It doesn't matter. The result you quote is true for any distribution
with bounded mean and variance. It's one of the basic theorems in
probability. I.e. Larry's argument is wrong here. Well spotted.
I get the impression that lots of people are shaky on statistics. So am
I - but I am a strong mathematician and I can guarantee to detect a
wrong mathematical argument :-).
I haven't seen anything to convince me that Richards benchmark is not
simply measuring a bi-distributed variable with number of running
processes as a hidden variable. That makes it perfectly valid. We can
get the two distributions out of that fairly simply. I don't know what
all this nonsense is about measuring medians and minimums.
Larry published the test results he got, and they were clearly from a
single distribution. I haven't seen that same basic data from Richard.
That's all that's required to extract the statistical information
and stop the argument (sic).
Peter
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/