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You identified an emergent property: a variable that
controls the behavior of the system.
http://www.econ.iastate.edu/classes/econ308/tesfatsion/bat3a.htm
Heat or temperature is the collective variable. Dust is an
externality.
XML-Dev is becoming home to the best amateur chaos/complexity
theorists on the web. And that is not surprising considering
the problem markup set out to solve.
len
From: Rick Marshall [mailto:rjm@zenucom.com]
electronics 101 - the main cause of electronics failure is heat induced
degrading of transistor gates (the doping materials under thermal stress
move around narrowing the gate to the point of failure). this applies as
much to microwaves as it does to microprocessors.
the main reason modern devices are more reliable is that we are winning
the heat war - lower voltages = less heat for given performance. more
gates means more heat. hence cpu fans etc. so long as the cpu fan keeps
working - providing adequate cooling - a modern pc will run for years
trouble free. keep the dust from your bearings and suspect the cpu when
software starts playing up - replace the fan.
i have reliability problems from some point of sale software because the
pc's get housed in enclosed spaces and cook themselves. but the pc dies
slowly so it looks at first like bizarre software faults, but in reality
it's random temporary circuit failures in the cpu. we debug the software
by fixing the cooling!
maybe we need holistic software development as a discipline ;)
rick
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