Agreed, but: IMHO there's a real and qualitative difference between
"might fail once a year" and "failure probability 10^-6 during the
lifetime of our sun".
The bloke in the street sees a real and **qualitative** difference
between the risks of not being able to drive to work in his car because
(a) it's been stolen and (b) it's exploded due to all of the molecules
in the petrol tank ganging up on the tank at the same time. They can
both happen though.
Whether or not you agree to recognise this quantitative difference as
also being a qualitative difference is the point on which we seem to
differ.
The probability of the car spontaneously exploding is non-zero, but it's
negligible. That word negligible is the key here. That's why I said
bounded latency - I mean that the tail of the distribution is negligible
in one's particular set of circumstances. How small negligible actually
is will vary of course, but let's not split hairs.
Neil
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