I once had a email that crashed the network card on a windows 2000 server. That was not fun to try and find the problem. After the 3rd occurrence the network card got binned
Comment on Is this sufficiently advanced technology?
Honytawk@discuss.tchncs.de 21 hours ago
No, I don’t agree.
Every single problem can be traced to a specific source.
What a lot of people (especially in IT) determine as a glitch, is just some unexpected change that they don’t have the time/energy to deal with and can be solved by just rebooting.
Every single thing has a cause, even if the problem was a single particle of radiation from space that flipped a bit on a hard drive.
I’ve had the pleasure to work with some IT-guru that could solve every problem. They could see where this unexpected change came from and tell how to solve it so it wouldn’t ever happen again. Except maybe those bit flips.
Theoriginalthon@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Bytemeister@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Bitflips are fun.
For a while, I managed a fleet of about 6500 iPod touch devices, and we would have random failures on devices where a simple re-image would solve the problem. I did a back of the napkin calculation, and our rate of those failures was almost exactly the expected cosmic radiation bitflip chance for the total surface area of all the memory chips in our devices.
gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org 16 hours ago
larger structure sizes can help against spontaneous bit flips, i think. at the cost of consuming more energy for each calculation step.
Bytemeister@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Indeed, but smaller structures are less likely to get hit in the first place, it’s a bit of a trade off.
Also, error correcting memory and storage are things, but at the end of the day, that is just more/larger structures, which is a roundabout way of saying you’re correct.