Notionally, the cause of
bIT rot. However, this is a semi-independent usage that may be invoked as a humorous way to
handwave away any minor
randomness that doesn' t seem worth the bother of investigating. "Hey, Eric - I just got a burst of garbage on my
tube, where did that come from?" "Cosmic rays, I guess." Compare
sunspots, {phase of the moon}. The Br
ITish seem to prefer the usage "cosmic showers" "alpha particles" is also heard, because stray alpha particles passing through a memory chip can cause single b
IT errors (this becomes increasingly more likely as memory sizes and dens
ITies increase). Factual note: Alpha particles cause b
IT rot, cosmic rays do not (except occasionally in spaceborne computers). Intel could not explain random b
IT drops in their early chips, and one hypothesis was cosmic rays. So they created the World' s Largest Lead Safe, using 25 tons of the stuff, and used two identical boards for testing. One was placed in the safe, one outside. The hypothesis was that if cosmic rays were causing the b
IT drops, they should see a statistically significant difference between the error rates on the two boards. They did not observe such a difference. Further investigation demonstrated conclusively that the b
IT drops were due to alpha particle emissions from thorium (and to a much lesser degree uranium) in the encapsulation material. Since
IT is impossible to eliminate these radioactives (they are uniformly distributed through the earth' s crust, w
ITh the statistically insignificant exception of uranium lodes)
IT became obvious that one has to design memories to w
IThstand these h
ITs. [
Jargon File]
In addITion suITable contents:
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