Liquidity is all very nice. But a pathological definition of liquidity drives HFT.
The definition of liquidity that make sense for most people is "probability of getting a fair trade opportunity before I can finish a cup of coffee". I agree that the higher this "liquidity", the better the market and the economy, though there is a natural upper bound on its value because it is defined as probability i.e. 1. HFT does nothing to increase liquidity by this definition.
The pathological definition of liquidity is "inverse of time in which I can get a fair trade". With nanosecond trade, you get a "liquidity" value as a billion Hz. Picosecond trade gives you a value 10^12 Hz. There is no upper bound. A relentless pursuit of a higher number gives an illusion that HFT increases liquidity, which is a good thing.
With the latter definition, liquidity stops being a good thing once its value is higher than 0.001 i.e. a fair trade in 1000 seconds.
PS : "Fair" trade is subjective, and intentionally so.
If I can have my trades cancelled when I screw up, I'll make big money too. HFT smartness doesn't lie in fundamental business model, but in bribing the system to play by their rules. It's like calling Calvin smart when he wins in calvinball.
Yes, very detrimental is the same as non-zero cost.
Again, this was a case where the proportion of damage was skewed severely against the innocent. Sony made the decision about harming their users, and Sony themselves were the least harmed. They might have done great things technologically earlier, but no need to be an idiot defending them.
Posters who are replying couldn't possibly be modding you down.
Downmodders might be triggered by the extremely illogical position you take on differentiating between $999 and $1000; then proceeding to declare you don't want to get into a discussion of cents. Try posting sensibly - that might expose the downmodders.
Calling $999 as $1000 is also an expression. You weren't kind enough to understand that for others. Why would others understand your "expression" of "not wanting to get into a discussion of cents" ?
Not sure things cannot be changed "functionally". And it depends on the definition of "functional". And even if they cannot be changed, they cannot be changed YET.
So your objection (if it is) to GP's statement of records being changed when reality changes - doesn't hold much water. At best it is applicable till the technology appears.
I see that you in another post define "functional" as reproductive - which is its "primary function". This doesn't make sense as a definition for the purpose of records - castrated, otherwise infertile, menopausal, pre-puberty - all kinds of individuals become ineligible. Depends on the purpose of the record, but in most purposes, such criteria of eligibility for being male / female is counterproductive.
If you put it like this (quoting me incompletely), yes. But there w. .
And my other sentence in my post answered that.
Well I already use ghostery and https everywhere. They don't directly address the intention of not having to do anything with Facebook so I don't see how your point is relevant.
This is about the factually incorrect statement you made that you don't want to get into a discussion of cents. Contradicted by your own venture into a discussion of exactly 100 cents.
Well, for a long time they were unusable without an x86 computer. Before the iCloud anyway. Even now only iCloud and no local x86 machine to sync the iDevice with is difficult to use for most people. And iDevices build on people's getting used to the internet / digital cameras including mobile phone cameras / viewing and sharing pictures. Which was all largely popularized by ubiquity of x86 computers. Ubiquity was largely driven by Intel, and AMD, though the latter rarely gets much mindshare. This drove most people to get an internet connection, without which iDevices are largely useless.
Emphasis in YOU TELLING THEM. Which is the opposite of THEY FIGURING OUT INDIRECTLY (which is what google does).
I have never logged in to facebook from my new laptop (or from any of my old machines). Facebook cookies on my browser contradict your statement. Yes, I'll get to blocking facebook from hosts file later, but most people won't.
But neither sells a database of people and likes to companies to spam you (which is what people seem to think they do).
They don't sell now. But if (when) they fold up, patents and user information are the only "assets" they will have to pay up debtors/suitors, which is either Wall Street or "technology industry colleagues". With legislators in their pockets (and later in the pockets of their debtors / "competitors" which are more like colleagues), what guarantee do you have that they won't in the future?
That is cool. But, not keeping track last few years, I find it difficult to pick processor sockets. They already have AM3+, FM1 and FM2, I guess, and I heard FM2 is temporary until FM3 is released. I also hear FX-8350 is the top-end processor. But the top-end processor runs on an older socket (AM3+).
Can you post some detail about expected future roadmap of processor sockets? What would likely give me longest processor upgrade time?
If a phone can run a browser at reasonable speed with wi-fi, its main processor should be capable of running a browser well for cellular data too. The cellular chip itself, yes if you expect 3g and 4g support, would cost somewhat more. Nokia (Asha) and Samsung (without Android) are selling 3g enabled feature phones in my country for less than $130 / $100 respectively, so doubling the cost of a $299 device just because of adding a cellular radio doesn't look right. For major players, patent royalties roughly cancel out, though you're right that Android still costs that way. But Android would cost nearly the same in patent royalties whether or not it has cellular.
I am not in the market for such a device, but you won't have any problem finding a phone for your requirement for $200, going by prices in my country. Samsung and HTC are good with bootloader support, so you could start there. Cyanogenmod will get rid of or work around any minor annoyances the device might present, if any, so no need to worry about every aspect.
Microsoft screwed up here. If you're the incumbent with over 90% market share, never EVER push your customer into having to make a decision to do anything other than the status quo
But if you're the incumbent with over 90% market share in a market which is dwindling in size as well as margins? When all your recent attempts at growth markets ended in dismal failures? When you had to abandon an established but outdated mobile OS which has been superceded by billion times better alternatives by TWO competitors? Subsequent attempt at mobile OS had to be abandoned in less than a year?
That is when you use the crutches of incumbency to enter the growth markets. Screw up the desktop OS - it isn't going to give the margins anyway, and suckers would still pay it. Screw up in such a way that mobile OS looks familiar to users from their forced use of the desktop OS.
Unethical? So what! Conceited? You know Microsoft.Destined to failure in both the incumbency and new growth market ? Let us see.
The pricing of an unlocked iPhone vs. an iPod touch shows that a device with a cellular radio costs approximately twice as much as a device with no cellular radio.
Highly incorrect. Pricing, not costing. The $27 Nokia phone with excellent reception shows that a device with a cellular radio costs approximately $4 more than a device with no cellular radio. iPhone is priced approximately twice as much as an iPod (assuming from your statement) because the market will bear the higher price on an iPhone. And that, in turn, is partly because "price" on phones in the US is hidden as it is subsidized by the carrier. It has no bearing on the cost of the radio, and other hardware is also different.
Higher availability and wider choice in devices including cellular radio is exactly analogous to higher availability of processors with a floating point co-processor built-in. Best way to buy a processor without floating point co-processor is to buy one with the co-processor and not use the co-processor.
Not the GP poster, but "Stability when you buy a complete desktop OS from the same vendor" does need some serious supporting arguments. Not only because technically the OS is created by Microsoft, and hardware is created by Chinese sweatshops assembled by yet other (US//Korean/Taiwanese etc.) companies in other Chinese sweatshops with the master chip coming from Israel/US, but :
1. Microsoft has itself derided the model (I think Ballmer used the word "craplets" ?). PC OEMs installing unwanted software before selling for extra revenue is well known to cause problems. At the very least they hog memory and occasional disk I/O and CPU. Popups wasting user's time, energy and concentration abound, and security problems because of them are not unheard of.
2. The network of Responsibility / blame / reputations is all wrong with this model. An OEM doing everything right might not get any credit, which might all go to Intel and Microsoft. An OEM foisting horrible craplets on users frequently gets away with blaming Microsoft; or gets an extra sale by user needing to upgrade to higher specced machine to handle the craplets AND work.
3. And, as even mentioned by the GP, a fresh install of Windows directly from Microsoft is loads better in all aspects for the user. But I mentioned this to add - that the OEMs do not even make this easy or intuitively cheap to do. A user might end up buying a retail license of Windows, likely to cost half what the laptop cost, to rescue the laptop from the laptop's manufacturer.
Considering all this, I don't see your statement sufficiently justified by a fair distance.
"Functionally" being the keyword. It has already been mentioned that functionally same does not mean the exact mechanism has to be the same. Otherwise if you don't know that most modern tablets would not run x86_64 instructions that a typical laptop runs, you don't belong on slashdot.
With the obvious out of the way, non-geeks do assume Word is part of windows, but that is not a functional requirement. And since most tablets selling today are NOT windows tablets, people assuming word is part of windows doesn't affect their expectations from windows.
So an example of people using Word on their laptop,outside of work is : They want to send an image to someone. They copy (or take a screenshot, I forget which) the image, paste it in a Word document, and send across the word document. This is a failure of the operating system to make the image file accessible to an average user so that it occurs to him that the image could be saved and sent as an image file. It is also a failure of the email client to make accessible this popular use case of sending images as email.
Today's tablet operating system do not have such a failure. Long press on an image proposes "Share" option in Android, which has email as an option. In most image viewers including the default one, opening context menu while viewing an image also proposes the same "Share" option.
And, above all, not being windows itself solves most of the problem. As you yourself say, "Most non-geeks assume it's part of windows."
And because of the premise, I started off with the observation that 80% users' use case is satisfied by tablets, and proper computers are available for the rest.
Since 75-90% of all URL sharing is done by copy and paste,
Just asked my non-geek friend about this. He asked me "what's a URL"? Most people I've seen using a browser think the URL bar has some greek content having no relation to their day to day work. If they want to open facebook, they type "facebook" into it, or an adjacent search bar if available. They click on the first link in Google (or any other search engine that is configured) to reach facebook.
Have you forgotten the episode when for a brief while facebook.com was not the first result in Google search, and the site was filled with comments of angry facebook users about their passwords not working?
While I, for one, do welcome my URL-aware overlords, they are too few and far between to matter, yet.
So, 50% of that is the average size of a music library
Agreed if suffixed by, of people who are "into computers". People who are not, have their music libraries into CDs. Or it is purchased on the device , and stays there for life; in which case it is rarely more than a few GBs.
Word, Excel, Powerpoint, SecureCRT, the version of Minecraft on android is pitiful compared to that of windows, dbpoweramp, taxact full, decent backup software without root, SimCity, Outlook
Wait, we are talking about 80% of users. Much less than 20% users backup their data, even lower number use a dedicated software for it.
Word, Excel, Powerpoint? Are you telling me more than 20% of users use them outside of their work? On their "casual use" PCs?
I think you are too caught up in the geek circles. Which is great, but your observations have no bearing to what 80% users do.
Slashdot Mirror
Liquidity is all very nice. But a pathological definition of liquidity drives HFT.
The definition of liquidity that make sense for most people is "probability of getting a fair trade opportunity before I can finish a cup of coffee". I agree that the higher this "liquidity", the better the market and the economy, though there is a natural upper bound on its value because it is defined as probability i.e. 1. HFT does nothing to increase liquidity by this definition.
The pathological definition of liquidity is "inverse of time in which I can get a fair trade". With nanosecond trade, you get a "liquidity" value as a billion Hz. Picosecond trade gives you a value 10^12 Hz. There is no upper bound. A relentless pursuit of a higher number gives an illusion that HFT increases liquidity, which is a good thing.
With the latter definition, liquidity stops being a good thing once its value is higher than 0.001 i.e. a fair trade in 1000 seconds.
PS : "Fair" trade is subjective, and intentionally so.
If I can have my trades cancelled when I screw up, I'll make big money too. HFT smartness doesn't lie in fundamental business model, but in bribing the system to play by their rules. It's like calling Calvin smart when he wins in calvinball.
Or you could admit you were being an idiot differentiating between 999 and 1000 while claiming to be above discussing cents.
Yes, very detrimental is the same as non-zero cost.
Again, this was a case where the proportion of damage was skewed severely against the innocent. Sony made the decision about harming their users, and Sony themselves were the least harmed. They might have done great things technologically earlier, but no need to be an idiot defending them.
Posters who are replying couldn't possibly be modding you down.
Downmodders might be triggered by the extremely illogical position you take on differentiating between $999 and $1000; then proceeding to declare you don't want to get into a discussion of cents. Try posting sensibly - that might expose the downmodders.
The hackers came down on Sony and shut down online for months
And Sony had no SLAs for guaranteeing any uptime, so not a dime off Sony's pockets, whereas legitimate customers suffered. Very detrimental indeed.
Calling $999 as $1000 is also an expression. You weren't kind enough to understand that for others. Why would others understand your "expression" of "not wanting to get into a discussion of cents" ?
Not sure things cannot be changed "functionally". And it depends on the definition of "functional". And even if they cannot be changed, they cannot be changed YET.
So your objection (if it is) to GP's statement of records being changed when reality changes - doesn't hold much water. At best it is applicable till the technology appears.
I see that you in another post define "functional" as reproductive - which is its "primary function". This doesn't make sense as a definition for the purpose of records - castrated, otherwise infertile, menopausal, pre-puberty - all kinds of individuals become ineligible. Depends on the purpose of the record, but in most purposes, such criteria of eligibility for being male / female is counterproductive.
If you put it like this (quoting me incompletely), yes. But there w. .
And my other sentence in my post answered that.
Well I already use ghostery and https everywhere. They don't directly address the intention of not having to do anything with Facebook so I don't see how your point is relevant.
This is about the factually incorrect statement you made that you don't want to get into a discussion of cents. Contradicted by your own venture into a discussion of exactly 100 cents.
Well, for a long time they were unusable without an x86 computer. Before the iCloud anyway. Even now only iCloud and no local x86 machine to sync the iDevice with is difficult to use for most people. And iDevices build on people's getting used to the internet / digital cameras including mobile phone cameras / viewing and sharing pictures. Which was all largely popularized by ubiquity of x86 computers. Ubiquity was largely driven by Intel, and AMD, though the latter rarely gets much mindshare. This drove most people to get an internet connection, without which iDevices are largely useless.
Emphasis in YOU TELLING THEM.
Which is the opposite of THEY FIGURING OUT INDIRECTLY (which is what google does).
I have never logged in to facebook from my new laptop (or from any of my old machines). Facebook cookies on my browser contradict your statement. Yes, I'll get to blocking facebook from hosts file later, but most people won't.
But neither sells a database of people and likes to companies to spam you (which is what people seem to think they do).
They don't sell now. But if (when) they fold up, patents and user information are the only "assets" they will have to pay up debtors/suitors, which is either Wall Street or "technology industry colleagues". With legislators in their pockets (and later in the pockets of their debtors / "competitors" which are more like colleagues), what guarantee do you have that they won't in the future?
I don't remember ever replying to you earlier, but , I guess nothing works like a little paranoia to avoid explaining your stupidities.
If one of my biggest fantasies took just one day to realize, I'd find that day within a month.
The rule is simple: if you pay more, you get more
That is cool. But, not keeping track last few years, I find it difficult to pick processor sockets. They already have AM3+, FM1 and FM2, I guess, and I heard FM2 is temporary until FM3 is released. I also hear FX-8350 is the top-end processor. But the top-end processor runs on an older socket (AM3+).
Can you post some detail about expected future roadmap of processor sockets? What would likely give me longest processor upgrade time?
But I guess I won't be totally satisfied until the registers on my CPU is big enough to store my media collection.
FTFY
I don't want to get into a discussion of specs and cents.
I saw you getting into a discussion of 100 cents.
If a phone can run a browser at reasonable speed with wi-fi, its main processor should be capable of running a browser well for cellular data too. The cellular chip itself, yes if you expect 3g and 4g support, would cost somewhat more. Nokia (Asha) and Samsung (without Android) are selling 3g enabled feature phones in my country for less than $130 / $100 respectively, so doubling the cost of a $299 device just because of adding a cellular radio doesn't look right. For major players, patent royalties roughly cancel out, though you're right that Android still costs that way. But Android would cost nearly the same in patent royalties whether or not it has cellular.
I am not in the market for such a device, but you won't have any problem finding a phone for your requirement for $200, going by prices in my country. Samsung and HTC are good with bootloader support, so you could start there. Cyanogenmod will get rid of or work around any minor annoyances the device might present, if any, so no need to worry about every aspect.
What matters is whether they believe they have a reason to screw you over
But unless he believes that they believe they have a reason to screw him over, he cannot take an action based on the belief.
This factually incorrect post modded +5 informative debunks your theory.
Microsoft screwed up here. If you're the incumbent with over 90% market share, never EVER push your customer into having to make a decision to do anything other than the status quo
But if you're the incumbent with over 90% market share in a market which is dwindling in size as well as margins? When all your recent attempts at growth markets ended in dismal failures? When you had to abandon an established but outdated mobile OS which has been superceded by billion times better alternatives by TWO competitors? Subsequent attempt at mobile OS had to be abandoned in less than a year?
That is when you use the crutches of incumbency to enter the growth markets. Screw up the desktop OS - it isn't going to give the margins anyway, and suckers would still pay it. Screw up in such a way that mobile OS looks familiar to users from their forced use of the desktop OS.
Unethical? So what! Conceited? You know Microsoft.Destined to failure in both the incumbency and new growth market ? Let us see.
The pricing of an unlocked iPhone vs. an iPod touch shows that a device with a cellular radio costs approximately twice as much as a device with no cellular radio.
Highly incorrect. Pricing, not costing. The $27 Nokia phone with excellent reception shows that a device with a cellular radio costs approximately $4 more than a device with no cellular radio.
iPhone is priced approximately twice as much as an iPod (assuming from your statement) because the market will bear the higher price on an iPhone. And that, in turn, is partly because "price" on phones in the US is hidden as it is subsidized by the carrier. It has no bearing on the cost of the radio, and other hardware is also different.
Higher availability and wider choice in devices including cellular radio is exactly analogous to higher availability of processors with a floating point co-processor built-in. Best way to buy a processor without floating point co-processor is to buy one with the co-processor and not use the co-processor.
Not the GP poster, but "Stability when you buy a complete desktop OS from the same vendor" does need some serious supporting arguments. Not only because technically the OS is created by Microsoft, and hardware is created by Chinese sweatshops assembled by yet other (US//Korean/Taiwanese etc.) companies in other Chinese sweatshops with the master chip coming from Israel/US, but :
1. Microsoft has itself derided the model (I think Ballmer used the word "craplets" ?). PC OEMs installing unwanted software before selling for extra revenue is well known to cause problems. At the very least they hog memory and occasional disk I/O and CPU. Popups wasting user's time, energy and concentration abound, and security problems because of them are not unheard of.
2. The network of Responsibility / blame / reputations is all wrong with this model. An OEM doing everything right might not get any credit, which might all go to Intel and Microsoft. An OEM foisting horrible craplets on users frequently gets away with blaming Microsoft; or gets an extra sale by user needing to upgrade to higher specced machine to handle the craplets AND work.
3. And, as even mentioned by the GP, a fresh install of Windows directly from Microsoft is loads better in all aspects for the user. But I mentioned this to add - that the OEMs do not even make this easy or intuitively cheap to do. A user might end up buying a retail license of Windows, likely to cost half what the laptop cost, to rescue the laptop from the laptop's manufacturer.
Considering all this, I don't see your statement sufficiently justified by a fair distance.
"Functionally" being the keyword. It has already been mentioned that functionally same does not mean the exact mechanism has to be the same. Otherwise if you don't know that most modern tablets would not run x86_64 instructions that a typical laptop runs, you don't belong on slashdot.
With the obvious out of the way, non-geeks do assume Word is part of windows, but that is not a functional requirement. And since most tablets selling today are NOT windows tablets, people assuming word is part of windows doesn't affect their expectations from windows.
So an example of people using Word on their laptop ,outside of work is : They want to send an image to someone. They copy (or take a screenshot, I forget which) the image, paste it in a Word document, and send across the word document. This is a failure of the operating system to make the image file accessible to an average user so that it occurs to him that the image could be saved and sent as an image file. It is also a failure of the email client to make accessible this popular use case of sending images as email.
Today's tablet operating system do not have such a failure. Long press on an image proposes "Share" option in Android, which has email as an option. In most image viewers including the default one, opening context menu while viewing an image also proposes the same "Share" option.
And, above all, not being windows itself solves most of the problem. As you yourself say, "Most non-geeks assume it's part of windows."
And because of the premise, I started off with the observation that 80% users' use case is satisfied by tablets, and proper computers are available for the rest.
Since 75-90% of all URL sharing is done by copy and paste,
Just asked my non-geek friend about this. He asked me "what's a URL"? Most people I've seen using a browser think the URL bar has some greek content having no relation to their day to day work. If they want to open facebook, they type "facebook" into it, or an adjacent search bar if available. They click on the first link in Google (or any other search engine that is configured) to reach facebook.
Have you forgotten the episode when for a brief while facebook.com was not the first result in Google search, and the site was filled with comments of angry facebook users about their passwords not working?
While I, for one, do welcome my URL-aware overlords, they are too few and far between to matter, yet.
So, 50% of that is the average size of a music library
Agreed if suffixed by, of people who are "into computers". People who are not, have their music libraries into CDs. Or it is purchased on the device , and stays there for life; in which case it is rarely more than a few GBs.
Word, Excel, Powerpoint, SecureCRT, the version of Minecraft on android is pitiful compared to that of windows, dbpoweramp, taxact full, decent backup software without root, SimCity, Outlook
Wait, we are talking about 80% of users. Much less than 20% users backup their data, even lower number use a dedicated software for it.
Word, Excel, Powerpoint? Are you telling me more than 20% of users use them outside of their work? On their "casual use" PCs?
I think you are too caught up in the geek circles. Which is great, but your observations have no bearing to what 80% users do.