How often is it offline outside the maintenance windows?

Yeah, maintenance windows are annoying, but they don’t really count when describing the availability of a system. Many government systems are only available during normal business hours. That means they’re offline for 16 hours per day. What matters is how available they are when they’re supposed to be working.

For Elder Scrolls, two nines would mean that the game was allowed to be down for more than an hour a week outside of those maintenance windows. Or, if measured by quarters, which is more typical, the game would still have those maintenance windows, but, in addition, it might be down for a full day once per quarter.

Basically, the 8 hour windows every Monday is a trade-off so that the rest of the week is uninterrupted. They probably manage three nines the rest of the week by shifting any serious maintenance into the weekly downtime.

And, as for the game being “still popular”, one site says that there are currently 7199 players in Elder Scrolls but more than 161k in World of Warcraft. It could be that part of the reason that World of Warcraft is more popular is that it doesn’t have 8 hour maintenance windows every week, but it does often have 2+ hour windows. The number of players who are willing to put up with 8 hour maintenance windows every week seems pretty small.

Again, a human hasn’t even gotten paged and out of bed in 5 minutes time.

Why don’t you go back and actually read what I wrote?

You clearly have no idea what you’re talking about.

It’s not impossible. Large reliable websites do it all the time. It’s call 100% uptime.

No, no website does it. There is no such thing as 100% uptime. If it happens, great, but I can guarantee you that no website even aims for 5 nines of uptime.

Google is the benchmark for website availability and in 2022 they had an outage that lasted an hour, meaning they didn’t meet 4 nines for the year.

Sure, it’s measured per year, and sometimes they have some outage that breaks the record. But, it is possible to have 100% uptime throughout the year.

If you miss your SLO target for the year, then you missed your SLO target. If you’re down for 60 minutes but fine for the other 11 months, 29 days and 23 hours, you still missed your yearly SLO.

No, it means you don’t have outages. Ever.

No, that’s infinite nines, which isn’t possible.

Five-nines is something like 7 minutes of downtime throughout the entire year. At best, you might have automated failover systems that require tiny outages. No human involvement, though, unless you’re deal with some major breakage that would have killed the five-nines commitment that year, anyway.

Yes, you have automated failover systems. But, if something happens which causes those systems to fail over, you need to immediately investigate what happened and why. Even at four nines you have automatic failover, redundant system, hot spares, etc. But, you accept that sometimes not everything will work as planned and you’ll need to fix something. Five nines is just that and more.

It’s takes a human something like 5-10 minutes just to get out of bed and figure out the situation, anyway.

Right, which is why I said that four nines is your realistic maximum if you’re going to have people on call who aren’t actually at their desks. To get better than four nines you need to have around the clock coverage with people at their desks so when a system breaks you have eyes on it in something like 30s.

I’ve worked on services with 5 nines of availability (i.e. 99.999% available, less than 5 minutes of downtime allowed per year). I’ve more frequently worked on ones with 4 nines, where you’re allowed almost an hour of downtime per year. GitHub is now barely maintaining 2 nines. That’s just embarrassing.

Each “nine” you add is much more difficult. To get four nines you need people on call who can start working on a problem within 5 minutes and fix it within a few more minutes, and you can only get those calls once every couple of months. Five nines means that you need people at their desks in shifts ready to start fixing something the moment there’s a problem because it would take too long for someone on-call to get their computer out, connect and authenticate. It requires warm backup systems that are sitting idle but ready to take over fully at a moment’s notice.

A two nines system is allowed to be down for 100x as long as a four nines system, and 1000x as long as a five nines system. It’s almost 15 minutes of downtime allowed per day, compared to about 15 minutes every 3 months for a four-nines system. Gamers wouldn’t even put up with a two-nines system for a video game. It’s absurd to allow that for a critical piece of infrastructure for software.

These movies are not exactly subtle about which side is the “good guys” and which side is the “bad guys”.

Who do you side with in a much more ambiguous movie like Apocalyspe Now or Sicario?

Or, if you’re like most movie watchers, you watched Zero Dark Thirty and sided with the American commandos. You watched The Hurt Locker and sided with the American bomb disposal experts. You watched Argo and sided with the CIA.

I’d guess there are a lot more pro-American movies where the typical audience sides with the Americans than there are anti-fascist movies where the audience sides with antifa. In fact, a lot of people who watched Starship Troopers didn’t get that it was an anti-fascist movie at all and took it all at face value siding with the humans against the aliens.

some mentally ill cannot vote.

And some people with multiple personalities are only allowed to vote once, not once per voice living in their head.

It’s probably a good idea to not allow absolutely everybody to have a say. It may not even be the best idea to give everybody an equal say.

Maybe also the first to set down formal rules. Getting the boys together to make a decision is one thing. A rule that everybody has an equal say, and that it’s 50%+1 for a decision to be made is different. Also, rules about when people are allowed to vote, if they’re allowed to re-vote, what things require a 2/3s margin vs. just a majority. Even things like if you’re allowed to sell your vote, if you’re allowed to make a speech before you vote, if you’re allowed to wait to see how other people vote before you vote… There are a lot of things we take for granted about how the process works.

I don’t think that was a Greek invention either. I’d imagine men have been telling women that only men get to make the big decisions for as long as language has existed.

I’m a huge fan of immutable distros, but I’m not sure they’re mass transit.

Maybe:

It gets you where you want to go, but you don’t have to handle the toil of dealing with traffic.

Windows:

Interesting game, but they seemed to intentionally make it as anti-fun as possible. Assembling the car was cool. But, everything you had to do to get the car parts, keep yourself alive, etc. was pretty tedious.

Typically it’s more:

Bazzite:

SteamOS:

That’s my current approach. Fedora Atomic, and let someone else break my OS instead of me.

I can do one better. A similar ‘rm’ command but while a Windows disk was mounted read/write. So, 2 OSes damaged in one command.

Yeah, these days you don’t need the base OS much anymore. That’s why I like the Atomic distros. I’m running Bazzite and it’s great. Someone else handles the upgrades of the base image, and I just run flatpaks or containers.

Yeah, I have the same issue with my 1080. I haven’t installed Debian in decades because everything in “stable” is so incredibly outdated. It’s supposed to lead to a stable system, and in some ways it does. But, in other ways because everything is so out of date, people often have to install from source or find alternate packages, so it becomes possibly even more unstable.

Like which ones?

Are there distros where you can’t do that? I mean, maybe Debian?

I have had only a few issues with nVidia on Linux for a few years. But, I am using an old card. I’d like to live in the nice sunny castle, not the scary one with bad weather. But, at least I have mostly working shelter while I play my games.