I don't care about the aggregate: I only care about me and my machine here.
> The expected case after surviving a hundred hours is that you're likely to survive another hundred.
That's exactly right. I don't expect to accrue another hundred hours before the new release, so I'll likely be fine.
> Which is a completely useless promise.
Statistics is never a promise: that's a really naive concept.
> at reasonable time scales for an OS
The timescale of the OS install is irrelevant: all that matters is the time between when the bug is introduced and when it is fixed. In this case, about nine months.
> Even so, "likely" here is something like "better than 50:50". Your claim was "very very rare" and that's not supported by the evidence.
You're free to disagree, obviously, but I think it's accurate to describe a race condition that doesn't happen in 100 hours on a multiple machines with clock rates north of 3GHz as "very very rare". That particular code containing the bug has probably executed tens of millions of times on my little pile of machines alone.
> It's a promise of odds with error bars, don't be so nitpicky.
No, it's not. I'm not being nitpicky, the word "promise" is entirely inapplicable to statistics.
> The expected case after surviving a hundred hours is that you're likely to survive another hundred.
That's exactly right. I don't expect to accrue another hundred hours before the new release, so I'll likely be fine.
> Which is a completely useless promise.
Statistics is never a promise: that's a really naive concept.
> at reasonable time scales for an OS
The timescale of the OS install is irrelevant: all that matters is the time between when the bug is introduced and when it is fixed. In this case, about nine months.