On Tue, 18 Feb 2014 04:05:03 +0200 Gevisz <gev...@gmail.com> wrote: > How can you be sure if something is "large enough" if, as you say > below, you do not care about probabilities?
Statistics. > If you do not care (= do not now anything) about probabilities > (and mathematics, in general), you just unable to understand > that debugging a program with 200K lines of code take > > 200000!/(10000!)^20 > > more time than debugging of 20 different programs with 10K lines of > code. You can try to calculate that number yourself but I quite sure > that if the latter can take, say, 20 days, the former can take > millions of years. Assuming PID 1 is 200K lines; however, it's a lot smaller than that. > It is all the probability! Or, to be more precise, combinatorics. That's too precise; both of these are just a part of something bigger, that big thing is called statistics, in theory you can hold yourself on to probabilities, but in practice statistics will give you guarantees. > Have you ever tried forex? If yes, you should have been warned > that "no past performance guarantee the future one." > > And if you do not believe that (and do not care about probability > and all the stuff like that), you should visit any of the forex forums > where you will be suggested a magical money winning strategy that, in > the past, behaved very well and earned 200 or even 500% a month. Same could be said about the opposite; seeing it in one way you would want to ditch statistics with this statement, seeing it the other way you would want to accept statistics with the opposite statement. It effectively makes the statement lose its meaning in this context; as said, statistics and the acceptance thereof is far more practical. If you consider a segfault in PID1 or the kernel to be the end of the world like losing tons of money, unless you run a critical appliance, then you could reconsider the stability of the rest of your system. Because in the end, you've put all your money in PID1 / kernel; whereas the full picture includes a lot more than that (eg. core libraries), so, a good winning strategy is to spare money for the rest out there. (Where "winning" means preventing your world from falling apart) -- With kind regards, Tom Wijsman (TomWij) Gentoo Developer E-mail address : tom...@gentoo.org GPG Public Key : 6D34E57D GPG Fingerprint : C165 AF18 AB4C 400B C3D2 ABF0 95B2 1FCD 6D34 E57D
