Dec 11
Cosmic Raymond, an aptly named ex-colleague, introduced me to what must be the best excuse for those elusive bugs that you can’t reproduce - cosmic rays! A cosmic ray hitting your computer can cause bit flips in your CPU and RAM, leading to memory corruption and dodgy arithmetic. You may think such an event unlikely, but it has almost certainly happened to you. An old IBM study reckons that a computer experiences one cosmic ray induced event for every 256MB of RAM every month.
The article doesn’t go on to explain why these events are almost guaranteed to occur when giving a demo to a client.