Word: flaw
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Politburo member identified as the World's Oldest Living Bolshevik (first seen in Angels), the ferociously bored lesbian (Marisa Tomei, in a sly, engaging performance) who guards the aforementioned brains, and an eight-year-old girl whose grandparents were exposed to radiation and passed down to her a genetic flaw that has rendered her mute...
Word of the flaw in Intel's Pentium chip, the powerful new brain in 4 million personal computers sold this year, began circulating before Thanksgiving. But the manufacturing problem was nothing compared with the flaw in Intel's understanding of how to keep good customer relations. Having kept the defect secret for months, Intel blithely dismissed the criticism at first, maintaining that the imperfection in the Pentium would affect only highly complex calculations. Most folks, said Intel, would encounter an inaccurate answer just once in 27,000 years; therefore, the errant chips would be replaced only if computer owners could...
...involving numbers with many digits. For example, if 4,195,835 is divided by 3,145,727 and then multiplied by 3,145,727, the result should be the original number: 4,195,835. It doesn't even take a computer to figure that out. But machines with the flawed Pentium come up with a different answer: 4,195,579. Although most users might never encounter such a mistake, businesses running thousands of computations a day could possibly run into trouble. The flaw, some experts contend, might affect the accuracy of corporate balance sheets or the calculations that banks make...
...line, the company agreed to replace a few thousand of the chips for buyers who requested a switch, and it will soon begin selling a corrected model. But to Robert Sombric, the data-processing manager for the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, government, Intel's decision to go on selling the flawed chips for months was inexcusable. Said he: "I treat the city's money just as if it were my own. And I'm telling you: I wouldn't buy one of these things right now, until we really know the truth about it." Repairing Pentium's flaw may be much...
...controversy over a defect in Intel Corp.'s popular Pentium microchip heated up as scientists and engineers accused the company of being too casual in its response to the problem. According to a Nov. 7 article in the Electrical Engineering Times, the flaw in the chip can cause computers to reach incorrect answers in complex division problems approximately once in every 37 billion calculations. Intel discovered the defect last summer, and has since corrected it, but it is offering free replacement chips only to customers with provably esoteric needs. "The chip is fine," said a company spokesman. "Statistically, the average...