IBM has announced a software simulation of a mammalian cerebral cortex that’s significantly more complex than the cortex of a cat. And, just like the actual brain that it simulates, they still have to figure out how it works.

At least that last phrase is honest. Simulating neurons and synapses with computer components doesn’t mean you know how a brain works. As the post goes on to say:

In a nutshell, when a simulation of a complex phenomenon (brains, weather systems) reaches a certain level of fidelity, it becomes just as difficult to figure out what’s actually going on in the model—how it’s organized, or how it will respond to a set of inputs—as it is to answer the same questions about a live version of the phenomenon that the simulation is modeling. So building a highly accurate simulation of a complex, nondeterministic system doesn’t mean that you’ll immediately understand how that system works—it just means that instead of having one thing you don’t understand (at whatever level of abstraction), you now have two things you don’t understand: the real system, and a simulation of the system that has all of the complexities of the original plus an additional layer of complexity associated with the models implementation in hardware and software.

Not really related but gleaned from one of the comments to the post is a link to software designed to catproof your computer:

When cats walk or climb on your keyboard, they can enter random commands and data, damage your files, and even crash your computer. This can happen whether you are near the computer or have suddenly been called away from it.

PawSense is a software utility that helps protect your computer from cats. It quickly detects and blocks cat typing, and also helps train your cat to stay off the computer keyboard.

I wonder if it works for three-year-old humans?

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

Scientists have developed a number of quantum computing systems that use ions or electrons as bits of data; mathematical “operations” can be performed on them with beams of light or electrical pulses. Until recently, however, these systems could only perform the specific tasks they were designed to do. But a group of NIST scientists have published a description of a quantum processor that can receive virtually any set of instructions and perform them on a set of inputs—in short, they’ve made the first programmable quantum processor.

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

First, it’s all about the web. All apps are web apps. The entire experience takes place within the browser and there are no conventional desktop applications. This means users do not have to deal with installing, managing and updating programs.

Second, because all apps live within the browser, there are significant benefits to security. Unlike traditional operating systems, Chrome OS doesn’t trust the applications you run. Each app is contained within a security sandbox making it harder for malware and viruses to infect your computer.

Some other information about Chrome is at MaximumPC. Google has a kindergarten explanation of Chrome in the video clip below:

The Chrome OS is not anything like Windows or any other general PC operating system. It is for the Web and small devices only. However, a Web appliance is just what millions of people need and it will be very interesting to see if this type of system someday replaces the PC in many households

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

You may not yet be using Windows 7 but there is already talk about Windows 8. As I mentioned last month, there is even a site about Windows 8. (It’s not an official Microsoft site, however.) Microsoft has now released a roadmap that has been interpreted to indicate 2012 as the year for the release of Windows 8.

Much more concrete information is available about the next version of Internet Explorer, IE9. A Microsoft blog talks about improvements in performance and scripting. A very interesting addition may be graphics hardware acceleration. It is not clear exactly how this is to be implemented or how generally applicable it will be but using hardware acceleration could be quite an advance for IE. Note that it requires Windows features that Windows XP doesn’t have.

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

For example, if you ask a question, search engines will be unaware of the context and will instead look for pages containing the specific words used in the question. So if your search is, “How many lawyers work at Microsoft”, the computers will give you links to pages containing “Microsoft”, “lawyers”, and “work” but will not answer your question. I tried it on Google and got 2,650,000 hits. None of the first few hundred links answered the question although one estimated the number of lawyers at Disney. The answer may have been buried somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of pages but as a practical matter the question was not answered. When I searched the exact phrase, “How many lawyers work at Microsoft”, Google said nothing was found. I tried “size of Microsoft legal staff ” but had no luck. Bing didn’t know either.

Then I tried “legal budget Microsoft”. There were 7,270,000 hits but the answer was actually in the very first one. (If you are curious, the answer is an annual legal budget of $900 million and 1050 employees in its legal department, including 450 attorneys.) So, if you try different phrases, synonyms, and related subjects you may finally get your answer.

The example I have just given illustrates some of the problems with search algorithms but at other times the results are remarkably good. I searched Google for the question, “How many people live in Schenectady NY”, and got the answer right at the top of the search listing. But it was the answer for the county, not the city. The city population was several entries down. Bing gave the city population in the third entry.

Ideally, the computer would understand the meaning and context of our search queries but that’s a tall order and asks a lot of computers. Still, the goal of semantic search is being pursued and progress is being made. Science Daily reports a recent development:

European researchers have created the first integrated semantic search platform that integrates text, video and audio. The system can ‘watch’ films, ‘listen’ to audio and ‘read’ text to find relevant responses to semantic search terms. At last, computers are able to look for meaning in our multimedia searches.

Further on, the article discusses semantic search:

Right now, text in computing is defined by a series of numbers, most commonly the Unicode standard. Each number signifies a particular letter, and computers can scan these codes very quickly. So when you enter a search term, the machine has no idea what those letters signify. It simply looks for the pattern — it has no inkling of the concept behind the pattern.

But in semantic search, every bit of information is defined by potentially dozens of meaningful concepts. When a copywriter invoices for his or her work, for example, the date could be defined in terms of calendar, invoice, billing period, and so on. All these definitions for one piece of information are called ‘metadata’, or information about information.

Collections of agreed metadata terms for a particular field or task, like medicine or accounting, are called ontologies.

So the computer not only searches for the term, it searches for related metadata that defines types of information in specific ways. In reality, the computer still does not ‘understand’ a concept in its semantic search — it continues to look for patterns of letters. But because the concepts behind the search terms are included, it can return results based on concepts as well as text patterns.

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

However, the enormous increase in Internet traffic means that some of the old methods need updating. Google has announced that it is working on a way to make the Web faster. It’s rather technical but basically it is a replacement for the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) that Google calls “SPDY”. Google’s description of the research begins:

Today we’d like to share with the web community information about SPDY, pronounced “SPeeDY”, an early-stage research project that is part of our effort to make the web faster. SPDY is at its core an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web. It is designed specifically for minimizing latency through features such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression.

This project is still in the experimental stage and it’s a long road to becoming an accepted protocol (if it ever gets that far) but it certainly looks interesting.

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

In many parts of the world, the cell phone is the main device used to get on the Internet. As recently noted, the number of smartphones keeps growing and will soon exceed the number of PCs. For some time now, there has been speculation that the smartphone or some similar mobile platform would become the main device for personal computing and communication.

The speculation becomes closer to reality as the mobile platforms continually grow in power and utility. Already, the iPhone and its cousins are the main device for many. At Technologizer, Harry McCracken has a post called PC vs. Phone: Which Matters Most? He writes about a recent survey of smartphone users:

A quarter of the survey respondents said that they use their smartphones more than they do their PCs for business use. I’m not sure if that sounds low or high, but as smartphones get smarter over the next few years, you gotta think that many of us will come to see them as our principal computing devices, and consider traditional PCs to be the secondary, special-purpose gadget.

And at ZDNet, Dion Hinchcliffe asks, Are the iPhone and social networks making the classic Web and intranet obsolete? He thinks that not only the PC but also the present Web may be replaced. He writes:

There’s been an important and relatively sudden change taking place over the last couple of years in the way that we interact with the Web. While direct access or search activity has been (and still is) the most common way that we access the content and applications of the Web, new ways have been rapidly growing and competing with how we work online, both at home and at work.

Thus these new models, exemplified by social networking sites like Facebook or mobile apps on platforms like the iPhone, Palm’s new webOS, and Android, will ultimately herald a change in the way that we work with our IT systems in the enterprise.

Technology always goes down surprising paths and what we will be doing 5 or 10 years from now, I won’t venture to guess. But it is hard to believe that the complex and ponderous Windows PC will continue to be so dominant. Some people see Google’s Android system as the coming thing. For an enthusiastic look at Android, see the Gizmodo post, Giz Explains: Android, and How It Will Take Over the World. A little hyperbole there, of course, but who knows?

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

So, Windows 7 does, in fact, matter. But for how long? At the moment, we live in a client/server world, so the operating system will likely matter on the enterprise level for some time. On the consumer level, the availability of thousands of Windows apps for PCs may well help this dominant OS live on as well. But as always, the world of technology is changing, and as such, it’s possible that this may be the last major version of Windows to come out.

He goes on to say:

With these factors in play, Win 7 may end up being the last major Windows release. Next time out, the OS may be much more focused on the cloud. Like Google’s Chrome, such a release would likely be free. Over the next few yeasr, Microsoft will have to figure out how to make money from cloud-based services, rather than from selling the operating system outright. In order to do this, the company will have to reinvent itself—something that will have to happen if Microsoft is going to survive and thrive in the future.

Another observer who wonders about the future of Windows is Christopher Dawson. Dawson provides IT for a school district and he writes an education blog at ZDNet. He compares Google and Microsoft:

I had a couple of very enlightening conversations with representatives from Microsoft and Google back-to-back on Friday. While our conversations were focused on their educational initiatives, some of which I’ll be featuring tomorrow on ZDNet Education, the more interesting aspects of the interviews actually related to their entirely different approaches to the Web, the cloud, and computing in general. These approaches, and the history behind them, beg the question, is it time for Microsoft to reinvent itself if it wants to avoid becoming the computing equivalent of fossil fuels?

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is “the great challenge of the age.”

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.

Researchers are two steps closer to creating a mass-market version of technology called phase-change memory that could change how computers of the future are put together.

Intel and Numonyx, the chipmaker’s joint venture with STMicroelectonics that’s focused on flash memory, announced Wednesday they’ve built a new type of phase-change memory chip they hope will help fulfill the technology’s promise for small size and large capacity.

©2009 The PC Informant. All Rights Reserved.