are in Morris Rosenthal’s book:
Computer Repair with Diagnostic Flowcharts Revised Edition: Troubleshooting PC Hardware Problems from Boot Failure to Poor Performance.

These flowcharts can give helpful hints to fixing computer problems. Unfortunately, they can’t cover all the latest technologies as they come out.

A couple of things that I do to diagnose and repair computers include:

1. Testing with replacement parts. If the monitor doesn’t show video, you can hook up another monitor with another video cable to see if it’s the computer or monitor that is malfunctioning. If you suspect a bad power supply, you can try a working one.
2. Perform a quick Google search. New computers often ship with a driver problem or needed updates that are easily fixed by searching Google or the knowledge database of the computer manufacturer.

via techdc.com