Failure rates (was: Linux Made Easy: Linspire 5.0)

[Benjamin Scott]

On Apr 24 at 11:43pm, David Ecklein wrote:
> My bad impression had only been with Samsung hard drives, and that is dated 
> and limited to my own small computer business activity, not "anecdotes". 
> Failure rate was higher than any other brand I had used.

    An interesting phenomenon has been observed when it comes to the public's 
perception of reliability of commodity brands:  The more units sold, the more 
units fail, in terms of absolute numbers.  Thus, a given brand of something 
will become popular to the point where it becomes "first choice".  Then, 
because there are so many of them out there, people begin to see more failures 
in that brand.  People thus conclude there must be something wrong with that 
brand.  Opinion drops, and the product falls out of first place, confirming to 
everyone that there was something wrong.

    I'm not saying this applies in this particular case, but it's worth keeping 
in mind, in general.

-- 
Ben <dragonhawk at iname.com>