Anyone can buy or sell contracts in E-minis, and can also buy or sell the underlying stocks. This generates a frantic amount of short-term trading from market players trying to profit from the differences between the two, which keeps the price of the E-mini close to the prices of the S&P 500 stocks.
OK so far.
None of this is productive activity, of course.
That's where you are wrong.
What started the crash was that a fundamentals trader (one who actually pays attention to the companies involved) was selling $4 billion in stocks. Ordinarily, this isn't a big deal. They had a program throttling their rate of sale to 9% of market volume in the last minute, to avoid depressing the market. That's normal. So far, so good.
And you're wrong again. Waddell & Reed, the "fundamentals trader", was not selling stock. They were selling E-minis. Why? Because it's much more "productive" for them (and for the market in general) to sell a single contract than to sell the corresponding 500 stocks. E-minis, or similar instruments like the SPY (for smaller investors who can't play in "futures"), are very "productive" as part of a well executed investment strategy. It's much more cost effective for a smaller investor to buy and sell SPY than to buy and sell 20 or 30 stocks.
Clearly, things went wrong. But demonizing E-minis (and the corresponding stock hedging that goes along with them) is the wrong takeaway.
Then the people responsible for that algo lose tons of cash, as they rightfully should.
I think you have the right idea, but what you propose would have also hurt some innocent investors. These investors entrusted their money to professional advisors to manage (these were small advisors, not the big fund companies like Fidelity). The moron advisors had "stop loss" orders in place on several of the stocks that had wild swings. So what happened was something like this (hypothetical stock, too lazy to Google for actual names involved):
XYZ trades at $60 flash crash begins, XYZ falls to $50 lazy advisor has set a "stop loss" order (which becomes a market order) at $50 flash crash continues; there is no one willing to make a market, so the "market order" in XYZ trades at $0.01 (because many institutions leave token tiny bids in place); the advisor has lost 99+% of his clients money!!! a few minutes later, XYZ recovers to $60, which is where it should be
Fortunately for the individuals, the trades were "busted".
I think it's gross negligence for an advisor to have these stop loss orders on the books. IMO its better not to have them in place at all (advisors are paid to watch the markets!), but at the least they should be stop limit not stop loss. An advisor who doesn't understand the difference should be fined 100% of his net worth and should be permanently barred from managing other people's money. It would be beneficial to the gene pool to put bullets into the back of these moron advisor's skulls, but most people would consider that to be too harsh a punishment.
All US banks are very happy to offer many years worth of transaction history to any Federal agency that desires this information. Too bad they won't do the same for their putative "customers".
Those bulbs are very good, I use lots of them. The one thing I don't like is they are more squarish and less pear-shaped than standard incandescent bulbs; there are some fixtures where this different shape doesn't provide enough clearance.
I think you underestimate the importance of Palm and WebOS. There is NOTHING behind the curve about WebOS's functionally. Its a joy to use compared to iOS.
Okay, it's days later so my comment won't be read by too many people. But I wanted to respond, since maybe you'll see it.
My answer to your praise about WebOS is: "so what?"
The real question is: will HP be able to monetize what they bought? Will they be able to profit from this purchase? I wager 1000 quatloos that HP will fail miserably!
Therefore, by definition (by my definition anway), the "importance" of WebOS to HP is just about zero. In fact its value is negative since the purchase price will never be recovered and since the acquisition will divert HP focus and resources from other endeavors.
I'm not a ZFS expert, but IIUC it's simply not possible to have stable production quality ZFS on 32 bit machines. This has nothing to do with FreeBSD, the original Solaris codebase just wasn't designed for it. There are places where the code manipulates 64 bit constructs in what it assumes are atomic operations. That assumption is often invalid on a 32 bit machine. Also the code is written assuming that it has a significant amount of VM to play with.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect the FreeBSD port to fix/workaround fundamental design decisions like that. The very first dictum in ZFS Best Practices is: Run ZFS on a system that runs a 64-bit kernel. How much clearer can they make that statement? N.B., repeated for emphasis: this is the very first dictum in ZFS Best Practices.
IIUC it's OK to expect ZFS to run with 2 GB of RAM, just not with a 32-bit kernel.
I just tested a bunch of my random UTP cables with a magnet, and they all seem OK. A magnet shouldn't have any problem distinguishing between copper and steel. It wouldn't work if the conductor was something like aluminum, but that wouldn't be likely. Steel is much cheaper than aluminum.
I think the real RDF is around Ballmer, who has surrounded himself with lackeys and yes-men
I absolutely agree. But Microsoft is a big company. Isn't there any employee remaining from the old days (who therefore already has "fuck you" money and less concern for his job) who can talk some sense into Ballmer?
It shouldn't take much. Unless Ballmer is a total idiot, then all someone would need to do is to take your post, your very post I'm responding to. Simply discuss it line by line with Ballmer. Or is Ballmer so clueless that he doesn't understand simple words. E.g.: "this latest debacle has only proven to the consumer that MS mobile products are NOT to be trusted."
The current management at Microsoft seems to be hopelessly lost!
The really really sad thing about your comments is all of them could have easily been predicted long before there was anything like IPv6. E.g. of course businesses will want to own their own addess space. Duh!
How could IPv6 ever have been proposed without having clear responses to those objections? Did they think they could arbitrarily dictate this stuff, and that everyone would simply acquiesce?
I'm not a software guy, so maybe I'm missing something. But paying $1 billion for MySQL (less than 1 year ago!) didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Wasn't a lot of the code GPL?
As of yesterday the stock market values the equity at $3 billion. And actually values the company at only $1.6 billion (they have $2.6 billion in cash but also have $1.3 billion in debt).
Maybe a company that throws money around so freely deserves to go out of business. Even in 2008, a billion US dollars is still a *lot* of money.
By the time the smoke cleared we had replaced 19 out of 24 drives.
My "gut feel" is that the failure rate you encountered was much too high to attribute to simple wear-out related drive failures.
I suspect something common, like a bad power supply, somehow damaged the drives. You were wise to replace all. But you probably should have scrapped the entire enclosure.
I think you need help with your math skills. 10% of $10 million is $1 million. But let's say you just give me $950,000 and hire yourself a math tutor with the extra $50,000.
I just don't understand the brain activity that would make him do this for 21 months in the can. He's white collar; he may have received parole after a few months for good behavior.
I don't know where you're from, so you may not be familiar with US law. And/.'s display of posts really gets screwed up when there are so many comments. So maybe this has already been said, but anyway...
In the US federal prison system there is no longer such a thing as parole. You must serve about 80% or 90% of your sentence (you can get a little time off for good behavior). So, no, this guy could NOT get out after a few months of jail time.
Still, the guy already served three months. Let's say he had another 15 months to go. That doesn't seem like an insurmountable hardship. But, clearly, spammers are quintessential sociopaths. I don't think the average person can easily understand their "brain activity".
and you can do it for $900 (the cost of Tivo plus a lifetime subscription)
Just for the record, a TiVo HD is under $300, lifetime under $400. Together under $700. There are occasional discounts, I've seen the package sold with a wireless adapter thrown in for about $650. You were probably thinking S3 when you said $900.
I do agree with your overall argument. For most people TiVo makes much more sense than a DIY DVR.
Slashdot Mirror
there is quite a few there and the list is no means exclusive.
Tang. Don't forget Tang.
Anyone can buy or sell contracts in E-minis, and can also buy or sell the underlying stocks. This generates a frantic amount of short-term trading from market players trying to profit from the differences between the two, which keeps the price of the E-mini close to the prices of the S&P 500 stocks.
OK so far.
None of this is productive activity, of course.
That's where you are wrong.
What started the crash was that a fundamentals trader (one who actually pays attention to the companies involved) was selling $4 billion in stocks. Ordinarily, this isn't a big deal. They had a program throttling their rate of sale to 9% of market volume in the last minute, to avoid depressing the market. That's normal. So far, so good.
And you're wrong again. Waddell & Reed, the "fundamentals trader", was not selling stock. They were selling E-minis. Why? Because it's much more "productive" for them (and for the market in general) to sell a single contract than to sell the corresponding 500 stocks. E-minis, or similar instruments like the SPY (for smaller investors who can't play in "futures"), are very "productive" as part of a well executed investment strategy. It's much more cost effective for a smaller investor to buy and sell SPY than to buy and sell 20 or 30 stocks.
Clearly, things went wrong. But demonizing E-minis (and the corresponding stock hedging that goes along with them) is the wrong takeaway.
Then the people responsible for that algo lose tons of cash, as they rightfully should.
I think you have the right idea, but what you propose would have also hurt some innocent investors. These investors entrusted their money to professional advisors to manage (these were small advisors, not the big fund companies like Fidelity). The moron advisors had "stop loss" orders in place on several of the stocks that had wild swings. So what happened was something like this (hypothetical stock, too lazy to Google for actual names involved):
XYZ trades at $60
flash crash begins, XYZ falls to $50
lazy advisor has set a "stop loss" order (which becomes a market order) at $50
flash crash continues; there is no one willing to make a market, so the "market order" in XYZ trades at $0.01 (because many institutions leave token tiny bids in place); the advisor has lost 99+% of his clients money!!!
a few minutes later, XYZ recovers to $60, which is where it should be
Fortunately for the individuals, the trades were "busted".
I think it's gross negligence for an advisor to have these stop loss orders on the books. IMO its better not to have them in place at all (advisors are paid to watch the markets!), but at the least they should be stop limit not stop loss. An advisor who doesn't understand the difference should be fined 100% of his net worth and should be permanently barred from managing other people's money. It would be beneficial to the gene pool to put bullets into the back of these moron advisor's skulls, but most people would consider that to be too harsh a punishment.
All US banks are very happy to offer many years worth of transaction history to any Federal agency that desires this information. Too bad they won't do the same for their putative "customers".
Those bulbs are very good, I use lots of them. The one thing I don't like is they are more squarish and less pear-shaped than standard incandescent bulbs; there are some fixtures where this different shape doesn't provide enough clearance.
The products Apple make are the closest thing to 'appliances' you can get in the computer world.
I love this sentence. I've never seen Apple's products summarized quite so eloquently.
I think you underestimate the importance of Palm and WebOS. There is NOTHING behind the curve about WebOS's functionally. Its a joy to use compared to iOS.
Okay, it's days later so my comment won't be read by too many people. But I wanted to respond, since maybe you'll see it.
My answer to your praise about WebOS is: "so what?"
The real question is: will HP be able to monetize what they bought? Will they be able to profit from this purchase? I wager 1000 quatloos that HP will fail miserably!
Therefore, by definition (by my definition anway), the "importance" of WebOS to HP is just about zero. In fact its value is negative since the purchase price will never be recovered and since the acquisition will divert HP focus and resources from other endeavors.
I'm not a ZFS expert, but IIUC it's simply not possible to have stable production quality ZFS on 32 bit machines. This has nothing to do with FreeBSD, the original Solaris codebase just wasn't designed for it. There are places where the code manipulates 64 bit constructs in what it assumes are atomic operations. That assumption is often invalid on a 32 bit machine. Also the code is written assuming that it has a significant amount of VM to play with.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect the FreeBSD port to fix/workaround fundamental design decisions like that. The very first dictum in ZFS Best Practices is: Run ZFS on a system that runs a 64-bit kernel. How much clearer can they make that statement? N.B., repeated for emphasis: this is the very first dictum in ZFS Best Practices.
IIUC it's OK to expect ZFS to run with 2 GB of RAM, just not with a 32-bit kernel.
I just tested a bunch of my random UTP cables with a magnet, and they all seem OK. A magnet shouldn't have any problem distinguishing between copper and steel. It wouldn't work if the conductor was something like aluminum, but that wouldn't be likely. Steel is much cheaper than aluminum.
I think the real RDF is around Ballmer, who has surrounded himself with lackeys and yes-men
I absolutely agree. But Microsoft is a big company. Isn't there any employee remaining from the old days (who therefore already has "fuck you" money and less concern for his job) who can talk some sense into Ballmer?
It shouldn't take much. Unless Ballmer is a total idiot, then all someone would need to do is to take your post, your very post I'm responding to. Simply discuss it line by line with Ballmer. Or is Ballmer so clueless that he doesn't understand simple words. E.g.: "this latest debacle has only proven to the consumer that MS mobile products are NOT to be trusted."
The current management at Microsoft seems to be hopelessly lost!
Assuming you had an app that could take advantage of AT&T's 5 Mb/s peak speed, you would hit your 2 GB cap in 53 minutes of streaming.
You won't be streaming too many movies to your 3G iPad anytime in the near future.
The Big Bang Theory also sneaks nerdy physics jokes into primetime programming!
Hi Bill,
The really really sad thing about your comments is all of them could have easily been predicted long before there was anything like IPv6. E.g. of course businesses will want to own their own addess space. Duh!
How could IPv6 ever have been proposed without having clear responses to those objections? Did they think they could arbitrarily dictate this stuff, and that everyone would simply acquiesce?
Not clear if P. A. Semi will be useful to Apple going forward. Dobberpuhl and some other employees have already bailed out.
It's a good thing they closed the Fresh Kills Landfill back in 2001!
Pud (of fuckedcompany.com fame) used to write about Accenture. He always added the note: "pronounced ass-enter".
You may be right. I like your hypothesis the best of everything posted so far.
Intel's Atom is a quite powerful alternative. I wonder if they considered it?
I'm not a software guy, so maybe I'm missing something. But paying $1 billion for MySQL (less than 1 year ago!) didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Wasn't a lot of the code GPL?
As of yesterday the stock market values the equity at $3 billion. And actually values the company at only $1.6 billion (they have $2.6 billion in cash but also have $1.3 billion in debt).
Maybe a company that throws money around so freely deserves to go out of business. Even in 2008, a billion US dollars is still a *lot* of money.
By the time the smoke cleared we had replaced 19 out of 24 drives.
My "gut feel" is that the failure rate you encountered was much too high to attribute to simple wear-out related drive failures.
I suspect something common, like a bad power supply, somehow damaged the drives. You were wise to replace all. But you probably should have scrapped the entire enclosure.
No parole. Maybe 20 years with time off for "good behavior".
This guy got more prison time than Jeff Skilling of Enron fame. And Enron's collapse cost a lot of people some serious coin.
Sorry no mod points to give you, and I'm not a DNS expert, but this seems to be a very very good idea.
No, there is no doubling of traffic.
You only double-check if the new IP address differs from the old IP address which you already had in cache but whose TTL expired.
That probably happens less than 1% of the time. So you are talking about a 1% increase in DNS traffic.
In my (generally ignorant about DNS) opinion, double-checking is a brilliant idea.
I think you need help with your math skills. 10% of $10 million is $1 million. But let's say you just give me $950,000 and hire yourself a math tutor with the extra $50,000.
I just don't understand the brain activity that would make him do this for 21 months in the can. He's white collar; he may have received parole after a few months for good behavior.
I don't know where you're from, so you may not be familiar with US law. And /.'s display of posts really gets screwed up when there are so many comments. So maybe this has already been said, but anyway ...
In the US federal prison system there is no longer such a thing as parole. You must serve about 80% or 90% of your sentence (you can get a little time off for good behavior). So, no, this guy could NOT get out after a few months of jail time.
Still, the guy already served three months. Let's say he had another 15 months to go. That doesn't seem like an insurmountable hardship. But, clearly, spammers are quintessential sociopaths. I don't think the average person can easily understand their "brain activity".
and you can do it for $900 (the cost of Tivo plus a lifetime subscription)
Just for the record, a TiVo HD is under $300, lifetime under $400. Together under $700. There are occasional discounts, I've seen the package sold with a wireless adapter thrown in for about $650. You were probably thinking S3 when you said $900.
I do agree with your overall argument. For most people TiVo makes much more sense than a DIY DVR.