how often program bugs are generated by hardware, kiosk env

[toglia]

Hi, I was just wondering if anyone had some experience dealing with software that is intended to run in harsh enviroments, like a public kiosk, knowing it has run 24/7 and deal with electric problems once in a while, but still mantain its memory integrity, or at least knowing it has been corrupted.

I had this discution with a cooworker the other day about memory corruption, he insisted that the class who mantained the most critical data had to be "deleted" and recreated every once in a while just to be sure we started with a fresh clean memory assignment, and that would prevent in some way showing bad information to the public. I thought this had no sense, but nevertheless I would be very grateful to know how often is memory even corrupted because of hardware failure or how can I even tell the user it has happened...

Thanks!

[Klaim]

It is known that some hardware can be subject to external interference that make their memory instable, easily corruptable. The example I've often read about was the space-exploration hardware that is clearly exposed to high radiations and other particule-projections that simply makes memory not to be trusted, so some way of coding for those environnement assume that no state can be kept longer than a short time without being corrupted and have to be reset.
I read, some time ago, an article about the first "graphic cards" if you could call it that way at the time, that were subject to all sort of radiation starting by those of the sun that were changing memory state if you had your card too much exposed or something like that.

So be sure that a home computer is some kind of "safe place" for a programmer. The farther you go from the hardware the less you need to worry about it (web apps being the farther I guess).