Pet peeve: News people love the word “glitch”, every computer bug is a “glitch”, even in headlines were they are usually looking for short words, and “bug” is a lot shorter than “glitch”.
The truth that every bug is a “glitch” is kind of like how cameras are for selfies, everyone knows these things. And “glitch” is more fun to say, too.
But the word “glitch” predates computers and has a specific meaning. It is a short (signal) anomaly, so short that it might be missed, and frequently hard to find the source, because it is short, and, pretty much by definition, rare.
A “glitch” is something one might easily miss.
But when a major airline has an hours-long global groundstop the news reports will all call it a “glitch”!
Even though there is no way one could not notice being stranded in the airport because ones airline is idle for hours on end.
Grrrr.
Anyway, I am reading a technical document about a little microcontroller and it talks about glitches, in the technical sense, in at least six places:
- They warn that some IO pins can output glitches on reset.
- There is glitch detection on the main clock pins that can be configured to reset the chip to prevent using glitches in fault injection attacks.
- There is a serial port that can automatically detect baud rate and it has a configurable glitch filter.
- The I²C hardware has a glitch filter.
- There is a pulse width modulator and it has a feature to prevent outputting glitches.
- These is pulse counting input hardware that has a glitch filter setting.
Refreshing.
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