Furthermore, even 99.99999% reliability is not good enough, and that's already incredibly hard to achieve. Five 9s of reliability still means 5 minutes of unreliable behaviour per year, which is unacceptable in the context of driving.
I know you mean 99% just as ‘most of the time’, but 99% means every 100th work day it’s not working, or about twice a year.
I think reliably is really important for work tools. Depends what you do of course.
That really depends how often it happens. You can't expect 100% reliability, especially for any processes that involve humans or physical items. And even if 100% reliability was attainable the cost would probably be astronomical so you have to make the tradeoff somewhere.
"100% is probably never the right reliability target: not only is it impossible to achieve, it’s typically more reliability than a service’s users want or notice. Match the profile of the service to the risk the business is willing to take."
>Every car, every phone, every plane, computer, TV, washing machine, factory robot, etc - every thing works pretty much flawlessly on a day to day basis.
What is your definition of "pretty much"? In my experience none of those things you mentioned have ever worked pretty much flawlessly.
A bit like any hardware/software combo. Nothing in life is 100% reliable. If you make the probability of failure small enough, and are able to detect and fix errors (very important), it will be good enough.
Poor reliability is a theme in IoT, self-driving cars, and here.
We are all accustomed to the fact that computers are flakey. Our computers and phones sometimes need rebooting to fix weird behavior. My printer just forgot how to connect to WiFi for no apparent reason. Everyone has stories like these.
What's tolerable for many popular products is not tolerable for others, though. Leaving aside whether having a gun actually protects you, people own guns for that reason. If your gun won't fire when your life is in danger, or if your car won't swerve when a truck is in the road, or if your thermostat won't turn on when it's bitterly cold, that's unacceptable.
Clearly there exists highly reliable technology: plane and spaceship controls, for example. My understanding is that an extreme focus and expenditure on reliability is required to achieve that.
I think that some of these consumer product categories where it's critical that the thing actually work will require the same kind of rigor before people can trust them.
That's a funny definition of "reliable". I'd factor availability into reliability. If I Uber to work and every time an Uber picks me up it gets me to my destination with 100% success but once a week no Ubers are available, is that a reliable mode of transportation? Would my boss not shout at me to find a more reliable way to get to work?
I think you have a misconception on what actual reliability is for more products and services. 99.999% is a solid service, 99.99999% is a hard to achieve target for enterprise software.
To say Google is not the place to look for reliability is a pretty comical statement.
99% is absolutely reasonable for one layer of defense among many! That is one of the best methods to achieve truly high reliability, as is needed in this case: stack many reliable systems in such a way that they all must fail to get an overall failure. It is not perfect, of course, and things can always cascade, but it is a powerful technique.
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