Forwarded message:
Subject: Re: Traffic Analysis (fwd) Date: Sun, 5 Oct 97 11:59:53 -0400
On 10/3/97 10:49 AM, Jim Choate (ravage@ssz.com) passed this wisdom:
If the MTBF for a remailer is n then the MTBF for m remailers is n*m. Inother words the remailer chain gets less reliable as it gets longer.
Jim, you want to take a look at that "n*m" again ... it doesn't wash. means MTBF goes *up* which means *more* reliable.
Remember n is a fraction, failures/time_period ... If your MTBF is 1 failure per year for each system and you have 10 systems your MTBF is 10 failures per year. Looks like multiplication to me.... Course you can look at it another way as well. Which would mean you would have 1 failure every 10th of a year. That's division, and also misleading because failures don't care about the time period, they may happen all at once. Depends on how you look at MTBF, I generaly look at it the first way because I can use addition if I'm working on a system that don't have multiplication (eg machine code on a 68HC11) that way I don't have to build some damn floating poing library to do division ... Statistics, damn statistics, and lies. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there | | be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. | | | | -Alan Greenspan- | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http:// www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage@ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|