[time-nuts] Rubidium standard

David C. Partridge david.partridge at dsl.pipex.com
Wed Nov 18 09:42:40 UTC 2009


>The failure rate of a human is not constant over the lifetime and just
taking a figure at the age of 25 will get you nowhere. 

Steve,  I think you'll find that's a total red herring.

That's because if you measure failure rates of almost anything, you will
find that the failure rate varies over their life time, increasing as they
get older, often very dramatically in the final stages ...

Now we can argue about "life-time" and such, but the point that Mike S was
making that lifetime != inverse MTBF is still very true, and the example
wasn't all that bad either.  I can't think of many manufactured things that
don't have a lifetime that is unrelated to MTBF figures early in their life.

Dave




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