On 2025-12-01 Adam Thompson wrote:
For an example of the importance of ECC, we seemingly have only to look at last week's recent Airbus Emergency Airworthiness Directive regarding bit-flip susceptibility in one of the flight computers on certain models of A320 - that corruption causing a major flight control upset in mid-air, with either 17 or 77 people (depending on which article I believe) needing immediate medical attention. It seems they don't use ECC, they instead use some software refresh technique to mitigate but-flips but accidentally disabled it in the latest update.
Holy crap! The stupidity (and parsimony) of some companies is astounding. They need to hire technology people who have been MUUG members... It's all the more stupid because as you get closer to space you get more cosmic ray memory errors because of the thinner atmosphere. "some software refresh technique to mitigate": ya right. I'd love to see the paradigm/algorithm for that. What happens if the code that does the "software refresh" itself gets corrupted? Hitchhiker's Guide level silliness. Great... now we get to choose between a fundamentally flawed 737 Max (now renamed to hide that it's still a Max) and non-ECC Airbuses. The scene from Red Dwarf where they are crashing onto a planet and read the boring in-flight magazine between their legs comes to mind.