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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (116108)	11/8/2000 10:36:15 AM
From: Tony Viola	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

John, Sun cosmic ray problem, or whatever, can't let it go uncommented on: "Sometimes in life, a problem becomes an answer," says John Shoemaker, Sun's executive vice president for system products... Huh? Maybe he should go into politics. Such errors aren't any more common in Sun machines than in others, Mr. Shoemaker says. Yes, but all other machines of that class have error checking and correction (ECC) built in to correct 99.999% (or something very very high) of the hits. The article does say this. Every so often, the cache memory in these servers develops so-called parity errors in which a single bit of data is flipped from a 1 to a 0 or vice versa for reasons that aren't entirely understood. A parity error is just an error flag set to indicate there has been a problem. It's the most mundane error checking there is in a computer. What can happen is much more serious: a data integrity problem that can cause the machine to give wrong answers. Tony