I agree in part, but the higher ups do not take any "Higher" risk in making those trades. If the programmer screws up with his code and it causes the company to lose a significant amount of money, he will be fired. If the higher up does the same, he is rewarded with a significant parting compensation package. That being said, if the programmers are unhappy with their pay and feel they can do better, then they should leave and start their own trading firm. Actions speak louder than words...

In my experience with small businesses, it may be never read but will absolutely need to be found for some type of emergency presentation/proposal.

the tests are wrong and not the children?

So is PDI something like a database agnostic version of MSSQL DTS packages?

Okay, so do we now hate Apple and like Microsoft? I'm really confused.

And it continues to be done Dennis Chamberland has been designing these things for a while. He is heading up some sort of expedition to start an undersea colony.

Why wouldn't they at least get some commercial industry advice instead of re-inventing the wheel. It seems a bit of a waste of money in my opinion.

You mean like this?
http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/noradsanta/index.html#utm_campaign=en&utm_medium=hpp&utm_source=en-hpp-na-us-gns-norad

Could do what we are planning and use existing workstations with VDI (http://www.vmware.com/products/view/features.html). Depending on your seat requirements, you may want to try pricing out a homegrown box of your own.

Out of the box replication in PostgresSQL was a bit lacking, last I checked. MySQL replication seems to work well for smaller scale projects.

All these other solutions are very good, but if you have any ambitions of possible migrating boxes to a production environment you almost have to go with VMWare. While the licensing cost of an Enterprise kit is expensive, the features that you get such as High Avail/DRS/VMotion are absolutely a godsend for any system admin (plus the whitelisted hardware specs). I don't work for VMWare, but run a small business's IT and have been through the upgrade path from VMWare server to ESX server.

I welcome our new warming climate overlords (and cheaper scuba gear prices).

What happens if SourceForge goes under?

Or its a great opportunity for other media sources to be able seize his market share.