You say you checksum EVERYTHING. I wonder what type of intel i3 processor supports ECC? From what I know, only intel xeon processors support ECC. Of course all amd processors support ECC and many cheap amd compatible motherboards do also. I bought a 3 core amd processor, a motherboard and 4gb of ECC ram for under $200, over a year ago. How reliable can a huge disk array be without ECC memory for the cpu?

Perhaps the AC Propulsion parts are expensive. That is what happens when you build in quantities of 1 to 10 at a time. Perhaps they aren't identical. Again, they don't do large scale manufacturing. I have driven most of their cars, starting with the Honda CRX, forward, except the E-box and the t-zero (though I have ridden in it). They have been building electric cars for close to 20 years. They have invented siginficant techonolgy. Has tesla? It is a stretched lotus with a modified AC Propulsion drivetrain. It is well marketed and financed. BTW, you get much better regenerative braking when you use front wheel drive, though perhaps less sports car performance.

Why license the technology from tesla when the motor and motor controller tech is based on the AC Propulsion design?

I wrote a simple python program that does file based disk de-duplication. It will work anywhere python runs as long as the filesystem supports hard links.

It is available under gpl at: http://jdeifik.com/

With the hardware solutions in the article, prices start at $25k or so, and you are beholden to the hardware vendor. Doing it in software will work with any reasonable OS, any reasonable filesystem, and any hardware. Sure, block based de-duplication is more efficient, but it is filesystem specific, and right now ZFS is the only somewhat reasonable filesystem that supports it.

I think you are clueless when you say "Generally his ideas aren't taken very seriously by academia in Computer Science".
Lets list what he invented:
Decent optical character recognition.
Text to speech synthesis.
Speech recognition.
CCD flatbed scanner.
High quality music synthesizers.

All of these inventions were quite innovative, commercial successful, and revolutionized the ideas of what AI was. I think any real computer scientist would take these quite seriously.

He got a PHD from CMU in CS, which is likely the best college for CS.

He invented the scribe text formatting language.

He invented the router, which became the first cisco router.

He co-founded what eventually became Adobe.

While at DEC, he and his group invented the altavista search engine.

There is more, but he clearly has serious computer science talents and vision.

I am a tiny bit off on the timeline. The motto was 'Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970'. See http://www.islandone.org/Propulsion/ProjectOrion.html

Actually, if we would have funded Project Orion, we would have gone to Saturn in the early 1960's. See http://www.ted.com/talks/george_dyson_on_project_orion.html among other references.

I built a bittorent server using an old pentium III M chip. It uses 17 watts AC at idle, including an external 2.5 inch hard drive. The upside is it is very quiet, low power, and can run any distro. The only downside is it doesn't have ECC memory, but as far as I know, no laptop does, and neither do any very low power computer. It has a dvd drive, and thanks to a notebook card, USB2. It doesn't have gigabit ethernet, but it supports a standard PS/2 keyboard, mouse, and VGA external video, so I can use a KVM switch to control it.

You can read about my quest for a low power bittorrent server at http://www.weasel.com/comp_server.html#bit2

You need to name the retailer. Some retailers are great, and some suck. I have reviewed many, explaining the details of my dealings with them.

You also need to name the NAS and what is wrong with it. The way the internet works, everyone gets to benefit from the experiences of others. Saying some nameless NAS sucks doesn't help anyone else. Saying XYZ NAS sucks because of a, b, and c means something.

On my personal web site, I have details of my dealings with many computer hardware and software vendors. Some are really good, and some are really sucko. I had some serious problems with Netgear, and someone else read about it and asked Netgear why their support was so bad, and not getting a decent answer, ended up getting $10k of gear from a different vendor.

If you want to see all my computer related reviews and comments, check out http://www.weasel.com/comp.html

Woo hoo!

I didn't know seagate had any 1gb usb freeagent disks. Or perhaps you mean 1tb...