“I cannot get into my email, it comes with a weird error”, whispered a trembling voice who called the Microsoft helpdesk. “Have you tried restarting your pc madam” was the reply. Now who has not heard this phase before? The Great Restart, which tends to “fix” 85% of most of your computer related issues. Ever wondered what exactly does a restart do, it’s like the magic pill which takes care of all your illness, if only there was one.
If you have not noticed already, most of your computer related issues occur when you turn your pc ON. That’s why I never turn mine OFF at all. Why is that? We tend to compare our pcs to ourselves. We believe that our pc gets tired and weary by working all day and try to put it to bed at night by switching it OFF. When we turn it back ON in the morning, woops we have a blue screen or some weird looking error. Why is that? And what do we do? Obviously we restart.
How many times have you woken up with a headache or stiff neck or some weird looking human error? If only we could restart ourselves. If only we had that magic pill. Do we go back to bed, sleep for a while and get up again. Will the headache vanish? Will your neck be fine? Most likely it has only worsened. Sometimes, your pc just turns ON and displays a ‘blue screen of death’ error; it’s similar to you collapsing in the mornings due to low \ high sugar levels. Your pc normally requests you to insert a boot disk while you inject yourself with a sugary drink or penicillin. We are not that different after all.
Why is there no Human Restart? Engineers at IBM are conducting research on the human brain to find out how exactly does it store so much data? Our brain is capable of storing video graphics and images which span over our lifetime. In more technical terms, it can store upto 99,987,7658 Terabytes of data, more than any existing storage solution and that’s all packed up in a 1/2 sq ft of plasma (popularly known as the grey matter). IBM is trying to come up with storage devices with similar capabilities but only better: They are trying to eliminate the faulty RAM issue. Our human brain is another funny “device”. It has an amazing storage capability but the RAM is invariably faulty. How many times have you tried to remember someone’s name only to recollect after they have left? How many times have you forgotten your maths formula during the math test only to remember on your way home? And how often have you turned blank when interrogated about a recent incident. Well, it’s the “faulty RAM” issue. You can compare it to the Request Denied, file not found or Search returned no matching records errors.
Another similarity between the human brain and the cpu is that it does need rest. It’s the video output device i.e the eyes that needs rest and hence we sleep while the brain continues to process delayed writes and write backs in the form of dreams and nightmares. Just like your pc’s hard disk the brain has a use by date when it finally crashes without notice and cannot be restarted. Before the end comes the performance deteriorates with the frequency of faulty RAM issues rapidly increasing. Most of the times the search requests go in endless loops before timing out. For a pc it means time to replace the hard disk but for us it means time to replay the best of what memories are left before we go into permanent shutdown.
