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