I would submit that any device that relies on a hard drive (of which there are many, not just computers), would have a failure curve that closely matches hard drives ;)

On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 2:41 AM, Adam Thompson <athompso@athompso.net> wrote:

On 14-09-04 02:23 AM, Trevor Cordes wrote:

The Cars example is imperfect, because, as you said "it's good for a
while",

Yup.  Closest mass good I could think of offhand.

Surely if you ASCII'd a modern car graph it wouldn't quite fit?

The key difference is that you can repair and maintain a car, whereas a HDD (or SSD, for that matter) is either alive and well, alive and dying, or dead - and there's nothing you can do about it.

Your human being analogy is probably much closer to what I'm looking
for, but that one definitely has an abrupt bathtub hockey-stick at the
right hand side :-)

Yessss... although not so abrupt, at various points in history.

Surely, though, in the world of consumer items something else must be
just like hard drives?

Not that I can think of.  You have to combine a) non-negligible failure rate, with b) extremely tight tolerances, with c) variable quality control on (b), to get a similar result.  Outside the computing field, I can't think of anything [other than cars] that has as much complexity, as "finicky" as 10,000rpm spinning platters - AND is common enough that everyone will understand it.


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-Adam Thompson
 athompso@athompso.net

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John Lange
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