OK - I'll admit it - I did engage in a little bit of hyperbole.

But you have to admit that "at best worthless" has a better ring to it than "at best, when combined with a qualitative analysis of the model itself, and some testing with out of sample data, can be a useful tool in decision making".

You are right that no investment bank will go anywhere near this.

When I used to work in the financial services industry we used to call this "data mining". The result is usually at best worthless and at worst dangerous as it is so often misused.

It's worth remembering the saying with data: "if you look hard enough, you can find anything you want to".

Why not mount the switches so they are flush with the edge of the case rather than having that unslighly mess of millions of cables?

Central NFS server with home directories on; /home mounted at startup on all the clients. That's the easy bit. At the time that we initially did it, setting up OpenLDAP was a real pain in the neck, but the more recent distributions have made it much easier - with RH8 at least everything you need comes pre-installed and it's just a matter of changing a couple of lines in a configuration file. The server side is a bit more tricky, but not much: set up OpenLDAP, tell it the (standard, provided) schema to use and then (sigh) write your scripts to add and modify users... Of course, by now, there will probably be countless management tools available, but we had to make up our own. I'd assumed that this was all nicely documented somewhere, too, but if it's not, I'll try to dig out the instructions we wrote out and send them on.