Brick Insurance

[Mitch Bradley]

ron minnich wrote:
> On 1/30/07, Ivan Krstić <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> wrote:
>> ron minnich wrote:
>> > flashus interruptus, due to things like power dropping, breaker
>> > tripping, or, literally, people tripping on a power cable :-) Yes,
>> > there's a battery, but ... maybe their battery has not charged for
>> > some reason.
>>
>> I asked early on that we skip flashing in a low-battery scenario, and
>> was assured it's easily doable.
>
> but it does rely on the EC not having a problem, right? Or not.
>
> I think with 10M nodes, there is no scenario too unlikely that it
> won't occur once :-)
Indeed, but the value of preventing N occurrences of possible problem X 
must be balanced against M times the cost of the prevention, with M much 
greater than N.  You can't prevent all possible problems.  Some laptops 
will get dropped in the water, stolen, run over by trucks, destroyed by 
fire, hurled at objects animate and inanimate, you name it.

We shall take reasonable precautions to reduce the probability of 
reflash-brickage to an acceptable level.  A level of 0 is neither 
achievable nor cost-effective.

>
> ron
>