>Of course I'm coming at this from the point of view of a user who wants
>100% reliability and error handling in the storage subsystem, and I
>don't care if that means forcing me onto newer and more trustworthy
>hardware.

I'm also for reliability and error handling ... as much as the current
hardware allows.  Not everyone can go out and buy new hardware when
a new rev of the OS comes out.  (I'm in that class.)  So we must work
at making use of the new hardware without making the OS quit working
on the older hardware.  New features may not be available on old 
hardware, but the OS should still be able to function with the 
improvements that can be used by the hardware.

This is a one of the reasons I use NetBSD ... because it runs on most
current PC hardware and on a lot of older machines.  So I only need
to know one OS to support the variety of machines I have.

-- 
Phil Nelson                    NetBSD: http://www.netbsd.org
e-mail: phil@cs.wwu.edu        !gifs: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html
http://www.cs.wwu.edu/~phil