ahem, I don't mean to be pedantic but you've got a semantic error in your summary.

They own motarola now so why compete with the Xoom; which as an owner I am happy with.

Diesel engines are simple and need to be built more ruggedly to withstand the additional pressures. This also makes them more durable and who wants to sell a car that will run for 20 years?

make a closet, get two peices of 2"x2" angle aluminium, drill your holes, get self taping screws and firmly bolt it to your closet frame. Cantilever your equipment; just avoid heavy long 1u equipment. Option 2, go to a computer recycler, I can get a full sun rack for $150.

I was given a p4 optiplex desktop which I am using for my fileserver. I have a pair of 1.5tb disks and a pair of 2tb disks in mirrors running freeNAS on a usb thumbdrive. The optiplex is great because is quiet, fast enough and the case conveniently fits 4 drives(and free). I have a cheap 4 sata card for the drives and I splurged on a decent intel gigabit nic after couple other cheap ones with no luck (asus and dlink I believe). If you do the thumbdrive thing, make sure and buy two and dd the contents over, one failed on me and now I have to manually manage my raid via cli. Of course this does not protect me from myself, but I haven't lost too much due to my own stupidity. I used to have a larger fileserver with all sorts of little drives, but I replaced them with a couple big ones and I'm much happier for it. Lots of people swear by drobos. One person I know plugs a decent usb drive into his hacked router. Rsnapshot is good for automatic incremental backups.

lets say we did exist in such an Orwellian society where this could happen; encrypted communications would be made to mimic existing systems, such as skype or youtube.

I worked 10-12 hours per day 10-18 days in a row as a skilled construction worker in the Oil Sands of Alberta Canada. My government and union invested in me to get the small amount of training required for the position. Some companies import foreign workers who will work for less, but they also make more mistakes which can be very very expensive. I lived in remote camps, I was attentive and always ready to work. I was paid $90k in my first 10months. What this article is describing is an American problem, not a western one. Train your youth in trades and technical certs. It will pay itself back with bucket fulls of income tax.

I never noticed any of this /w dedup and compress on. it chugged along and responded just fine. Manual "memory tuning" is not required, my 5tb file server w/ 48gb ram has no problem addressing memory whenever it wants /wo any tuning. ZFS is a beast, regardless of os or hardware but that is the point. You don't get bit loss protection, ram caching, compression or de-dup hash tables for free.

I wasn't very scientific with my testing but I don't think duplicates were any faster. I believe the bottleneck is the CPU (a single $500 xeon). I am mostly interested in read speeds which were more or less unaffected. Capacity, bit rot protection and ease of array management(zfs labels drives for easy importing) are also very nice features.

I put 48gb in it. Ram is cheap. I have yet to see it "wire" more then half that, but I am slowly deploying it.

ZFS v28 not a highlight? I just finished testing a 5tb Freebsd 9.0rc2 Supermicro server. ZFS v28 adds de-duplication and a removes rather nasty failure when an intent log device is removed. It also had built in support for the LSI HBA controller card I used, which made installation much easier. We'll save at least %40 with compression and de-dup but it does half write speeds with our xeon 5600(200MB/s down to 80MB/s) .

Thats good to hear, to bad I didn't find those guys a couple years ago.

I tried a cheap $5/month vps for a while, it was trouble. First they falsely claimed that I was maxing out my transfer limit and I switched to linode after a bunch of os files became corrupted. I haven't had an issue with linode and a few of my friends use them. Also 128mb a bit inconvenient for most things(watch out for orphaned ssh sessions chewing up ram at 5mb each).

I like Lenovo SL410/Ubuntu/SSD combo; cheap, rugged, simple and fast.