[sirwhinesalot]

Constructive feedback is always appreciated!

The only thing I'll comment on is the IEEE stuff. I was taught these terms in a university course on fault tolerance. You'll find slides from various courses using them like this or similar if you search on Google, and that particular IEEE standard was mentioned as the source (I never personally read it). I have read a later standard that rather than defining error specifically, mentions all the various ways in which the term is used.

The thing is, the actual standard is irrelevant, it wasn't meant as an appeal to authority. Rather, it's a source of 3 related terms (fault/error/failure) that can be used to refer to the 3 distinct ideas discussed throughout the post.

Your suggestions for alternative names are just as valuable and just as useless, neither the ones in the standard nor your own are generally agreed upon. My hope was that by using a somewhat common triple I would have avoided pointless discussion on the terms themselves, rather than the ideas discussed in the post.

As this hackernews comment section demonstrates, I was all for naught ;)