On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 7:32 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <e...@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 | e...@debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel -- Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D. 538...@gmail.com ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
