What format are these drives in? Are they flash drives formatted in FAT32... great plug them all into a powered USB hub and share the files... no, well... bummer.

Are they stand alone ZFS pools? Great, drop them into your ZFS SAN and mount the zpool and share away... no, well... bummer.

What file system are they presented in? Could be anything... if it's Plan9 9P then maybe we can say sure what the heck... anything else and you're going to have to be a bit more specific.

For point of reference, I have two SAN systems at work. One is very fast, 4TB and runs on OpenIndiana and uses ZFS for our database and email servers. It takes several minutes to bring all disks online and be fully functioning. These are flash disks and it has 128GB of ram. It's screaming fast but has lots and lots of small disks. It cost $24K and is made for crazy speeds (saturates two 10GBe links and handles 120k IOs read/write simultaneously no problem).

The big SAN is 40TB and boots in about one minute to a useful state and starts bringing disk online with 10 minutes. It cost $2.5 million and is about the size of a minivan. It's made for gigantic simultaneous IO and 5 nines of availability and has dozens of easily removable drives and is extremely tolerant of hot swapping.

Be more specific OP.

I said 35K LESS. I used to make 80K. I also have all the debt of someone at that level (about $1400/mth just in debt). A typical Googler pay is around $125k plus. They are at the top of the pay scale. So 50% for 10 years would be $625k PLUS whatever life insurance they had. At that income level I would expect at least $1 million.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/end-of-life-financial-study-0803.html

Most Americans die with less than $10,000 in assets. Typical life insurance pays less than $250,000 and hardly anything outside of government employees get pensions anymore. Even then, pensions aren't safe as several have been wiped out due to the 2008 stock market crash or through bankruptcy. 401k personal retirement funds are the norm or most people and they have tax benefits along with 25% - 100% matching funds from your employer but more and more people either cannot afford to pay into them or are actively borrowing against them. After 2 years of unemployment, my 401k is empty.

I am 40, employed with a very shaky job at $35k less than I was making before and no retirement, no health care, and am racking up debt to pay for more college as I try to get a masters degree to be more employable. My plan is to GTFO of the US and go some place where quality of life is the focus and not on corporate profits... Mars, maybe?

Very well thought out and informative. Thank you!

IT does nothing.. and I mean NOTHING... without it being crammed down our throats by management, legal, or regulatory departments. We would rather get back to playing CoD or Warcraft and considering our pay has been on average slashed by half in the last 8 years, that's all the living we get any more.

Two network discovery and self documenting systems. NetDisco is (if you can set it up) fantastic for tracking changes made per port.
http://www.netdisco.org/
http://www.observium.org/wiki/Main_Page

I'll stick to Eiffel.. thank you very much ;-)

I turned off the cable years ago... anything good on besides Mad Men and Game of Thrones?

As my former Special Night Squad grandpa used to tell me... "talk is cheap and so is a petrol bomb". The idea being that politicians should be reminded from time to time who is really in charge.

Not that I am advocating anything today (or hopefully for a long time if ever), but this nation has a pretty darn long history of getting violent when push comes to shove. There is a reason why personal weapons and ammo sales are through the roof right now and it isn't the coming zombie apocalypse.

It's OUR country and OUR job to look after OUR own interests through the democratic process. Those whackjobs we send to the legislature are OUR representatives in the process.

You want to point a finger, point it at yourself.

Microsoft SQL server is a fine product but like Oracle gets real expensive real fast...

OpenBravo POS and LemonPOS are both great open source POS solutions that have commercial support available. Also, Xymon can be used to monitor windows and/or linux service or executables, notify on downtime and restart or perform other scripted operations.

http://www.openbravo.com/product/pos/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lemonpos/
http://xymon.sourceforge.net/

NOD32 from ESET is cheap and works without crushing your computer.

Collusion plugin for Chrome/Safari from Disconnect.me blocks all known trackers. Since using it for a while, I have noticed a disappearance of eerily targeted ads in Google searches, etc.

Purdue was first in 1962... and no I'm not THAT old and I didn't have to RTFA. I went there.