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From: Tony Kimball <alk@subtle.east.sun.com>
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To: jas@flyingfox.com
Cc: hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Newest Pentium bug (fatal)
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! Compared with the aforementioned
! floating-point bug, this seems like a much bigger deal.

No, the FP bug was infinitely worse, because it would silently give
wrong answers.  You could crash the Thai Bhat by accident with an old
Pentium chip.  In this case, the machine is locked -- no one is going
to misinterpret that.  Indeed, a non-broken compiler would never emit
the code.  This is no worse than running Windows on a computer without
the bug, right?  In both cases, pathological code can lock the
machine.  And millions run Windows voluntarily -- or at least don't
try hard enough to not run Windows in order to overcome the coercivity
of the environment.