It's just annoying that whenever something like this gets posted on slashdot, the knives come out for HFT. Yet it's pretty obvious that the market is overbought. Investors who are long in this market are playing musical chairs with Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, et al. Scary news causes jittery investors to run for the seats and take profit.
HFT didn't cause this situation. It is the fed who destroyed savings accounts and CDs and drove everyone into the stock market just to keep up. The music's going to stop someday and then, if you're long in the market, you'd better be ready to sell quickly.
Selling on the way down? More like people taking handsome profits in a bull market.
Let's analyze those "winners" and "losers". Someone who is long the Dow in the midst of a bull market and who would sell on bad news is also unloading the risk that we may be pretty much at the top. On the other hand someone who would buy the Dow in the midst of a bull market is acquiring the risk that they are buying at the top. So who is the winner and who is the loser here?
My wife and I went shopping for a new laptop for her to do her writing, and we went to Best Buy to look at various models. She picked Windows 8.
She wasn't thrilled by Windows 8 on models without the touch screen, but she fell in love with an Ultrabook with Windows 8 and a touch screen. There's a wide variety of applications, there's not much lag time in starting them up, and we experienced no tedium. She also looked at Apple laptops and wasn't impressed. They seemed like the same-old same-old to both of us. And also I showed her Ubuntu 12 on my laptop, but it was a non-starter. She couldn't figure out where things were. She thought Unity was trying to be like Mac but not doing nearly as good a job.
And having brought it home, I've had a minimum of "service" requests, which is a big plus for me because the last thing I want to do when I get home is administer her machine (after having done a fair amount of that all day at the office). She can connect to the wireless, she found the printer on the network, she can watch Netflix, etc. Our kids even use it to draw and play games. No pain.
So pardon me, but having actually witnessed someone using it so successfully, I am skeptical of all of these negative reviews of Windows 8 on the basis of poor UI. Does it really boil down to the square corners?
Kudo to these kids for learning how to build something useful out of (technologically advanced) parts!
I think the kids got a taste of what product development is like, as much as you can get in a few weeks in a pre-college school scenario anyway. But real product development is hard, and the reasons why it is hard are also hard to teach. You have to be able to get out and talk to people who would be future users of your product, and distill down to something that would actually be of service to them, and not just solving a problem that you personally imagine would be a great service to them.
I don't want to be overly critical of a school project which looks like it was carried out very well. But I would add to the curriculum: In real life, make sure you are solving a real problem and not just a fancy hammer for the nail you are imagining. And make sure your solution doesn't introduce new problems as side effects to solving an existing problem.
As someone who is in charge of dispensing medication to my elderly mother, I can tell you that having pills automagically appear at the right time is about 5% of my problem. My main problems are staggered refill schedules for four different medications on 30 day supplies, prescriptions that run out of refills and have to be re-prescribed several times during the year, making sure she actually takes the medicine and doesn't hoard it for later "because she feels pretty good now", having a secure distribution system that she can't break into and otherwise hoard the medication, and locating her within the 50,000 square feet of maze-y retirement home when its time for medication. Furthermore, the Raspberry Pi device comes along with a maintenance load, ie- I still have to go there regularly to fill the device, albeit I do that now with a day-of-the-week pill box. Plus it also is under power and so has to be plugged in somewhere. It can lose power, or it can lose internet connectivity, and presumably would generate warnings in addition to the warnings about medicine left in the dispenser. But this all just turns regularly scheduled visits into other randomly scheduled visits.
From Hans Blix's last (I believe) report to the UN (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/feb/14/iraq.unitednations1):
How much, if any, is left of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and related proscribed items and programmes? So far, UNMOVIC has not found any such weapons, only a small number of empty chemical munitions, which should have been declared and destroyed. Another matter - and one of great significance - is that many proscribed weapons and items are not accounted for. To take an example, a document, which Iraq provided, suggested to us that some 1,000 tonnes of chemical agent were "unaccounted for". One must not jump to the conclusion that they exist. However, that possibility is also not excluded. If they exist, they should be presented for destruction. If they do not exist, credible evidence to that effect should be presented.
And according to Wikileaks, the US Army was finding small caches of WMD right up until they left, albeit not the massive program posited as the cause for war. (http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/10/wikileaks-show-wmd-hunt-continued-in-iraq-with-surprising-results/)
If even UNSCOM/UNMOVIC didn't know for sure if there were still proscribed chemical precursors of WMD in Iraq at the open of the Iraq war or not, and if there are small remnants of some kind of WMD program being unearthed almost to this day, in what sense were the media delinquent for not reporting the non-existence of WMD in Iraq? I think like everyone else at the time, they honestly didn't know, and they didn't want to go out on a limb and be wrong later. That's not quite a "rush to war" on the part of the media.
Bush of course had no problem going out on a limb. A lot of people were supportive because they were no longer willing to live with the same risks post 9/11 that they uneasily lived with pre 9/11, and then walked it back when no WMD were found. Other people were egging Bush out onto the limb because they were actively sawing it off. Such is politics.
But every link contained in the summary is supporting an important piece of the argument. I'll reply to your sarcasm with a detailed point by point rebuttal as soon as I've vetted each and every source article linked in the summary. (Insert sound of crickets chirping...)
Of course, the folks who created Upstart really are well-connected. And I'll bet if you were in that well-connected club and looking for the best and the brightest, you might call them up and ask them if they knew of any good people.
This is rank speculation, but I wonder if the backend part of this model is more like a high-priced HR staffing firm, so it boils down to identifying folks that can pass "Google" muster, hook them on some debt and then pump them out to high-paying elite clients. In addition to getting a placement fee they get a percentage of what that client pays over 7-10 years.
Any EULA must be enforceable. Just because it is written down doesn't make it so. For example, the EULA can't say that the buyer must provide a webcam feed from their bedroom, or is required to deliver up their firstborn son on demand.
And that's what this is all about. What is valid and enforceable in a EULA and what is not. Hopefully the pendulum is swinging back to a common law conception of ownership, and damn all the restrictive EULAs. And if Apple or Microsoft or anyone else with restrictive EULAs wants to bow out of the marketplace because they can't fathom how to make a phone or a videogame console without restrictive EULAs, I say let them take their toys and go home. Their market shares will be taken up in a microsecond by plenty of companies willing to make a buck actually **selling** such things.
Are your friends working on the Higgs, or on something else? I didn't say that all of Fermilab was shut down, just the collider program. They still run a very active neutrino oscillation program, and I think they are also doing physics with muons. They also participate in analysis for LHC data from afar. As for searching in old data, I'm sure that there are also still supersymmetry and exotics searches going on.
Researchers at the Fermilab Tevatron accelerator near Batavia, Ill., have pulled together their final findings in the search for the elusive Higgs boson. Their announcement comes just two days before scientists using the powerful Large Hadron Collider at the European particle-physics center CERN plan to unveil highly anticipated results from their high-energy, proton-smashing experiments.
Actually, they've already finished analyzing this backlog of data at Fermilab of which you speak. Although there is a bump in the data, it is not enough to claim a discovery, and certainly not enough to establish that the properties of the bump make it a Higgs. http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/25_sigma_higgs_signal_tevatron-91654
You can't "replicate" a discovery with a non-discovery, so that doesn't save the original statement.
While you're right that higher luminosity makes a difference in Higgs searches, and that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has a higher luminosity than Fermilab (about 10 times better in fact), higher center of mass energy also makes a difference. According to this resource, the higher energy results in better production cross section of Higgs at the LHC, also about a factor of 10 improvement. http://www.slac.stanford.edu/econf/C020121/overhead/J_Womers.pdf
There's an intuitive reason for that. Namely, at a proton collider, the center of mass energy is spread out among the quarks which are themselves moving around within the proton. So although the protons are at 1 TeV (or 7 TeV at the LHC) and it seems like plenty to make a Higgs, the quarks don't individually carry the same punch, and it's the quarks that have to make the Higgs. Intuitively, higher luminosity translates into more opportunities to make a Higgs and higher cms energy translates into more ways that the quarks can make a Higgs per collision. Both are improved at the LHC, but my bias is to tend to favor the higher energy solution simply because background increases with luminosity too. But signal-to-noise ratio improves with better production cross sections from higher energy.
Not to belabor the point, nor to embarrass the original commenter, who was plainly hoping for some confirmation good news to come out of Fermilab. But the truth remains: Fermilab cannot replicate the discovery on the data they do have (otherwise they would have claimed discovery before the LHC), nor will they ever replicate the discovery as the collider program is shut down and even if it wasn't, the tevatron is simply not the right machine to do it. It makes me sad more than anything else.
And it makes me sad that the crowd sourced moderation system at Slashdot would upmod a false statement after a contrary true statement was offered in a matter-of-fact but friendly manner. Well, ok, not really. More like LOL! My friends at Fermilab will get a chuckle this morning to hear that some moderator at slashdot thinks there is an active Higgs program at Fermilab that is going to replicate the Cern results.
The energy of the tevatron collider at Fermilab is much lower than at CERN, making it very difficult if not impossible to observe the Higgs or measure its properties there. The collider has been shut down for more than a year anyhow as they transition to other physics experiments. http://www.fnal.gov/pub/tevatron/
Because Apple wants to drive Samsung out of the smartphone/tablet business. If HTC licensed the same patents for a reasonable price, Samsung would have some leverage to get the same deal and stay in the market.
[Knight Capital CEO] Joyce reportedly asked SEC chief Mary Schapiro to let his firm cancel many of the unintended trades but she shot down his request, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Slashdot Mirror
Even a small portion of the money saved over the years could be used to upgrade ancient systems to modern standards
They took the peace dividend and spent it on marketing already.
It's just annoying that whenever something like this gets posted on slashdot, the knives come out for HFT. Yet it's pretty obvious that the market is overbought. Investors who are long in this market are playing musical chairs with Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, et al. Scary news causes jittery investors to run for the seats and take profit.
HFT didn't cause this situation. It is the fed who destroyed savings accounts and CDs and drove everyone into the stock market just to keep up. The music's going to stop someday and then, if you're long in the market, you'd better be ready to sell quickly.
Selling on the way down? More like people taking handsome profits in a bull market.
Let's analyze those "winners" and "losers". Someone who is long the Dow in the midst of a bull market and who would sell on bad news is also unloading the risk that we may be pretty much at the top. On the other hand someone who would buy the Dow in the midst of a bull market is acquiring the risk that they are buying at the top. So who is the winner and who is the loser here?
What does any of that have to do with HFT?
They're big on blaming high frequency traders when the market drops in 3 minutes on bogus news.
They're not so big on crediting high frequency traders when the market recovers in 3 minutes when the news is recognized to be bogus.
I guess it was the army of Wilford Brimleys in bow ties and green eyeshades that did that.
My wife and I went shopping for a new laptop for her to do her writing, and we went to Best Buy to look at various models. She picked Windows 8.
She wasn't thrilled by Windows 8 on models without the touch screen, but she fell in love with an Ultrabook with Windows 8 and a touch screen. There's a wide variety of applications, there's not much lag time in starting them up, and we experienced no tedium. She also looked at Apple laptops and wasn't impressed. They seemed like the same-old same-old to both of us. And also I showed her Ubuntu 12 on my laptop, but it was a non-starter. She couldn't figure out where things were. She thought Unity was trying to be like Mac but not doing nearly as good a job.
And having brought it home, I've had a minimum of "service" requests, which is a big plus for me because the last thing I want to do when I get home is administer her machine (after having done a fair amount of that all day at the office). She can connect to the wireless, she found the printer on the network, she can watch Netflix, etc. Our kids even use it to draw and play games. No pain.
So pardon me, but having actually witnessed someone using it so successfully, I am skeptical of all of these negative reviews of Windows 8 on the basis of poor UI. Does it really boil down to the square corners?
It's not like a hairdryer which draws the same power whether or not it is blowing at your head..
I think the kids got a taste of what product development is like, as much as you can get in a few weeks in a pre-college school scenario anyway. But real product development is hard, and the reasons why it is hard are also hard to teach. You have to be able to get out and talk to people who would be future users of your product, and distill down to something that would actually be of service to them, and not just solving a problem that you personally imagine would be a great service to them.
I don't want to be overly critical of a school project which looks like it was carried out very well. But I would add to the curriculum: In real life, make sure you are solving a real problem and not just a fancy hammer for the nail you are imagining. And make sure your solution doesn't introduce new problems as side effects to solving an existing problem.
As someone who is in charge of dispensing medication to my elderly mother, I can tell you that having pills automagically appear at the right time is about 5% of my problem. My main problems are staggered refill schedules for four different medications on 30 day supplies, prescriptions that run out of refills and have to be re-prescribed several times during the year, making sure she actually takes the medicine and doesn't hoard it for later "because she feels pretty good now", having a secure distribution system that she can't break into and otherwise hoard the medication, and locating her within the 50,000 square feet of maze-y retirement home when its time for medication. Furthermore, the Raspberry Pi device comes along with a maintenance load, ie- I still have to go there regularly to fill the device, albeit I do that now with a day-of-the-week pill box. Plus it also is under power and so has to be plugged in somewhere. It can lose power, or it can lose internet connectivity, and presumably would generate warnings in addition to the warnings about medicine left in the dispenser. But this all just turns regularly scheduled visits into other randomly scheduled visits.
And according to Wikileaks, the US Army was finding small caches of WMD right up until they left, albeit not the massive program posited as the cause for war. (http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/10/wikileaks-show-wmd-hunt-continued-in-iraq-with-surprising-results/)
If even UNSCOM/UNMOVIC didn't know for sure if there were still proscribed chemical precursors of WMD in Iraq at the open of the Iraq war or not, and if there are small remnants of some kind of WMD program being unearthed almost to this day, in what sense were the media delinquent for not reporting the non-existence of WMD in Iraq? I think like everyone else at the time, they honestly didn't know, and they didn't want to go out on a limb and be wrong later. That's not quite a "rush to war" on the part of the media.
Bush of course had no problem going out on a limb. A lot of people were supportive because they were no longer willing to live with the same risks post 9/11 that they uneasily lived with pre 9/11, and then walked it back when no WMD were found. Other people were egging Bush out onto the limb because they were actively sawing it off. Such is politics.
But every link contained in the summary is supporting an important piece of the argument. I'll reply to your sarcasm with a detailed point by point rebuttal as soon as I've vetted each and every source article linked in the summary. (Insert sound of crickets chirping...)
Of course, the folks who created Upstart really are well-connected. And I'll bet if you were in that well-connected club and looking for the best and the brightest, you might call them up and ask them if they knew of any good people.
This is rank speculation, but I wonder if the backend part of this model is more like a high-priced HR staffing firm, so it boils down to identifying folks that can pass "Google" muster, hook them on some debt and then pump them out to high-paying elite clients. In addition to getting a placement fee they get a percentage of what that client pays over 7-10 years.
Any EULA must be enforceable. Just because it is written down doesn't make it so. For example, the EULA can't say that the buyer must provide a webcam feed from their bedroom, or is required to deliver up their firstborn son on demand.
And that's what this is all about. What is valid and enforceable in a EULA and what is not. Hopefully the pendulum is swinging back to a common law conception of ownership, and damn all the restrictive EULAs. And if Apple or Microsoft or anyone else with restrictive EULAs wants to bow out of the marketplace because they can't fathom how to make a phone or a videogame console without restrictive EULAs, I say let them take their toys and go home. Their market shares will be taken up in a microsecond by plenty of companies willing to make a buck actually **selling** such things.
As for the Higgs, I am pulling my info from the news: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/02/science/la-sci-sn-fermilab-higgs-boson-hadron-collider-20120702
Actually, they've already finished analyzing this backlog of data at Fermilab of which you speak. Although there is a bump in the data, it is not enough to claim a discovery, and certainly not enough to establish that the properties of the bump make it a Higgs. http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/25_sigma_higgs_signal_tevatron-91654 You can't "replicate" a discovery with a non-discovery, so that doesn't save the original statement.
While you're right that higher luminosity makes a difference in Higgs searches, and that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has a higher luminosity than Fermilab (about 10 times better in fact), higher center of mass energy also makes a difference. According to this resource, the higher energy results in better production cross section of Higgs at the LHC, also about a factor of 10 improvement. http://www.slac.stanford.edu/econf/C020121/overhead/J_Womers.pdf
There's an intuitive reason for that. Namely, at a proton collider, the center of mass energy is spread out among the quarks which are themselves moving around within the proton. So although the protons are at 1 TeV (or 7 TeV at the LHC) and it seems like plenty to make a Higgs, the quarks don't individually carry the same punch, and it's the quarks that have to make the Higgs. Intuitively, higher luminosity translates into more opportunities to make a Higgs and higher cms energy translates into more ways that the quarks can make a Higgs per collision. Both are improved at the LHC, but my bias is to tend to favor the higher energy solution simply because background increases with luminosity too. But signal-to-noise ratio improves with better production cross sections from higher energy.
Not to belabor the point, nor to embarrass the original commenter, who was plainly hoping for some confirmation good news to come out of Fermilab. But the truth remains: Fermilab cannot replicate the discovery on the data they do have (otherwise they would have claimed discovery before the LHC), nor will they ever replicate the discovery as the collider program is shut down and even if it wasn't, the tevatron is simply not the right machine to do it. It makes me sad more than anything else.
And it makes me sad that the crowd sourced moderation system at Slashdot would upmod a false statement after a contrary true statement was offered in a matter-of-fact but friendly manner. Well, ok, not really. More like LOL! My friends at Fermilab will get a chuckle this morning to hear that some moderator at slashdot thinks there is an active Higgs program at Fermilab that is going to replicate the Cern results.
Hmmm, "being replicated at Fermilab" starts out at score +1.
I point out that the Fermilab collider is shut down, and post a link to that effect, and then "being replicated at Fermilab" gets modded up +4.
Great job, moderators!
The energy of the tevatron collider at Fermilab is much lower than at CERN, making it very difficult if not impossible to observe the Higgs or measure its properties there. The collider has been shut down for more than a year anyhow as they transition to other physics experiments. http://www.fnal.gov/pub/tevatron/
There are two independent teams at two independent collider detectors at CERN studying the Higgs: ATLAS and CMS.
That is as good as it is going to get for now.
Is that what Sergey Brin is looking for with his Google glasses?
Mythology notwithstanding, even in the Star Trek universe Vulcan is a hot desert planet. Not a cold, dead moon.
Someday, an enterprising staffing firm will figure out a cheaper way to send the signals you're speaking of, and make millions on the spread.
Really, does it take 4 (or is it 5 now!) years to train people to be file clerks?
You can scam more money out of Windows users. Plus there are more of them.
And of the rest, the Linux users are broke to begin with and the Mac users gave all their money to Apple already.
Because Apple wants to drive Samsung out of the smartphone/tablet business. If HTC licensed the same patents for a reasonable price, Samsung would have some leverage to get the same deal and stay in the market.
By whose measuring stick do we judge merit?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/halahtouryalai/2012/08/06/knight-capital-the-ideal-way-to-screw-up-on-wall-street/
[Knight Capital CEO] Joyce reportedly asked SEC chief Mary Schapiro to let his firm cancel many of the unintended trades but she shot down his request, according to The Wall Street Journal.