Comparing to cars isn't quite fair. For one thing, Voyager doesn't have to deal with traffic, accelerating, decelerating, etc. Its commute is more like "Hang a left with gravity assist at Jupiter and cruise for the next several years." It doesn't even have to gas up.

It doesn't have to deal with pot holes, school zones, daredevil drivers, stop-n-go traffic, or heck, stopping and going in any sense. It's been slingshotted into space and can make subtle adjustments to its course or pick up the occasional planetary gravity-assist, and that's about it. If it were to totally croak today, it'd still keep flying into the interstellar medium. We just wouldn't be able to hear about it if the telemetry gear croaked.

And before you go on to praise the unprecedented electronics, realize there's plenty of people still developing home brew games for Intellivisions and Ataris, and they're almost as old... All those old consumer electronics gizmos still function, and were produced at a fraction of the cost. The only reason newer electronics haven't run for as long is, well, not enough time has passed for them to have run that long.

You can get anything you want, at Alice's Asteroid
You can get anything you want,
At Alice's As-ter-oid
Float right in, orbit's round the back
Half an AU from the railroad track
You can get anything you want, at Alice's Asteroid.

You could design a single-use code that isn't a random pad, such as assigning meanings to sequences of letters, in essence making a set of "words" for that mission. For example, "CQ" might mean "soldiers", "TQ" might mean tanks, etc. Notice in the ciphertext, the triad JRZ is repeated twice and the first and last 5 characters are the same.

That said, spot checking a few letters, it appears the distribution is pretty flat, suggesting an OTP. If you strike the last 5 letters (assume they're a repeat of the first 5, a sort of framing protocol), you'd expect each letter of the alphabet to get used around 5 times, and that's about what I see.

One Time Pads are indeed impossible to crack, if the pad is indeed used only one time, and is indeed fully random. That's because it makes any message that's the same length as or shorter than the ciphertext equally likely.

If I sent you the ciphertext PDXS, how would you know if it decoded to "EAST", "WEST", or any other four letter word?

Actually, that's already the reality in the business I'm in. We have ECC on our large L2 and L3 on-chip memories, and have had for 5-6 years. (We added parity checking to the L2 memories around 8-9 years ago, and upgraded to SECDEC a few years later.) We're now adding ECC and parity even at the L1 and cache tag level, as others have.

From what I hear, the fab has informed us that some RAMs at smaller geometries will need active ECC just due to leakage and marginality. The traditional soft error model (ie. an alpha particle knocked charge loose from a cluster of bits) doesn't apply. I may have bits that are persistently unreliable and unrepairable, and so look closer to a hard error than a soft error. ECC can help us cope with these more novel memories. It's becoming more and more a way of life.

Somehow I doubt it means you must always use the absolute latest methods. It just means you need to use an appropriate method taking into account current knowledge. Dirt berms are as old as the hills, so to speak, but it can be entirely appropriate for a civil engineer to specify one as part of a road's right-of-way to control drainage, for example. Likewise, I don't have to write my code in the latest, greatest language de jure if plain old C is appropriate to the task.

Shouldn't a certain number of crashes just be expected? Yes, BUT: Digital Computers allow for no entropy increase, therefore would be immune to the second law of thermodynamics. Except for physical damage, manufacturing tolerance, radiation damage, and operator error. (most notably, programmer error). Generally the first two are caught early, long before the final customer sees the device, and the third only really applies if the computer is going into space or is to be deployed near a strong radiation source.

You do get bit flips in memories (aka. soft errors), and occasionally other problems. There's a failure rate associated with each component known as the Failure In Time (FIT) rate, and bit-flips in memories is a rather common cause. For modern processors with large amounts of memory on-chip (in the form of caches, reorder buffers, etc.), we're seeing increasing need for ECC codes on-chip. Off-chip, servers have had ECC memory for a very long time. Consumer equipment too often lacks ECC, and so many crashes could come from soft errors.

So, I don't think it's correct to say that "deployed near a strong radiation source" is necessary to see flaky behavior from a modern system, even with perfect hardware.

If I were to rephrase your statements slightly"
"The lion inches towards the hapless innocent doe, just about to pounce, while the doe cowers in fear trying to escape, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping."

"Because there's no selfish reason to help."

Your line of thinking has destroyed our world because it is based on hubris - our collective notion that it is our moral or "human" duty to interfere, to rescue, to meddle, and we sleep well at night thinking that "we have made it right" and have "made a difference". Very often, we are just meddlers, and only sleep well at night because we just ended up fueling our egos with our self-righteous acts.

Why don't we just stop judging everything around us and just try to lead a life in which we are honest and true to ourselves - for a change? I argue the world will be a better place for all of us.

Okay, I get what you were trying to say earlier. Fair point too - because AMD64 was a vastly superior design and more importantly, a vastly more pragmatic design compared to what Intel was trying to shove down people's throats. Goes to show what hubris can do.

I'm not 100% sold on your recommendation of Intel dropping Atom and adopting ARM though. x86 is still very attractive to corporate clients and others who value legacy support and enterprise support. Business upgrade cycles are often very slow, and the only reason why iPads have even made inroads in the corporate market (and they are quickly doing so) is because there were no x86 and Windows alternatives. That's again why I say that the new wave of Atom Clovertrail Windows 8 tablets would be a very interesting battle in the business sector.

The other alternative - which is Intel adopting ARM would be a bad strategic move for Intel. Or perhaps I'm being too conservative in my thinking and perhaps it is a really bold idea.

What are you even talking about? Since when did Intel miss the "64 bit era" as you put it? Sure, Itanium was a failure and Intel sunk billions of dollars trying to make it work. However, Intel could afford that mistake and still continue chugging along. As things stand today, Intel absolutely dominates the 64 bit market. In fact, except for Intel, AMD, and the IBM Power chips, there is no other game in town as far as 64 bit is concerned, and in this market, Intel probably has 80% or 90% market share, and has the best performance and performance per watt numbers.

So, I'm not sure which 64 bit era you are talking about, and how Intel missed it.

As far as Atom is concerned, yes, Intel is struggling quite a bit. However, Intel is trying to scale down its power consumption while ARM is trying to scale up its performance. Sooner or later, the two shall meet and it will be a very interesting battle. I wouldn't write off Intel so soon yet. In fact, the upcoming Clovertrail based Windows 8 tablets should be a very interesting launch. Take a look at the Thinkpad Tablet 2 for example. It should be a very interesting tablet for corporate customers or for users who want x86 along with Windows 8 Pro along with 3G and LTE mobility and a full-size USB port and with 8-9 hrs battery life.

I'm not saying Intel will win or lose, and it needs be relentless in improving power efficiency to even be a viable alternative to ARM. However, to say that Atom has already lost the race is a bit premature.

I once read somewhere that a superiority complex usually arises from an inferiority complex. Something else I remember is that "we despise most in others that which we hate in ourselves". As I get older and come across more instances of arrogance and humility, I realized that these statements usually hold true even if they sound a bit glib.

This is not just true for ignorance but true for most vices and weaknesses, in my experience. If you find yourself having a really strong reaction at some quirk or weakness you observe in someone else, chances are that you either consider that a weakness in yourself, or you used to and now think you have overcome it. We only feel superior because we feel we overcame certain weaknesses so when we notice it in someone else, we feel they are inferior or less evolved or weak or something similar. It is just a way of patting ourselves in the back.

The problem is often worse in nerds and geeks because we often don't even have regular conversations. (I'm not even sure non-nerds and non-geeks do for that matter.) When we interact with others, it is mostly an information sharing exercise or an exercise in sharing trivia or exotic information tidbits, to show off our awesome information databank. How many of us truly try to listen to someone, try to understand someone? I've personally found that the hardest thing to do in my life. It is so much easier to mask ignorance by just talking a lot and sounding knowledgeable and opinionated. We build our careers and our lives inside these bulwarks.

Dont' be so quick to dismiss Intel from the race. Intel is already shipping Medfield at 2GHz which has the same peak and idle power consumption as other ARM chips. It still lags the very high end ARM chips in performance but is very competitive when compared to mid range ARM phones and chips - in terms of performance, price, power - everything.

You will soon see Clovertrail based Windows 8 tablets by the end of this month. Again, Clovertrail is able to hold its own against the top end ARM tablets, which is why so many vendors are using it.

Let's be clear - ARM is still the king when it comes to mobile phones and tablets, but while it is trying to dramatically increase processing power while slowly increasing power consumption, Intel is doing exactly the opposite - it is trying to dramatically decrease power consumption while slowly decreasing performance.

Let's also be clear about one more thing - Intel is the king when it comes to performance and sheer processing power. Even the highest end ARM chip doesn't even begin to compete with say, a mid-range Intel laptop chip.

Another thing to consider is that in most of these handheld devices, display power consumption is quickly becoming the biggest factor - CPU/GPU power consumption is a clear second - which also gives Intel a bit of an edge, along with its manufacturing superiority.

Who will meet in the middle first - is anyone's guess. All I am saying is that it is too early to count Intel out of this race. Intel is clearly worried and wants to own this space. The next couple of years will be extremely interesting.

What would make it even more interesting, is if Intel bought out a big ARM player or did a cross-licensing agreement to compete with Qualcomm.

A teacher - any teacher - has to undergo a state level certification before she or he can even teach. This is above and beyond their academic degrees. Do you hear them arguing and debating about egocentric parasites who created the system? Perhaps, but even though they argue about it, they just go and get the certification and then move on in their lives with the real act of teaching.

Firstly, I want to clarify that I didn't mean to come across as strongly as I did in my previous post. Was just having a bad day and felt like a rant.

I completely agree with you about building a reputation. My only point was that *if* a certification happens to give you an additional stamp on your resume, why waste time and energy even arguing about it - just go get the certificate and get it over and done with. There are plenty of such certifications and "licenses" and exams (many even at a state level) that many professionals have to get under their belt.

I only hear this line of reasoning (only intellect and performance matters - certifications don't) from software professionals. From my perspective, it sounds silly even to have this argument. While all certifications are not created equal, there are many that have a good reputation in professional circles. It seems incredibly foolish to wantonly not get the certification based on the argument that it is not "necessary". Of course it isn't. But that is besides the point.

I'm sorry if I come across as rude but this is the kind of nonsense that I only see in the software development industry. You're offering your services as an expert tradesman. If your professional or commercial circumstances require that you get a certificate or a degree just so people can cut to the chase and know that you are more reliable than the thousands of other pretenders, just go get the certificate, even if it means nothing more to you than toilet paper.

Do you hear a doctor strutting about in pride about how she or he did not need to get a medical degree and can still heal patients?

The worst part about this is that most certificates cost a few thousand dollars at best. It is a pittance compared to what a degree from a university costs. It is even way less than what anyone in just about any industry (other than the software industry) is gladly willing to spend if it means they get a competitive advantage in their career. Are you seriously telling me that you are that unwilling to invest in a profession or trade that you intend to pursue for the rest of your life??

Come on, man!

For the record, this is nothing against you or OP. I'm not judging you or anything. Just a general rant.