infant mortality: n. It is common lore among hackers (and in
the electronics industry at large; this term is possibly techspeak
by now) 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.
![[prev]](../gif/left.gif){kind=small}
![[up]](../gif/up.gif){kind=small}
![[next]](../gif/right.gif){kind=small}