infant mortality
<hardware>
It is common lore among hackers (and in the electronics industry at large) that the chances of sudden hardware failure drop off exponentially with a machine's time since first use (that is, until the relatively distant time at which enough mechanical wear in I/O devices and thermal-cycling stress in components has accumulated for the machine to start going senile). Up to half of all chip and wire failures happen within a new system's first few weeks; such failures are often referred to as "infant mortality" problems (or, occasionally, as "sudden infant death syndrome").
See bathtub curve, burn-in period. [Jargon File]Last updated: 1995-03-20
Nearby terms:
inetd ♦ inews ♦ infant mortality ♦ infeasible path ♦ inference ♦ inference engine
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