Comments on: The culture of failure http://www.oliyiptong.com/blog/2008/09/23/the-culture-of-failure/ Tue, 06 Jan 2009 04:55:00 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.2 By: Andrew Louis http://www.oliyiptong.com/blog/2008/09/23/the-culture-of-failure/#comment-82634 Andrew Louis Tue, 23 Sep 2008 19:47:25 +0000 http://www.oliyiptong.com/blog/?p=73#comment-82634 Except when it's too expensive to fail... We're lucky to be in the software industry where failures *usually* aren't the end of the world but there are certainly lots of deadly counterexamples (Therac-25) Kevin Kelly just posted about this today. For instance, take airplane design. Failures are rare but completely catastrophic. This makes it hard to rely on smaller/minor failures. What's the solution? He calls it "looking for ugly." It's a really great post: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/09/looking_for_ugl.php Except when it’s too expensive to fail…

We’re lucky to be in the software industry where failures *usually* aren’t the end of the world but there are certainly lots of deadly counterexamples (Therac-25)

Kevin Kelly just posted about this today. For instance, take airplane design. Failures are rare but completely catastrophic. This makes it hard to rely on smaller/minor failures.

What’s the solution? He calls it “looking for ugly.” It’s a really great post: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/09/looking_for_ugl.php

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