[Gllug] Recommended distro

[John Hearns]

On Tue, 2004-12-14 at 21:14 +0000, Nix wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Dec 2004, Christian Smith muttered drunkenly:
> > Yeah, that's more along the lines I was thinking of. Any server should
> > have ECC memory.
> 
> These days, any *desktop* should. The cells in modern RAM chips are
> small enough and there's enough RAM fitted that bit-flipping via cosmic
> rays and (particularly) alpha particle emission from the chip packaging
> can flip well over a bit a month: worse than that if you live on
> granite. (My 512Mb+ boxes spot a bit flip every two weeks or so.)

As a physics student (*) I had ideas about a project using RAM chips
to image radioacive sources.  Never really got around to it, and these 
days I don't have ready access to sources.
I just thought about writing bit patterns to the RAM and reading them
back.


(*) Giving you some idea of the timescale, my department had Motorola
68000 development boards, and I learned 68000 assembler.
Never regretted it really - nice architecture.

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug