On Fri, Dec 25, 2009 at 5:44 AM, Vadim Antonov <avg@kotovnik.com> wrote:
The ISP industry has a long way to go until it reaches the same level of sophistication in handling problems as aviation has.
It seems that there's a logical fallacy floating around somewhere (networks have parts and are complicated, airplanes and flight involve lots of parts and are also complicated, therefore aircraft are like networks). I assert that comparing 'packet switching' to an industry that has its roots in the late 1800's and had its first "hello world" moment in 1903 isn't terribly fruitful. Further, aircraft are the asymptotic limit of 'singly homed transit.' Because of this, I think one could argue that pilots and ATC must be held to a different professional standard due to the nature of public trust at risk. At the other end of our strawman spectrum, we have end users who must accept the risk that their provider will be unable to connect them to lolcats.com on occasion, perhaps as often as 0.01% per year, and most are happy to accept this. Four nines survivability on flights, clearly, won't work. What I'm getting at is that after following this thread for a while, I'm not convinced any amount of process-borrowing is going to solve problems better, faster, or even avoid them in the first place. At best, our craft is 1/3rd as "old" (if that's somehow I measure of maturity) as flight and nobody is being sued to settle 200+ accidental deaths because of our mistakes. -Tk