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Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2006 13:02:36 -0400
To: andrea@cpushare.com
Cc: Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>, Hans Reiser <reiser@namesys.com>,
       Nikita Danilov <nikita@clusterfs.com>, Rene Rebe <rene@exactcode.de>,
       Linux Kernel Mailing List <Linux-Kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: the " 'official' point of view" expressed by kernelnewbies.org regarding reiser4 inclusion
Message-ID: <20060726170236.GD31172@fieldses.org>
References: <200607230920.04129.rene@exactcode.de> <17604.31639.213450.987415@gargle.gargle.HOWL> <20060725123558.GA32243@opteron.random> <44C65931.6030207@namesys.com> <20060726124557.GB23701@stusta.de> <20060726132957.GH32243@opteron.random> <20060726134326.GD23701@stusta.de> <20060726142854.GM32243@opteron.random> <20060726145019.GF23701@stusta.de> <20060726160604.GO32243@opteron.random>
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From: "J. Bruce Fields" <bfields@fieldses.org>
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On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 06:06:04PM +0200, andrea@cpushare.com wrote:
> JFYI: all statistics only take a sample of the larger space, the whole
> point of having a statistic is because you can't measure the total.
> The smaller the sample compared to the total, the less the stats are
> accurate

Definitely not true in general.  If I wanted to know the gender ratio at
the latest OLS I'd take the results from a sample of a dozen chosen
randomly over the results from a sample of hundreds all taken from the
men's room.

For exactly the same quality of sampling, yes, the larger the better,
but the point of diminishing returns comes pretty quickly.  So given
limited resources it's probably more important to work on the quality of
the sample rather than on its size....

--b.