alt Hacker NewsInteresting article, and I agree that ECC needs to be more widely available. But I think this is a major overreach:
> We need ECC RAM to be more widely used. Ideally we would have some government action to force this given the ongoing cost to society in corrupted data and lost time due to RAM hardware errors. I think that at minimum we need sufficient taxes on non-ECC RAM (and EC4 RAM for DDR5) to make it more expensive when bought new than ECC RAM.
ECC RAM is not needed for every application and mandating it for every gaming rig and machine used to run Chrome will just increase prices unnecessarily. 99% of the time it's also not a "cost to society" but a cost to whoever owns/uses that machine. If they want to eat that cost, it should be up to them.
Replies
Important data should probably be worked on and stored with error-correcting codes, in addition to the hardware-provided ones. The Btrfs mention in TFA suggests that maintaining integrity of the Btrfs metadata is not considered part of the job description of Btrfs, but perhaps it should be.
> ECC RAM is not needed for every application and mandating it for every gaming rig and machine used to run Chrome will just increase prices unnecessarily.
The price increase will be very small if manufacturers are no longer able to segment the market to make a higher margin on those who need it. No one wants even games or web browsers to crash randomly.
> If they want to eat that cost, it should be up to them.
They need to be given the choice. Most people do not know they even have the choice, and they are not offered it at a reasonable price.
A cost to people in general is a cost to society.