> A ECC DRAM module contains 9 chips rather than 8. I'm not sure how you can claim that's "almost free" unless you have a very loose definition of "almost free"

> A ECC DRAM module contains 9 chips rather than 8. I'm not sure how you can claim that's "almost free" unless you have a very loose definition of "almost free". I do. Let's do the math here. A typical computer has 8GB RAM. That's under $20 at my local retail store. We're talking a $2 price difference. That's with the methods used today. The overhead can go arbitrarily low if we adopt techniques used in nonvolatile storage and work in larger blocks of bits. $2 is less than the cost of a tiny fraction of a crash. > Surely you wouldn't want the the computer to have ECC memory, but it decides to reboot for a 2 hour update? A broader regulatory regime would certainly be good. > If this is true, why do we need the government to step in? Why aren't businesses doing this themselves out of self interest? Mostly, because businesses can focus on a finite number of things. A $20 benefit which costs $2 to implement stops making sense if it means your local clinic needs to have someone on-staff who can do an ROI computation on adopting ECC. It's cheaper to buy something sub-optimal. Again, that's where centralization and regulation helps. > ECC protects against solar flares and EMP? That's new. That's literally what they're there for. ECC primarily protects against bit flips, which are the result of random radiation. Mild flares will flip a few bits which ECC will correct. Severe ones will flip a lot of bits, which ECC will detect, and the computer can shut down before destroying more data. > 1. DRAM modules aren't made in the US, they're made in asian countries with cheap labor. If there's a military crisis, we'd be screwed regardless I'm not sure what you mean by "modules," but DRAM PCBs are easy to assemble. They can be made in the US overnight. DRAM chips are primarily made in the US (Micron), Korea (Samsung), and Taiwan (TSMC). https://www.micron.com/manufacturing-expansion https://www.micron.com/manufacturing-expansion And not all crises are military. > The only work to retool a line from non-ECC to ECC is to change the PCBs. Thus the supposed benefits is negligible, unless for whatever reason the military needs a massive amount of desktops. If all you need is memory, that's true. If you also want motherboards and processors which will take those chips, that's harder. If you don't want bit flips in your computation, that's impossible without redesigning all CPUs. Academic CPUs can do error-correcting computation at nominal cost, but there isn't a market incentive to bring that to market.