I mostly use my Galaxy Note II for Listening to music Games Read my gmail account at work and on the go Text (sms and Google chat) on-demand Maps + GPS the FT.com app Browsing the web
And somewhere below all that, there's the 'phone' aspect, at 1-2 calls a week or so.
Sure I do, but are you telling me that changed the iPhone experience? How many of my gripes above are addressed in the latest one?
Uncle Steve might as well be a mythical figure for all the difference it makes, my issue is with the 'my way or the highway' attitude of Apple products, giving me an arbitrarily crippled experience.
Tried it, hated it, never again. I mostly use my phone as a music player, and here are all issues that it had, all of which were really annoying to me in daily use - Every time I connect to charge, my on-the-go playlist is reset - No custom EQ - No browse-by-folder - Only exchange files with one machine, and can't treat it as just a hard drive that happens to have music - Stupid 'features' enabled by default, such as shake-to-randomize-song-order, I had some 'what the fuck?' moments there before I learned to turn them off.
Now a happy Galaxy Note II user, it's not exactly cheap but none of the above issues, bigger screen, and if I don't like the player that came with it I could always change it. I also think it looks better but that's of course subjective. I'm hardly a tinkerer these days, am hardly exposed to ads (don't watch TV for example, and walk to work so don't see ads in public transport much), and price is pretty much irrelevant for me when choosing phones.
The iPhone is great if you happen to like it just the way Uncle Steve wants it, but I have a hard time understanding how anybody who actually has own opinions of their own could do that.
> Do you really think drug use is on par with what type of car you drive? Yes. Personal choice mainly affecting the user, with some effect on those around them (depending on the specific drug, minimal in the case of marijuana)
> The main consequence is that it determines what type of society you live in: does it have standards and values, or not? If 'standards and values' means your prohibiting me things because you disapprove of them, even though they don't directly harm you, then please keep them to yourself.
> The point of a free society is that you're not compelled to do things against your values. That doesn't mean there are no rules or standards. Rules preventing people from actively harming other people (rape, robbery, etc) are one thing. But you seem to think much wider rules than that are desirable, right? You value your right to 'live in a society where X is not normal', is that what you mean by standards? To me, that's naked, unjustifiable desire to control what other people do even when it's none of your fucking business, just because you say so.
If that's an essential part of your definition of a free society, sounds like you're the one who's confused.
Capitalism doesn't _produce_ free markets
on
The Web We Lost
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· Score: 1
> The result of a Capitalistic Society that practices Capitalism would be Open and Free Markets, right?
Wrong. Left to themselves, these tend to degenerate into monopolies as the incumbents use their profits to keep competitors out. Open and free markets must be maintained by forces outside of the market mechanism, such as regulations.
Capitalism doesn't produce free markets, it requires them (most definitions of it do anyway), so wrong causality direction.
I'm mostly with you, but expiration on death is a really bad idea as it give would-be users an incentive to kill the authors. I'd much rather go with a fixed, short protection period, and then public domain.
Yes, I also think I have the right to use the image in such a context. I also believe there should be no copyright protection for non-commercial use of anything by individual persons (as opposed to organizations), as it happens, of which this is a special case.
Firstly, it's perfectly possible to buy -6 shares, it's called selling. It's even possible to buy -6 shares if you don't have any, that's called short selling and is more complicated but still possible (though illegal for some shares such as, currently, Spanish ones I believe).
Here they were talking of futures contracts not shares, you can buy or sell as many as you want, it's totally symmetrical. And that $69T was just referring to the notional, which misleading since you don't pay the notional when you enter a futures contract - you just post margin which is a tiny fraction of that. The margin on that kind of amount would still be monstrous, but not measured in the trillions.
No, politicians at Obama's level are being scrutinized constantly and intensively, and are squeaky clean certainly where the small stuff is concerned becaused simple cost-benefit analysis says it's the strategic thing to do. 'Sunlight is the best disinfectant' at work.
Do I hear a condescending tone there? Me, I'm with the GGP in that I like my games to be beautiful, engaging, easy interactive movies. My competitive spirit is getting all the workout it needs at work, and whatever energy I got left after that, my 1yo daughter has first claim on.
So when I grab an hour or two to play a game, I want beautiful and fun, and yes I want guaranteed progress, as I simply have no time or energy to try over and over again.
Not saying my way is better than yours, to each his own - it's just that people with my kind of priorities, regarded as a group, probably have a total budget for purchasing games that is at least comparable to that of people who have the time and inclination for really hard gaming challenges; thus, a lot of games lately accomodate my priorities, and I think that's a good thing.
Play music: 70% Play video games while in the bus, train etc: 10% Record videos of my little daughter to share with relatives: 5% Google chat and SMS: 5% Read personal mail at work: 5% Phone calls are somewhere in the remaining 5%
Oh, and while on holidays it's invaluable to have a GPS navigation device that allows you to click right through to the website of the hotel you found on the overlaid map and yes, call them to reserve a room for the night.
And the GPS + satellite photo maps have saved me from getting badly lost in a forest at least once, and kept me from being late while taking a picturesque route to a rendez-vous another time. Maps-on-demand that include your location are a god-given when you're traveling, hiking, etc.
Are you working for Google or something? I work in a large corp, and the hiring procedures are insane, especially on the IT side. There is one process for getting budget to pay people (which is fair enough), then you have to get permission at damn near board level to actually start looking for an actual person to hire, and once all the people in that would-be hire's command chain have signed off on hiring them, it can still take HR weeks to months to get an actual written offer out. And then there are yearly hiring freezes that strike about every September, last till next year, and supersede any approvals you might have achieved by then. These, again, can be bypassed by pushing hard enough - overall, none of this makes hiring impossible, but an incredible time sink, not to mention causing us to lose candidates because the competitors were faster on the draw.
Once you're in the system, it's actually a pretty good place to work (and getting a bit better every year IMO, as the number of bright people around me grows), but the hiring procedures are just damn crazy.
The trick is to throw them edgewise onto concrete and give them enough spin that it lands on a corner and bounces back upright.
Did that experiment when I discovered its music player had no folder browsing, no custom EQ, and reset the on-the-go playlist everytime I connected to charge. Now a happy Note 2 user.
Yes, and that reason is that people brainlessly copy whatever the 'latest thing' is. I far, far prefer physical keyboards so can't regard the wave of iPhone lookalikes as a good thing; and of the no-keyboard phones, I think the best is Galaxy Note because it has a reasonable-sized screen, again very unlike the iPhone; and Android lets me install whatever I want without trying to force me to the One True Way, ditto.
Yes, iPad and iPhone had a huge impact, but not for the better as far as I'm concerned. I want more buttons on my MP3 player so that I can use it without taking it out of pocket - it's Steve Jobs' (and brainless copymonkeys') fault stuff doesn't have buttons anymore...
Sorry, can't agree with your comparison of Richard Dawkins and religious nuts. Richard Dawkins would be more than happy to re-evaluate his views were he presented with any scientifically valid evidence that any religion's statements about reality are actually true (eg, God does respond to prayer, etc). In the face of complete absence of such evidence, he rightly continues to call bullshit on these claims, and just as rightly points out that we shouldn't tiptoe around bullshit claims and intolerance just because they're driven by religious views.
Note that, unlike religious nuts, he does not call for censorship of the views he objects to, merely does his best to present his views.
I find the resurgence of religion in the last decade or so truly scary, people take for granted all the advances science keeps bringing us and keep trying to impose their medieval views on everybody around them, regardless of the damage it causes.
I'm doing a machine learning course with them right now, and they ask you as one part of the homework to write Matlab code, and include a script that connects to their servers, and checks your code for correctness. This, plus a set of partly randomized multiple-choice questions for each lecture are a great help for me to focus on the content.
That's pretty awesome in my book, way more than any forums (well already at Uni I mostly skipped the lectures and discussion groups, and passed everything by reading the lecture notes, then doing the homework).
All this needs to match everything a real university can give me is the option for those few that can pass that sort of course with flying colors (doing the advanced homework well etc) to get a chance for a follow-up advanced course where after passing the automated code check you'd get a real human to comment on your solutions to the more interesting problems. I'd be more than happy to pay for that sort of course, too, after I'd had a chance to check out the professor and material during the free initial course. I already have a career so couldn't care less about getting a piece of paper out of it, but could always do with learning some bleeding-edge techniques.
Well there is high-freq execution, that's a service very much in demand as it allows to lower market impact and thus get filled at a better price. Secondly, a lot of what's described on Slashdot as HFT is marketmaking (Knight for example), these folks have an obligation to provide tight prices all the time, which is a service. Finally, as for pure HFT prop guys, they mostly make money off each other, contrary to what you read on slashdot it's not at all easy to make money in HFT these days, this is not 2009. Also the spreads on equities have collapsed in the last decade, so a very plausible scenario is that the money that the brokers were earlier getting from charging high spread, HFT traders are getting now while lowering the spreads for the rest of us.
And why does HFT provoke so much vitriol when for example the fact that retail currency exchange points routinely quote spreads of several cents on the dollar, while the professional markets are 0.01 cent wide means that the money lost by retail consumers when exchanging currencies is a very large multiple of anything they might lose due to HFT (if anything)?
There are murky corners in finance, no denying that (LIBOR anyone?), but HFT just isn't one of them.
Well that doesn't answer my original question, how any of this can make your pension pot to become worthless in 0.005 seconds.
Making decisions on information before it's public knowledge is called insider dealing, is a criminal offense that lands people in jail, and has nothing to do with HFT, in fact algos don't generally trade events or use information like that even if it was available.
Ditto for market manipulation.
Of course every trade made affects the market, what you haven't given a single argument for why HFT's effect is _adverse_.
How? What tax? I can go into the market and buy equities any time, the more counterparties willing to take the other side, the smaller my market impact and therefore the better price I can get. The place where the small inverstor can get ripped off are the brokerage fees they're asked, but that has nothing to do with HFT.
Which one? Knight? Unfortunately you're wrong there, Knight lost a sum that was a large fraction of their market value and had to sell itself to a consortium of other firms (ie lost its independence) as a result. The trades reversed were some of the trades done by other counterparties after the Knight trades effectively messed up price discovery for those 20 minutes or so.
> Sometimes, large segments of the people are not able to recognize what is good for them.
All too often. Your attitude is scary - the last thing I want is some official deciding what's good for me in contradiction to my own opinion. Or do you honestly believe that a) there is some objective standard of what's 'good for the people' distinct to what people themselves think and b) that officials are somehow more able to perceive what that is than the populace at large?
The reason we need government is because different groups of people have different preferences, and we need a mechanism to mediate between them - but that's a very very different thing to 'doing good to people who don't know what's good for them'. If I am to be coerced, I'd rather it be done on honest motives of someone's selfishness, or being outvoted, etc, than 'for my own good', thank you very much.
Which part of 'Humans using computers to carry out pre-defined series of actions on request' don't you understand? When you wrote your post, were its contents 'algorithmically controlled' because as a human you're not able to send signals over wires in milliseconds to the Slashdot web server, and rely on your computer to do so on your behalf?
And FYI I work in finance (not HFT, but similar stuff) and so know nearly as much about HFT as people who do it - and find the level of ignorance on Slashdot mindboggling, these posts are my attempt to bring a bit of commonsense into that discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
I mostly use my Galaxy Note II for
Listening to music
Games
Read my gmail account at work and on the go
Text (sms and Google chat)
on-demand Maps + GPS
the FT.com app
Browsing the web
And somewhere below all that, there's the 'phone' aspect, at 1-2 calls a week or so.
Sure I do, but are you telling me that changed the iPhone experience? How many of my gripes above are addressed in the latest one?
Uncle Steve might as well be a mythical figure for all the difference it makes, my issue is with the 'my way or the highway' attitude of Apple products, giving me an arbitrarily crippled experience.
Tried it, hated it, never again. I mostly use my phone as a music player, and here are all issues that it had, all of which were really annoying to me in daily use
- Every time I connect to charge, my on-the-go playlist is reset
- No custom EQ
- No browse-by-folder
- Only exchange files with one machine, and can't treat it as just a hard drive that happens to have music
- Stupid 'features' enabled by default, such as shake-to-randomize-song-order, I had some 'what the fuck?' moments there before I learned to turn them off.
Now a happy Galaxy Note II user, it's not exactly cheap but none of the above issues, bigger screen, and if I don't like the player that came with it I could always change it. I also think it looks better but that's of course subjective. I'm hardly a tinkerer these days, am hardly exposed to ads (don't watch TV for example, and walk to work so don't see ads in public transport much), and price is pretty much irrelevant for me when choosing phones.
The iPhone is great if you happen to like it just the way Uncle Steve wants it, but I have a hard time understanding how anybody who actually has own opinions of their own could do that.
> Do you really think drug use is on par with what type of car you drive?
Yes. Personal choice mainly affecting the user, with some effect on those around them (depending on the specific drug, minimal in the case of marijuana)
> The main consequence is that it determines what type of society you live in: does it have standards and values, or not?
If 'standards and values' means your prohibiting me things because you disapprove of them, even though they don't directly harm you, then please keep them to yourself.
> The point of a free society is that you're not compelled to do things against your values. That doesn't mean there are no rules or standards.
Rules preventing people from actively harming other people (rape, robbery, etc) are one thing. But you seem to think much wider rules than that are desirable, right? You value your right to 'live in a society where X is not normal', is that what you mean by standards? To me, that's naked, unjustifiable desire to control what other people do even when it's none of your fucking business, just because you say so.
If that's an essential part of your definition of a free society, sounds like you're the one who's confused.
'My eight eyes'?
> The result of a Capitalistic Society that practices Capitalism would be Open and Free Markets, right?
Wrong. Left to themselves, these tend to degenerate into monopolies as the incumbents use their profits to keep competitors out. Open and free markets must be maintained by forces outside of the market mechanism, such as regulations.
Capitalism doesn't produce free markets, it requires them (most definitions of it do anyway), so wrong causality direction.
I'm mostly with you, but expiration on death is a really bad idea as it give would-be users an incentive to kill the authors. I'd much rather go with a fixed, short protection period, and then public domain.
Yes, I also think I have the right to use the image in such a context. I also believe there should be no copyright protection for non-commercial use of anything by individual persons (as opposed to organizations), as it happens, of which this is a special case.
Firstly, it's perfectly possible to buy -6 shares, it's called selling. It's even possible to buy -6 shares if you don't have any, that's called short selling and is more complicated but still possible (though illegal for some shares such as, currently, Spanish ones I believe).
Here they were talking of futures contracts not shares, you can buy or sell as many as you want, it's totally symmetrical. And that $69T was just referring to the notional, which misleading since you don't pay the notional when you enter a futures contract - you just post margin which is a tiny fraction of that. The margin on that kind of amount would still be monstrous, but not measured in the trillions.
No, politicians at Obama's level are being scrutinized constantly and intensively, and are squeaky clean certainly where the small stuff is concerned becaused simple cost-benefit analysis says it's the strategic thing to do. 'Sunlight is the best disinfectant' at work.
Do I hear a condescending tone there? Me, I'm with the GGP in that I like my games to be beautiful, engaging, easy interactive movies. My competitive spirit is getting all the workout it needs at work, and whatever energy I got left after that, my 1yo daughter has first claim on.
So when I grab an hour or two to play a game, I want beautiful and fun, and yes I want guaranteed progress, as I simply have no time or energy to try over and over again.
Not saying my way is better than yours, to each his own - it's just that people with my kind of priorities, regarded as a group, probably have a total budget for purchasing games that is at least comparable to that of people who have the time and inclination for really hard gaming challenges; thus, a lot of games lately accomodate my priorities, and I think that's a good thing.
The usages of my Samsung Note 2 are:
Play music: 70%
Play video games while in the bus, train etc: 10%
Record videos of my little daughter to share with relatives: 5%
Google chat and SMS: 5%
Read personal mail at work: 5%
Phone calls are somewhere in the remaining 5%
Oh, and while on holidays it's invaluable to have a GPS navigation device that allows you to click right through to the website of the hotel you found on the overlaid map and yes, call them to reserve a room for the night.
And the GPS + satellite photo maps have saved me from getting badly lost in a forest at least once, and kept me from being late while taking a picturesque route to a rendez-vous another time. Maps-on-demand that include your location are a god-given when you're traveling, hiking, etc.
Try any that with a brick phone.
Are you working for Google or something? I work in a large corp, and the hiring procedures are insane, especially on the IT side. There is one process for getting budget to pay people (which is fair enough), then you have to get permission at damn near board level to actually start looking for an actual person to hire, and once all the people in that would-be hire's command chain have signed off on hiring them, it can still take HR weeks to months to get an actual written offer out. And then there are yearly hiring freezes that strike about every September, last till next year, and supersede any approvals you might have achieved by then. These, again, can be bypassed by pushing hard enough - overall, none of this makes hiring impossible, but an incredible time sink, not to mention causing us to lose candidates because the competitors were faster on the draw.
Once you're in the system, it's actually a pretty good place to work (and getting a bit better every year IMO, as the number of bright people around me grows), but the hiring procedures are just damn crazy.
The trick is to throw them edgewise onto concrete and give them enough spin that it lands on a corner and bounces back upright.
Did that experiment when I discovered its music player had no folder browsing, no custom EQ, and reset the on-the-go playlist everytime I connected to charge. Now a happy Note 2 user.
Yes, and that reason is that people brainlessly copy whatever the 'latest thing' is. I far, far prefer physical keyboards so can't regard the wave of iPhone lookalikes as a good thing; and of the no-keyboard phones, I think the best is Galaxy Note because it has a reasonable-sized screen, again very unlike the iPhone; and Android lets me install whatever I want without trying to force me to the One True Way, ditto.
Yes, iPad and iPhone had a huge impact, but not for the better as far as I'm concerned. I want more buttons on my MP3 player so that I can use it without taking it out of pocket - it's Steve Jobs' (and brainless copymonkeys') fault stuff doesn't have buttons anymore...
Sorry, can't agree with your comparison of Richard Dawkins and religious nuts. Richard Dawkins would be more than happy to re-evaluate his views were he presented with any scientifically valid evidence that any religion's statements about reality are actually true (eg, God does respond to prayer, etc). In the face of complete absence of such evidence, he rightly continues to call bullshit on these claims, and just as rightly points out that we shouldn't tiptoe around bullshit claims and intolerance just because they're driven by religious views.
Note that, unlike religious nuts, he does not call for censorship of the views he objects to, merely does his best to present his views.
I find the resurgence of religion in the last decade or so truly scary, people take for granted all the advances science keeps bringing us and keep trying to impose their medieval views on everybody around them, regardless of the damage it causes.
I'm doing a machine learning course with them right now, and they ask you as one part of the homework to write Matlab code, and include a script that connects to their servers, and checks your code for correctness. This, plus a set of partly randomized multiple-choice questions for each lecture are a great help for me to focus on the content.
That's pretty awesome in my book, way more than any forums (well already at Uni I mostly skipped the lectures and discussion groups, and passed everything by reading the lecture notes, then doing the homework).
All this needs to match everything a real university can give me is the option for those few that can pass that sort of course with flying colors (doing the advanced homework well etc) to get a chance for a follow-up advanced course where after passing the automated code check you'd get a real human to comment on your solutions to the more interesting problems. I'd be more than happy to pay for that sort of course, too, after I'd had a chance to check out the professor and material during the free initial course. I already have a career so couldn't care less about getting a piece of paper out of it, but could always do with learning some bleeding-edge techniques.
Well there is high-freq execution, that's a service very much in demand as it allows to lower market impact and thus get filled at a better price. Secondly, a lot of what's described on Slashdot as HFT is marketmaking (Knight for example), these folks have an obligation to provide tight prices all the time, which is a service.
Finally, as for pure HFT prop guys, they mostly make money off each other, contrary to what you read on slashdot it's not at all easy to make money in HFT these days, this is not 2009. Also the spreads on equities have collapsed in the last decade, so a very plausible scenario is that the money that the brokers were earlier getting from charging high spread, HFT traders are getting now while lowering the spreads for the rest of us.
And why does HFT provoke so much vitriol when for example the fact that retail currency exchange points routinely quote spreads of several cents on the dollar, while the professional markets are 0.01 cent wide means that the money lost by retail consumers when exchanging currencies is a very large multiple of anything they might lose due to HFT (if anything)?
There are murky corners in finance, no denying that (LIBOR anyone?), but HFT just isn't one of them.
Well that doesn't answer my original question, how any of this can make your pension pot to become worthless in 0.005 seconds.
Making decisions on information before it's public knowledge is called insider dealing, is a criminal offense that lands people in jail, and has nothing to do with HFT, in fact algos don't generally trade events or use information like that even if it was available.
Ditto for market manipulation.
Of course every trade made affects the market, what you haven't given a single argument for why HFT's effect is _adverse_.
Why - those trades were made by people who have nothing to do with Knight - is it always fair that they suffer because of Knight's blunder?
E.
Do you have shares in an HFT fund? No? Does your pension fund? ( Even if it does it soon won't because of Volcker rule)
So how exactly do you see yourself losing it due to HFT?
How? What tax? I can go into the market and buy equities any time, the more counterparties willing to take the other side, the smaller my market impact and therefore the better price I can get. The place where the small inverstor can get ripped off are the brokerage fees they're asked, but that has nothing to do with HFT.
Which one? Knight? Unfortunately you're wrong there, Knight lost a sum that was a large fraction of their market value and had to sell itself to a consortium of other firms (ie lost its independence) as a result. The trades reversed were some of the trades done by other counterparties after the Knight trades effectively messed up price discovery for those 20 minutes or so.
So what's your problem exactly?
> Sometimes, large segments of the people are not able to recognize what is good for them.
All too often. Your attitude is scary - the last thing I want is some official deciding what's good for me in contradiction to my own opinion. Or do you honestly believe that a) there is some objective standard of what's 'good for the people' distinct to what people themselves think and b) that officials are somehow more able to perceive what that is than the populace at large?
The reason we need government is because different groups of people have different preferences, and we need a mechanism to mediate between them - but that's a very very different thing to 'doing good to people who don't know what's good for them'. If I am to be coerced, I'd rather it be done on honest motives of someone's selfishness, or being outvoted, etc, than 'for my own good', thank you very much.
Which part of 'Humans using computers to carry out pre-defined series of actions on request' don't you understand? When you wrote your post, were its contents 'algorithmically controlled' because as a human you're not able to send signals over wires in milliseconds to the Slashdot web server, and rely on your computer to do so on your behalf?
And FYI I work in finance (not HFT, but similar stuff) and so know nearly as much about HFT as people who do it - and find the level of ignorance on Slashdot mindboggling, these posts are my attempt to bring a bit of commonsense into that discussion.