Mini rant: sda vs hda

[Bruce Marshall]

On Saturday 28 July 2007, Michael Hipp wrote:
> Just installed my first copy of Ubuntu "Feisty", previous work had all
> been in "Dapper" or older. Kernel = 2.6.20.something.
>
> Why on earth are all my ancient PATA IDE drives now referred to as
> /dev/sda ?
>
> Who should I blame for this silliness? Shuttleworth or Torvalds?

I think it would be Torvalds....   but why is this such a big problem?