41–50 of 567 posts
Basically you can register domains using small bit differences for domains and start getting email and such for that domain
If I recall correctly the example given was a variation of microsoft.com
All because so much equipment doesn't use ECC
I don't know if ECC is that important, but reliability of RAM (or any storage) feels pretty crazy to me. 128GB being refreshed every second for a month error requires that the per-bit refresh process has a reliability of 99.9999999999999999% to be flawless. Considering we are dealing with quantum effects (which are inherently probabilistic), I wouldn't trust myself to design anything like that. Now back to ECC, I'll…
A system on Earth, at sea level, with 4 GB of RAM has a 96% percent chance of having a bit error in three days without ECC RAM. With ECC RAM, that goes down to 1.67e-10 or about one chance in six billions. So I'd say ECC is not only important but insanely impactful. There's a reason why many organizations don't even want to hear about getting rigs with non-ECC memory.
If you think it doesn't matter: how do you know? If you don't run with ECC memory, you'll never know if memory was corrupted (and recovered).
That blue screen, that sudden reboot, that program crashing. That corrupted picture of your kid.
Who knows.
I'll tell you, who knows. God damn every sysadmin (or the modern equivalent) can tell you how often they get ECC errors. And at even a small scale you'll encounter them. I have, on servers and even on an SAN Storage controller, for crying out loud.
If you care about your data, use ECC memory in your computers.
I don't know if ECC is that important, but reliability of RAM (or any storage) feels pretty crazy to me. 128GB being refreshed every second for a month error requires that the per-bit refresh process has a reliability of 99.9999999999999999% to be flawless. Considering we are dealing with quantum effects (which are inherently probabilistic), I wouldn't trust myself to design anything like that. Now back to ECC, I'll…
A system on Earth, at sea level, with 4 GB of RAM has a 96% percent chance of having a bit error in three days without ECC RAM. With ECC RAM, that goes down to 1.67e-10 or about one chance in six billions. So I'd say ECC is not only important but insanely impactful. There's a reason why many organizations don't even want to hear about getting rigs with non-ECC memory.
[1]: https://twitter.com/catfish_man/status/1335373029245775872?l...
I bought ECC RAM for my laptop and it definitely was about 4x the price. It's valuable to me for a few reasons -- peace of mind being a big one. Bit flips happen and are real. I really wish ECC was plentiful and not brutally expensive!
This is the first time I hear about a laptop that supports ECC memory. Could you please share the make and model?
It is filled to the gunwales with ECC RAM.
Cost him the equivalent of $7k or so. Eeek.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I'm always annoyed with this kind of mistake. Especially as non-native speakers should know better than the native ones (which usually don't give a f.). Now the point about internally doing ECC is an interesting one, could be a way out of this mess. And apparently ECC is more available in AMD land
>> But is ECC more available in AMD land? Yes it is. The problem is they dont really advertise it. I'm not certain but it might even be standard on AMD chips, but if they dont say so and board makers are also unclear, who knows...
For consumer motherboard OEMs, only AMD effectively has ECC support (Intel's has been so spotty and haphazard from product to product), and of AMD users, only a small number care about ECC.
So motherboard companies, being resource and time-starved as they are, don't make it a priority to address such a small user-base.
If Intel started shipping ECC on everything, it would go a long way towards shifting the market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To someone on HN who isn’t familiar with what ECC does that explains nothing about how ECC works and how it could have prevented these situations. Or how often they really happen.
It takes 5 seconds to Google ECC memory if you're really interested and if you're working on kernel related stuff you 99.9999% know what it is.