This is what I am looking into to make myself more marketable... http://www.scs.northwestern.edu/program-areas/graduate/predictive-analytics/

Why IT doesn't have state licensure is bizarre to me. Engineers, nurses, doctors, architects, accountants, lawyers, actuaries, etc. all have licensing that gives some protections why don't we? I know my mom, aunt, and ex wife have all had instances (on a weekly basis) where they have been asked/demanded/bullied to risk patient lives in the name of cutting a few corners (they are all nurses) and the only thing they could fall back on was the law and the risk they would lose their license.

Slashdot has always been a comfortable port in the storm of the IT world for me. As a contractor for nearly 20 years, I worked mostly alone with no one to speak geek to. You were always there.

I was testing out and as soon as I saw ads popping up, I moved to Mint (after a brief and very painful visit to Fedora).

You could have some fun with this: http://www.raith.com/?xml=solutions%7CSEM+%26+FIB+lithography+kits%7CELPHY+MultiBeam

This is very different from 3G where Qualcomm was the major developer. QComm still has a ton of LTE patents, but Samsung hold 819 of its own. Apple owns 434 patents (44 they developed themselves, the rest they own either through Freescale or in a consortium with Microsoft when they bought out Nortel). Because of all of the litigation over 3G, none of the developers are allowing cash only deals (Qualcomm is famous for this stance... they're an IP company). They all require cross licensing to stop the lawsuits. So far, Apple is the only major to refuse. They have a gigantic bullseye painted on them because of their actions in the OEM market. Basically, they are Microsoft in the 1990's. Pure, vicious, evil. Shame... they make a hell of a good product.

My phone came with 2.2 and I have upgraded all the way to the latest Jelly Bean. Here's a hint: only buy Samsung or straight from Google. Maybe Motorola will finally stop being jerks now that Google owns them and have an upgrade path, but my next device will be a Nexus 7 straight from Google.

In other news former CTO of Intel who has huge amounts of stock options says Intel chips are awesome! Seriously though, our tiny little SAN maxes out 8 Xeon cores and 16 GB of ram while running less than 30 heavy VMs (80,000 IOs on average). I don't see ARM in this space for a while.

Too late, EMC, we have already discovered KVM and are happily running on it.

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!