From 538280 at gmail.com  Thu Mar 20 18:23:47 2014
From: 538280 at gmail.com (Greg Snow)
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 11:23:47 -0600
Subject: [Rd] The case for freezing CRAN
In-Reply-To: <21290.60882.865159.407363@max.nulle.part>
References: <3dfcdc$fuu13r@ironport9.mayo.edu>
	<21290.60882.865159.407363@max.nulle.part>
Message-ID: <CAFEqCdy8opJ-Rix0uB_7CAOEWqaA01YuL5nN78YhnhExfgfuOA@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 7:32 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:
[snip]

>      (and some readers
>    may recall the infamous Pentium bug of two decades ago).

It was a "Flaw" not a "Bug".  At least I remember the Intel people
making a big deal about that distinction.

But I do remember the time well, I was a biostatistics Ph.D. student
at the time and bought one of the flawed pentiums.  My attempts at
getting the chip replaced resulted in a major run around and each
person that I talked to would first try to explain that I really did
not need the fix because the only people likely to be affected were
large corporations and research scientists.  I will admit that I was
not a large corporation, but if a Ph.D. student in biostatistics is
not a research scientist, then I did not know what they defined one
as.  When I pointed this out they would usually then say that it still
would not matter, unless I did a few thousand floating point
operations I was unlikely to encounter one of the problematic
divisions.  I would then point out that some days I did over 10,000
floating point operations before breakfast (I had checked after the
1st person told me this and 10,000 was a low estimate of a lower bound
of one set of simulations) at which point they would admit that I had
a case and then send me to talk to someone else who would start the
process over.



[snip]
> --
> Dirk Eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel



-- 
Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D.
538280 at gmail.com



[Rd] The case for freezing CRAN
Greg Snow