Maybe, his escape plan vaporized somewhere along the way, and he hadn't figured out a new one.
Or maybe it wasn't a real Ponzi scheme. Anyone who thinks this guy wasn't trading with every market making exemption he had is drinking government kool-aide.
They can't find records of it. Oh my. But of course.
You want to compare that to any other Wall St. CEO who spent 50 years on Wall St., doing things like helping to found NASDAQ?
Like I said, quite modest in comparison. You are regurgitating pap for the uninformed who like to think they understand and think this is lavish and that's where tens of billions went.
I'm not sure how you just "walk away" from thousands of investors without giving them their money (and he couldn't, their money didn't really exist, hence the scam) and not raise any alarms.
The stock market collapsed. Lehman Brothers went under weeks before he confessed. The derivatives market was even worse. Many people wonder why he didn't do exactly that when he had the cover to do it.
He'll still never see the inside of a real prison.
Oh, it went from no prison to real prison.
Ok, I'll play. Previous posters stated that over 30 years required a maximum security prison. Don't see any reason there'll be an exemption made for that. He was sentenced to maximum sentence requested by government, 150 years.
Is the jail he's been staying in since he pled guilty a real jail? Or maybe you have a soft spot for NY jails and think them homey.
I can't believe the poster you're replying to knows what he's talking about. Very few minimum wage workers have health care. Maybe he's just playing and making up stuff, I don't know, but fairly clueless.
...before he lived a life of luxury, squandering more stolen money than he can ever repay.
Madoff lived quite modestly compared to others who spent a career on Wall Street and held the positions he held. You're repeating the pap for the masses, but in fact there is no substance to it.
Seriously, if he had nothing invested, I wonder why the implosion of Wall Street impacted his ponzi scheme at all?
That's a really good question. The answer you'll be given is that he paid it out, but no one is really showing any numbers that back up their claim. Mainly because they can't.
I wonder what the actual amount lost is, compared to the investors investing their money in a normal (5-15%, not the unsustainable Ponzi scheme interest rates) investment.
13 billion was the figure the government gave in most recent news, I believe.
Ponzi schemes must, by definition, go up exponentially in terms of the number of participants. Therefore the greatest growth will always happen just before the fall.
Only if they pay out. Many if not most of Madoff's investors did not take payouts.
What Madoff's sons told police that he told them is that there were $7 billion of redemption requests made that did him in. There are many problems with this, starting with I haven't seen any validation that there any substantial amount at all. There's no indication of it from the many, many interviews that were done following his self-outing.
No, the math cannot be done that would show the money he took in last couple of years going out. But I'd be interested to see someone come up with it.
...this doesnt seem to have anything to do with nerds or nerd culture...
The computer software systems involved in this is pretty interesting. There's a lot of questions the government is not revealing any answers to on this if indeed they have any, which appears they don't.
The one guy who did his own analysis and kept badgering the SEC to investigate was the estranged lover of Madoff's daughter, AND he worked for a competitor.
I can't recall hearing that before, and I think I would have since it was her current lover then husband who many believe in some way diverted the Justice Department from looking into those claims more fully.
The one who worked for a competitor who was repeatedly alerting the Justice Department was Markopolos. It's possible you're confusing him with her SEC husband and getting it backwards about the investigation.
Most of the $65bn never existed in the first place. The rest would have been handed out to customers who had withdrawn money in the past. The $65bn is what his clients thought they had in their accounts with him, but a lot of that can be attributed to fictitious gains that he reported on their accounts.
True, but even the billions coming in in last few years can't be accounted for as paid out. I've seen some market types try on a couple of sites but can't be done. No one in the government looking into this addresses this inconvenient fact. They just chase after people that you're talking about for what they can but the numbers don't add up.
Seriously, it's impossible to get rid of $65 Billion without having something valuable to show for it. So far they've gathered the low 9 figures of $ from him, less than 1% of the money.
This is a really insightful remark, I'm glad to see that it was modded that way. No one will touch the math because it quite frankly is impossible to account for the money that was coming in. It is also ridiculous to believe that he stashed billions away in a buried treasure chest as it's not in the usuall suspect Swiss bank accounts and the like. Many of those bankers lost money with him as well.
I believe he lost it with financial shenanigans he could get away with with a grandfather market maker exemption and a unique vertical stack of companies to do any aspect of shenanigans he wanted. No info is coming out to determine anything one way or the other though. People who think this was a coordinated effort among other parties with Madoff just have no clue or insight into this. But that's the story being sold by the government. It's just as much of a con job.
I think it's very likely that there were others in-the-know. But they probably worked out a plea to provide documentation to nail the case against Madoff, which is why they won't be prosecuted.
whoa sparky, I wasn't comparing Java to C++, I stated that TFA said they got better performance with the converted Java than their prior mainframe COBOL environment which I said I would consider hard to do. They cached and static'd everything in Java and not sure what kind of mainframe environment they had that could be so bad.
I also say the same things as you do to Java (and PHP and scripted languages) advocates, which are legion, about ERP systems. Just as you list things in OS capabilities that aren't done in Java for performance reasons, the same is true for ERP systems, although Oracle is trying real hard.
Not that I'm a C++ fan. I'm a business systems developer, and RPG is a better business systems language than C++, although in our ILE environment on the AS/400 iseries we can develop and link in C and/or C++ modules with RPG modules if we so desired.
yes, and they also stated clearly they got better performance after the conversion.
They did some cache architecting, static structures, and the like to accomplish that which I would consider hard to do. Depends on the level of mainframe and load they had I guess.
What, did IBM pull a VB6 and make RPG3 code non-migratable to 4?
No, they provide a free converter. It's mostly a format change in terms of RPG III code, in other words not rearchitecting to use RPG IV capabilities.
Why the guy has a five pass converter to do the same thing? Don't know, but I presume to rearchitect to use RPG IV capabilities.
Also, everything is totally backwards compatible. One program could contain RPG II, RPG III, RPG IV, and RPG/free syntax. It's a hell of a compiler that Toronto Labs keeps adding to without breaking anything.
While I say this as an extreme example, I would also emphasize that ILE module and service program constructs, subprocedure functions, and/free syntax which resembles any other language is now what we do.
Where Cobol and RPG, the languages that run business?
They were so far off the top and right axes, the algorithm discarded them as outliers.
RPG would put every language except C to shame, and yes, it could execute all the benchmark code. However, given that there's no real RPG compiler outside of OS/400, it's sort of a moot point.
On the other hand, not only can RPG, COBOL, C/C++, Java, and PHP be benchmarked in OS/400 (now i5/OS or just i), but probably every one of these languages in TFA can also be benchmarked in the Unix subset of OS/400. And for any that might be implemented in Linux only (unlikely), can be benchmarked in a Linux partition on the iseries, concurrently with the OS/400 benchmarking.
But like I say, RPG would blow away all the script languages and Java, and that's even with not doing what it's forte is, business data processing, where it would blow C/C++ away as well.
Not that the syntax format makes a difference in speed, but RPG syntax now is similar to other languages with free format as far as coding, readability, and maintenance go. And the Integrated Language Environment of mixing RPG and C++ among others, calling Java class methods directly, calling any Unix program directly, and being called directly by PHP or SQL stored procedures preceded and is superior to later ripoffs such as.NET.
So yes, off the charts, but in the best direction.
Perhaps you didn't mean to compare DB2 to MySQL, but saying MySQL would serve the same place in the product lineup is deeply silly, at best.
While this is true, some may be interested that IBM is writing a DB2 frontend plugin for MySQL. All SQL statements against MySQL would actually be performed against DB2.
This is a compatability interface for all PHP software to run unmodified against the enterprise DB2 database on the IBM iseries. Zend has a free Apache PHP engine for the iseries, and MySQL can be installed and used as is as well as DB2 with Zend provided calls, but ideally unmodified PHP would run against the iseries DB2 database with the default MySQL database syntax, and that's what the IBM plugin will provide.
It's all running in a Unix subset of the iseries OS (formerly OS/400) so should also be available for Unix and Linux.
Perhaps it really is a good reason to upgrade if you can hire experienced Java programmers for half as much as experienced COBOL Programmers. (I'm only guessing on this from a supply and demand perspective.)
When you have working code in COBOL, really battle-hardened proven-beyond-doubt COBOL code, would you really trust a mechanical translation into another language?
I am 99.9% sure that no CPU runs COBOL directly in microcode (although I'm willing to accept that IBM has some weird animal that does exactly that). In other words, that unimaginably important code is already translated into another language - namely machine language - before it's executed. Are you certain that no one else could possibly get it right?
You miss multiple points here. For completeness sakes for the thread, I'll elaborate.
Re: conversion of a battle hardened system to another language. There are many things that are not equivalent in languages. Not only is a conversion to get identical results dicey, but the testing by programmers and users to replace a proven production system with a replacement production system in another language is something so extensive that only a massive effort will accomplish it.
I have seen many of these efforts in the news, and they were newsworthy because when attempting to replace IBM systems these massive efforts ended up as massive failures.
Re: running COBOL directly. You are right, COBOL and RPG and the other languages used for mainframe and midrange systems are compiled as with any other language. However, on the IBM midrange, which goes to mainframe size, the compiler output is byte code which is CPU independent, similar to Java byte code but preceeding it by many years.
This has the important distinction of providing for an increase from 48 bits to 64 bits and switching from CISC to RISC CPU's, to name a couple of changes through the years, without requiring a recompile of any software.
Re: can anyone else possibly get it right. COBOL and RPG are based on decimal precision, in other words, business processing. That's really what our systems are all about, so we get it right.
Also, very importantly, we have native relational database indexed I/O in addition to SQL, and again is all about business database processing.
We also have Java on our mainframes and midranges, and PHP on our midranges, and for that matter all Unix tools/languages, as well as being POSIX compliant, and concurrent Linux partitions, so there isn't anything we don't do and do better than anyone else when it comes to business processing.
* I apologize for the profanity, but any program that can't change a fucking constant is a broken program. Or did they copy/paste 6.55 all over the place?
Your comment is idiotic. Do yu think there was only one change to the minimum wage in all the decades that California payroll system was in production?
There was a long thread on that system, and the real reasons that that California bureaucracy didn't want to modify the payroll system at that time was covered in the thread.
I also provided a solution in the thread that didn't require modifying the system. The California thing wasn't about technology, it was about politics.
There, I've wasted some more of my life on this idiotic issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe, his escape plan vaporized somewhere along the way, and he hadn't figured out a new one.
Or maybe it wasn't a real Ponzi scheme. Anyone who thinks this guy wasn't trading with every market making exemption he had is drinking government kool-aide.
They can't find records of it. Oh my. But of course.
rd
You want to compare that to any other Wall St. CEO who spent 50 years on Wall St., doing things like helping to found NASDAQ?
Like I said, quite modest in comparison. You are regurgitating pap for the uninformed who like to think they understand and think this is lavish and that's where tens of billions went.
Nope, sorry.
rd
I'm not sure how you just "walk away" from thousands of investors without giving them their money (and he couldn't, their money didn't really exist, hence the scam) and not raise any alarms.
The stock market collapsed. Lehman Brothers went under weeks before he confessed. The derivatives market was even worse. Many people wonder why he didn't do exactly that when he had the cover to do it.
rd
He'll still never see the inside of a real prison.
Oh, it went from no prison to real prison.
Ok, I'll play. Previous posters stated that over 30 years required a maximum security prison. Don't see any reason there'll be an exemption made for that. He was sentenced to maximum sentence requested by government, 150 years.
Is the jail he's been staying in since he pled guilty a real jail? Or maybe you have a soft spot for NY jails and think them homey.
rd
2% of 300,000,000 is 6,000,000
I can't believe the poster you're replying to knows what he's talking about. Very few minimum wage workers have health care. Maybe he's just playing and making up stuff, I don't know, but fairly clueless.
rd
...before he lived a life of luxury, squandering more stolen money than he can ever repay.
Madoff lived quite modestly compared to others who spent a career on Wall Street and held the positions he held. You're repeating the pap for the masses, but in fact there is no substance to it.
rd
Seriously, if he had nothing invested, I wonder why the implosion of Wall Street impacted his ponzi scheme at all?
That's a really good question. The answer you'll be given is that he paid it out, but no one is really showing any numbers that back up their claim. Mainly because they can't.
rd
I wonder what the actual amount lost is, compared to the investors investing their money in a normal (5-15%, not the unsustainable Ponzi scheme interest rates) investment.
13 billion was the figure the government gave in most recent news, I believe.
rd
Ponzi schemes must, by definition, go up exponentially in terms of the number of participants. Therefore the greatest growth will always happen just before the fall.
Only if they pay out. Many if not most of Madoff's investors did not take payouts.
What Madoff's sons told police that he told them is that there were $7 billion of redemption requests made that did him in. There are many problems with this, starting with I haven't seen any validation that there any substantial amount at all. There's no indication of it from the many, many interviews that were done following his self-outing.
No, the math cannot be done that would show the money he took in last couple of years going out. But I'd be interested to see someone come up with it.
rd
Madoff will never see the inside of a real prison. The rich have a lot of resources to use to stay out of prison.
He pleaded guilty.
rd
...this doesnt seem to have anything to do with nerds or nerd culture...
The computer software systems involved in this is pretty interesting. There's a lot of questions the government is not revealing any answers to on this if indeed they have any, which appears they don't.
rd
The one guy who did his own analysis and kept badgering the SEC to investigate was the estranged lover of Madoff's daughter, AND he worked for a competitor.
I can't recall hearing that before, and I think I would have since it was her current lover then husband who many believe in some way diverted the Justice Department from looking into those claims more fully.
The one who worked for a competitor who was repeatedly alerting the Justice Department was Markopolos. It's possible you're confusing him with her SEC husband and getting it backwards about the investigation.
rd
Most of the $65bn never existed in the first place. The rest would have been handed out to customers who had withdrawn money in the past.
The $65bn is what his clients thought they had in their accounts with him, but a lot of that can be attributed to fictitious gains that he reported on their accounts.
True, but even the billions coming in in last few years can't be accounted for as paid out. I've seen some market types try on a couple of sites but can't be done. No one in the government looking into this addresses this inconvenient fact. They just chase after people that you're talking about for what they can but the numbers don't add up.
rd
Seriously, it's impossible to get rid of $65 Billion without having something valuable to show for it. So far they've gathered the low 9 figures of $ from him, less than 1% of the money.
This is a really insightful remark, I'm glad to see that it was modded that way. No one will touch the math because it quite frankly is impossible to account for the money that was coming in. It is also ridiculous to believe that he stashed billions away in a buried treasure chest as it's not in the usuall suspect Swiss bank accounts and the like. Many of those bankers lost money with him as well.
I believe he lost it with financial shenanigans he could get away with with a grandfather market maker exemption and a unique vertical stack of companies to do any aspect of shenanigans he wanted. No info is coming out to determine anything one way or the other though. People who think this was a coordinated effort among other parties with Madoff just have no clue or insight into this. But that's the story being sold by the government. It's just as much of a con job.
rd
I think it's very likely that there were others in-the-know. But they probably worked out a plea to provide documentation to nail the case against Madoff, which is why they won't be prosecuted.
There's no indication at all this happened.
rd
Don't worry RD - all those guys are full of shit.
whoa sparky, I wasn't comparing Java to C++, I stated that TFA said they got better performance with the converted Java than their prior mainframe COBOL environment which I said I would consider hard to do. They cached and static'd everything in Java and not sure what kind of mainframe environment they had that could be so bad.
I also say the same things as you do to Java (and PHP and scripted languages) advocates, which are legion, about ERP systems. Just as you list things in OS capabilities that aren't done in Java for performance reasons, the same is true for ERP systems, although Oracle is trying real hard.
Not that I'm a C++ fan. I'm a business systems developer, and RPG is a better business systems language than C++, although in our ILE environment on the AS/400 iseries we can develop and link in C and/or C++ modules with RPG modules if we so desired.
rd
"sluggish java"??
yes, and they also stated clearly they got better performance after the conversion.
They did some cache architecting, static structures, and the like to accomplish that which I would consider hard to do. Depends on the level of mainframe and load they had I guess.
rd
What, did IBM pull a VB6 and make RPG3 code non-migratable to 4?
No, they provide a free converter. It's mostly a format change in terms of RPG III code, in other words not rearchitecting to use RPG IV capabilities.
Why the guy has a five pass converter to do the same thing? Don't know, but I presume to rearchitect to use RPG IV capabilities.
Also, everything is totally backwards compatible. One program could contain RPG II, RPG III, RPG IV, and RPG /free syntax. It's a hell of a compiler that Toronto Labs keeps adding to without breaking anything.
While I say this as an extreme example, I would also emphasize that ILE module and service program constructs, subprocedure functions, and /free syntax which resembles any other language is now what we do.
rd
...it is usually pretty bloody difficult to just to figure out what the existing system is doing and and why.
You're about the umpteenth post to point to a code readability problem which no one said existed as a reason for conversion.
They stated clearly they were doing this to get off a mainframe and run off of PC server farms to save millions of dollars.
rd
But now what will the poor grey-beards do for a living?
They stated clearly they were migrating the people along with it.
For the post before yours, they stated clearly they were doing this for the money it saves them to move from a mainframe to PC server farms.
It's not even really an article to read, just a few bullet points.
rd
Where Cobol and RPG, the languages that run business?
They were so far off the top and right axes, the algorithm discarded them as outliers.
RPG would put every language except C to shame, and yes, it could execute all the benchmark code. However, given that there's no real RPG compiler outside of OS/400, it's sort of a moot point.
On the other hand, not only can RPG, COBOL, C/C++, Java, and PHP be benchmarked in OS/400 (now i5/OS or just i), but probably every one of these languages in TFA can also be benchmarked in the Unix subset of OS/400. And for any that might be implemented in Linux only (unlikely), can be benchmarked in a Linux partition on the iseries, concurrently with the OS/400 benchmarking.
But like I say, RPG would blow away all the script languages and Java, and that's even with not doing what it's forte is, business data processing, where it would blow C/C++ away as well.
Not that the syntax format makes a difference in speed, but RPG syntax now is similar to other languages with free format as far as coding, readability, and maintenance go. And the Integrated Language Environment of mixing RPG and C++ among others, calling Java class methods directly, calling any Unix program directly, and being called directly by PHP or SQL stored procedures preceded and is superior to later ripoffs such as .NET.
So yes, off the charts, but in the best direction.
rd
Perhaps you didn't mean to compare DB2 to MySQL, but saying MySQL would serve the same place in the product lineup is deeply silly, at best.
While this is true, some may be interested that IBM is writing a DB2 frontend plugin for MySQL. All SQL statements against MySQL would actually be performed against DB2.
This is a compatability interface for all PHP software to run unmodified against the enterprise DB2 database on the IBM iseries. Zend has a free Apache PHP engine for the iseries, and MySQL can be installed and used as is as well as DB2 with Zend provided calls, but ideally unmodified PHP would run against the iseries DB2 database with the default MySQL database syntax, and that's what the IBM plugin will provide.
It's all running in a Unix subset of the iseries OS (formerly OS/400) so should also be available for Unix and Linux.
rd
Perhaps it really is a good reason to upgrade if you can hire experienced Java programmers for half as much as experienced COBOL Programmers. (I'm only guessing on this from a supply and demand perspective.)
Your guess is wrong.
rd
When you have working code in COBOL, really battle-hardened proven-beyond-doubt COBOL code, would you really trust a mechanical translation into another language?
I am 99.9% sure that no CPU runs COBOL directly in microcode (although I'm willing to accept that IBM has some weird animal that does exactly that). In other words, that unimaginably important code is already translated into another language - namely machine language - before it's executed. Are you certain that no one else could possibly get it right?
You miss multiple points here. For completeness sakes for the thread, I'll elaborate.
Re: conversion of a battle hardened system to another language. There are many things that are not equivalent in languages. Not only is a conversion to get identical results dicey, but the testing by programmers and users to replace a proven production system with a replacement production system in another language is something so extensive that only a massive effort will accomplish it.
I have seen many of these efforts in the news, and they were newsworthy because when attempting to replace IBM systems these massive efforts ended up as massive failures.
Re: running COBOL directly. You are right, COBOL and RPG and the other languages used for mainframe and midrange systems are compiled as with any other language. However, on the IBM midrange, which goes to mainframe size, the compiler output is byte code which is CPU independent, similar to Java byte code but preceeding it by many years.
This has the important distinction of providing for an increase from 48 bits to 64 bits and switching from CISC to RISC CPU's, to name a couple of changes through the years, without requiring a recompile of any software.
Re: can anyone else possibly get it right. COBOL and RPG are based on decimal precision, in other words, business processing. That's really what our systems are all about, so we get it right.
Also, very importantly, we have native relational database indexed I/O in addition to SQL, and again is all about business database processing.
We also have Java on our mainframes and midranges, and PHP on our midranges, and for that matter all Unix tools/languages, as well as being POSIX compliant, and concurrent Linux partitions, so there isn't anything we don't do and do better than anyone else when it comes to business processing.
rd
* I apologize for the profanity, but any program that can't change a fucking constant is a broken program. Or did they copy/paste 6.55 all over the place?
Your comment is idiotic. Do yu think there was only one change to the minimum wage in all the decades that California payroll system was in production?
There was a long thread on that system, and the real reasons that that California bureaucracy didn't want to modify the payroll system at that time was covered in the thread.
I also provided a solution in the thread that didn't require modifying the system. The California thing wasn't about technology, it was about politics.
There, I've wasted some more of my life on this idiotic issue.
rd