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Right. 99% is an A+ in school and 3 days of downtime per year.

That's about the reliability of my home server. A set of commodity mid-to-low quality parts that I assembled and programmed to turn on after a power outage.

And I could easily double it (as in half the unavailable time) if any ok ISP become available at my place.

Good point. I had assumed the parent was complaining about syntax, but that could be confusing.

When you say 99% is bad, are you making a normative or positive statement?

I'm saying that the author believes 99% reliability to be “Bad (TM)”. Further evidence in the second paragraph of this post: http://danluu.com/broken-builds/

I didn't say that this is a normative viewpoint in engineering or whether I personally agree with it. As you can see from other commenters, many do hold this view. A sometimes opposing philosophy, however, is “release early, release often” which many open source projects adhere to.

I don't know what positive and normative statements are, but think of examples of highly available services. Electricity, Water, phone service. What do you think when those are down 3 days (or 72 hours) per year?