[ih] why did CC happen at all?

[Andrew G. Malis]

Detlef,

I disagree with "Defective hardware is not a scientific problem but
something for the waste basket." Well, it may not be a scientific problem,
but it certainly is an engineering problem.

Nothing in this life is perfect, and that especially includes anything
manufactured. Unless you take every precaution in the HW to protect it
against cosmic rays, any possible manufacturing defect, or so on, ignoring
the fact that HW may be defective (if even just momentarily) is just hiding
your head in the sand. And even if you could guarantee perfect HW that was
hardened against any possible failure, it would probably be much too
expensive to be practical. It's much more cost-effective from a system
point of view to anticipate possible HW failures with such mechanisms as
end-to-end checksums, retransmission timeouts, soft state, and outage
resiliency.

Cheers,
Andy


On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 4:20 PM, Detlef Bosau <detlef.bosau at web.de> wrote:

> Am 02.09.2014 um 21:47 schrieb Craig Partridge:
> >> My basic assumption is always that hardware works as designed.
> > I think the examples you've been given should cause you to realize that
> > assumption is false.  If not, I'm sure many many many more examples can
> > be provided.
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > Craig
>
>
> I wanted to understand a rational in a scientific discussion.
>
> Defective hardware is not a scientific problem but something for the
> waste basket.
>
> "Pi is about 3.14"
> "You are wrong, there are enough counterexamples for defective circles."
>
> And yes, I dealt with defecitve hardware several years in my life. For
> years, I worked at user helpdesks. So I know defective hardware very,
> very well.
>
> --
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> Detlef Bosau
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>
>
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