Here in Belgium the rule of thumb is 30 years before you need major renovations, typically including a new roof, kitchen, heating, windows, ... Some parts may last a little longer with proper maintenance, but like you say technology gets outdated too.

We bought a 40 years old house and basically stripped it down to the walls. The electric installation was minimal, in the bedrooms there was just one socket each. Otherwise it was outright dangerous.

Or just the classical scaling issues when adding more cores and more threads, such that the threads are waiting for each other on locks. It's usually worse because multi core processors are typically clocked slower. So you have more threads but they execute slower each, causing the lock to be held longer by each thread, causing more lock contention...

Sun changed to ZFS as the default file system in one of their last Solaris 10 updates. I can't believe they would do that if it wasn't completely ready according to them.

Over here almost everybody has a laptop. The recommendation is to take it home every day, the alternative is to put it in your locker. Don't leave it on your desk because security will confiscate it because it might be stolen otherwise. Everybody knows how safe Kensington locks are (not at all). If you really need overnight jobs to run you can still get a fixed desktop pc next to your laptop. Guess how many computers don't get turned off at night? On top of that it's more efficient in every single way. Laptops use less energy, you can carry them with you in meetings (wifi rules), we can work from home over vpn when it suits you and so on. They're not that much more expensive compared to desktops either.

Don't tell us you're reading /. from home, we don't believe you. That will cost you at least 10 minutes a day as well...

Way easier to manage: only 2 commands! While now with an LVM you have to place your disks in the desired topology inside your LVM (RAID0, 1, 5, ...), format them, put a filesystem on, mount, file check, repair, whatever. With zfs you place disks in your pool and kinda mount part of it, that's it.

There are some other things you could complain about: it makes less sense on hardware RAIDs with good management tools. They missed a chance to make it a distributed or clusterable file system (though they bought Lustre lately, who knows) and it's not possible to boot from it yet, but all in all it's a major step forward.