Bank balance £3.50

Can I borrow some please?

All you need to do is find 2,048 equally wealthy people, and you can all timeshare on it. For roughly 4 hours every year each .

Im looking at the new MBA, I think perhaps I may look into getting an 11" one to replace my old MacBook...I had a play with one in Cardiff yesterday and they are really quite nice.

Also, I think I may look at getting a Mac Mini in the future to replace my monster of a server (it only really dishes out files, no need for much oomph). But that'll have to wait until I can afford some Thunderbolt storage for 5TB of data my server is currently holding...

I have been giving the mac Mini a look. I might have two tasks that would be excellent to do on a mac mini. I will have to think how exactly it will work, especially if I can avoid getting a screen. Either using one of my imacs screen simultaneously or some other way.

If it's primarily a file server, then do you really want to pay for a fancy OS and shiny little box that then needs a pile of external drives? I'd have thought something more designed for the job would be better. I'm considering building a RAID 5 box with 4 1.5TB drives into the smallest box I can find, Atom powered and will probably cost less than a mini without the external drives...

Yes I had a look at the specs and it is only a Core 2 Duo and max 1Tb with 2x500 Gb drives, and very pricey at that. So not for me.

Currently I have a cheap, low end C2D in my file server (when I first built it I only had a laptop so thought of using it for virtualisation),
It started life running some pre-release version of OpenSolaris, and has been slowly upgraded to running OpenIndiana, but I just don't play with it enough (then again, servers are like erections, if you play with them while they're up, they'll go down...)
A Mac Mini server, while expensive, would give me a nice and familier GUI to admin it with.

I may yet look at Linux, but having used something at work (can't remember the distro) I've been unimpressed with the tie between GUI and command line stuff (connecting to a samba share was a good one - got a GUI to to it wonderfully, but it would only mount the smb share in my home directory and only give me access Still took weeks of rummaging to find the correct arguments to put in /etc/fstab).

An very techy acquaintance raves about Haiku. It is a new linux distro but very fast. In fact last time they had a boot competition booting from off two linux distros. Haiku won. Under a couple of seconds though both machines had SSD.

Last I heard about Haiku (about a year and a half ago) it was still quite experimental...
I've got two major bug bears with Linux: One is (funnily enough) the elitism you get almost anywhere, users seem to look down on you while you are still learning the ropes. Two, things are different to the way I've worked on other OS's, Solaris and OS X aren't that far apart in terms of the command line and how some of the things work underneath.

I've somewhat set my mind on an OS X home server now, not sure how easy it'll be for me to change my mind...

Well the advantage of OSX is that you can get a lot of support from Apple, Mac User Groups and I have not noticed any elitism along the lines of Linux.

While Mac users as a group are often labelled with fanboyism and elitism (which isn't necessarily a lie), Mac devs and sys admins do seem more willing to part with their knowledge than their Linux counterparts...

Maybe it's their way of justifying paying much more than a PC would cost? While my iMacs were expensive they look better than the vast majority of PC's. And in the lower risks of malware and I think that the price is more reasonable.