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12
All the Rules in One Story
“You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles.”
—SHERLOCK HOLMES, THE BOSCOMBE VALLEY MYSTERY
War Story. Company T had a small device that sometimes refused to start up because a microprocessor couldn’t properly read from a battery-backed-up memory. Some units were worse than others, and a unit that failed one start-up could work the next time. This meant that the data in the memory was okay—the problem was reading it.
Engineer A attacked the problem and concluded that it was caused by data bus noise of some sort, since the memory was being read incorrectly. The system was a small circuit board containing memory and a battery-backup memory controller, which had been added to an existing ...
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