Comment by geocar
4 years ago
> What is the difference in the context of your comment? The likelihood of the risk, and nothing else. So what is the exact magic amount of risk that makes one thing durable and another not, and who made you the arbiter of this?
What's the difference between the sun exploding and a single machine failing?
I have no idea how to answer that. Maybe it's because many people have seen a single machine fail, but nobody has seen the sun explode? I guess I've never had a need to give it more thought than that.
> It does to anybody who actually understands these definitions. It is durable according to the design (i.e., UBER rates) of your system.
You are wrong about that: Nobody cares if something is "designed to be durable according to the definition in the design". That's just more weasel words. They care what are the risks, how you actually protect against them, and what it costs to do. That's it.
I was asking about the context of the conversation. And I answered it for you. It's the likelihood of the risk. Two computers in two different locations can and do fail.
> You are wrong about that: Nobody cares if something is "designed to be durable according to the definition in the design".
No I'm not, that's what the word means and that's how it's used. That's how it's defined in operating systems, that's how it's defined by disk manufacturers, that's how it's used by people who write databases.
> That's just more weasel words.
No it's not, its the only sane definition because all hardware and software is different, and so is everybody's appetite for risk and cost. And you don't know what any of those things are in any situation.
> They care what are the risks, how you actually protect against them, and what it costs to do. That's it.
You seem to be arguing against yourself here. Lots of people (e.g., personal users) store a lot of their data on a single device for significant periods of time, because that's reasonably durable for their use.