AGE AND SURVIVORSHIP
Of particular interest to me are the data shown in the table at right. It is essentially an accounting of trackables released in years past, but have survived long enough to yield at least one log in 2020. The first column is the year of release, the second column is the total number of bugs released in that year. The row across the bottom shows the sums of the columns above. Read the table as follows. For the year 2010, a total of 240 trackables were released. Of these, 16 had survived to have at least one log in 2020. The 16 value is 6.7% of all the trackables released in 2010, and 0.4% of all trackables released 2010 through 2020. Skipping up to the year 2020, there were 435 releases and 435 logs, including the logs for my releases into my own containers. The 435 releases in 2020 were 10.3% of all trackables released 2010 through 2020. From the bottom row we learn that the 1421 bugs logged were 33.6% of the 4229 total bugs released before 31-Dec-20. It is hardly surprising that the trend in the percentages of surviving trackables decreases toward the past…with age comes more encounters with cachers and caches, each of which presents new sets of risks. However, there seems to be an attenuation, or leveling off, of the rate of loss in the oldest trackables. This more obvious if we plot the percentages from the table above against the year of release (see at right). If the rate of decline was the same throughout, the line would eventually reach the zero baseline. This attenuation suggests some trackables are persisting better than others, a circumstance that prompted me to look more closely at the attributes of the 2010-15 releases, the oldest bugs. |