I use a HP Microserver N40L as a NAS. It's way cheaper to purchase than decent 4 drive dedicated NAS appliance. It's more powerfull and does not use much energy. I bought mine for about €200,- without disks . It uses about 14 Watt without disks booting from USB. With the high electricity prices here (€0.23 per kWh) I expect to spend in 4 years 4x365x24x0.014x0.23= €112,- on energy on the system. So in total that is €312,-. That total is still less than the purchase price alone of a decent 4 bay NAS which will still not give me the same performance. Installing OpenMediaVault or FreeNAS is about as much work as configuring a dedicated NAS (Next, next, finnish).

I installed 4 WD20EARX disks for €84,- per piece. This increases the power usage to about 40 Watts active. So the disks are the biggest component in price and energy usage and that will be the same with a NAS. Performance is great I can saturate a 1Gbps ethernet link nicely if the device requesting the data is fast enough.

But if you want to make this analogy correct it it should be something like:
Customer to Bill: That weld is bad.
Bill to Customer: No, you're looking at it wrong.
Supervisor overhearing this and after inspecting the weld: Bill, STFU and grind it out and redo. It's absolutely one of the worst welds I've ever seen. And don't be an arsehole to our customer.
Bill to supervisor: Sorry boss. I'm doing my best and wonder why the bottom being cold would be a problem.
Supervisor to Bill: You know that a cold weld won't handle load and can cost lives. But what pissed me off the most is the way you handled our customer when he was right.

Well, I know people who use FreeNAS which is based on FreeBSD. I think the thought behind the BSD license is telling. It basically says you can take the code and nothing in return is expected, which is exactly what they get.

Disney is able to produce great movies, like the first "Pirates of the Caribbean", "The Avengers", and others. Any Star Wars movie without Mr. Lucas involved has to be greeted with a new hope!

FTFY

How long before we see a T-shirt with Mickey holding a light saber and the text below it:
Minnie, I am your father.....

While I agree that there are talented Windows administrators just as there are talented Linux administrators the rest of that paragraph is nonsense. The concepts differ significantly between the two operating systems once you look further than the "OS manages hardware resources and provide services" part. And you will not be fine one a more than trivial setup by just reading the books and following best practices. In fact, in my opinion that is one of the things that makes the difference between a mediocre administrator and a good one. The good administrator has a good insight in why things are best practice and knows when to deviate from them while a mediocre one just follows the rules. And a good Windows administrator is just as scarce and will cost you about the same as a good Linux administrator. But with the Windows administrator you get the added cost of licenses.

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When we had an RFP for new network equipment Cisco's proposal was twice the price of the next bid. In the end Juniper won the contract. Of all the proposals only the party offering Avaya/Nortel made a judgement error and ignored a few requirements which they could have fulfilled with a bit more expensive kit and still come out as the winner. The requirements were pretty high but not impossible. We had proposals with kit from Cisco, Avaya/Nortel, H3C, Juniper and Alcatel.

If the price for the Cisco proposal was not a real price one wonders why they submit a proposal at all. Writing the proposal costs money and if they submit a f-you quote they know the will get nothing in return.

Alas the hardware video decoding on the A10 allwinner has been problematic. The XBMC team want(ed) to make a native port to the A10 and found the library to access the cedar video decoding hardware is broken. There has been an effort to solve this but despite commitment from Alwinner there has been no progress. See also http://www.j1nx.nl/xbmc-allwinner-a10-apologies-received-accepted/

Also broadcast storms can really wreak havoc on the cloud.

Well, the actual price would be about 15,- euro per 1GB if you can believe their reseller at http://www.europe-satellite.com/EMS/webshop/online_tooken01.htm. But Avanti is not the first, Tooway has been providing a similar service for several years now.

If you can detect indvidual raindrops, I suspect detecting a marble sized radar target flying near or over the speed of sound is no problem whatsoever. While this radar is probably too big to put in a fighter a datalink from a ground based version to the fighter will solve that problem quite nicely.

I totally agree with the Juniper EX licensing issue. Why is there a difference between OSPF and OSPFv3 ? I could understand if an advanced license was needed for both or for none of them but the split is just awkward.

Not yet in North America. However in the Asia Pacific region you're out of luck. If an ISP there runs out of addresses, and in China they do, they have to NAT and/or provide IPv6. Now I grant you that the west doesn't use many Chinese webservices. But Australia is in the same boat. So in the not so distant future you will find yourself unable to use some Australian webservices if you don support IPv6.
Also the BGP tables will reach 512k entries within two years. As this is the maximum for hardware forwarding tables in many (older) routers be prepared for an IPv4 slowdown as these routers will forward IPv4 traffic over the slow path. Or unreachable sites as ISP's will start to filter all prefixes longer than /24 to prevent supervisors from overloading.

The nice status of IPv4 can be found at http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html
 

You mean you want to implement the DANE proposal ?
Well, you just have to wait a bit till NSSEC is widely deployed and the proposal ratified. But the protocols are already on paper.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-dane-protocol/

But I'll pass until it can print BGA's. Seriously, for the complexity it can do now a breadboard is better suited.