If the "occupy wall st" people added dissolution of the TSA to their agenda, I might join them at this point...

Obviously you are not running much in the way of windows guests. There are quite a few micro$oft products that require >= 1GB RAM to even install. Some require >=2GB now or more. Windows 7, SQL Server 2008R2, System Center and TMG Server come to mind as examples...

If the business uses automated acceptance testing, this would is not a big deal. Just run your test suite on the new version and you will know in short order if there is a problem. I think this is really what Mozilla is trying to say: use better development practices and you won't have an issue.

Simple: IPV6, while having more then "sufficient" address space, was poorly conceived, tries to do stuff it doesn't need to and lacks standardization of key items, such as the transition from legacy (IPV4) protocols. I for one would LOVE to see a more elegant, more complete solution that would allow us to quickly implement it and bypass the nightmare that is IPV6. It doesn't need to offer more address space, just implement that space in a way that makes it and the translation to it easy to understand and standardized so you can get some buy in from the world at large.

A Drobo is not really a "SAN". It's a NAS, only the DroboPro and Elite models even meet the minimum requirements of being a SAN...and those start at $2K. In any case, it's really a NAS that would be the appropriate solution for storing a large picture collection as mentioned in the article. That being said, my favorite NAS for home use (and some small business) is the Synology line of NAS products. They are incredibly fast for their price point and offer a rich set of features that should satisfy any home user. They are easy to setup and the software is pretty easy to use (unlike some other NAS products), and the exteriors are pleasing to the eye (important in a household like mine where the wife wants everything to look "nice"). The DS211 would be great for pictures. It takes two 3.5" disks so you can mirror your data to protect from disk failures and have 2TB of space to work with Transfer speeds are excellent and it will even act as an iSCSI target if you want be all high and mighty and call it a SAN. You can put together a DS211 with 2x 2TB drives for around $500,

As others have mentioned, backups should be part of the plan. My wife is a photographer and all images (personal and professional) go onto her laptop but are backed up to external disk or NAS immediately. At the end of each year she has me copy of all the pictures for the previous year to DVD at which time they are purged from the laptop. The DVD archives are kept in a fire safe along with our important documents. So there is always two copies of each image somewhere.

Having worked with sets of comparable cards from Fusion IO and OCZ (IOXtreme and Zdrive), I can give this assessment:

Neither card met the published performance numbers. But the Fusion I/O card came closer to it's published numbers then the OCZ card in basic benchmarks making the Fusion I/O card quite a bit faster for raw throughput. Both cards were blazingly fast though pushing MBps and IOps like no tomorrow.

Real world performance suffered greatly with the Fusion I/O cards due to their software driven architecture. The CPU overhead was significant, even on a powerful multi CPU Xeon server. The OCZ cards did not have this problem.
The Price/performance ratio in real world made OCZ the winner overall. The competition was closest when excluding CPU overhead, but once you include CPU overhead the OCZ cards win hands down.
Support was highly disappointing from Fusion I/O. With OCZ you expect minimal support, but I expected something better from the "premium" Fusion I/O brand (and price point). Unfortunately, their support was no better then OCZ.
We originally evaluated the original Zdrive model which was kindof a rough implementation of the technology. If you are going to buy one now, avoid the old Zdrives...there are several problems with their design. The new R2 Zdrives have fixed these problems and are sold at basically the same price point for similar specs.

We eventually returned the Fusion I/O cards due to their ridiculous CPU penalty. We still have the OCZ cards, but have stopped using them in favor of normal SAS controllers with hot swap SSD drives. It's just not convenient to shut down a server and crack open the case just to replace a failed SSD...and SSDs do fail:) At this point, PCIe SSD cards seem better suited to high end workstation applications where it's not as big of a deal to crack open the box for maintenance.

I would say the main reason it didn't start happening in 2005 is that IPV6 was/is over-complicated and tries to do too much beyond what is needed: a bigger address space. Why make the addresses so un-readable? Why not put a translation standard into the main standard instead of letting others come up with multiple non-compatible standards that to this day are not resolved? Why make it such a potential security nightmare? People like me hesitated to make any effort to use it because we hoped and prayed that something better structured would come along and we would be able to ignore IPV6. As it is, we are still not using IPv6 anywhere in our organization because (a) we still see no clear upgrade path after 6 years of it being a "standard", even though all of our stuff now technically support it and (b) our ISPs still don't support it...presumably due to (a).

I would have voted for Primes

Social programs just cause the population to become stagnant, unproductive and boring. Space programs encourage new technologies, new industries, promote productivity, and can be quite interesting. The "social programs spending" arguement is bunk.

Certain models of Adaptec controllers with recent firmware (since April 2010) support SSDs and platter drives on the same mirror array (RAID 1 or 10). The controller intelligently sends all reads to the SSD unless it goes offline. It's not at all an advertised feature, I have only ever seen mention of it in the firmware release notes. Note that this is not the same thing as what their "MAXIQ" product does, which is essentially add more cache to the controller in the form of a small SSD attached to one of the controller's ports.

While I am all for attempts to preserve history in general, I have to mention another perspective...

When we as a society become "packrats" and attempt to preserve every obscure product, prototype, document, and recording of things of the past, it dilutes the value of the things preserved overall. You get to a point where the volume of items is overwhelming to someone wishing to do legitimate historical research and the "collector" value from a monetary perspective is also diluted as the object becomes just "one of many examples surviving of this ____ (fill in the blank)." So I pose the question: "Might it actually be healthy for things of a bygone age to naturally 'decay' over time in to a more manageable and valuable sub-set?"

Parent has an excellent point. Utilization is not always about how full the disk is...especially in a data center where there is frequently large database operations requiring extreme amounts of IOPS. In the past, the answer was to throw "more spindles" at it. At which point you could theoretically end up with a 20GB database spread across 40 SAS disks making available ~1.5TB of space using the typical 73GB size disks just to reach the IOPS capacity needed to handle heavy update/insert/read operations. Huge waste of space, but only way to do it with spinning disks. SSDs of course can solve the problem, but most SAN vendors are still charging insane prices for what meager SSD options they offer, with some vendors not even offering SSD options yet. And then you can end up on the other end of the scale, with having to buy more IOPS capacity then you need just to get enough SSD space for your data. Adaptec has some cool technology for "hybrid" arrays consisting of both SSDs and spindle disks in the same array (I have heard the latest versions of Solaris can do this with ZFS too). But the applications for Hybrid arrays are somewhat limited because write performance still sucks once any available write cache is saturated (and especially if the controller/software array has no cache).

The number of cores and the speed per core becomes vitally important when you start doing virtualization. Since Windows 7 has this out of the box and Macs use it all over the place and everybody and their cousin are running VMware (or insert your favorite VM environment here), yes, I think alot of people care. That's not even starting to talk about the server space where almost everything is virtualized these days and more cores can mean more VMs (especially on Hyper-V).

I don't want to leave the enthusiasts out, so I will just say for their benefit that seeing all those core graphs lined up in task manager is a major rush and should not be discounted as users look to buy processors (though I guess Intel has that covered with "hyper-threading":P

How about establishing "jurisdiction" for software patent cases. It seems stupid to me that they get to cherry pick courts just because it's difficult to say "where" the problem happened. Jurisdiction should be well defined for these types of cases, such as going to the court presiding over the locality the copyrite/patent owner resides (in the case of corporate entities, the locale of their primary place of business [IE: Corporate office location]). And all other courts can/must say "not my problem [Jurisdiction]". Establishing "shared" court facilities to allow plaintiffs and defendants to attend hearings and present evidence "remotely" as the parent mentioned would complete the picture.

There are several on ebay right now. Just search for "iped".