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.