Comment by schainks
2 years ago
One night while in the computer science lab doing a Java assignment, my professor for that class happened to walk by the lab and quipped to me, "oh, good luck on _that_ machine."
He explained: once upon a time, the machine refused to run _any_ Java programs, and would spectacularly crash and burn instead. C++ fine, python fine, anything Java was a hard nope. He didn't believe this at first until his program also started crashing the machine.
It took a tech, him, and another professor about two weeks to work out that the JVM happened to allocate the same RAM address to the integer 12 on that particular machine every time the JVM started. The actual chip of RAM that contained that hardware address was faulty, so whenever the machine tried to allocate to that address, it would crash.
Swapping out the bad RAM stick immediately solved the problem.
> At this point, there are two natural conclusions: either I have a severe hardware issue, or there is a wild memory corruption bug in the binary.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15845118