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Being Enron's SysAdmin
CowboyRobot writes "FreeBSD's Kirk McKusick has a long interview with Enron's former SysAdmin, Jarod Jenson, where he describes the nuts and bolts of working in and managing such a large-scale operation." From the article: "EnronOnline was a Web-based trading application. We had several hundred, even thousands of commodities that we would price in realtime, the same way that equities are priced. We were trying to push realtime pricing information out to clients who could do instantaneous transactions on them. People who are familiar with financial markets--the commodity markets--would recognize EnronOnline as sort of the same thing. We had a lot of the same issues that the markets had trying to push out realtime data--not only within our local network but also to the customers--as quickly as we could globally, and trying to make sure that what every trader saw on the screen matched what every company in the world had on theirs."
I don't know about that. You should watch an excellent documentary by the title 'Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room'. The impression I get is that almost everyone at Enron knew that something shady was going on. For example, a lot of the power outages in California were due to traders calling up power plants and asking them to shut down in order to drive the price of energy up.
The entire operation was extremely corrupt and a lot of innocent people not involved with the commodity trading (employees of utility companies that Enron bought, custodians, etc..) lost their life savings. Not to mention that they dabbled a bit too much in politics (they were partially responsible for Arnold becoming governor of California, only so he could keep Energy prices deregulated). The only reason this scam went on so long is because Enron the company was doing lots of evil things in the marketplace. Enron, as a corporation, was able to garner special status with the SEC and this allowed them to use a different kind of book keeping which essentially let them claim profits on monies not yet received.
If people worth millions (paper money or not) can't be arsed to buy "Investment 101" or "Savings for Dummies" they are setting themselves for failure.
And don't bring the "they were forced to buy Enron" bullshit. I am pretty sure that nobody put a gun to the head of anybody to force them to risk all their saving eggs in one basket only.
The bad luck of a fool is always regrettable and certainly one can feel a degree of pity for the fool, but the fool has to take responsibility for his own actions if he or she is a normal functioning grown up adult.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.