If our estimate of that benefit, made today, is valued less than our current estimate of the cost of completetion, then completing the station is just throwing good money after bad.
The cost of abandoning the station might just be the whole manned space program, not just losing a station. The world isn't just a few columns of expenses and benefits. How do you calculate an intangible cost in terms of dollars like the cost to reputation and worldwide public opinion of the space program? Abandon the project now, and IMO the likelihood of another station to replace it goes down by 100 fold, and manned space exploration goes down the toilet for another 30 years. Personally I think those are bad scenarios, and few billion dollars is a really cheap price to pay to avoid that situation.
Maybe you don't see any benefit in manned space exploration, and that's a valid answer. But then you really aren't in this cost/benefit argument to begin with.
"guessing" at the problem and having "theories" is probably not a good way to go.
Welcome to the real world of problem solving. Any solution always starts out as a guess. It's pretty much impossible to solve any problem without eliminating a whole bunch of possibilities (i.e. guessing and having theories). It's likely 10 times harder when you don't have the tools necessary to diagnose this particular problem. (i.e. they need an oscilloscope to look for strange power fluctuations from the new solar array). So I could see how it might be particularly hard to turn those guesses and theories into near certainties. Also, it's apparently a common-mode failure, which you shouldn't have in a safety-critical system; generally this is avoided by having different computer hardware and/or completely different code to do the same tasks.
Having completely redundant systems down to the electrical level is hard enough on the ground. In a small space station a few hundred miles in space I imagine it's next to impossible. You could argue that "why didn't they just have a $50 UPS that'd at least provide them with redundant power, then see if the broken computer boots". But then you have to realize this is a space station with limits on how much space there is for tools that might otherwise go un-used.
You could probably equally blame this issue on lack of testing. Though that's obviously difficult as well since you don't have a duplicate space station orbiting the earth to first try it out on.
The only people who know and understand how unreliable it is as a service are the people administering it, not the majority of the end user population.
I actually think most people DO know it's unreliable. Who hasn't had the experience of "I sent you an email about subject X, did you get it?" and received NO as a reply? Anyone that thinks email is reliable isn't really paying attention.
Most of these employees are off-site and travel more time than not, and when clients call in and ask for them, we recommend that the client emails them.
Are your employees Doctors or Lawyers where someone might die, or be thrown in jail if they can't be reached? These are examples of what I would call urgent communications needs. I.e. if you can't get ahold of someone quite quickly, something "bad" happens.
The unreliability of email isn't just because of spam, it's fundamental to the design of SMTP. If you want a technology where the sender knows if the message was delivered (and read) by the recipient, choose something other than email. If your employees are relying on email for mission critical jobs with no backup communications channel available, I'd say you're going to miss some emails and hurt your business in the process.
Maybe you haven't many doctors & lawyers with their crackberries. Unless they are sitting at their desk, email IS the best way to reach them in a hurry.
In that case, they should have an email address that's kept private, so there's no spam problem. And has no filtering on it, so it's more reliable.
The premise is still ridiculous. It involves creating a scenario where a doctor/lawyer has chosen an unreliable communication means, and then someone else is taking advantage of it.
The argument here is predicated on the ridiculous premise that can only reach you need to reach your Doctor or Lawyer urgently (not so bad so far), but you can only do so though email.
Huh? Email isn't an urgent communications medium. Furthermore Doctors and Lawyers who need to be reached urgently have secretaries and nurses who do triage. They contact the Dr/Lawyer if it's truly urgent.
In all fairness, it would probably be a much wiser decision to do taxes on the vehicle and eliminate fuel taxes altogether.
I think that's a rather poor idea. A fuel tax taxes people who actually use the roads. Eliminating the fuel tax would eliminate that tie between road usage and tax. You'd also not tax anyone from outside the state who uses the roads, which for some states is a big chunk of income. You'll also unfairly penalize people who don't drive much, and give a large break to people who drive a lot. Not a great incentive for people to use the roads more efficiently, or buy more fuel efficient cars. Of course, the taxes on vehicles are more or less flat, so a vehicle worth $50k will pay the same tax as a vehicle worth $7k.
Same here. In MN our former wrestler/governor had a bug up his butt about the high vehicle tax for expensive vehicles. I don't remember the specifics of how it came out, but after a year or two the tax is essentially flat.
The people will move out of the state because of it?
No. People will be more reluctant to move to the state, or vacation their. In other words, the state is not the same as a company, a state's bad image is harder to link to immediate loss of profits.
Maybe link directly. But it's not too much of a stretch to notice that bad publicity for a state isn't good for tourism, or increasing the educated job pool.
After reading the first "fictional CIO" article I have to wonder how much of this article is the fantasy of a journalist trying to sell subscriptions.
The article makes it all sound so slick and organized. I have to wonder how much is made up nonsense, and how much is real. It's not that anything in the article is all that unbelievable, it's just that it's all written from the perspective of someone inside. Something said journalist likely has little to no clue about.
Thanks for a classically snooty post that basically says "Photoshop translates to print better than Gimp".
You can gloss it up all you like, but there's a lot of people out their that don't give a rats ass about print, and never will. With one post you've basically confirmed my theory that people don't like Gimp because:
a. They know photoshop and don't want to learn anything different (that's fine, but not a reason to diss Gimp) b. They do print stuff, and Gimp doesn't translate to print very well. c. They're snobs like yourself who poo-poo anyone that doesn't do the same things as themselves, use the same tools, etc. If you really think web graphics are "less advanced" than other design work, you really don't understand the web. There's a hell of a lot more to web design than making pretty pictures (and no, I'm NOT a web designer).
The thing you're missing is that CMYK support was recognized long ago as a useful feature of the GIMP.
I understand that.. but WHY? What is it about CMYK support that's so important? Is it just that print uses CMYK? If so, who cares unless you're doing print?
Re:"professional-level", what do you mean?
on
The History of Photoshop
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Most equipment starts out as expensive, professional-grade products which percolate down to amateur-grade products.
I don't know about "most", but there's a LOT of "ameteur" level equipment that "professionals" use as well. The microcomputer started out as a cheap calculator, and now it's replaced the mainframe. Linux started out as an experiment by a college kid, and now it's replaced big expensive Sun/HP/AIX boxes. The video toaster on the Amiga did a lot of eye-candy video stuff really cheaply that the then expensive-ass "professional" grade video editors couldn't.
Anyway, I think you're ignoring the larger picture brought up by the original poster. That the distinctions between "ameteur" and "professional" are really quite meaningless and artificial. I'd even argue it's really a lot of marketing whooey. Anyone smart will ignore all that nonsense and buy the tool that gets the job done.
To give an example, currently I'm looking into getting some speakers. If you measure performance by the only fair way, accurate sound reproduction, the cheap $100 sony bookshelf speakers outperform $1400 Infinity super-dupers. For floorstanding speakers the $280 Sony's are equally as good as "great name" $1400 Bose.
(BTW, he's talking about 3.5 inch hard drives, not floppy disks. Many years ago those big databases you speak of were run on big honkin expensive ass drives, not small, inexpensive, 3.5 inch hard drives.)
They're about as pointless as an ostensibly professional-level graphics editing program without proper CMYK support.
I always here this complaint about Gimp, but I never really understand why people whine about this. Isn't CMYK only important if you're doing printing, as printing uses CMYK?
The designers I know basically just do website design. They use photoshop, mostly because it's the tool they're familiar with. But I don't really see a reason why they can't use Gimp if they had a decent reason to.
Has anyone thought of the possibility this is an IP ethernet printer, and it's firmware just isn't coded to tell the difference between IPv4 and IPv6 packets.
I thought of that exact possibility after I made my original post. It's a definite possibility, and from the little we know matches the data better than "Vista's IPV6 stack is broken". Personally I think putting out a big article saying "IPV6 on Vista is broken" before you really know anything is totally irresponsible.
Just because there's no scientific way to disprove creation
I'm not sure which creationism you're talking about, but I'm talking about the one where the earth is 6000 years old, there's no evolution, the whole flood thing, etc. That "theory" has been thoroughly dis-proven. That also happens to be the theory this museum is showcasing. And even so, there's no reason not to study evolution, but there are massive gaping holes in evolutionary theory.
What gaping holes are those? We may eventually prove evolution is how we all got here, and we may never do so.
Proof is a term used in mathematics. It doesn't have a whole lot of applicability to science. Currently there's an enormous amount of evidence that evolution is correct. There may be some particulars that we don't fully understand, but that has no bearing on if evolution is correct or not. PS. By way of comparison, belief in the possibility of extra-terrestrial life (despite a complete lack of hard evidence at this time) has become much more mainstream of late among scientifically minded people
The difference is we know that life exists, we know it arises spontaneously, we know intelligence arises spontaneously, and we know there's a LOT of other planets. That's not HARD evidence, but it's certainly evidence that intelligence life might exist. I wouldn't bet any money on it though.
We have no evidence to support creationism, and a lot of evidence that it's totally wrong. Do you really have to wonder why scientifically minded people are open to a theory that's possible and has some evidence to support it, and openly hostile to a "theory" that all the evidence points against?
Not to be overly pedantic, but carbon dating coal is kind of useless.
I know all that, but to debunk this theory we don't need an answer of millions years, we just need to know it's substantially older than 6000 years. I'm not sure exactly how far back you can go with carbon dating, but I'm quite sure it's a hundred thousand or more. In other words, giving an answer of "it's older than x hundred thousand years old" is way more than enough to destroy the creationist argument.
I don't know what to do. I fully believe in Voltaire's classic quotation on freedom of speech and belief. But in this instance, I find myself thoroughly unwilling to defend the "Creation Museum's" right to make up whatever crazy "facts" they want. It's the first time I find myself wanting to "think of the children" who may very well grow up into the willfully ignorant bible beaters that are founding this "museum."
Well, I think the problem we have here is not one of messages, but lack of critical thought. The creationists can get a foot in the door here because for a long time we've taught science as a series of facts and "convincing arguments", and left the whole critical thought thing by the wayside.
To give an example, why do you believe the creationist arguments are nonsense? I'd hope it's because you can say something like "well, we have an enormous amount of evidence the earth is billions of years old like the mid-atlantic ridge and alternating rock with different magnetic reversals. Also we can carbon date coal and find out it's a LOT older than a few thousand years. Therefore their arguments don't hold water"
I've got Vista, an IP based printer, and even IPV6 via a tunnel broker. I've had no problems with printing or any other network applications.
So I have to wonder, is this really an issue with Vista's IPV6, is it an issue with the driver writers, or is it a minor issue with Vista's implementation of the layer that supports IP printers?
The article seems to indicate "we turned off IPV6 and then it started working". Well that tells us a little, but it's hardly time to start blaming the IPV6 stack. There's quite a few different components that could be responsible. I had problems with Firefox on Ubuntu on my network, and was able to track it down to a faulty implementation of DNS on my DSL modem only under IPV6.
I wonder what makes it notable? Size? cost? speed?
High throughput, low latency. Don't know about cost.
It's basically the perfect hibernate cache that doesn't require power to maintain it's state, and will give near instant uptimes. You could also gain a bit from caching disk reads. It seems a large enough main ram would invalidate this or even the mere presence of on chip cache.
RAM is volatile unless you constantly supply power. Because of this you can't rely on the information to still be their when you come back to a full power state.
Basically this little device would allow people to turn off their PC completely, and power it back up into a fully functional state. You can sort of do that now, but it means either maintaining a little power to the memory to maintain state, or spending an interminable time writing out to disk.
Of course, that means that driver writers need to actually support resuming from sleep, which many today don't properly support.
Venter isn't claiming a patent on the entire concept of synthetic life, he's claiming a patent on A synthetic life form. As the article says, patents on genetically modified life forms aren't anything new. What's new is this is a life form created entirely from scratch (or at least as much from scratch as you can get when you already know how other life works).
You're focusing too much on the question. The question is irrelevant and only serves to illustrate a point. I'm not doing a survey here, I'm trying to say what I believe "most people" want. "most people" just want to get whatever the task they're trying to accomplish done. Most of the time that means just doing what they've done before.
Imaging you have a huge medical database on several servers and are running out of disk space
Heh. The biggest mistake in the world I could make was run my database on a brand new filesystem, very likely unsupported by the DB vendor. Running out of disk space would be the least of my problems. Losing data and DB crashed from an untested, brand new filesystem would be a MUCH greater concern than the very foreseeable and easy to solve problem as adding disk space.
I've no doubt that ZFS or anything similar to it is a great solution. I just don't think it should be the default yet.
I guess I don't understand what you're really getting at here. But in my experience if you ask someone "hey, do you want all your software to "just work", or do you want this new feature with a decent chance you'll lose some data, or some programs won't work" "most people" will choose the stability.
It doesn't really matter if people are technical or not, if they read your little statement or not. What matters is knowing what most people desire and then providing that. The job of a software developer (in this case Apple) is to do just that so the user doesn't have to.
Right, I'm sure it won't wind up breaking some important application at the expense of adding a wiz-bang feature that 95% of the users couldn't care less about.
I'm not a Mac user, but even if I could (maybe I can) add ZFS to my Linux workstation I wouldn't. I prefer stable and reliable over untested new features. I think most people feel the same way, so making the default something else makes a lot of sense. If ZFS is as great as you say, it will eventually become the default, and anything it breaks that's important will have been fixed.
5:1 that it's not the default root file system in Leopard.
It would be foolish to make any new technology that touches so many other applications and parts of the OS the default when you don't have to. It's much smarter to make it an option and try to shake out any problems that arise. Then make it the default at a later date.
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If our estimate of that benefit, made today, is valued less than our current estimate of the cost of completetion, then completing the station is just throwing good money after bad.
The cost of abandoning the station might just be the whole manned space program, not just losing a station. The world isn't just a few columns of expenses and benefits. How do you calculate an intangible cost in terms of dollars like the cost to reputation and worldwide public opinion of the space program? Abandon the project now, and IMO the likelihood of another station to replace it goes down by 100 fold, and manned space exploration goes down the toilet for another 30 years. Personally I think those are bad scenarios, and few billion dollars is a really cheap price to pay to avoid that situation.
Maybe you don't see any benefit in manned space exploration, and that's a valid answer. But then you really aren't in this cost/benefit argument to begin with.
"guessing" at the problem and having "theories" is probably not a good way to go.
Welcome to the real world of problem solving. Any solution always starts out as a guess. It's pretty much impossible to solve any problem without eliminating a whole bunch of possibilities (i.e. guessing and having theories). It's likely 10 times harder when you don't have the tools necessary to diagnose this particular problem. (i.e. they need an oscilloscope to look for strange power fluctuations from the new solar array). So I could see how it might be particularly hard to turn those guesses and theories into near certainties.
Also, it's apparently a common-mode failure, which you shouldn't have in a safety-critical system; generally this is avoided by having different computer hardware and/or completely different code to do the same tasks.
Having completely redundant systems down to the electrical level is hard enough on the ground. In a small space station a few hundred miles in space I imagine it's next to impossible. You could argue that "why didn't they just have a $50 UPS that'd at least provide them with redundant power, then see if the broken computer boots". But then you have to realize this is a space station with limits on how much space there is for tools that might otherwise go un-used.
You could probably equally blame this issue on lack of testing. Though that's obviously difficult as well since you don't have a duplicate space station orbiting the earth to first try it out on.
The only people who know and understand how unreliable it is as a service are the people administering it, not the majority of the end user population.
I actually think most people DO know it's unreliable. Who hasn't had the experience of "I sent you an email about subject X, did you get it?" and received NO as a reply? Anyone that thinks email is reliable isn't really paying attention.
Most of these employees are off-site and travel more time than not, and when clients call in and ask for them, we recommend that the client emails them.
Are your employees Doctors or Lawyers where someone might die, or be thrown in jail if they can't be reached? These are examples of what I would call urgent communications needs. I.e. if you can't get ahold of someone quite quickly, something "bad" happens.
The unreliability of email isn't just because of spam, it's fundamental to the design of SMTP. If you want a technology where the sender knows if the message was delivered (and read) by the recipient, choose something other than email. If your employees are relying on email for mission critical jobs with no backup communications channel available, I'd say you're going to miss some emails and hurt your business in the process.
Maybe you haven't many doctors & lawyers with their crackberries. Unless they are sitting at their desk, email IS the best way to reach them in a hurry.
In that case, they should have an email address that's kept private, so there's no spam problem. And has no filtering on it, so it's more reliable.
The premise is still ridiculous. It involves creating a scenario where a doctor/lawyer has chosen an unreliable communication means, and then someone else is taking advantage of it.
The argument here is predicated on the ridiculous premise that can only reach you need to reach your Doctor or Lawyer urgently (not so bad so far), but you can only do so though email.
Huh? Email isn't an urgent communications medium. Furthermore Doctors and Lawyers who need to be reached urgently have secretaries and nurses who do triage. They contact the Dr/Lawyer if it's truly urgent.
In all fairness, it would probably be a much wiser decision to do taxes on the vehicle and eliminate fuel taxes altogether.
I think that's a rather poor idea. A fuel tax taxes people who actually use the roads. Eliminating the fuel tax would eliminate that tie between road usage and tax. You'd also not tax anyone from outside the state who uses the roads, which for some states is a big chunk of income. You'll also unfairly penalize people who don't drive much, and give a large break to people who drive a lot. Not a great incentive for people to use the roads more efficiently, or buy more fuel efficient cars.
Of course, the taxes on vehicles are more or less flat, so a vehicle worth $50k will pay the same tax as a vehicle worth $7k.
Same here. In MN our former wrestler/governor had a bug up his butt about the high vehicle tax for expensive vehicles. I don't remember the specifics of how it came out, but after a year or two the tax is essentially flat.
The people will move out of the state because of it?
No. People will be more reluctant to move to the state, or vacation their.
In other words, the state is not the same as a company, a state's bad image is harder to link to immediate loss of profits.
Maybe link directly. But it's not too much of a stretch to notice that bad publicity for a state isn't good for tourism, or increasing the educated job pool.
After reading the first "fictional CIO" article I have to wonder how much of this article is the fantasy of a journalist trying to sell subscriptions.
The article makes it all sound so slick and organized. I have to wonder how much is made up nonsense, and how much is real. It's not that anything in the article is all that unbelievable, it's just that it's all written from the perspective of someone inside. Something said journalist likely has little to no clue about.
Thanks for a classically snooty post that basically says "Photoshop translates to print better than Gimp".
You can gloss it up all you like, but there's a lot of people out their that don't give a rats ass about print, and never will. With one post you've basically confirmed my theory that people don't like Gimp because:
a. They know photoshop and don't want to learn anything different (that's fine, but not a reason to diss Gimp)
b. They do print stuff, and Gimp doesn't translate to print very well.
c. They're snobs like yourself who poo-poo anyone that doesn't do the same things as themselves, use the same tools, etc. If you really think web graphics are "less advanced" than other design work, you really don't understand the web. There's a hell of a lot more to web design than making pretty pictures (and no, I'm NOT a web designer).
The thing you're missing is that CMYK support was recognized long ago as a useful feature of the GIMP.
I understand that.. but WHY? What is it about CMYK support that's so important? Is it just that print uses CMYK? If so, who cares unless you're doing print?
Most equipment starts out as expensive, professional-grade products which percolate down to amateur-grade products.
I don't know about "most", but there's a LOT of "ameteur" level equipment that "professionals" use as well. The microcomputer started out as a cheap calculator, and now it's replaced the mainframe. Linux started out as an experiment by a college kid, and now it's replaced big expensive Sun/HP/AIX boxes. The video toaster on the Amiga did a lot of eye-candy video stuff really cheaply that the then expensive-ass "professional" grade video editors couldn't.
Anyway, I think you're ignoring the larger picture brought up by the original poster. That the distinctions between "ameteur" and "professional" are really quite meaningless and artificial. I'd even argue it's really a lot of marketing whooey. Anyone smart will ignore all that nonsense and buy the tool that gets the job done.
To give an example, currently I'm looking into getting some speakers. If you measure performance by the only fair way, accurate sound reproduction, the cheap $100 sony bookshelf speakers outperform $1400 Infinity super-dupers. For floorstanding speakers the $280 Sony's are equally as good as "great name" $1400 Bose.
(BTW, he's talking about 3.5 inch hard drives, not floppy disks. Many years ago those big databases you speak of were run on big honkin expensive ass drives, not small, inexpensive, 3.5 inch hard drives.)
They're about as pointless as an ostensibly professional-level graphics editing program without proper CMYK support.
I always here this complaint about Gimp, but I never really understand why people whine about this. Isn't CMYK only important if you're doing printing, as printing uses CMYK?
The designers I know basically just do website design. They use photoshop, mostly because it's the tool they're familiar with. But I don't really see a reason why they can't use Gimp if they had a decent reason to.
Has anyone thought of the possibility this is an IP ethernet printer, and it's firmware just isn't coded to tell the difference between IPv4 and IPv6 packets.
I thought of that exact possibility after I made my original post. It's a definite possibility, and from the little we know matches the data better than "Vista's IPV6 stack is broken". Personally I think putting out a big article saying "IPV6 on Vista is broken" before you really know anything is totally irresponsible.
Just because there's no scientific way to disprove creation
I'm not sure which creationism you're talking about, but I'm talking about the one where the earth is 6000 years old, there's no evolution, the whole flood thing, etc. That "theory" has been thoroughly dis-proven. That also happens to be the theory this museum is showcasing.
And even so, there's no reason not to study evolution, but there are massive gaping holes in evolutionary theory.
What gaping holes are those?
We may eventually prove evolution is how we all got here, and we may never do so.
Proof is a term used in mathematics. It doesn't have a whole lot of applicability to science. Currently there's an enormous amount of evidence that evolution is correct. There may be some particulars that we don't fully understand, but that has no bearing on if evolution is correct or not.
PS. By way of comparison, belief in the possibility of extra-terrestrial life (despite a complete lack of hard evidence at this time) has become much more mainstream of late among scientifically minded people
The difference is we know that life exists, we know it arises spontaneously, we know intelligence arises spontaneously, and we know there's a LOT of other planets. That's not HARD evidence, but it's certainly evidence that intelligence life might exist. I wouldn't bet any money on it though.
We have no evidence to support creationism, and a lot of evidence that it's totally wrong. Do you really have to wonder why scientifically minded people are open to a theory that's possible and has some evidence to support it, and openly hostile to a "theory" that all the evidence points against?
Not to be overly pedantic, but carbon dating coal is kind of useless.
I know all that, but to debunk this theory we don't need an answer of millions years, we just need to know it's substantially older than 6000 years. I'm not sure exactly how far back you can go with carbon dating, but I'm quite sure it's a hundred thousand or more. In other words, giving an answer of "it's older than x hundred thousand years old" is way more than enough to destroy the creationist argument.
I don't know what to do. I fully believe in Voltaire's classic quotation on freedom of speech and belief. But in this instance, I find myself thoroughly unwilling to defend the "Creation Museum's" right to make up whatever crazy "facts" they want. It's the first time I find myself wanting to "think of the children" who may very well grow up into the willfully ignorant bible beaters that are founding this "museum."
Well, I think the problem we have here is not one of messages, but lack of critical thought. The creationists can get a foot in the door here because for a long time we've taught science as a series of facts and "convincing arguments", and left the whole critical thought thing by the wayside.
To give an example, why do you believe the creationist arguments are nonsense? I'd hope it's because you can say something like "well, we have an enormous amount of evidence the earth is billions of years old like the mid-atlantic ridge and alternating rock with different magnetic reversals. Also we can carbon date coal and find out it's a LOT older than a few thousand years. Therefore their arguments don't hold water"
I've got Vista, an IP based printer, and even IPV6 via a tunnel broker. I've had no problems with printing or any other network applications.
So I have to wonder, is this really an issue with Vista's IPV6, is it an issue with the driver writers, or is it a minor issue with Vista's implementation of the layer that supports IP printers?
The article seems to indicate "we turned off IPV6 and then it started working". Well that tells us a little, but it's hardly time to start blaming the IPV6 stack. There's quite a few different components that could be responsible. I had problems with Firefox on Ubuntu on my network, and was able to track it down to a faulty implementation of DNS on my DSL modem only under IPV6.
I wonder what makes it notable? Size? cost? speed?
High throughput, low latency. Don't know about cost.
It's basically the perfect hibernate cache that doesn't require power to maintain it's state, and will give near instant uptimes. You could also gain a bit from caching disk reads.
It seems a large enough main ram would invalidate this or even the mere presence of on chip cache.
RAM is volatile unless you constantly supply power. Because of this you can't rely on the information to still be their when you come back to a full power state.
Basically this little device would allow people to turn off their PC completely, and power it back up into a fully functional state. You can sort of do that now, but it means either maintaining a little power to the memory to maintain state, or spending an interminable time writing out to disk.
Of course, that means that driver writers need to actually support resuming from sleep, which many today don't properly support.
Venter isn't claiming a patent on the entire concept of synthetic life, he's claiming a patent on A synthetic life form. As the article says, patents on genetically modified life forms aren't anything new. What's new is this is a life form created entirely from scratch (or at least as much from scratch as you can get when you already know how other life works).
You're focusing too much on the question. The question is irrelevant and only serves to illustrate a point. I'm not doing a survey here, I'm trying to say what I believe "most people" want. "most people" just want to get whatever the task they're trying to accomplish done. Most of the time that means just doing what they've done before.
Imaging you have a huge medical database on several servers and are running out of disk space
Heh. The biggest mistake in the world I could make was run my database on a brand new filesystem, very likely unsupported by the DB vendor. Running out of disk space would be the least of my problems. Losing data and DB crashed from an untested, brand new filesystem would be a MUCH greater concern than the very foreseeable and easy to solve problem as adding disk space.
I've no doubt that ZFS or anything similar to it is a great solution. I just don't think it should be the default yet.
I guess I don't understand what you're really getting at here. But in my experience if you ask someone "hey, do you want all your software to "just work", or do you want this new feature with a decent chance you'll lose some data, or some programs won't work" "most people" will choose the stability.
It doesn't really matter if people are technical or not, if they read your little statement or not. What matters is knowing what most people desire and then providing that. The job of a software developer (in this case Apple) is to do just that so the user doesn't have to.
Are you kidding? This is ZFS we're talking about.
Right, I'm sure it won't wind up breaking some important application at the expense of adding a wiz-bang feature that 95% of the users couldn't care less about.
I'm not a Mac user, but even if I could (maybe I can) add ZFS to my Linux workstation I wouldn't. I prefer stable and reliable over untested new features. I think most people feel the same way, so making the default something else makes a lot of sense. If ZFS is as great as you say, it will eventually become the default, and anything it breaks that's important will have been fixed.
5:1 that it's not the default root file system in Leopard.
It would be foolish to make any new technology that touches so many other applications and parts of the OS the default when you don't have to. It's much smarter to make it an option and try to shake out any problems that arise. Then make it the default at a later date.