About the history and feasability of moving data centers out of Manhattan:

I am not an expert on this, but Wall St has been a datacenter hub because it has always been an information hub. There has always been a huge telecom demand down there, because there has always been a huge information demand down there. From telegrams, ticker tapes, masses of traders on phones, to bloomberg terminals, to exchanges sending quotes out, there has always been a big demand for data lines down there- I am using data lines generically, because we are talking technology spanning back to the 1900s. So when the first data centers were being built, lower Manhattan was a natural location. It actually made financial sense for a time, as running lines used to be really expensive, and there were major telco facilities based in lower Manhattan.

Of course things have changed, connectivity has gotten way cheaper, to the point where proximity is no longer very important, especially from an economic standpoint. On top of that, 9/11, and to a greater extent the blackout of 2003, made companies realize that having geographical diversity is really important.

So yeah, not only is it feasible to move datacenters out of Manhattan, it is happening, and preferred. Its much cheaper and easier to build out in suburbs and exurbs. However, partly because these facilities already exist in Manhattan, and partly because a good Business Continuity Plan also has data centers in close proximity to your main offices, there are still data centers downtown. My firm is running at reduced capacity for some specific processes due to a data center under water, and at least as of yesterday was running some on generator power, but we are fully functioning. I am sure there is an infra guy right now who is regretting on a micro level the usage of this particular facility due to its placement and vulnerability (though I know this building houses machines from many firms, and I am not sure how easy it is to find data center space in Manhattan), but having a facility in Manhattan is part of the BCP.

High Frequency Trading doesn't really play a part in this btw. The stuff running in our data centers in Manhattan is mundane stuff. HFT requires you to be close to the exchange's matching engines, which in the case of NYSE are actually in mahwah NJ, near the NY border.

If that makes you envious, FIOS now offers 300 down, 65 up in my neighborhood. Its a standalone plan, and costs about $200 a month, but that just blew my mind. It appeared I could also increase my current 50/25 to 150/50 for about $20. My current 50/25 plan, all in with the "triple play" currently costs $100/month.

I hope you aren't in NYC or Silicon Valley, because that is almost entry level in those places.

I am with you on that. I went Android after owning a 3GS. I mostly liked it, but the pace of change just seemed so slow- even what seemed to be infuriatingly easy to implement features like being sent invitations from exchange and having apple recognize them. The walled garden of the app store, lack of flash support, and then finally the small screen size vs android phones made me switch. I loved the widgets on android, and the fact that apps like the NYTimes could DL content overnight so I can just pull up the app on the subway and read the morning's news (this is finally in the latest IOS release).

So I bought a Samsung Galaxy S II. Aside from the super large screen, I was really excited about Google Wallet and NFC, which were only supported in ICS which would be coming down to the S II "any day now" when I bought it. 9 months later, I am still waiting for AT&T to release it. This is supposed to be a flagship phone. My buddy spends many hours rooting and tweaking his phone with ICS images found on the net, but my phone is something I just want to work with as little effort as possible. The fragmentation makes it harder for the carriers to support, but also harder for people to bitch- "antenna gate" could never happen with an android device because it would be so easy to deflect as a carrier specific modification causing problems!

Google really needs to tighten up the reins a bit. Aside from the absurd branding each carrier does (Sprint's flavor of the SGS II is officially called the Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch. Really?!), even the hardware is different on each model- I was told that the SII would have an FM tuner on it, which I was quite excited about, only to find out that wasn't the case for AT&T. Single phone models across carriers (hard). Force them into some sort of SLA that requires them to provide updates within a few months for a support window of 2 years.

I like the choice among Android phones, but at the same time the Android universe is so fragmented, I really have no idea what someone has in their hand when they say they have an android phone- it could be a cheap POS, or a premium phone. At least with an ios device I have an idea of what features are supported and when and what I am getting with each new release. If Apple comes out with an iphone with a competitive screen size, I am going back.

"Wall St" is a tremendous beast, and fortunately for you, the biggest banks have larger "IT" departments than major software companies. I put IT in quotes, because in general, I think of IT as being the networking/desktop support guys, not developers, but on Wall St, developers are considered IT. Most jobs need no real financial experience, you are just building a web app or piece of infrastructure, and in the case of real IT jobs, you are just building infrastructure like any other- a network on a trading floor might have a bit more fail over and edge protection, but its still just a network. The highest paying "quant" and automated trading jobs do require financial knowledge, but there are many jobs that don't require that.

The more dangerous question is what is the culture like? The crisis has really hit the banks hard. I used to love my job and the industry, but its really changed from work 10 hours a day because you love it and want to get ahead, to work 11 hours a day or else you are at risk of being laid off- and that risk is very real. The banks nowadays seem to hiring and firing in waves, and just kind of seeing what sticks. Layoffs are a semi-annual occurrence. I have watched the culture from generally being team based and cooperative, to very competitive. People are overworked, and no longer willing to take time and risk their projects being late to explain how something works to someone new. So in general you have to work twice as hard reverse engineering stuff and looking at years old docs and source code to learn how things work. The guys that are thriving on my team are young, single, and generally don't have friends and families in the area. They don't mind working late nights and weekends as much, and don't seem all that concerned that they are heading into their late 20s alone. I sometimes wish I never got a dog, because while my wife can tolerate me working late to some extent (because she often does as well), I have real guilt when the clock hits 7:30 pm and I know my little furball is sitting in a crate anxiously awaiting for me to come home. I also miss my wife and dog as well- it was a lot easier to work past 8pm when I only had some transient roommates at home waiting for me.

Some things that make me happy: I work on real, important systems. These make real money for the firm, and my contributions have real bottom line impact on revenue. There are no "throwaway" projects, code that doesn't make it into production, etc that I hear about in a lot of places. The pay is generally good, but as I spoke before, the hours are murderous, and bonuses are way down. They are no longer something you look forward to all year round. The culture used to be exciting and dynamic, and I hope that the industry will get its groove back, but it seems to be permanently calcified- moving from IT to the business side or to a real quantitative role is nearly impossible once you are boxed in as an "IT" guy.

Things that make me unhappy: At larger firms, its really hard to innovate. At a smaller firm, I would read about a new boost release, see something I wanted to use in it, work a little late that night to upgrade the codebase to it, and be done with it. Heard about a new IDE or compiler? I would DL it and try it out. Same for new versions of software like Chrome, firefox, or whatever. Playing with new technology makes me happy. At larger banks, everything is locked down. To upgrade from boost 1.35 to something more recent, is going to require a business sponsor, or some proven improvement- which is really hard to do when you can't even DL the source code as just about all download sites are blocked! You will be using winxp, and the approved version of the software packages your company has blessed- which is always several years behind. I was quite excited when we moved from gcc3.4 to 4.1 last year. There are lots of meetings, a lot of time spent coordinating with other teams and regions. There is also a general trend for all new hiring to occur in cheap regions like budapest, eastern europe, and India.

What I don't know, is the requirements for working overseas as a foreigner. I can tell you, that I have seen a few transfers from the US to Asia, and it seemed to go fairly smoothly. At least some of the guys I talk to in Shanghai seem to be from the US/EU, just based on their lack of accent and knowledge of US culture. I don't know for sure their background, as the time differences between NY and Asia mean its very late and very early for each of us, so there is zero chit-chat. Which brings up an interesting point- you are likely going to be in a role where there is inter-region interaction, be prepared to be on conference calls at inconvenient times.

In the US market, the best way to get a job is to talk to some recruiters- some of these guys also recruit for roles in Asia as well. Those guys are somewhat rare, but good recruiters can refer you to someone else as well.

BTW- I have been working in finance most of my career, though I did start out at a software consulting firm. Send me a PM if you want.

As a resident of Jersey City, I am not surprised we are on that list. They pretty much started ripping up the entire waterfront starting about 15 years ago, and just rebuilt the whole thing from scratch. I actually had fiber running into my last apartment, which was a new building. Multiple data jacks in each room- topped off with a real patch panel in one of the closets, it was a dork's dream...

Many people have never heard of it, but Jersey City is directly across from Manhattan on the other side of the Hudson river, and many financial firms, which have big data requirements, have relocated their technology departments (or their entire offices) there. Verizon Fios is available in most parts of the city, and they offer 150/35Mbps, though the "standard" is 50/20 or 25/25.

If you haven't gotten the memo, Jobs died. And while yeah he likely did have input into what the major features of the next IPhone will be, he isn't there to handhold and polish the product as it is being developed.

They are still selling products developed in the Jobs era. The product pipeline is the big concern. The next iphone will be the first phone developed without any oversight from Jobs. It will be interesting to see where it goes.

Personally, I think some cracks are already showing. The iPad 3 was mostly a tech update. Siri, the main feature of the last iPhone, has usability issues that make it a lightly used curiosity. Siri is the kind of feature that Jobs was legendary for forcing his engineers to get working flawlessly. If you read about him, he was a completely hands-on micromanaging perfectionist when it came to product design. He would critique every minute detail, until he got it just the way he wanted, with little regard to cost. He was also a great pitch man. Somehow he got you excited about a bookstore on your phone.

I think Apple's success is wonderful, but I fear that without Jobs, the company is going to flounder, just like it did in the 90s. I really hope that doesn't happen, Apple makes great products. But I won't be buying their stock until I see a few successful product releases in the post-Jobs era.

I still play the original version off my cd that is still kicking from 1996- and it still only supports 8.3 filenames!

  One other nice thing about using a virtual machine is that you can just escape out of the vm and it will save the state of the whole vm. So you can walk away and then come back later to the exact point you left off at, which is especially useful in older games, which tended to have a lot fewer save points.

Gotcha. On Linux it would definitely be easier- you could actually lock down their local disks and map their home directory to the NAS.

I think there is something wrong with my ds211j. I am also on gigabit ethernet, and have a netgear soho router in front of my wireless router that everything plugs into. I still get abysmal speeds from my laptop. I tried different protocols (ftp, nfs, samba), and they all have the same problem, so it seems there is an i/o bottleneck somewhere- its not a laptop issue, because I can actually up/download faster to many servers over the internet. The one exception is iscsi- isci is screaming fast and feels like a local disk. I have had this problem for years and just tolerated it. I used to have a 207, and haven't done a clean install of dsm since I upgraded to my 211j, I have to block out time to do that soon- there are definitely ghosts of 207 past- I could not upgrade to dsm 4.0 until I cleaned my logs due to the original system partition sizes from the 207 days being too small. The web UI also seems way slower than it should be, but I compared it to Syno's demo system and it was comparable.

I bought a new laptop exactly a year ago and almost did the full linux conversion then, but I bought a sandy bridge and the driver support just wasn't there, and didn't seem to really arrive in the distros until ~september. It was devastating to get ~4 fps in tux racer. I love visual studio too. So sweet.

NAS's don't get enough credit. I have a synology ds211j, and while it is not quite as stable or as fast as I would like, I have all my data in one place, and my laptops get automatically backed up on a weekly basis. The data is backed up to an external disk, which I really should rotate out and store off-site to be completely protected. I love being able to access all of my stuff via the internet as well, especially the ip camera when on vacation.

I was curious as to how you force your family to use the mounted drives. I assume you have shares that get mounted. Did you just train them to use the mounted drives? I tried to make the music/photo/document/video folders map to shares on the nas, but was not able to on Win7. It seems the only way you can do that is if you make an iscsi share, but that has it's own problems in that is then completely separate from your other folders. Since windows apps keep defaulting to use the My documents (or whatever its called on win7), I often get sloppy and leave stuff in the local directories, and one of the biggest reasons I got a NAS was so that I would have a single place to keep all of my files and avoid duplication.

Kind of off topic, but I have found that by far the best way to get old games to run is to run them in a virtual machine with their original OS installed. I tried really hard to get CIV 2 to run under win7, to no avail. With Vmware, and winxp, the English were happily breaking peace treaties with the Mongols after 20 minutes (installing old OS's from ISOs on a modern machine is really fast).

Did you read the article? This isn't abut paying $100 and bypassing the checks- its paying $100 for a background check so you are cleared to go through the express lane. It's also only a pilot program and only available in 9 airports.

Judge them on all of the above. The delta issue you speak of is cake to fix- just use numerical scores. Interestingly, I went to two schools, one where they used numerical scores after elementary school, and another where they used letter grades. There was way more grade inflation and jockeying at the end of the quarter where letter grades were used, often in the form of extra credit projects to boost that 88 or 89 to an 90 and get an A- instead of a B+.

Metrics aren't foolproof, that is for sure. However, using a few broad based metrics is way better than not evaluating teacher performance at all. I wouldn't be surprised if there were cases where one under performing teacher was let go when they were actually better than another under performing teacher due to unusual circumstances, but in these metrics you discussed, I don't see how an "excellent" teacher is going to find themselves at the bottom of the pile, and I would be willing to bet my paycheck that certain teachers are going to consistently find themselves in the bottom 5%. Laying off teachers based on imperfect metrics is far superior to what is usually done now- firing based on seniority.

And by focusing on how bad metrics are, aren't we ignoring a white elephant in the room- that the entire education system is driven by equally flawed metrics- student test scores!

I understand where you are coming from. My issue personally isn't so much with managers, but dealing with globally shared codebases, politics, and working for megacorps where you can't write anything interesting without convincing an architect that it was his idea first.

I have been considering a move towards data analysis type jobs at non-tech firms. These generally aren't jobs in an IT group, and you do data mining or build models that forecast sales and other things. From the few people I have talked to, you get an assignment, and you have free reign in how you get it done, whether its an excel spreadsheet, R, SASS, or whatever you come up with. The only downside is that you are often working with a bunch of cobbled together scripts, vb excel and whatever. Personally I have a much better time working with shitty code and making it pretty (by my definition of pretty) than sitting around in circle jerk code reviews having my code picked apart because I didn't use enough abstract factories or put an ORM somewhere irrelevant. You get to stay technical, so if you want to go back to your old role, you still have the option