Re: [9fans] thoughs about venti+fossil

["ron minnich" <rminnich@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 10:16 PM, Enrico Weigelt <weigelt@metux.de> wrote:
> * Bruce Ellis <bruce.ellis@gmail.com> wrote:
>  > it's even sillier, if everyone bought 1,000,000 times as many tickets
>  > guess how that would change the probabilities. not at all!
>
>  The main problem is: statistics is not reliable.

baloney. Statistics are quite reliable. It's why your computers work
at all. They are statistical beasts, with quantifiable uncertainty.
You don't get certainty, you get dialed-in uncertainty.

It's just that the engineering is so good you've fooled yourself into
thinking it's certain.

Think about this. You can warm up some CPUs to a point at which they will:
- transparently corrupt floating point computations
- not be warm enough to trigger the "I'm too hot" fault

Think about this: the probability of a perfectly bad packet getting
through a network layer with no detected error is non-zero.

Think about the bit error rate of disks -- it's non zero. But you
trust them for some reason, and you don't trust venti?

OK, why is that? If you understand that you might start to understand
why Venti is better than you know.

In any event, if you are going to try to make statistical arguments,
move away from anecdotal conjectures such as "my cousin bought a
lottery ticket on the same day I got hit by lightning" and move into
the math. That's what the tools are for, so use them :-)

ron