2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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bit rot
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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n. [common] Also bit decay. Hypothetical disease the existence of which has
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been deduced from the observation that unused programs or features will
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often stop working after sufficient time has passed, even if nothing has
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changed. The theory explains that bits decay as if they were radioactive. As
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time passes, the contents of a file or the code in a program will become
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increasingly garbled. There actually are physical processes that produce
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such effects (alpha particles generated by trace radionuclides in ceramic
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chip packages, for example, can change the contents of a computer memory
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unpredictably, and various kinds of subtle media failures can corrupt files
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in mass storage), but they are quite rare (and computers are built with
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error-detecting circuitry to compensate for them). The notion long favored
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among hackers that cosmic rays are among the causes of such events turns out
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to be a myth; see the cosmic rays entry for details. The term software rot
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is almost synonymous. Software rot is the effect, bit rot the notional
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cause.
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