The case for freezing CRAN

On Mar 20, 2014, at 12:23 PM, Greg Snow <538280 at gmail.com> wrote:

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.

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.