..BP didn't do the cementing. Halliburton did. So, if Halliburton's model showed that more centralizers were required but they decided to go ahead with the cementing anyway, seems to me that they were negligent.
It's like a builder telling the developer "We should use beams and girders in this wall to make it stronger" and the developer saying "Hmmm. We haven't got any steel beams to hand. Can you use reinforced concrete instead and maybe make the wall thicker?". If the builder says "Yeah, sure!" and goes ahead, he can't blame the developer if the wall later collapses.
I sense desperate attempts at ass-covering on Halliburton's part. Probably worried about all their lucrative no-competition Pentagon contracts.
Oh, shut up! It's obvious to anyone with an IQ above single digits that the constant sniping at BP is nothing but a xenophobic witch-hunt, fomented by a faltering White House to distract attention from their own failings. The Oil Spill Commission has already found that BP did not sacrifice safety in favour of profits so give us all a fucking break!
Why don't you direct some of your ire at the federal investigators who haven't yet started an examination of the blowout preventer (made by a US firm, by the way) that FAILED TO WORK, even though it's been sitting in a NASA faciloty for TWO MONTHS!
The same thing will happen to the Facebook social networking service as happened to the Compuserve electronic mail service. New, open protocols and standards will negate the network effects it currently enjoys, and it will become one of many inter-operative social networking platforms.
There is certainly a sound basis for the assertion that "more liquidity is better for investors" because it delivers tighter spreads and greater market depth.
However.....I'm not necessarily convinced that the sort of liquidity provided by high-frequency traders is of a particularly high "quality", for want of a better description. I think it's worth taking a step back and looking at the whole picture. Are these guys making their money by honest trading or are they exploiting flaws in the way the system is put together and regulated? I've never traded in the US so I don't know a lot about it but I find myself wondering about Reg NMS. When I got into a shop to buy an iPad, they're under no obligation to let me know that the shop around the corner is selling it for 10% less. And your average retail investor doesn't know or care whether the shares they're buying/selling through their broker are traded on NYSE, NASDAQ or some dark pool. The important thing should be that they get the best price available. I probably don't know enough about it so I'm probably just talking out of my arse at this point. I should probably just shut up and hit submit. Yup.
> Can someone tell me why what they did was illegal? i.e. What are the limits?
Put simply, they took the piss. Personally, I think they got off quite lightly because, if I recall correctly, the FSA's investigation revealed that they had planned to "drive up" the futures market which, to me, is almost a dictionary definition of market manipulation.
It's like the difference between saying "I reckon the price of silver is going to go up, so I'm going to buy some silver so I can sell it later at a profit" and saying "Hey, let's buy up all the silver in the world so we can corner the market and make a killing!"
Everyone with half a brain knew that what they had done was possible but our guys had rejected the idea without giving it any serious consideration because they knew it was deeply, deeply dodgy (in a bad way, that is) from a legal perspective.
Well, in an ideal world, you profit from the spread - e.g. you buy at 99.99 and sell at 100.01, thereby making a profit of $0.02 on each share. That's what happens in liquid markets, where there are plenty of buyers and sellers putting in market orders.
It's not really all that different to what Asda does with cans of beans - buy 'em from one person and sell 'em to another for a higher price.
There are "official" market makers on the NYSE and (I think still) on the London Stock Exchange.
I'm not a lawyer and I don't speak Norwegian so I can't read the court document to find out exactly what happened.
I am, however, an electronic trading specialist and I've also been a trader at a big American investment bank (one that didn't go bust, by the way, despite my best efforts).
Rumour has it that these guys realised that there was a flawed algorithm (which turns out to have been operated by Timber Hill) making a market in illiquid shares, which set its quotes based either on the prices at which recent trades in those shares had been done, or on the algorithm's own position in the stock.
To give some background: if you are making a market in a stock, that means you are prepared to buy from people who want to sell and sell to people who want to buy. Unless you're feeling particularly generous, you want to buy at a "low" price and sell at a "high" price. In liquid markets (i.e. where there are lots of people buying and selling), you can typically rely on the market mid price (i.e. the best bid plus the best offer, divided by two) and "spread" off that (e.g. add a cent to it to get your ask, subtract a cent from it to get your bid). As the market (i.e. the mid price) moves up and down, you can adjust your bid/ask to follow it and, if you end up buying or selling stock, you can adjust your bid/ask to make it more likely that your quotes get hit/lifted to flatten out your position (e.g. if someone hit your bid and sold you shares, you would probably lower both your bid and your offer, in relation to the market, to make it more likely that someone will buy the shares off you and less likely that you'll buy more shares).
However, in illiquid markets and, in particular, in markets where you are the only market-maker, you may not be able to rely on a market mid, because you are the market, so it's up to you to set the price.
So, let's say you start off with a quote of 99.99/100.01 and a quantity of 10,000 on each side. I come in and lift your ask (i.e. I submit an order to buy at 100.01, which matches against your ask) to the tune of 1,000 shares (i.e. I buy 1,000 shares from you). You are now "short" 1,000 shares, so you might adjust your price to make your bid more attractive to potential sellers - i.e. you change your quote to 100.00/100.02 - and you keep quoting with a 10,000 quantity on either side.
I buy another 1000 shares from you. You shift your quote to 100.01/100.03
I buy another 1000 shares from you. You shift your quote to 100.02/100.04
I buy another 1000 shares from you. You shift your quote to 100.03/100.05
I now own a total of 4000 shares, for which I paid a total of [(1000*100.01)+(1000*100.02)+(1000*100.03)+(1000*100.04)=] 400,100
I now hit your bid and sell you back all 4000 shares at 100.03 for a total of 400,120
I just made myself $20. Thanks very much. Rinse, lather, repeat.
Now, you can see how some people might claim that I'm manipulating the market because I'm issuing orders into the market with the intent/expecation that the price will move as a result. But it's all a bit of a grey area.
However, I might argue that I'm merely taking advantage of bids and offers that are already in the market. If the market-maker on the other side wants to quote prices that allow me to make a profit (or, more accurately, if he's been stupid enough to roll out a market-making algorithm that does that), then why shouldn't I take advantage of it?
If this is what happened, then I'm surprised that Timber Hill decided to make an issue of it. If I'd been that stupid, I probably wouldn't want to draw everyone's attention to it. I would put the loss (which is this case appears to have been kless than $70k) down to experience, fix my algorithm and move on.
People/banks/brokerages/traders/hedge funds do make mistakes like this. A long, long time ago, when I was younger and far more stupid than I am now, I once gave a trader a market-making algorithm that used the market
Their biggest customers (i.e the Fortune 500 companies) are sick and tired of the cost of supporting locally-installed operating systems that they've put serious pressure on Microsoft to come up with a solution. In the not-too-distant future, there will be an "enterprise" version of Windows, where nothing is installed locally. Basically, you'll be able to sit down at any PC on your company's network, log in and your "profile" will be downloaded to the PC you're sat in front of - not just your desktop preferences and IE shortcuts - all the software you regularly use will be "installed" and ready to use.
In this context, the price of a product is not determined by supply and demand.
First of all, let's take supply out of the equation for the time being and we're also going to ignore the effects of marketing and advertising.
Price and demand have an inverse relationship - drop the price, demand increases; raise the price, demand will drop. How much the demand will increase/decrease per unit change in price is determined by the price elasticity of the product in question.
If you're manufacturing widgets, supply is an issue because in a competitive market, prices will generally (I know people are going to point out all the exceptions to this statement) adjust to a level where demand broadly matches supply.
For digital content, supply isn't a factor in determining price. Costs and customers' willingness to pay are the factors you should be thinking about.
Let's say I spend $10m creating a piece of software that is designed for the corporate market. I do a bit of market research and I discover that, if I price it at $20k (let's assume that the incremental costs of production/distribution are negligible for the purposes of this example), approx. 1,000 companies will buy it - i.e. those companies willingness to pay for my product is $20k or higher.
On the other hand, if I price it at $5k, approx. 10,000 companies will buy it - i.e. their WTP is $5k or higher.
What do I do? Well, if you do the math, you'll find that pricing it at $5k brings in the most revenue. However, the problem with that is, 1,000 of the 10,000 companies I'm selling it to for $5k are actually willing to pay $20k, so I'm leaving $15m worth of potential revenue on the table.
How can I capture that extra $15m of revenue? I'll leave that one as an exercise for the reader but while you're thinking about it, have a think about how much you're willing to pay for a given product, whether it be a digital camera or a piece of software like an email client or even an operating system, and (more importantly) why.
Their definition of "auction" seems somewhat different from mine. It seems to me like this is simply a system that will tell you which of your ad networks will pay you the most for displaying their ad to a given user. Not quite a true auction where the ad networks can bid for the ad space on the page being displayed to that user.
The mouse needs to be replaced by a touch screen with a stylus.
Try out a Tablet PC.
I have a Toshiba Tecra M4 and I'd love to have the option of using this desktop interface. I was doing some research into a topic the other night and I ended up with about 9 web browsers, half a dozen PDFs and a couple of spreadsheets. Being able to see them all on a virtual desktop like this would be far cooler than Alt-Tabbing around or having to poke around on the task bar...
The first layoff is tough. After bending over backward, after being a loyal employee, this is the reward? To summarize how I felt: Disillusioned.
Oh, get the fuck over it. Grow up, welcome to the real world.
Don't work in cubicles, ever. Working in cubicles is the sure sign that you're not working for a successful company.
Bullshit. I work for a top company - tens of thousands of employees, an instantly recognisable name, multi-billion turnover, a top-choice destination for graduates, recognised in lists of the best places to work, constantly in the top three of our industry. A lot of our people work in cubicles, including some of the smartest and best developers and technology people on the planet.
Just How Dumb is Management, Anyway?
Just how dumb are you? You have, that, 15 months experience out of college, and you have the idiocy to write an article like this? Do you actually realise the potential impact of this? Part of my job is interviewing and selecting candidates for our graduate programme, as well as lateral hires. If I ever hear your name as a potential hire, I'll veto it.
Oftentimes, a non-technical manager, or an "old hand" who's edge is no longer sharp will be impressed enough to listen to your technical advice. If they were smart, they'd actually take it. [...] If you find yourself in a situation where management is disregarding the sound technical advice they should be basing decisions on, you need to expedite your job search.
Bullshit. It's just as likely that they're more experienced than you and have the smarts to think about the wider picture, not just the narrow technical scope that you think you're expert in. Try asking them why they've made the decision and learning something from them instead of throwing a juvenile hissy fit.
If you tell management that it will take 8 days, and they turn around and tell you they think it will take six, you need to leave.
This guy's a loser.
Guess what? A company does not, repeat, not revolve around an inexperienced, prima donna, overinflated programmer. You are there to contribute to the company, not the other way around. If the circumstances demand that you do an 8-day job in 6 days, then pull out your fucking finger, put in some overtime and fucking get it done. Otherwise get the fuck out of that seat and out the door to make way for someone who can do the job.
If you're not happy with the amount of money that you're making, do a reality check.
Hahahaha... Really? Ya think? As part of that reality check, why don't you have a long, hard think about exactly how good you actually are?
If you're so smart, why did you leave it until May of the year you were supposed to graduate to start looking for a job? If you're such a fucking.NET ninja, then why aren't you working at a decent company, rather than some crappy local software company?
Upstairs here at my firm, we have some of the smartest Comp Sci grads in the world. Why aren't you among them?
Yeah, here, take your reality check, go cash it and here's the extra 90 cents you'll need to afford a Big Mac.
Oh, and while you're there, pick up a application form for a burger-flipping job.
D. ..is for Don't reply. It would be a waste of good oxygen.
I read this story this morning (London time) in the FT on my way into work.
When I read a classic Slashdot story like this in a print publication 8 hours before it appears on Slashdot, then it says to me that Slashdot's going seriously downhill...
Okay, answer me this: What is Linux "threatened" with? Loss of market share? So what? When it was conceived, it had zero market share. Not just a very small percentage, but ZERO . People chose to use it, it became popular, trendy, a threat to Microsoft, blah, blah, blah. If people choose not to use it, it won't make any difference to what Linux is . You can't threaten Linux. It's always going to exist.
Even if development completely ceases (and I do preduct that will happen...but only in the unforeseeable future when computing technology moves to a different paradigm which we can't yet predict), it's still going to be there, waiting for anyone who wants to, to pick it up and continute where the last kernel patcher left off.
Stop trying to define Linux in terms of it's user base or feature set. It's a free, open kernel, not a commercial product. You can't threaten it and anyone who thinks otherwise is an idiot. Get a clue.
Slashdot Mirror
..BP didn't do the cementing. Halliburton did. So, if Halliburton's model showed that more centralizers were required but they decided to go ahead with the cementing anyway, seems to me that they were negligent.
It's like a builder telling the developer "We should use beams and girders in this wall to make it stronger" and the developer saying "Hmmm. We haven't got any steel beams to hand. Can you use reinforced concrete instead and maybe make the wall thicker?". If the builder says "Yeah, sure!" and goes ahead, he can't blame the developer if the wall later collapses.
I sense desperate attempts at ass-covering on Halliburton's part. Probably worried about all their lucrative no-competition Pentagon contracts.
Oh, shut up! It's obvious to anyone with an IQ above single digits that the constant sniping at BP is nothing but a xenophobic witch-hunt, fomented by a faltering White House to distract attention from their own failings. The Oil Spill Commission has already found that BP did not sacrifice safety in favour of profits so give us all a fucking break!
Why don't you direct some of your ire at the federal investigators who haven't yet started an examination of the blowout preventer (made by a US firm, by the way) that FAILED TO WORK, even though it's been sitting in a NASA faciloty for TWO MONTHS!
Morons.
You know, it's probably just as well that no one ever did a discounted cash flow forecast on the Apollo programme. We'd never have gone to the moon.
> There were fights in supermarkets in Gloucestershire over bread and water when the floods hit in 2007...
Let's be fair, they don't really need an excuse to fight in Gloucestershire.
The same thing will happen to the Facebook social networking service as happened to the Compuserve electronic mail service. New, open protocols and standards will negate the network effects it currently enjoys, and it will become one of many inter-operative social networking platforms.
There is certainly a sound basis for the assertion that "more liquidity is better for investors" because it delivers tighter spreads and greater market depth.
However.....I'm not necessarily convinced that the sort of liquidity provided by high-frequency traders is of a particularly high "quality", for want of a better description. I think it's worth taking a step back and looking at the whole picture. Are these guys making their money by honest trading or are they exploiting flaws in the way the system is put together and regulated? I've never traded in the US so I don't know a lot about it but I find myself wondering about Reg NMS. When I got into a shop to buy an iPad, they're under no obligation to let me know that the shop around the corner is selling it for 10% less. And your average retail investor doesn't know or care whether the shares they're buying/selling through their broker are traded on NYSE, NASDAQ or some dark pool. The important thing should be that they get the best price available. I probably don't know enough about it so I'm probably just talking out of my arse at this point. I should probably just shut up and hit submit. Yup.
Well, that actually makes more sense than TMB deciding to air their stupidity in public. :-)
> Can someone tell me why what they did was illegal? i.e. What are the limits?
Put simply, they took the piss. Personally, I think they got off quite lightly because, if I recall correctly, the FSA's investigation revealed that they had planned to "drive up" the futures market which, to me, is almost a dictionary definition of market manipulation.
It's like the difference between saying "I reckon the price of silver is going to go up, so I'm going to buy some silver so I can sell it later at a profit" and saying "Hey, let's buy up all the silver in the world so we can corner the market and make a killing!"
Everyone with half a brain knew that what they had done was possible but our guys had rejected the idea without giving it any serious consideration because they knew it was deeply, deeply dodgy (in a bad way, that is) from a legal perspective.
> I have, however, found a bug in one of your algorithms. Lathering after rinsing doesn't work so well.
Fuck! That explains why my hair is so manky!
Haha, I'll bet they're embarrassed! :-)
Well, in an ideal world, you profit from the spread - e.g. you buy at 99.99 and sell at 100.01, thereby making a profit of $0.02 on each share. That's what happens in liquid markets, where there are plenty of buyers and sellers putting in market orders.
It's not really all that different to what Asda does with cans of beans - buy 'em from one person and sell 'em to another for a higher price.
There are "official" market makers on the NYSE and (I think still) on the London Stock Exchange.
Rumour has it that these guys realised that there was a flawed algorithm (which turns out to have been operated by Timber Hill) making a market in illiquid shares, which set its quotes based either on the prices at which recent trades in those shares had been done, or on the algorithm's own position in the stock.
To give some background: if you are making a market in a stock, that means you are prepared to buy from people who want to sell and sell to people who want to buy. Unless you're feeling particularly generous, you want to buy at a "low" price and sell at a "high" price. In liquid markets (i.e. where there are lots of people buying and selling), you can typically rely on the market mid price (i.e. the best bid plus the best offer, divided by two) and "spread" off that (e.g. add a cent to it to get your ask, subtract a cent from it to get your bid). As the market (i.e. the mid price) moves up and down, you can adjust your bid/ask to follow it and, if you end up buying or selling stock, you can adjust your bid/ask to make it more likely that your quotes get hit/lifted to flatten out your position (e.g. if someone hit your bid and sold you shares, you would probably lower both your bid and your offer, in relation to the market, to make it more likely that someone will buy the shares off you and less likely that you'll buy more shares).
However, in illiquid markets and, in particular, in markets where you are the only market-maker, you may not be able to rely on a market mid, because you are the market, so it's up to you to set the price.
So, let's say you start off with a quote of 99.99/100.01 and a quantity of 10,000 on each side. I come in and lift your ask (i.e. I submit an order to buy at 100.01, which matches against your ask) to the tune of 1,000 shares (i.e. I buy 1,000 shares from you). You are now "short" 1,000 shares, so you might adjust your price to make your bid more attractive to potential sellers - i.e. you change your quote to 100.00/100.02 - and you keep quoting with a 10,000 quantity on either side.
I buy another 1000 shares from you. You shift your quote to 100.01/100.03
I buy another 1000 shares from you. You shift your quote to 100.02/100.04
I buy another 1000 shares from you. You shift your quote to 100.03/100.05
I now own a total of 4000 shares, for which I paid a total of [(1000*100.01)+(1000*100.02)+(1000*100.03)+(1000*100.04)=] 400,100
I now hit your bid and sell you back all 4000 shares at 100.03 for a total of 400,120
I just made myself $20. Thanks very much. Rinse, lather, repeat.
Now, you can see how some people might claim that I'm manipulating the market because I'm issuing orders into the market with the intent/expecation that the price will move as a result. But it's all a bit of a grey area.
However, I might argue that I'm merely taking advantage of bids and offers that are already in the market. If the market-maker on the other side wants to quote prices that allow me to make a profit (or, more accurately, if he's been stupid enough to roll out a market-making algorithm that does that), then why shouldn't I take advantage of it?
If this is what happened, then I'm surprised that Timber Hill decided to make an issue of it. If I'd been that stupid, I probably wouldn't want to draw everyone's attention to it. I would put the loss (which is this case appears to have been kless than $70k) down to experience, fix my algorithm and move on.
People/banks/brokerages/traders/hedge funds do make mistakes like this. A long, long time ago, when I was younger and far more stupid than I am now, I once gave a trader a market-making algorithm that used the market
Okay, tell us where the budgie is.
Or the cat gets it.
Their biggest customers (i.e the Fortune 500 companies) are sick and tired of the cost of supporting locally-installed operating systems that they've put serious pressure on Microsoft to come up with a solution. In the not-too-distant future, there will be an "enterprise" version of Windows, where nothing is installed locally. Basically, you'll be able to sit down at any PC on your company's network, log in and your "profile" will be downloaded to the PC you're sat in front of - not just your desktop preferences and IE shortcuts - all the software you regularly use will be "installed" and ready to use.
D.
First of all, let's take supply out of the equation for the time being and we're also going to ignore the effects of marketing and advertising.
Price and demand have an inverse relationship - drop the price, demand increases; raise the price, demand will drop. How much the demand will increase/decrease per unit change in price is determined by the price elasticity of the product in question.
If you're manufacturing widgets, supply is an issue because in a competitive market, prices will generally (I know people are going to point out all the exceptions to this statement) adjust to a level where demand broadly matches supply.
For digital content, supply isn't a factor in determining price. Costs and customers' willingness to pay are the factors you should be thinking about.
Let's say I spend $10m creating a piece of software that is designed for the corporate market. I do a bit of market research and I discover that, if I price it at $20k (let's assume that the incremental costs of production/distribution are negligible for the purposes of this example), approx. 1,000 companies will buy it - i.e. those companies willingness to pay for my product is $20k or higher .
On the other hand, if I price it at $5k, approx. 10,000 companies will buy it - i.e. their WTP is $5k or higher .
What do I do? Well, if you do the math, you'll find that pricing it at $5k brings in the most revenue. However, the problem with that is, 1,000 of the 10,000 companies I'm selling it to for $5k are actually willing to pay $20k, so I'm leaving $15m worth of potential revenue on the table.
How can I capture that extra $15m of revenue? I'll leave that one as an exercise for the reader but while you're thinking about it, have a think about how much you're willing to pay for a given product, whether it be a digital camera or a piece of software like an email client or even an operating system, and (more importantly) why.
D.
D.
The mouse needs to be replaced by a touch screen with a stylus.
Try out a Tablet PC.
I have a Toshiba Tecra M4 and I'd love to have the option of using this desktop interface. I was doing some research into a topic the other night and I ended up with about 9 web browsers, half a dozen PDFs and a couple of spreadsheets. Being able to see them all on a virtual desktop like this would be far cooler than Alt-Tabbing around or having to poke around on the task bar...
D.
..under the UK's Data Protection Act. See http://www.dataprotection.gov.uk/ for details...
Guess what? A company does not, repeat, not revolve around an inexperienced, prima donna, overinflated programmer. You are there to contribute to the company, not the other way around. If the circumstances demand that you do an 8-day job in 6 days, then pull out your fucking finger, put in some overtime and fucking get it done. Otherwise get the fuck out of that seat and out the door to make way for someone who can do the job.
Hahahaha... Really? Ya think? As part of that reality check, why don't you have a long, hard think about exactly how good you actually are?If you're so smart, why did you leave it until May of the year you were supposed to graduate to start looking for a job? If you're such a fucking .NET ninja, then why aren't you working at a decent company, rather than some crappy local software company?
Upstairs here at my firm, we have some of the smartest Comp Sci grads in the world. Why aren't you among them?
Yeah, here, take your reality check, go cash it and here's the extra 90 cents you'll need to afford a Big Mac.
Oh, and while you're there, pick up a application form for a burger-flipping job.
D.
I read this story this morning (London time) in the FT on my way into work.
When I read a classic Slashdot story like this in a print publication 8 hours before it appears on Slashdot, then it says to me that Slashdot's going seriously downhill...
March 17th is St Patrick's Day. :-)
IBM?
I'm not forgetting anything. You listed a series of benefits Linux has brought and then said Linux does exist and it can't be killed.
If you can figure out a way you think you can kill Linux, reply and I'll tell you why you're wrong.
D.
Okay, answer me this: What is Linux "threatened" with? Loss of market share? So what? When it was conceived, it had zero market share. Not just a very small percentage, but ZERO . People chose to use it, it became popular, trendy, a threat to Microsoft, blah, blah, blah. If people choose not to use it, it won't make any difference to what Linux is . You can't threaten Linux. It's always going to exist.
Even if development completely ceases (and I do preduct that will happen...but only in the unforeseeable future when computing technology moves to a different paradigm which we can't yet predict), it's still going to be there, waiting for anyone who wants to, to pick it up and continute where the last kernel patcher left off.
Stop trying to define Linux in terms of it's user base or feature set. It's a free, open kernel, not a commercial product. You can't threaten it and anyone who thinks otherwise is an idiot. Get a clue.
D.
Linux has grown beyond the point where it can be effectively maintained by part time volunteers.
This is, if you'll forgive me, bullshit.
You're completely missing the point and I can't be arsed explaining it to you in terms that are simple enough for you to understand.
D.