Computerworld – Tanenbaum outlines his vision for a grandma-proof OS

Tanenbaum wants to mainstream a new metric: LFs (lifetime failures).

Though I generally agree with Tanenbaum about software reliability, and that it is important that we (as an industry) make progress in that area, this quote struck me:

When consumers go to buy an electrical appliance such as a TV or stereo they expect to bring it home, plug it in and see it work. And it is exactly what happens — for years on end. But not so with computers, even though it should, says Tanenbaum…

Uh…I run OpenBSD, Linux (well, ok, not right now, but that’s actually a deviation from my norm), and WindowsXP on my various assemblies of cheap PC hardware (all built myself – no vendor support for me! Cheaper components with shorter MTBFs! Yay!) – and I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced a WindowsXP BSOD (ok, it’s more like the reboot-of-death now, if you have the default settings intact) since leaving Microsoft. That’s nearly 6 years without a [catastrophic] failure of the OS. I’ve had a few kernel panics in Linux and OpenBSD, but that’s because I was hacking. Neither have failed for me under normal usage scenarios.

The quote struck me because my electrical service goes out far more frequently than that.

I’m just sayin’.

Update:
Tanenbaum’s argument serves as an interesting corollary to my previous post about why we don’t make software better (probably the reverse, actually).