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You only use your machines for twenty hours per month?

Even so, "likely" here is something like "better than 50:50". Your claim was "very very rare" and that's not supported by the evidence.

> Statistics is never a promise: that's a really naive concept.

It's a promise of odds with error bars, don't be so nitpicky.



> Even so, "likely" here is something like "better than 50:50". Your claim was "very very rare" and that's not supported by the evidence.

You're free to disagree, obviously, but I think it's accurate to describe a race condition that doesn't happen in 100 hours on a multiple machines with clock rates north of 3GHz as "very very rare". That particular code containing the bug has probably executed tens of millions of times on my little pile of machines alone.

> It's a promise of odds with error bars, don't be so nitpicky.

No, it's not. I'm not being nitpicky, the word "promise" is entirely inapplicable to statistics.


If my computer has a filesystem error that happens every week of uptime (168 machine hours), I call that "common".




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