The only question is when does it happen and who will lose out because of it.
The really important question is what would have happened if there wasn't a coordinated effort to help the "correct" fork?
The longer one would have won.
No. A majority of miners
cannot effect a change in protocol rules.
A hard fork like this would require the
intentional support of a majority of merchants.
Short of an emergency, that means everyone will be given at least 2 years to upgrade.
2 years according to who? Luke jr who is maintaining the older clients?
There are major advancements in version 0.8 and there is no reason that anyone should be wasting CPU and hard disk cycles when 0.8 is actually functional and older versions can't even keep up with the block chain. If 0.8 had been released 6 months ago, and we had twice as many people on 0.8, the scenario that might have played out would have been upgrade to version 0.8 because the only pools left on previous versions might just have been you lukey.
I don't see where it has been pointed out anywhere else, but it looks like it was slush's pool that made the original block at 225430. Then also had 5 more orphaned blocks. There were many blocks around 500 KB, it's the one at 974 KB that choked it.
So is anything over 250 soft limit not safe, or not over 500, or not over? Or has that not been determined yet?