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Comment Re:A funny scary thing (Score 1) 70

At least once a week

That is not cosmic rays. Are you sure your nextdoor neighbour isn't running a secret nuclear reactor?

Yes bit flips from cosmic rays happen. If you were to to say once or twice a year then I'd blame it on a bitflip (that's about in line with what Google's study estimates a a server with large amounts of memory would have), but if you were getting errors daily then its time to replace your RAM. If it's seemingly random across the memory channels then new CPU/Motherboard.

Comment Re: Why was the older version better? (Score 3, Insightful) 70

And second, if cosmic really are to blame, then they should have rolled back to the previous version of the sun.

You're assuming a lot. The software rollback may very well have to do with changes in error detection and correction routines. Hell here's a super oversimplified example: When you update your BIOS on a server there's a good chance you come out the other side with ECC turned off.

This isn't unreasonable. I've experienced a large compressor shutdown costing many millions of dollars thanks to a firmware update on a safety system from Honeywell which had a bug in error detection and handling which caused a simple random single hardware fault to escalate to a redundant failure that shouldn't have occurred. Honeywell withdrew the update globally and we were advised to roll back. This kind of shit happens.

Comment Re: Why was the older version better? (Score 2) 70

If they aren't using semiconductors made with depleted boron, they should be.

No they should not. They should spend their money focusing on designs that are inherently resilient to soft errors rather than spending a fortune on buying hardened silicon to address a singular cause of a potential error. Boron-11 silicon is predominantly used in the medical imaging, space, and nuclear industry where equipment is expected to be continuously bombarded with high levels of radiation. Flights just don't qualify for that level of mitigation requirement in the silicon manufacture.

Comment Two questions come to mind (Score 2) 40

1) What are the maintenance requirements for this and are they competitive with the shipping industry's goal of employing the cheapest 3rd world labour they can get their hands on?
2) Are there negative implications to these reactors becoming one of the 20-40 ships per year that end up on the bottom of the ocean?

Comment Re:Saturated market (Score 1) 99

My house is around 100 eet long and the main circuit box is on the other side from the garage in the basement. Cables cannot be run through the basement ceiling, so they have to run a shielded cable around the outside of the house and into the garage. Apparently a 250 foot shielded copper cable runs around $2000. I fill my tank around once every two weeks at 90 a fill. Comes out to 45 weeks now that I do it again.

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