"Ideally we would have some government action to force this given the ongoing cost to society in corrupted data"
Why is it so often Australia with the "We must force unnecessary things upon people" attitude?
Why is it so often Australia with the "We must force unnecessary things upon people" attitude?
Forcing the vendors to sell only products that do what they are advertised cannot be considered in any way as "forcing unnecessary things upon people".
Any computer without ECC memory is a computer that does not compute from time to time and you have no idea when that happens.
Originally, any IBM PC or compatible had memory error detection.
All this problem of the computers without ECC memory has been created by some evil Intel employees, who have conceived around 1994 a scheme for market segmentation between "Pentium" and "Pentium Pro".
So they removed memory error detection support from the Pentium chipsets (Intel Triton), so that this would remain a marketing feature exclusive to the "Pro" Intel products.
Obviously the removal of this feature from "consumer" products was done without any price reduction, which made happy also the memory vendors, because this trick increased their profits.
So in the next years this market segmentation method became the "standard" business practice, preying on the naivety of most computer users.
A consumer protection law should force that any computer or motherboard must support ECC, which adds a completely negligible cost.
The end users may buy non-ECC modules, if they choose so, but non-ECC modules should be sold like cigarettes, with a visible advertisement that using such modules may cause unpredictable errors in your computer.
So are the computers with ECC memory. It's not an absolute protection either.
I hate to break it to you but the computer I had in the 80s didn't come with ECC. Non-ECC computing was a thing WELL BEFORE Intel tried to think of market segmentation. Revisionist history is not welcomed here.
The DDR4 ECC RAM has 72 bits total and 64bits of data which means the same 9/8 ratio of data storage to usable data as the original PC/XT.
The Z80 and 6502 based computers in the 80s typically didn't have parity RAM. The Amiga and Macintosh were higher performance systems in the 80s which also didn't have parity RAM.
We could and should have gone straight from parity RAM to ECC RAM for everything.
Absolutely all IBM PC originals or clones until those with 486 and with the early Pentium variants supported parity on the motherboard.
The user could choose to not install the parity chip (or when the first memory modules appeared there were also slightly cheaper modules without the parity chip), but that was the user's decision, all the motherboards supported parity.
On IBM PC compatibles, the lack of protection against memory errors had never existed before Intel segmented the market between "non-Pro" and "Pro", by launching the Triton chipset, which no longer supported parity memory.
As long as the memory modules were byte-wide, only parity could be implemented. ECC memory could appear only later, after the passage to wide memory modules.
That's what we mean when we say that people with your point of view are promoting nanny-statism. It amounts to infantilization of adult consumers and subsequent disempowerment.
Occasionally such legislation can be justified, as when genuinely hazardous products are involved, or products whose use involves wide-ranging externalities, but usually not. People can and should be educated -- and expected -- to make their own decisions about things like whether they need ECC RAM.
I think my knowledge of the topic is pretty good but I learned from this discussion that almost all AMD CPUs support ECC RAM and you apparently just need a motherboard to match. When accompanying people who were buying "gamer" PCs (after they rejected my recommendation for a second hand workstation grade computer with ECC RAM) I never witnessed store staff saying "hey you could get a motherboard with ECC support".
Just because you can allow it, doesn’t mean you should. I don’t want to live in a world where you need a PhD to avoid being scammed by increasingly sophisticated ploys. Data isn’t free anymore and the right questions are becoming harder to ask.
Ridiculous. Access to knowledge has never been as widely and freely available as it is now (no thanks to the nanny-statists.)
The government imposed a 12% GST on all computer gear just because they felt like it. Would making ECC RAM GST exempt satisfy you?
So you think its realistic to expect the average consumer to assess the pros and cons of using ECC RAM?
We could solve this by better information which addresses your concerns about it being nanny statism. We would need it to be something that consumers understand - e.g. We could require all computers without ECC RAM to have a warning label saying something like "this computer uses cheap memory so is prone to crashing and losing your data". I strongly suspect the impact of that would be very similar to that of just banning non-ECC RAM.
I would also argue that having reliable RAM is a reasonable extension of existing legal requirements for consumer products: e.g. that they are of satisfactory quality and fit for purpose (to use the current UK terminology).
I just do not think that banning non ECC is an example of nanny statism.