Fans of the manga Ghost In the Shell no doubt remember one of the more visually stunning pages at the beginning of the saga, CG art depicting a neurochip, which in the series was the technology underlying artificial intelligence and the prosthetic brains which made full body cyborgs possible. Not a few of us have dreamed of the day in which it would be possible to directly interface doped silicon processors with our wetware and move information out of one and into the other with little more than a thought. However, our science fiction-fueled dreams are just that, dreams, and …
Never bolt the sides back onto a computer you're building until you're absolutely, positively, cutting-charge-wrapped-around-a-major-artery serious that it's working exactly the way it's supposed to. Installing a server in the rack before the systemware's installed and patched and the servers are up and running is a sure-fire way to provoke a hardware failure or hard drive crash.
When installing the heatsink/fan assembly of an Intel CPU designed for the LGA 775 socket, do not twist the fastening pins of the cooling unit to seat them. Just use a flat-headed screwdriver to push them straight down. Twisting them is only done to remove the cooling unit!
I got home from work early last Thursday afternoon after putting in a couple of hours at work to wrap things up and ensure that nothing would crash, blow up, or spontaneously develop sentience and go on a rampage through the city while I was taking a long weekend in New York City to attend The Next HOPE conference, thrown by 2600 Magazine once again. Unfortunately, this meant taking a couple of phone calls on the way home and throwing a suitcase of stuff together at the last minute so that Hasufin, Mika, and I could then drive to the …
If you just look at the outside of a piece of hardware you can't tell if it's working or not, but if you open the housing to peek inside you will unquestionably break it.
Thirty-two years ago (plus a day or two - real life happens) two computer hobbyists stuck at home in a blizzard not unlike snowpocalypse named Randy Suess and Ward Christenson created something wholly new, which geek history remembers as the bulletin board system. At the time, the idea was revolutionary - with a computer, an auto-answer modem, and some disk space you could set up forums for people to leave public and private messages to one another. As disk space became less expensive, file archives were often added for people to trade files. By the mid-1980's boards were all over the place …
I've been wrestling with this post for weeks now because, at its heart, transhumanism isn't a simple set of beliefs, actions, or ideas. It encompasses many disciplines, from cybernetics to engineering to computer science to biology and many things in between. I say that not as a cop-out but because practically every discipline is covered in some way and informs the body of knowledge somehow. It is also a deeply personal philosophy, often attracting adherents who attempt to lead by example as well as participating in the research, development, and deployment of the technologies which originally inspired it (such as …
Something that I keep meaning to write about is the topic of practical data backups - how to back your data up in such a way that you won't go bonkers trying to manage it, but if you blow a drive you'll be able to restore something at least. The thing about backups is that they're at once easy to overthink and confuse yourself horribly (which means that you'll never make or use them) and easy to do in such a fashion that they won't be usable when you need them the most. At the enterprise level, there are at least …
Just a few days ago it was made official – eccentric systems cracker Gary McKinnon, known as the UFO Hacker by the news media has lost his final appeal and will be extradited to the United States to stand trial. If convicted, McKinnon is looking at 70 years in federal prison for compromising 97 computer networks operated by the US Department of Defense in his quest to prove that UFOs exist. Federal prosecutors claim that McKinnon’s actions may have interfered with their response to the events of 9/11, though there is little to no evidence supporting their claim …
