Archive for March, 2011

Thoughts on Fukushima Daiichi

Sunday, March 20th, 2011

Yet again, people have heard erroneous and/or misleading and/or sensationalized warnings about a set of unfortunate events befalling a complicated and potentially dangerous system. (“A lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes”, attributed to Twain). Today it happens to be Fukushima Daiichi.

Yet again, it is the solemn duty ;) of those who took care to inform themselves as best they could, to reassure people: “It’s fine. Things aren’t going right, but it’s not going to be the end of the world. It’s not that big a deal.” The refrain is as old as technology and technologists.

Sidebar: Sometimes this backfires. Sometimes calm is advised in actual emergencies that require immediate response. Sometimes the original sentiment cools and lithifies into reactionaryism. The ongoing debate over climate change comes to mind.

Just some thoughts. I’m reading Anathem, so my mental and philosophical models of Technology are being violently spun around and shaken.

On a lighter note:

Unit 1 at Fukushima Daiichi was originally scheduled for shutdown this week (before a Feb extension for another decade). Like the cop’s partner in a crime drama’s first act: “Why did it have to be Simmons who took that bullet tonight, Chief? He was two weeks away from retirement.”

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Why You Don’t Want ZFS on Mac OS X

Wednesday, March 16th, 2011

Scott told me yesterday about a company bringing Sun’s ZFS filesystem to Mac OS X, picking up where Apple left off.

To be honest, I don’t understand why someone would try porting ZFS now. What Apple offered wasn’t just a new filesystem. Users don’t care about filesystems: they are a technical detail. Instead, Apple would change Mac OS X, across the whole system, to take the best advantage of the new capabilities and guarantees ZFS offers.

“Time Machine 2″ with ZFS’s cheap easy snapshots. A new default policy to set copies=2 on important folders like ~/Documents and ~/Library/Mail – better protection for users’ data, with zero effort. Every FireWire or USB hard disk would become as smart as a Drobo. And so on. Apple would do what they always do with new technology: turn an uninteresting detail into a series of small and large fixes and features that directly improve the Mac OS X experience for all users.

Instead, this new port will be just another entry in a list of filesystems most people don’t use. The system at large won’t do anything differently to take advantage of ZFS. To get any real benefit, users will have to study ZFS and figure out how to apply it to their system. That limits it to users technically competent enough to just use Solaris or Linux.

The worst news is that this port will become a support nightmare. 10.7 will come out soon. Apple puts zero effort into maintaining compatibility for low-level system modifications. So, 10.7 will probably break ZFS. The developers will scramble to fix it. Some users will lose data in the confusion. Two years later, 10.8 will come out. It will probably break ZFS. And so on.

For those who choose ZFS on Mac OS X, the question remains: What problem are you solving? What data do you have that’s so important that you want the durability guarantees and administration capabilities of ZFS, but so unimportant that you don’t mind the unreliability and future integration worries of a filesystem your OS vendor already decided they don’t want to support?

Thanks to my Dad for the Question.

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