Back in the 1960s there was a kind of car called a Bubble Car. They had a front-opening door, that is, the door and windscreen were one, and it opened up, out and to the left. The cars also had no reverse gear.
It was thus possible to get into a state where you’d driven right up to the back wall of a garage and were then completely unable to get out.
The car wasn’t broken and otherwise worked normally. If there’d been a radio in there, that would have still worked. The seat didn’t suddenly become uncomfortable, etc. Nonetheless, the user was stuck.
What’s the point of this anecdote? Well, a computer that can be fixed by rebooting was in a state like that bubble car stuck against the back wall of the garage.
Unfortunately, with the car, there was no equivalent reset to get back outside the garage again, and usually resulted in the user screaming for help.
One thing I think about is that we make servers with ECC RAM because normal RAM has cosmic rays cause random corruption IIRC once every 100 days on average.
It’s overkill for desktops because you don’t care about 3 bit flips every year if you only have 1 machine as opposed to managing thousands in a datacenter, and you regularly restart your stuff anyway.
And then you have people who have to deal with hundreds of people who never restart their stuff.
And companies ship stuff with memory leaks all the time on top of this. US nuclear guidance systems have them, but they are not expected to have to be on constantly for weeks on end like the laptop of Joan from Marketing.
I HATED how often this worked. I want to know what actually went wrong. I usually have some idea … but no, finding that out is rarely the job.
Back in the 1960s there was a kind of car called a Bubble Car. They had a front-opening door, that is, the door and windscreen were one, and it opened up, out and to the left. The cars also had no reverse gear.
It was thus possible to get into a state where you’d driven right up to the back wall of a garage and were then completely unable to get out.
The car wasn’t broken and otherwise worked normally. If there’d been a radio in there, that would have still worked. The seat didn’t suddenly become uncomfortable, etc. Nonetheless, the user was stuck.
What’s the point of this anecdote? Well, a computer that can be fixed by rebooting was in a state like that bubble car stuck against the back wall of the garage.
Unfortunately, with the car, there was no equivalent reset to get back outside the garage again, and usually resulted in the user screaming for help.
One thing I think about is that we make servers with ECC RAM because normal RAM has cosmic rays cause random corruption IIRC once every 100 days on average.
It’s overkill for desktops because you don’t care about 3 bit flips every year if you only have 1 machine as opposed to managing thousands in a datacenter, and you regularly restart your stuff anyway.
And then you have people who have to deal with hundreds of people who never restart their stuff.
And companies ship stuff with memory leaks all the time on top of this. US nuclear guidance systems have them, but they are not expected to have to be on constantly for weeks on end like the laptop of Joan from Marketing.
I’d love if you had a source for this, that’s hilarious
Its incredibly hard to search on the web nowadays, so this is the best I could find. If I try searching for anything military, it’s propaganda slop.
It’s not specifically about nukes, and it might have been the origin point of an urban legend that reached my circles mutated.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180228-00/?p=98125
Also it’s technically a storage leak not a memory leak.