Uptime matters more than almost anything else

Image courtesy of this guy.

Although the meatspace event ended hours ago, those of us on the west coast are just now watching the Spice Girls drive around on LED-encrusted London taxicabs while singing hits from elementary school. Or rather, West Coasters who don't have DirecTV are watching the Spice Girls. I'm watching the error message above that describes a solution but does not enumerate said solution in a way which precludes the need for additional Googling. The "no need to call us" is particularly cute.

The abrupt failure of high definition television services for the west coast, notably Los Angeles, inspired some strong feelings on Twitter. When the error message appeared, I immediately opened Twitter with a search for "directv." The results were...well, take it away, Nima:

 

You and me both, friend.  Of course, some people felt the need to politicize the issue:

 

I had no idea President Obama had such a tremendous influence on television broadcasts from space. Guess I'm voting Republican. Meanwhile, Crystal made a statement of truth, followed by a statement of questionable veracity: 

 

 Melissa makes yet a bolder statement:

Agreed. I've been waiting ages for the Spice Girls to sing together again. Ghetto University has a simple question:

We'll hold off answering that for a moment while Natasha broadcasts from the Winter Olympics. Vancouver 2010 or Sochi 2014?

Ms. University has, apparently, decided that she is, indeed, being punished, and is not pleased with this:

Nobody puts babby in the corner!

There's two things I'd like to note from this.

1. Before Twitter, how did we all whine?
2. Uptime matters. Five nines is not sufficient. In a world where we're looking to save nanoseconds of latency in financial transactions, dropping rovers onto Mars with rocket-powered skycranes, and driving around in LED-encrusted London cabs, there's no reason why every enterprise application shouldn't have 100% uptime. It's time to step messing around.