I've actually found a mantra which is quite useful for this exact purpose. Whenever I'm talking/thinking and I'm about to say/think "I'm right", I automatically replace it with the more elaborate construction "I dare hope that I'm right" and then mentally append a list of reasons why I think that's the case (to be revised according to further information).
Helps me remain critical yet non-judgmental. YMMV, but I dare hope it works :)

I saw one of the stocks I owned go up when Company A released a press release that Company A signed a deal with company B.

The stock of Company A spiked again 3 days later when Company B released a press release that it had just signed a deal with Company A.

If there are quant systems out there listing to the wire and trading on info like this, the system will surely be gamed. What is worse is that if a human were watching the blips come over the wire would he necessarily catch the problem?

They've been doing crap like this in their accounting for years, Enron charges X to company Y, and Y charges X back to Enron, both of them had 2X extra sales in the quarter, but no money or goods actually change hands, now it extends to journalism.

I have been using this for years. Very nice plug in for Visual Studio. Note that you need the full version of Visual Studio, though, not the free-as-in-beer Express versions, as the Express versions don't support plug-ins.

The truth is that there is no benchmark for this. I am a consultant and tend to take a sysadmin role for clients.

If you use Active Directory and store user files on the network then you can do stock images for each model of machine and a broken unit is a 20minute re-image (or swap fresh machine in from the pool) and your up and going, documents and all. This is where a directory services' up-front costs become justified.

With Active Directory I can manage machines and users very efficiently, keep user's files safe with shadow copies, backups, etc, and deploy software and printers to users easily. For linux to Active directory look at likeise-open or centrify for single sign on with the latery able to do group policy on linux machines.

I have 4 techs and myself. between the 5 of us we handle about 2500 or so users across our clients. Our clients that have been with us for a year or two are all have some sort of AD setup and have a much lower computer expense than before. oddly enough, newer clients account for larger expenses because they havent standardized their computers ad require more trips to their site and more billable hours.

I would imagine that if I had only established users, with computers on AD then my crew could handle 3000-3500 users without much overtime. If we did no managed computers then I think that 250 users per tech would be pushing it.

If you just compare those numbers, 600 vs 250 you can pretty easily see the cost savings for a managed network, either through AD, network, or other LDAP. a 1200 user network could be reasonably run by 2 IT guys vs really needing 4 or 5 to do the same job otherwise. let be conservative and say 4 guys at $40,000 each vs 2 guys at $50,000 (higher skills for 2 techs vs 4) and you see a $60,000 gap, which is much more than the CALS and servers needed for 1200 users. 1200 users is still in the 2 ADDS servers arena. lets say $3500 per licensed server and $35 per CAL and you save money on year 1, next 4 years are free!.

Right now it is kind of handy because my guys work their ~40 hours doing stuff on managed networks and pull 'overtime' going to customers sites or doing old computer triage and repair and get paid part of the service fee.

If you are at 600+ users per tech, then you really should be on some sort of directory service like AD. If you are not, I suspect you are spending a lot of your labor dollars spinning tires and not helping clients/users very well. That equals more compaints, less praise, and likely a lack of raise or bonus.

The _buying_ of the phone is not invite only. That's just the special event to unveil it. It's in the article.

If you watch the video linked in the article description, they give a fairly thorough explanation of how it all works and say that they can achieve sub 80ms latency. They say a user needs to be within 1000 miles of their server and needs a high speed internet connection for this to work. They say they can highly compress a standard or HD video frame in 1ms. They do this by compressing the video using an advanced compression algorithm and running it on silicon. They also say they use a proprietary technique to get low latency from wireless controllers. The video presentation linked above is long but it is quite interesting.

This is way cool, yes. But I miss the obfuscated C contest which was also way cool eg in terms of discovering legal features of the language that probably should never get used LOL. What happened to it?

And what made you think my post wasn't satire too? I leave it as an exercise for you to detect the sarcasm in that post. Or if you prefer, get off my lawn.

I recall the day evolution was covered in my Texas public school, years ago. The regular science teacher left and a substitute came in to give a 30-45 minute lecture on Lamarck. His conclusion was that scientists were often wrong and that eventually the idea that "we are descended from monkeys" would also be rejected. I had wanted to laugh, but after looking around at my classmates I decided it was just too sad.

I don't see that this decision would help that sort of thing in the small, rural districts in Texas where this (along with bible study as "literature" these days) is much too common. I'd figured at the very least that discussing strengths and weakness would have more value.

As a type 1 diabetic I've long known that mental exercise is just as effective as moderate physical exercise in reducing my daily insulin requirements and driving down glucose levels, but I've never noticed any later spikes that would be expected with increased cortisol.