We are being attacked!!

[bistro]

Yep...that's right. We are being attacked from the OS. No...not Vista....from outer space.

There's an interesting article written by Tom Halfhill in the December issue of MaximumPC. In the article he talks about "soft errors"...momentary hardware faults. These are not manufacturing defects or permanent malfunctions, but they can be easily mistaken for such. The cause? Cosmic ray bombardment..subatomic particles from outer space.

These particles have great penetrating power. Billions are passing harmlessly through your body right now. But when they hit a transistor in a microprocessor or memory chip, they can reverse the transistor's state from zero to one, or vice-versa, resulting in a transient error. It can crash a program or even a whole computer.(italics mine)

He goes on to mention that these errors are more prominent in systems that are at high altitudes, such as Denver, Colorado (1 mile above sea level). Neutron flux is is six times greater there than a place like San Francisco. If you are in an airliner cruising above 30,000 feet, Halfhill says that flux can be 100 times greater than at sea level. This altitude difference was demonstrated in 2004 when a 2,048 processor computer kept crashing at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico (7,000 feet above sea level). The cosmic rays scrambled the processor's cache.

In PCs, buggy software is so rampant that it masks the soft-error problem. Who can say why your machine crashed? But soft-errors are becoming such a threat that chip designers are adding more error-correction circuitry, despite the cost.

NOW I know why my Mahjong game I was playing on my laptop crashed while I was searching for Truth in the Himalayas last week...

[Crimson Blonde]

lmaooo Bistro


What an article

[jerryctx]

At last! An explanation for my idiocies. I'm not stupid, just bombarded.

[wonderinguy34]

*puts on tin foil hat

You are crazy.

[bistro]

Alas...tin foil does not foil those insidious cosmic rays. The only thing I can think of that does is the Super Anti-Neutrino Power Helmet...I think that was invented by Emperor Ming The Merciless in Flash Gordon...not sure.
Dang particles just pass right through the human body. If I could figure out how to charge them a toll, I could be a wealthy man. Would that make them..."charged particles"? Hmmmmm...

Time for my meds....