Re: how can a bit be off in memory?

On Sat, 30 Jun 2007 14:56:14 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

CBFalconer wrote:
"Robert M. Riches Jr." wrote:
... snip ...
If rebooting the machine made the (apparent) error go away, then my
guess would be a bit got flipped in RAM, the page of RAM that held the
cached copy of the page from disk. While I worked at a large chip
company, I heard of cosmic rays, alpha particles, and such causing
occasional soft errors in RAM. (That's why ECC RAM was a primary
factor in the motherboard I chose when I built my machines.) I would
suggest running memtest86 overnight to check for something more
sinister.

At last, someone who agrees with me about the essentiality of ECC. Most
of the uninformed keep spouting 'unneeded' when told to insist on it in
every machine.

Its a good thing, but not in this case relevant. GIGO. the Ram can only
reliably replicate what's been put into it, and its so unlikely that the
cells in a single byte would fail ALL ones..

Who said anything about all ones?
.

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