Date: Sat, 8 Nov 1997 14:30:51 -0600 (CST) From: Tony Kimball <alk@subtle.east.sun.com> To: jas@flyingfox.com Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Newest Pentium bug (fatal) Message-ID: <199711082030.OAA17326@pobox.com>
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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.
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