[billconan]

I had this bug that can reproduce only on a specific hp notebook, after running certain stress test for days.

The issue (a crash) was in a device driver we were developing, but the root cause was because 1 single bit in the host memory was flipped randomly.

My coworker joked that this bug was due to strong sunspot activities during those days (We indeed saw news about strong sunspot activities at the time.), so that strong universal radiation altered the data on the memory. I guess that batch of memory the notebook used had some issues.

My background is purely software, I always thought that computer hardware is rigid and trustworthy. But I learnt from this bug that it's not always the case.

[aidos]

I had a similar one (almost 20 years ago!) where I came back from lunch to a panic about all the sites being down.

The errors on all the sites were reporting a broken sql query - something like "select * from qccounts...". I guess the way ASP worked meant that the code was stored in a common location in memory for all the sites.

I like to imagine some cosmic event millions of years ago flipped that bit...

[jeanmichelx]

That's what we want you to think, but the hardware is at least as much of a mess as the software

[Toast_25]

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from chaos.

Oh, wait, those were regexes.