[Rd] The case for freezing CRAN

[Greg Snow]

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