BTW, forgot to mention, there is a big difference between banks and trading firms. I'd suggest you focus on trading firms. Banks vary quite a bit and many of them are just IT shops that buy vendor products. Trading firms lean way forward and although there is a penchant for hiring people with financial sector experience that is a way distant second to hiring damn smart people. For my team, I'm actually looking for people explicitly NOT from the financial sector. We have a lot of ex-Google people, national lab HPC people, etc. I'm looking for people with experience in _large_ scale distributed computing (and by distributed I mean global and all the latency and flappiness that implies).

Three cheers for critical thinking!!

I feel the same way. Good information is the foundation of self governance but the incentive and constraints structures we have commercially dont engender that.

I wonder if there isn't some form of checks and balances system or competing structures that could be put in place for information sharing in society. As it stands the largest influence on the majority of media outlets is quarterly earnings on their stock price or emotional drivers for bloggers (or similar) like Assange. I dont see the systems as quite balancing each other or competing for better information.. I know everyone in this crowd is going to jump up and defend Joe blogger and how the "little guy" can show how wrong CNN is but it hasn't really played out that way and the trends tend to point in the wrong direction.

Agreed. I have been working on upgrading for quite a while but there is one issue I haven't figured out yet:

lingerd in apache 2.2 _with_ mod_php in pref_fork (as many linux source libs used in PHP not thread-safe).

As soon as the question comes up about linger_close people say "it doesn't matter in cuz its so multi-thredded coolz" but that does no good in a PHP app server model.

Anyone know if lingerd is still needed in 2.2-pre-fork mode? Cuz I know the module has not been updated for 2 family..