[rescue] Fun With Statistics

[Brian Hechinger]

On Sat, Jun 01, 2002 at 12:44:50PM -0400, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> 
> Dodge does that on some (if not all) of their trucks now.  I heard a
> reason for it that sounded good, but now I forget.  It might have had
> something to do with performance tuning.

well, with a single coil you need something to make sure that the right sparc
plug gets the juice at the right time.  hence, the distributer.  now, a
is a mechanical device that is rather difficult to control via computer.  with
a coil per cylender, all the computer has to do is trigger the coil when it
needs to.  hence, a very controlable situation where the computer has far
greater leaway to do what it thinks is right to get the last bit of performance
or efficiency out of the engine.

IANAM however, so take this all with a grain of salt.

> > Is a 4 processor machine more likely to crap out than one with only one.
> 
> Presumably, but processors just don't fail all that often.

you'd be surprised.  think ultrasparc.  ;)

> Depends on the system.  IBMs mainframes can handle CPU failures
> without causing kernel failures, linux can't.

with dynamic reconfig setup, solaris has a fairly good chance of not crashing,
but doesn't posses nearly the ability of IBM's kit to survive hardware failure.

-brian
-- 
Besides, statistics are different for computers.  Experience has taught
me that if you see one instance, it's an anomaly. If you see two, you're  
fucked. :-)				-- Peter L. Wargo --