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While working at a major online brokerage, I was tasked with comparing a basic "hello world" program written in 3 methods: Perl in CGI, Perl in a core-dumped executable (this was the 90s) and C++. C++ of course won, but when you took the compile time away from Perl, the factor decreased from 8:1 to around 1.5:1. I'm guessing you'd find that PHP behaves in much the same way.

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Terrence B.
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Division of TD AMERITRADE, Inc.

Instead of whining about the machinations of capitalism, join it. Go here, or here, or go through your bank, open an account, and start buying the shares these companies have out on the market.

Way before Katrina came along, I bought $10,000 worth of VLO, back when this company was $10. My mouth was watering after they became the biggest oil refining company in the United States (they took over Diamond Shamrock not too long ago).

After Katrina hit, I had well over 5x my original investment and dumped the stock. So, now I have almost a year's worth of wages I'm sitting on, and I can take this money and go put it somewhere else.

These companies that layoff workers are only doing it for one single reason: to please Wall Street. Any Wall St. analyst would be shocked if a merger or acquisition did NOT involve layoffs, since that is primarily a driver for the merger in the first place (increase market share + lower costs == higher returns).

So, if the company is doing the layoff is a sincere, sound manner... why not invest? Oracle and SAP have pretty-much shutout all the other accounting (er... "ERP") systems on the market... MAS-90/100, Solomon, J.D. Edwards, and a myriad of other big speciality systems... they are ALL going the way of the dodo.

POS vendors are probably the next target to be consolidated after this (which I would breathe a HUGE sigh of relief if that happened... do you know how many different POS systems are out there???)

This is possible. However, the Ameritrade privacy policy states that they can share personal information of clients with non-affiliated business to improve quality of service. The only thing preventing this from happening is an option that clients can request to not have their information trade with non-affiliates. I don't see any reason to pretend to 'lose' customer data, when you simply sell it legally.

That's why I don't think you can trust anything Wall Street says about the Google IPO: The investment banking establishment has too much at stake and too many institutional conflicts of interest to make them credible on this offering.

I've been saying this since day one. The great thing about the Google IPO is that it puts the market back into balance - remember, shares are *supposed* to be valued based on direct investor demand, not insider deals and analyst payoffs. The Street will do what is in *it's* best interest, which means controlling the market (ahem, not a free market then eh?)

Not only is Google doing the auction to avoid insider deals (and keep that cash in the family), but it's spreading the offering among many, many different brokers, even progressive discount brokers [/shamelessplug]!

Definitely *not* evil ;)

I'm convinced that some companies just have a dysfunctional corporate culture that's immune to real reform. Their only hope is that things get so bad that all the top idiots lose their jobs -- and they're very, very lucky in choosing their new management. (That's basically what saved IBM.) But AT&T's so far gone, not even a total shakeout can save them.

I didn't know it either until recently, when I stumbled across the pattern day trading regulations and wondered "Why the hell are they treating cash sales like options?" Then I was Enlightened, and looked up how things work. Here's a good description of the whole process.

Union Pacific Railroad is in the midst of converting everything over from NT to Apache running on Solaris. The NT webservers were way too unstable, crashing several times per week.

Where I work, Microsoft salespeople came into our group, and started telling us that IIS is behind 70% of ALL e-commerce sites. We laughed them out of the building. We asked to be explained why to use their product, we did not ask them to lie to us about made-up things. iPlanet had just told us a few weeks ago that THEY have 70% of the eCommerce market. Hmmm... That adds up to 140%, someone must have been doing math in the vicinity of a black hole again...

Don't believe the marketspeak - it's usually fabricated, unverifiable bullshit. Tell them "Show me the money - set up identical Apache and IIS servers here and prove your distorted figures."

I adminned IIS servers for 5 years, and just in the last year started doing Apache. At first, the lack of a GUI is intimidating, but once you get familiar with the configuration file, you find that Apache can do all kinds of things that IIS never dreamed of...

All that day trading ameritrade $hit ain't going to help anyone either.