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Re^4: Projects where people can die

by hv (Prior)
on Sep 08, 2006 at 11:46 UTC ( [id://571934]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Re^3: Projects where people can die
in thread Projects where people can die

How many have experienced cpu failure--of any kind? Of those that have, how many could be attributed to some form of radiation degeneration of the cpu (or memory)? Much harder to access as without extreme analysis, there is simply no way to know.

I have experienced failure which, after extreme analysis, we could only attribute to radiation degeneration of a byte of memory - see Re: What do you know, and how do you know that you know it? for some details.

Later in the same job I was writing interrupt handlers for a new ARM-based chipset, and found a problem in that chipset - a bug in certain (characterisable) situations when a multiple-register store instruction crossed a 64k page boundary. Somehow that did less to shake my confidence in the perfection of hardware than the memory corruption problem.

Hugo

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Re^5: Projects where people can die
by MidLifeXis (Monsignor) on Sep 08, 2006 at 17:06 UTC
    Somehow that did less to shake my confidence in the perfection of hardware than the memory corruption problem.

    One was random, one was not. Very understandable.

    --MidLifeXis

Re^5: Projects where people can die
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Sep 08, 2006 at 13:37 UTC
    ... after extreme analysis, we could only attribute to radiation degeneration ...

    A somewhat less than definitive causality. But assuming that you are correct, that's 1 in n*100e6 computer users.

    I'm still inclined to believe that disk failure is probably more common :)


    Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
    Lingua non convalesco, consenesco et abolesco. -- Rule 1 has a caveat! -- Who broke the cabal?
    "Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".
    In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

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