Re: OT: The whole Apple can Run Windows thing...

J. Clarke wrote:

So the RAM is faulty in such a way running one particular application
causes the entire OS to crash? Doubtful.

Yes. Happens with surprising regularity.

Maybe decades ago, but no longer today.

If the faulty memory is mapped to a user-level process, it can only
crash that process and no other -- certainly not the entire OS.

If the bad memory is mapped to the kernel (a low probability event,
given the size of the kernel compared to the amount of memory), then
either it will be in a place that is not critical in which case it will
be handled as above, or it is in some critical area, in which case a
complete system crash is inevitable.

In the latter case, though, the crash will (with high probability,
conditioned as above) occur well before any particular "special
program" is run, and that there will be more than just one "special
program" that can trigger the fault.

The fact that you have not seen particular behaviors speaks more of your
lack of experience than of their likelihood of occurrance.

I concur with Mr. Rullgard's observations re: VisualFoolio. A long
chain of computers over the years have suffered wipe-outs and other
odd, inexplicable, random behavious while using this piece of dreck
from Microsnot. O(weekly) reboots (very large variance though). Given
this data, do we conclude that all of these computers had faulty
memory, or is it more reasonable to infer that the underlying system
software is faulty? You may wish to google up "bayesian inference" for
the answer.

.

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