On Mar 20, 2014, at 1:02 PM, Marc Schwartz <marc_schwa...@me.com> wrote:
> > On Mar 20, 2014, at 12:23 PM, Greg Snow <538...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> 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. > > > Further segue: > > That (1994) was a watershed moment for Intel as a company. A time during > which Intel's future was quite literally at stake. Intel's internal response > to that debacle, which fundamentally altered their own perception of just who > their customer was (the OEM's like IBM, COMPAQ and Dell versus the end users > like us), took time to be realized, as the impact of increasingly negative PR > took hold. It was also a good example of the impact of public perception (a > flawed product) versus the realities of how infrequently the flaw would be > observed in "typical" computing. "Perception is reality", as some would > observe. > > Intel ultimately spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 million (in 1994 > U.S. dollars), as I recall, to implement a large scale Pentium chip > replacement infrastructure targeted to end users. The "Intel Inside" > marketing campaign was also an outgrowth of that time period. > Quick correction, thanks to Peter, on my assertion that the "Intel Inside" campaign arose from the 1994 Pentium issue. It actually started in 1991. I had a faulty recollection from my long ago reading of Andy Grove's 1996 book, "Only The Paranoid Survive", that the slogan arose from Intel's reaction to the Pentium fiasco. It actually pre-dated that time frame by a few years. Thanks Peter! Regards, Marc ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
