Since it is on multiple RAID 5 devices and I run a cron job that checks the MD5 sigs against a database I know that it is in good condition.

I applaud your desire to maintain integrity, but if something goes bad, you have to manually restore it. I, too, keep MD5 or SHA hashes of important stuff, but I rely on ZFS and 'scrubbing' for verifying integrity. The benefit is if a bit does flip, it will be corrected, and I will be told.

You should consider it.

You know, someone could write an allegory about the desire for the geeks to have the consumer appliance "du jour" run an unadulterated Linux distribution. Call the appliance a toaster for all I care. It doesn't matter, because the story is always the same.

10 years ago we wanted some fancy hard drive based MP3 player to run our favorite distro. Now, it's phones. The cycle repeats.

The reason that the geeks will perpetually never be satisfied? We meet women*, we fall in love, we get married, we buy a house, etc.

At some point, you say, "I just want a damned insert name of appliance that works." And hence, Apple.

Fight it all you want, but mark my words.

* - Hopefully.

I may hate Groupon, but this person has no one to blame but herself. Do the math. If you sell that many coupons, even if only a fraction of them are redeemed, that's a lot of cupcakes.

CS is programming.

âoeComputer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.â -- Edsger Dijkstra

It sounds like you are the one conflating things and causing confusion.

Better idea - add a low fixed tax on any stock trade, regardless of value or size. Just a $0.01 per transaction would make HFT extremely costly- if you're executing millions of trades per second, that quickly brings you up to billions of dollars per trading day. HFT can't be that profitable. Yet it wouldn't really affect people making actual investments - ones where you actually investigate the company to make sure it knows how to earn a profit.

Yea, what a horrible idea. You'll realize how bad an idea that is when you want to go unload your "investment" and no one wants to buy it.

Liquidity comes at a price. Those who provide liquidity take on risk. It's a generally accepted practice to pay people for taking on risk (see, for example, interest rates).

Come back when you understand how markets work.

However, the amazing advancement in network technology and all these crazy RDMA and 10G user-space network stacks is literally due to the HFT community

This is completely true. Financial applications are driving HPC components in a way that educational and government spending haven't in years and years of use.

Where do you get these price feeds from (or route the prices to) ? surely you could save 5e-7s just by using shorter cables or putting the mic and speakers closer to the traders.

Nearly all market data is transmitted from the exchanges via IP multicast. Typically you will have servers in each exchange to trade on that exchange, but you also will have links pulling in market data from every other relevant venue as well.

See, for example, Spread Networks who made a lot of money by digging a really straight trench from Chicago to New Jersey in order to get CME data to the NJ metro area as fast as possible.

there is absolutely nothing, whatsoever, 'valuable' behind a credit default swap. it is a bet. that is a fact, and its not rocket science, and its not a conspiracy theory, and its not "the ignorant and alarmist" decrying some nefarious boogey man.

You're completely wrong. If you buy a bond from company X, it certainly makes sense to have insurance that if company X goes out of business, you still get your money. And hence, the credit default swap was born. The fact that someone may use the instrument to speculate is a separate issue.

People speculate on everything. It's what you do when you stock up on cans of soup when it's on sale. You speculate that the price is going to go up next week.

If this is the case, you're an idiot. I'm sorry; I don't know an easier way to put it.

There is no appreciable difference between Debian and OS X in setting up a desktop environment to develop in other than that in Debian, it might make take me some time to figure out what video card driver to use.

What the hell took you 4 hours in Debian? It should take you about 15 minutes on Debian, or Ubuntu, or OS X.

Guinness has a nice history of using math and science in improving their product.

Student's t-distribution was conceived by William Sealy Gosset while working at Guinness.