What would it take for you die hard Sony fans to switch over to Microsoft?

[Squilliam]

Torillian said:

Squilliam said:

Torillian said:

Squilliam said:

I don't see anyone else with a knowledge of the fate of 80 consoles of the same year/model whom I trust as a source. Is there anything wrong with taking his personal experience as a strong indication of the reliability of the 40GB PS3? I haven't really seen any real source that beats it really.

Oh come on Squilliam, you know what one person's experience is in statistics.  Absolutely meaningless.  Twesterm's personal experience can just be negated by someone else who didn't have troubles. 

Its not one sample. My statistics textbook tells me that I can apply the central limit theorem because I feel that a sample of 80 adequately represents the population of 40GB PS3s at large. The only issue is precisely how accurately he reported the information, so the real problem is not the representativeness of the sample but how accurately twesterm measured it.

And how do you prove this part?  Because obviously if you think it represents the population at large then you can extrapolate the data, but what evidence do you have for that?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem

"In probability theory, the central limit theorem (CLT) states conditions under which the sum of a sufficiently large number of independent random variables, each with finite mean and variance, will be approximately normally distributed"

A sample size of 80 gives a confidence of roughly 10% for the entire population of 40GB PS3s. So if the sample gives a 10% failure rate we can be reasonably sure it would be between 9 and 11%.