Comment by d1sxeyes
1 day ago
That makes it vanishingly unlikely. On a 16GB RAM computer with that rate, you can expect 64 random bit flips per month.
So roughly you could expect this happen roughly once every two hundred million years.
Assuming there are about 2 billion Windows computers in use, that’s about 10 computers a year that experience this bit flip.
> 10 computers a year experience this bit flip
That's wildly more than I would have naively expected to experience a specific bit-flip. Wow!
Scale makes the uncommon common. Remember kids, if she's one in a million that means there are 11 of her in Ohio alone.
~800 bit flips per year per computer. 2 billion computers with 800 bit flips each is 1,600,000,000,000 (one point six trillion) bit flips.
Big numbers are crazy.
I saw a computer with 'system33', 'system34' folders personally. Also you would never actually know it happened because... it's not ECC. And with ECC memory we replace a RAM stick every two-three months explicitly because ECC error count is too high.
Got any old microwaves with doors that don't quite shut all the way nearby? Or radiation sources?