I thought I gave some examples - FX, equity, commodity prices get better as frequency increases.
Less cost and fuss for consumers and importers/exporters, etc. A few people spend their lives making prices tighter, and millions of people get better prices on vacations, on their mortgages, etc. Why begrudge them for pocketing a few percent off the top?
International trade on high-tech products becomes possible: you can get a firm offer on 20 inputs you need in 1 hour. In the old days, that level of co-ordination was impossible - you had to BUY the suppliers.
I take "better" to mean "you get better stuff at a better price."
Right. We can have the banks just trade once a minute or once a day.
End users can go back to using Travellers Cheques: sure you spend a few hours of your foreign vacation either getting ripped off or waiting in line at a bank, but hey, at least global trading is now leisurely.
Stocks are just as good: you paid 3% to trade, but hey, it's a long term investment!
Commodities? You need a supply of tin? Just buy a tin mine.
People proposing slowing down trading speeds are like people proposing slowing down computer clock speeds. Sure, you save some energy, but so what? Everyone has to use a 6502 based iPad because you think that would be better?
HFT has been using statistical synchronization of dbs for years.
Big financial shops switched to in-memory dbs decades ago. With co-lo on the compute farms.
I don't know why he's even talking about 32G boxes as servers. That's a desktop, real db hosts are an order of magnitude bigger.
His "push the disks to the edge of the network?" Um, that's already happened - it's called tier 2. Tier 1 is the terabytes of solid-state storage we keep just in case.
The system I'm currently working on has most of the above (compiler, custom file system/database, simulation system, real-time constraints, and also compute farms, global 24/7, hundreds of developers, etc.)
We run "build-and-test on check-in." No code base forks, no long-lived private branches. "Daily build" would be horribly inefficient for our specific workflow, even 5 minute builds are a bit annoying.
The environment you are operating in determines a lot about the tools/practices you get: we deploy code to production about 500 times/day, core code a little less frequently.
My eyes glaze over when a candidate starts asking about what versions of what products she will be using. No one cares. If we made the wrong choice, I expect someone to get some consensus and fix it.
I always tell a candidate about management structure: it's 1 boss per 20 workers, so there won't be a lot of hand-holding or meetings, initiative is required, etc. That's the easiest way to avoid a bad match.
Also, always walk the candidate through the group's workspace. 2 minutes there saves an hour of explaining how your group works.
I think putting this fear in the hearts of the powerful is the point of, and value of, Wikileaks. Regardless of whether they've broken a world-changing story so far, they've produced a chilling effect on corruption.
According to JA's writings, that is their immediate aim. Their strategic goal, however, follows from this: by making secret groups more leaky, those groups are forced to slow down or compartmentalize their internal communications and control, thus making them less effective and less co-ordinated.
Pretty much the same approach we use to tackle Al Quaeda, etc.
They alert the following driver much better. If you aren't following an SUV, you can even see the t+2 car ahead of you braking.
A bit of history: the "third brakelight" was given a trial run on Manhattan taxis, and people just plain rear-ended the equipped ones a lot less. It was probably the most cost-effective anti-crash item ever invented.
Candid assessments about Karzai's leadership : DO NOT RELEASE
Why? We've been in Afganistan for longer than WW2. A bit of light here might help the US citizens understand this is a quagmire worth quitting now.
Name calling of the Prince of England : DO NOT RELEASE
Why? He's a douchebag.
If you don't want that fact noted as part of US diplomacy, that just don't say it. Or fire the idiot who felt the need to write the factoid in an official cable.
A mass murderer, assuming he's not in the US, is an international problem. We've left other countries to more or less mind their business since our country's founding. ("More or less" meaning that we largely negotiate and strongarm with whomever manages to act like a government in some cases, and when we don't do that we always regret it.)
Huh? A murderer is a problem for the nation he did the murders in. Or are you assuming two kinds of law: American and the magical non-American global law?
Wikileaks, however, is an organization that has come to directly target the operational security of the USA. It's not even journalism -- it's just "secrets are bad." There's hardly anything in the last three big releases that should be news to ANYONE. (War is hell in Iraq. War is hell in Afghanistan. What countries say in private isn't what they say in public.)
Ok, so you are saying the leaks are a non-issue? Oh, and when did "journalism" become the definition of freedom of speech?
OTOH, I wouldn't say that the federal government is SCARED of wikileaks. If they were really a problem, Obama has an absurdly broad array of options, the most fast-acting of which would be to recognize WIkileaks as a terrorist organization. (What ELSE do you call a private group dedicated to breaking laws and changing the political direction of a country that they are not citizens of?) . OTOH, Assange is a big enough prick that it looks like all we have to do is wait, and he'll hang himself. (Yes, if you're mid-sex and she says stop, failing to do so *IS RAPE*.)
Terrorism? wtf? Who is he causing to be terrified? Or do you define "terrorism" as "anything I don't like that doesn't seem to be against the law?"
Probably true, but I dump $1K+ into DonorsChoose each year on simple stuff like a rug big enough for the class to sit on. If you can't provide an environment better than a jail, how do you expect the children to think school is in their interest?
It looks more like they are patenting "nothing much at all." As in, "here are some use cases, here is a state machine that implements them, run our program, find questionable state transitions, ask users to decide what happens in those cases. Repeat until you have a complete formal spec."
This looks more like a case of a small group of people trying to justify their continued employment by pointing to their patents/minor revenue generated as evidence that they are doing something useful and so should not be laid off.
Without the degree, a kid is likely to get stuck in an unskilled or menial position, and his only chance for advancement is to be 'noticed' by higher-ups during internal expansion, or to leverage his experience into a new company. It takes ambition to move up the corporate ladder. Why would an ambitious person forgo college, choose a more difficult starting position, and choose to leave a distinct void in his resume?
Assuming we restricting ourselves to ambitious people capable and able to attend a good college, one common answer I've seen is:
The person is already bored in college, finds it too slow or too like high school, and wants to learn and succeed in the real world. Sure, the starting position will be harder, but getting "noticed" should only take a month or two. Then it's up, up, up. The person needs a lot of faith in themselves that for this to be an attractive plan, but I've seen it tried often.
BTW, my group's hiring plan is "good degree from good place" for the junior roles, education unimportant (but successes critical) for higher-level positions.
Quite the contrary. The easiest way into a woman's pants is often through her stomach.
I noticed that when I was younger.
Now I find a personal chef in the kitchen while you sip wine with the women works pretty well too. It has the added benefit that her panties don't smell of garlic.
the law should allow for the guy to be a little slow on the uptake in certain situations.
Don't worry, it does. Probably to point of favoring the guy.
If you find yourself with a topless girl in your bed who is pushing and/or hitting you while yelling "no," and you think sex is still on the cards, you might want to work on the uptake thing.
If you understand that "consent is realtime" you are not going to get into much trouble.
Oh, and the courts don't even consider "sex slave" contracts where person X signs on the dotted line to do act Y. That is play, not consent.
Uh, maybe if you're a rice-picker or something. As far as writing code goes, there's a hell of a lot that's changed:
Design: Object orientation. Use cases. UML instead of flow charts and DFDs.
OO: Smalltalk 80? That was 1980. An already mature OO system. UML vs FCs and DFDs? This is not really programming. Just porn for managers now available in HD versus VHS.
Coding practices: The whole paradigm of TDD. Security as a design center. Agile methods instead of waterfall.
TDD: 1970s. See IBM. Security as design center: now sure what this means. Agile: 1970s. We forgot it in the late 1980s when C beat out LISP.
Technology: Relational databases. The whole concept of the web and n-tier systems. SOA and web services. Multi-core CPUs.
Relational DBs: 1970s. see Codd. The web & tiered systems: not much new here. Multi-Core systems? 1970s. Transputers - early 80s.
If he needs to look into modern COBOL, he should just give up now.
Almost nothing has changed between 1980 and 2010. Modern PCs and phones look a lot like mainframes from the 1980s. Sure, speeds are higher, programmers are more expensive, and communication is much cheaper. But, algorithms and design are virtually unaffected. A good 1980s hacker can be up to speed in a month, tops.
Pick up python, ruby, or whatever, and write code. GUIs aren't magic - they are just bits visible to the user: read and play and you realize they are trivial.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought I gave some examples - FX, equity, commodity prices get better as frequency increases.
Less cost and fuss for consumers and importers/exporters, etc. A few people spend their lives making prices tighter, and millions of people get better prices on vacations, on their mortgages, etc. Why begrudge them for pocketing a few percent off the top?
International trade on high-tech products becomes possible: you can get a firm offer on 20 inputs you need in 1 hour. In the old days, that level of co-ordination was impossible - you had to BUY the suppliers.
I take "better" to mean "you get better stuff at a better price."
Right. We can have the banks just trade once a minute or once a day.
End users can go back to using Travellers Cheques: sure you spend a few hours of your foreign vacation either getting ripped off or waiting in line at a bank, but hey, at least global trading is now leisurely.
Stocks are just as good: you paid 3% to trade, but hey, it's a long term investment!
Commodities? You need a supply of tin? Just buy a tin mine.
People proposing slowing down trading speeds are like people proposing slowing down computer clock speeds. Sure, you save some energy, but so what? Everyone has to use a 6502 based iPad because you think that would be better?
Yep, the article is 10-20 years out of date.
HFT has been using statistical synchronization of dbs for years.
Big financial shops switched to in-memory dbs decades ago. With co-lo on the compute farms.
I don't know why he's even talking about 32G boxes as servers. That's a desktop, real db hosts are an order of magnitude bigger.
His "push the disks to the edge of the network?" Um, that's already happened - it's called tier 2. Tier 1 is the terabytes of solid-state storage we keep just in case.
This is a blast from the 1990s.
When we decide to hire high-school graduates and give them guns, I expect we'll reconsider.
Until then, we'll hire self-directed, highly-educated professionals. They tend to be a better fit for writing complex software.
Interesting.
The system I'm currently working on has most of the above (compiler, custom file system/database, simulation system, real-time constraints, and also compute farms, global 24/7, hundreds of developers, etc.)
We run "build-and-test on check-in." No code base forks, no long-lived private branches. "Daily build" would be horribly inefficient for our specific workflow, even 5 minute builds are a bit annoying.
The environment you are operating in determines a lot about the tools/practices you get: we deploy code to production about 500 times/day, core code a little less frequently.
This is good advice.
My eyes glaze over when a candidate starts asking about what versions of what products she will be using. No one cares. If we made the wrong choice, I expect someone to get some consensus and fix it.
I always tell a candidate about management structure: it's 1 boss per 20 workers, so there won't be a lot of hand-holding or meetings, initiative is required, etc. That's the easiest way to avoid a bad match.
Also, always walk the candidate through the group's workspace. 2 minutes there saves an hour of explaining how your group works.
I think putting this fear in the hearts of the powerful is the point of, and value of, Wikileaks. Regardless of whether they've broken a world-changing story so far, they've produced a chilling effect on corruption.
According to JA's writings, that is their immediate aim. Their strategic goal, however, follows from this: by making secret groups more leaky, those groups are forced to slow down or compartmentalize their internal communications and control, thus making them less effective and less co-ordinated.
Pretty much the same approach we use to tackle Al Quaeda, etc.
Um, the US military's "job" is to do what the politicians tell it to do.
Or maybe you think it's an independent branch of government that should just use all its toys to "win" one for the USA?
You are a moron.
Unfortunately, 90% of drivers make those stupid mistakes once in a while. You are proposing little more than a "lose your license forever" lottery.
They alert the following driver much better. If you aren't following an SUV, you can even see the t+2 car ahead of you braking.
A bit of history: the "third brakelight" was given a trial run on Manhattan taxis, and people just plain rear-ended the equipped ones a lot less. It was probably the most cost-effective anti-crash item ever invented.
Candid assessments about Karzai's leadership : DO NOT RELEASE
Why? We've been in Afganistan for longer than WW2. A bit of light here might help the US citizens understand this is a quagmire worth quitting now.
Name calling of the Prince of England : DO NOT RELEASE
Why? He's a douchebag.
If you don't want that fact noted as part of US diplomacy, that just don't say it. Or fire the idiot who felt the need to write the factoid in an official cable.
A mass murderer, assuming he's not in the US, is an international problem. We've left other countries to more or less mind their business since our country's founding. ("More or less" meaning that we largely negotiate and strongarm with whomever manages to act like a government in some cases, and when we don't do that we always regret it.)
Huh? A murderer is a problem for the nation he did the murders in. Or are you assuming two kinds of law: American and the magical non-American global law?
Wikileaks, however, is an organization that has come to directly target the operational security of the USA. It's not even journalism -- it's just "secrets are bad." There's hardly anything in the last three big releases that should be news to ANYONE. (War is hell in Iraq. War is hell in Afghanistan. What countries say in private isn't what they say in public.)
Ok, so you are saying the leaks are a non-issue? Oh, and when did "journalism" become the definition of freedom of speech?
OTOH, I wouldn't say that the federal government is SCARED of wikileaks. If they were really a problem, Obama has an absurdly broad array of options, the most fast-acting of which would be to recognize WIkileaks as a terrorist organization. (What ELSE do you call a private group dedicated to breaking laws and changing the political direction of a country that they are not citizens of?) . OTOH, Assange is a big enough prick that it looks like all we have to do is wait, and he'll hang himself. (Yes, if you're mid-sex and she says stop, failing to do so *IS RAPE*.)
Terrorism? wtf? Who is he causing to be terrified? Or do you define "terrorism" as "anything I don't like that doesn't seem to be against the law?"
6-8% return on a relatively safe mutual fund?
That hasn't happened in a decade, and we'll never see a long-term safe return of over 2% above inflation again: the world has changed since 1970.
Me thinks that someone wants to sell furniture.
Probably true, but I dump $1K+ into DonorsChoose each year on simple stuff like a rug big enough for the class to sit on. If you can't provide an environment better than a jail, how do you expect the children to think school is in their interest?
It looks more like they are patenting "nothing much at all." As in, "here are some use cases, here is a state machine that implements them, run our program, find questionable state transitions, ask users to decide what happens in those cases. Repeat until you have a complete formal spec."
This looks more like a case of a small group of people trying to justify their continued employment by pointing to their patents/minor revenue generated as evidence that they are doing something useful and so should not be laid off.
The figure actually seems very low, though perhaps not unreasonable for medium size (400K LOC) apps.
I estimated $3-$30 per line of code PER YEAR for one big (10M+ LOC) app at a previous job.
10/10/10? Wow, it's also a day I didn't get a blowjob. Let me mark that on my calendar.
Um... no.
You are allowed to do nothing, and they can break down your door. Then, you don't get sue for damages over the busted door.
The whole of a search warrant is that a judge has signed off on the action the police wish to do as being in-scope.
Assuming we restricting ourselves to ambitious people capable and able to attend a good college, one common answer I've seen is:
The person is already bored in college, finds it too slow or too like high school, and wants to learn and succeed in the real world. Sure, the starting position will be harder, but getting "noticed" should only take a month or two. Then it's up, up, up. The person needs a lot of faith in themselves that for this to be an attractive plan, but I've seen it tried often.
BTW, my group's hiring plan is "good degree from good place" for the junior roles, education unimportant (but successes critical) for higher-level positions.
Yep, Portal is a total 10/10.
My eight year old is playing it now. Her level of intellectual and emotional focus is far beyond anything I've seen before.
I noticed that when I was younger.
Now I find a personal chef in the kitchen while you sip wine with the women works pretty well too. It has the added benefit that her panties don't smell of garlic.
I assume you are talking about Maouloud Baby v. State of Maryland.
The conviction was overturned on appeal, so I'm right, you're wrong. Sorry.
Don't worry, it does. Probably to point of favoring the guy.
If you find yourself with a topless girl in your bed who is pushing and/or hitting you while yelling "no," and you think sex is still on the cards, you might want to work on the uptake thing.
If you understand that "consent is realtime" you are not going to get into much trouble.
Oh, and the courts don't even consider "sex slave" contracts where person X signs on the dotted line to do act Y. That is play, not consent.
Uh, maybe if you're a rice-picker or something. As far as writing code goes, there's a hell of a lot that's changed:
Design: Object orientation. Use cases. UML instead of flow charts and DFDs.
OO: Smalltalk 80? That was 1980. An already mature OO system.
UML vs FCs and DFDs? This is not really programming. Just porn for managers now available in HD versus VHS.
Coding practices: The whole paradigm of TDD. Security as a design center. Agile methods instead of waterfall.
TDD: 1970s. See IBM.
Security as design center: now sure what this means.
Agile: 1970s. We forgot it in the late 1980s when C beat out LISP.
Technology: Relational databases. The whole concept of the web and n-tier systems. SOA and web services. Multi-core CPUs.
Relational DBs: 1970s. see Codd.
The web & tiered systems: not much new here.
Multi-Core systems? 1970s. Transputers - early 80s.
If he needs to look into modern COBOL, he should just give up now.
Almost nothing has changed between 1980 and 2010. Modern PCs and phones look a lot like mainframes from the 1980s. Sure, speeds are higher, programmers are more expensive, and communication is much cheaper. But, algorithms and design are virtually unaffected. A good 1980s hacker can be up to speed in a month, tops.
Pick up python, ruby, or whatever, and write code. GUIs aren't magic - they are just bits visible to the user: read and play and you realize they are trivial.