| ▲ | tokyobreakfast 3 hours ago |
| >even a cosmic ray flipping the "do not upload" bit in memory Stats on this very likely scenario? |
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| ▲ | strbean 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > IBM estimated in 1996 that one error per month per 256 MiB of RAM was expected for a desktop computer. From the wikipedia article on "Soft error", if anyone wants to extrapolate. |
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| ▲ | d1sxeyes 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | That makes it vanishingly unlikely. On a 16GB RAM computer with that rate, you can expect 64 random bit flips per month. So roughly you could expect this happen roughly once every two hundred million years. Assuming there are about 2 billion Windows computers in use, that’s about 10 computers a year that experience this bit flip. | | |
| ▲ | eszed 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > 10 computers a year experience this bit flip That's wildly more than I would have naively expected to experience a specific bit-flip. Wow! | | |
| ▲ | mapontosevenths an hour ago | parent [-] | | Scale makes the uncommon common. Remember kids, if she's one in a million that means there are 11 of her in Ohio alone. |
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| ▲ | homebrewer 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Given enough computers, anything will happen. Apparently enough bit flips happen in domains (or their DNS resolution) that registering domains one bit away from the most popular ones (e.g. something like gnogle.com for google.com) might be worth it for bad actors. There was a story a few years ago, but I can't find it right now; perhaps someone will link it. |
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| ▲ | pixl97 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aT7mnSstKGs Was in DEFCON19. | | | |
| ▲ | lanyard-textile 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | A very old game speedrun -- of the era that speedruns weren't really a "thing" like they are today -- apparently greatly benefited from a hardware bit flip, and it was only recently discovered. Can't find an explanatory video though :( | | |
| ▲ | direwolf20 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The Tick Tock Clock upwarp in Super Mario 64. All evidence that exists of it happening is a video recording. The most similar recording was generated by flipping a single bit in Mario's Y position, compared to other possibilities that were tested, such as warping Mario up to the closest ceiling directly above him. | | |
| ▲ | tavavex an hour ago | parent [-] | | I'm pretty sure that while no one knows the cause definitively, many people agreed that the far more likely explanation for the bit change was a hardware fault (memory error, bad cartridge connection or something similar) or other, more powerful sources of interference. The player that recorded the upwarp had stated that they often needed to tilt the cartridge to get the game to run, showing that the connection had already degraded. The odds of it being caused by a cosmic ray single-event upset seem to be vanishingly low, especially since similar (but not identical) errors have already been recorded on the N64. |
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| ▲ | drysine 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| At google "more than 8% of DIMM memory modules were affected by errors per year" [0] More on the topic: Single-event upset[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-event_upset |
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| ▲ | halfmatthalfcat 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It's "HN-likely" which translates to "almost never" in reality. |
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| ▲ | Supermancho an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Happens all the time, in reality (even on the darkside). When the atmosphere fails (again, happening all the time), error correction usually handles the errant bits. | |
| ▲ | patja 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Especially since HN readers are more likely to be using ECC memory | |
| ▲ | smegger001 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | if cosmic ray bit flips were so rare then ecc ram wouldn't be a thing. | | |
| ▲ | Sayrus 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | ECC protects against more events than cosmic rays. Those events are much more likely, for instance magnetic/electric interferences or chip issues. | | |
| ▲ | direwolf20 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Those random unexplainable events are also referred to casually as "cosmic rays" | |
| ▲ | wang_li 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | In the 2010 era of RAM density, random bit flips were really uncommon. I worked with over a thousand systems which would report ECC errors when they happen and the only memorable events at all were actual DIMM failures. Also, around 1999-2000, Sun blamed cosmic rays for bit flips for random crashes with their UltraSPARC II CPU modules. | | |
| ▲ | mapontosevenths an hour ago | parent [-] | | > actual DIMM failures. Yep, hardware failures, electrical glitches, EM interference... All things that actually happen to actual people every single day in truly enormous numbers. It ain't cosmic rays, but the consequences are still flipped bits. |
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