Ask SoylentNews: Flawed Hardware Design
An Anonymous Coward writes:
Knowledge can be a terrible thing.
In my case, helping a newbie with circuit design found a beginner's mistake which causes a circuit to run slow. I used a technique which I learned from They Write the Right Stuff in which NASA improves hardware and software quality by looking for similar classes of bugs elsewhere. I wish that I hadn't looked. The newbie had copied a flawed template which has been used by more than 50 parties over 15 years. The flawed design has been promoted by an expert in the field and is used by other noted experts. The most likely explanation is that the design was devised when the expert was less knowledgeable. It has subsequently been propagated until it has become an unchallenged article of faith. An alternative explanation is that the design is deliberately flawed to detect plagiarism.
The published design works. However, I am very certain that moving one or two wires would make it work about 10% faster. This has very probably caused projects to fail unnecessarily, cause people to abandon projects or implement designs which have reduced throughput. In the worse case, a system can be fixed by making it operate at half speed. This leads to a professional quandary. It would be easiest to not mention the flaw. However, if I silently apply the fix to my own work, this design variation may be noticed sooner or later. Therefore, *completely* ignoring the problem willfully undermines the efficiency and reliability of my own work. Whereas, reporting the flaw publicly may undermine the expert or incur a "shoot the messenger" scenario. In either case, this may discourage people from using the flawed or fixed design and may reduce interoperability.
Perhaps a way out of this problem would be privately and jokingly mention that I found the deliberate mistake? The expert is uncharacteristically touchy about uncredited use of a design which can be derived independently using the Quine-McCluskey algorithm. This leads me to consider that the inefficiency is deliberate. That would make it the Quine-McCluskey-Dunning-Kruger algorithm.
Have you been in a similar situation? What did you do and how did it work out?
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.