Talk:Bit rot

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The article mentions bit rot with respect to EPROMs; what about magnetic storage such as disks and tapes.

more info on this discredited cosmic ray theory please

Yeah, seriously. If the theory has been discredited, give a reference. Otherwise the 'discredited' assertion should be removed.

    • Added reference to Intel experiment that showed how background radioactivity of ceramic chip packaging causes bit flips, not cosmic rays. I think IBM has research on cosmic rays affecting high altitude (satellite and aircraft) electronics. Rolofft

Contents

[edit] May old published content be considered bit rot?

Please see Wikipedia:Replies to common objections#Redundancy, where "bit rot" is considered old published content. Is RCO wrong or is this article incomplete? See also the talk page. Thanks! :) ≈ Ekevu talk contrib 14:58, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

This term is frequently used by software engineers to describe the more common issue of data corruption on hardware that is actually functioning perfectly. Malware, viruses, spyware, worms, and the like combined with the repeated installation and deinstallation of applications, patches, and service packs can cause a gradual destructive effect on a computer's operating system and applications, or "bit rot". Axewielder 16:55, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Causes of bit rot on Windows

Old libraries/registry entries don't necessarily contribute to degraded performance. Extra, unused registry entries cause as much of a performance hit as extra rows in an SQL database. Unused libraries simply sit idle on the disk and only consume space. In any case, someone else can add a second example (the history has previous examples), or change the first one to be less technical if need be. --CCFreak2K 04:44, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

This is an interesting phenomenon. Aside from defragmenting the disk, which many users fail to do, there are many unsubstantiated conjectures about this slow-down effect. It is also unclear if this is uniquely a feature of Windows. But in general, performance claims about different OS's are not reliable. DonPMitchell 06:21, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Software bit rot

I am a sysadmin with 13 years of experience and I have always used the term bit rot to refer to the spontaneous degradation of a software program over time. I have never known anyone to use it to refer to the actual failure of hardware. Is the use of the term to refer to hardware failures actually predominant or even common? I strongly suspect it is not. Robert Brockway 19:56, 9 July 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Major Change

Edited the part about cosmic rays, to a completely different idea. Thoughts? Dobbs (talk) 04:45, 27 January 2008 (UTC)