From owner-freebsd-chat Sat Aug 16 13:34:14 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id NAA09239 for chat-outgoing; Sat, 16 Aug 1997 13:34:14 -0700 (PDT) Received: from po1.glue.umd.edu (root@po1.glue.umd.edu [128.8.10.97]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id NAA09209; Sat, 16 Aug 1997 13:34:09 -0700 (PDT) Received: from divot.eng.umd.edu (crb@divot.eng.umd.edu [129.2.102.194]) by po1.glue.umd.edu (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id QAA05845; Sat, 16 Aug 1997 16:34:04 -0400 (EDT) Received: from localhost (crb@localhost) by divot.eng.umd.edu (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id QAA01507; Sat, 16 Aug 1997 16:34:01 -0400 (EDT) X-Authentication-Warning: divot.eng.umd.edu: crb owned process doing -bs Date: Sat, 16 Aug 1997 16:34:01 -0400 (EDT) From: "Christopher R. Bowman" X-Sender: crb@divot.eng.umd.edu To: "Julian H. Stacey" cc: dkelly@hiwaay.net, chat@FreeBSD.ORG, platforms@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: speed test In-Reply-To: <199708161005.MAA02831@desk.jhs.no_domain> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Sat, 16 Aug 1997, Julian H. Stacey wrote: > Reference: > > From: dkelly@hiwaay.net > > Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 22:19:02 -0500 > > Message-id: <199708160319.WAA05640@nospam.hiwaay.net> > > Hi, > dkelly@hiwaay.net wrote: > > Poul-Henning Kamp writes: > > > > > > That should be moderately easy: Grab lites and get moving... > > > > > > I somehow doubt that there are many Mac owners who are into UNIX ... > > > > I've always said, "Gimme a Mac, or gimme Unix, keep the half-baked poor excus > > e Microsoft boxes to yourself." Maybe I'm 3-sigma? > > What does "3-sigma" mean in English ? > (I'm English not American, perhaps others were puzzled too ?) > If I remember correctly 3-sigma is esstentially a short-hand for 1 in a million. It derives from statistics where given a gaussian (bell) distribution, the probability of anything outside 3 sigma (sigma is a ususally the standard deviation) from the average is like .999997 or something close to that, which is basically 1 in a million. Motorola was big into this basing their near zero defect quality project on this catch phrase. --------- Christopher R. Bowman crb@Glue.umd.edu My home page