Price is alway an issue. You are using the space so you should invest in decent storage capacity. I personally spin about 15 SATA drives off of a single raid card.

I recomend the following:
Build a decent NAS head with the following recipe and share it out to all your other devices.

buy a 4U case with ~ 20 drive bays that link to a SATA bus ~$300 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811219041)
                -You may need to mod the case if the port multiplier is SAS instead if SATA
buy a high point RAID controller in the 2000 class or higher (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115049) (32 drives max with 4 port port multipliers and mini sas - 4 sata cable)
Start with 4x 2TB drives (RAID 5, 3 + hot spare)
1 gigabit ethernet hub

then attach it to a cheap cpu with a good amount of ram and gigabit ethernet. Stick the storage kit in the garage and run cat 6. Put the hub in the house and wire it to any machine playing back HD video, for the rest I find you can get away with wireless G.

You are looking at about a 1K investment in kit for storage. For OS I'd use your favorite flavor of linux, gentoo for me but I recomend deb or ubuntu for other people, that supports lvm. This way you can add new drives and expand the storage dynamically. You can expand ext3 or ext4 easilly, you just can't shrink them. In my opinion there no need to go exotic with the FS.

Once you set up the storage share is both via nfs to anything playing high def content and samba for everyone else. Then sit back, relax and enjoy.

I have a G2 on T-Mobile. Put cyanogen on it and use any carrier. That does involve rooting the phone, but if you buy a phone fro mthier list of supported devices its really really easy.
http://www.cyanogenmod.com/

-Darkseer

The funny part is, that as written there is nothing wrong with the statement:

"Calling R a programming language is like calling Mathematica or Matlab a language. ..."

Since by strict definition they are Turing Complete. So yes R is equivalent to Mathlab and Mathmatica, they are programming languages. I'm inferring by inflection that this isn't what the author intends say.

If I understand the intent of the original comment, the statement aptly show the difference between those use use programming languages and people who know what they are and how they work. Hobbes' and slashdotmsiriv's comments have the flavor of people who have written or know much about a programming languages internals. daknapp appears to be saying "This doesn't look like anything I've used, must not be a programming language".

"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." -- Abraham Lincoln

I did my senior project in college on this in 1998... At that time I was looking at something from MIT called the exo-kernel and comparing it to some 2.4 version of the linux kernel. Back in 1998 the problem was mainly that nobody had invested in that particular mirco-kernel technology, unlike say mach, because it was a research project. In my conclusion, it was clear I could not do a meaningful comparison of complex applications on both OSes due to its lack of maturity. But there was one thing that was clear, the design philosophy behind the micro kernel allowed a much more flexible way to interact with the hardware.

The time it would take to design an implement a what the equivalent of driver would be were smaller. In the end it puts more flexibility into the hands of the application designer with the kernel taking care of just the bare minimum. The initial work at the time reported a 10x improvement in performance since you could customize so much of how the hardware resources were being used. This of course comes at a price, in addition to developing the application, you need to develop the drivers it uses, possibly increasing the time to write anything significant.

But in the end, flexability was key, and you can see some of the microkernel design philosophies start to seep into the linux kernel. Take a look at kernel modules for example. The code is already being abstracted out, now if it just effectively was designed to run in userspace.

My thoughts are that in the end the microkernel will win do to the fact that I can engineer a more complex OS that is cheaper to change, not because it is faster. Tis is the compromise that was made with compilers vs. machine language programming. In the end I think Tanenbaum will win, linux will become a microkernel out of necessity, and Linus as it turns out would have gotten a good grade from Dr. Tanenbaum. He just would have handed his final project in 40 years late by the time it happens.