Oh yeah? You made the switch? I have been looking for someone like you, none of my friends have gone iPhone-> Android, and I am seriously considering making the switch myself, but I want to see what the next iPhone offers, as well as some Android phones that will be released this fall.
What do you think Android does better? Do you find the "polish" is good enough on Android? I really like that the iPhone just works. I like to tinker with some things, but my phone... should Just Work. Is battery life an issue?
I already get the philosophical reasons, I was really pissed when Android had real multi-tasking, and could open ICS files and Jobs pretty much just told everyone "eh you don't want that."
Well there are some fairly safe assumptions one can make about the new iphone:
It is almost definitely going to have the A5 processor from the iPad, which will be a big bump in speed. Similarly, I think its safe to assume that there will be more memory. A camera that is probably bumped up in specs, as well as some sort of screen upgrade. Its also pretty safe to assume that the new phones will be 4G- and that will be enough for most to make the upgrade.
If you are a happy apple customer like my wife, and you are due for a new phone, you are going to buy whatever Apple releases unless they really screw something up. And keep in mind that this includes not only rabid apple fans who will buy anything Jobs puts out there, but also people who have 2 year contracts, have seen the iphone4 and decided its something they definitely want.
My iPhone 3GS is the first and only apple product I have ever bought, and it is a great product. I would be in the "sight unseen" category if it wasn't for Android making some huge leaps in the past year.
Just because it is new, doesn't mean it is better. At this point, why even put a version out there at all. Just call it firefox, and hideaway a build number in the about box and be done with it. The version number is supposed to convey some meaning to the user, and it does not. Just take it off.
At least with chrome, they did it like this from the beginning and didn't build a plugin process around it- there is a big assumption on google's part that Chrome is just going to continually be updated, which is find for an immature product used by home power users, but I would be really surprised if you ever see Chrome being installed on corporate desktops doing that. I think that model is going to really burn them when they have their first major regression too. People aren't going to trust google to auto update anymore, meaning they will probably just shut the mechanism off altogether.
This is lunacy, and just because Linus is doing it, doesn't mean it makes sense. I am supposed to read in-depth changelogs all the time just to see if there are any significant features I might want, or if I want to hold off and let the early adopters shake out the bugs in a major subsystem overhaul? In the end, this hurts the marketing/PR for the product as well. When there was a major number switch, it kind of sounded the alarm that its time to pay attention to what those guys are doing over in Firefox land.
This is definitely true. Concepts were supposed to fix this problem, but they were booted out at the last minute. Like most compiler errors though, you start associating those walls of text with common errors after a few times. STL isn't the worst offender by far in my opinion though, boost is. Most of Boost is hard to really consider C++ anymore, its template meta programming. C++ is there in the core, but if you show a circa 1998 (IE pre-templates) developer most boost libraries, they probably wouldn't recognize it as C++.
After reading this and recalling what it was like going to NYC in the 1980s, and what it is like going to the "bad neighborhoods" now, I feel as a whole US society is a lot nicer and safer. My neighborhood itself, not too long ago considered to be a "bad" neighborhood, now resembles what my grandparents told me about 1940's Brooklyn or a sitcom (everyone knows each other, says hello, hangs out with each other, etc). When I am in a bad neighborhood now, I feel a lot safer than I did on a typical subway ride in the late 80s. Now some of that may be attributed to me be being a child in the 80s, and I have probably grown a lot more urbanized. But a thought did occur to me: Perhaps high incarceration rates have produced something of a tipping point- you take enough aholes out of the neighborhood, and people are no longer afraid, and thus aren't hiding, and invest time/money to make their property nicer. About a year ago I had to walk to a store about a half mile from the subway in the South Bronx- one of the worst neighborhoods in the entire city, but I never once felt like I was in a dangerous situation like the many times you would see real junkies on the subways ranting and raving. Its not a place I would want to live, but it certainly didn't live up to descriptions from "the Bronx is burning" era.
The Times also mentioned the drop in crack use, and the relative replacement of that with marijuana. Crack can take an otherwise nice person and make them crazy enough to steal and murder. Marijuana takes an otherwise nice person and makes them a bit poorer, and less motivated, but certainly not to murder, and maybe in extreme cases slightly more prone to steal.
I would think that most if not all new houses these days are wired up in each room for cable and ethernet/phone. Is this not the case? Obviously you still want wireless to work, as I constantly walk around my house with my phone and laptop, but for the most part these problems should be easy to mitigate.
Personally I would be very wary about buying new construction that didn't have wiring to the rooms- who knows where else they may have cut corners!
Its not just visibility, its availability too. If I have a question about how some component works, or have some compile error that I just need a second pair of eyes on, I am not going to contact the guy at home, I am going to walk over to the nearest cube, not send an email/IM, or call someone, unless they are the only person that can answer that question. People get promoted by being the go-to guy, and its really hard, if not impossible, to be that guy if you are not available in person.
You also miss out on design and other technical discussions that just pop up in the office. Its hard to keep up with the pack when you miss out on all that stuff.
They were making them longer than 5 years ago, but still to this day they aren't selling them in any significant numbers. Flame away, but I have worked with a lot of developers over the past 4 years since I have used my NAS, and I have never come across anyone else who has one. Most are not even that familiar with what they can do.
I was not precise when I used the word "unheard." I really meant it was unheard of to actually have one installed, not that no one had ever heard of one.
I disagree- People left friendster and myspace because there were parts of the experience they were unhappy with and the new social network offered them a compelling reason to switch. I think Facebook will be here to stay because it has reached a "good enough" point that it is going to be difficult to get users to switch to another social network. I honestly can't even remember why I left friendster, but I definitely remember leaving Facebook because of the eye bleeding pages and flash players. Facebook was clean, simple, and relatively stable. FB also utilized ajax for as long as I joined, which was a huge improvement.
Could someone innovate on the social network concept and cause facebook to fall? I suppose its possible, but FB seems to be quite nimble and has a huge amount of resources at its disposal. When foursquare came around and threatened to eat some of FB's lunch, they cloned it quickly.
Look at it like the browser wars. Everyone used to jump from IE to netscape, then back to IE, and then Firefox came along and out innovated all the others. It was damn good, and even though chrome has come along, and is arguably better, it hasn't really eaten into FF's userbase all that much.
Its interesting you mentioned shared network storage. After I ditched my desktop 4 years ago and just went laptop, I decided to buy a NAS for mass storage. At the time, my motivation was mostly due to the fact that I was living in a small Manhattan apartment, and laptop disks were relatively slow and expensive. I was ahead of the curve then, but at the time it was unheard of even in geek circles- I am glad it is getting mentioned on slashdot and is thus getting a bit more prominence. I can definitely see this being the model of the future.
The fact that my NAS box is essentially a shoe box sized low powered linux server that could I could access from anywhere on the net is a huge plus too. (I have a synology ds211j).
Considering flash was about $7.50/gb in 2007, $3.80 in 2009, and is now down to about $1.71/gb, all the while capacities are increasing, I think pricing will be "competitive" in a year or two. Also we are just beginning the release cycle of the next generation- OCZ and crucial are set to release their products this month, so price/$GB could drop further in the very immediate future. Speeds are still increasing by leaps and bounds with each generation- the new vertex 3's, in real actual use, have seen sustained transfer rates over 400 MegaBYTES per second.
Adding an SSD is the best upgrade you can do to increase performance. If you look at the videos on you tube, they show that loading even the largest, slowest apps like Photoshop, CAD, WoW, etc are more than 2x as fast as a hard disk- most app loads are instantaneou-, and thus halve boot times. SSD's use a fraction of the energy, which means cooler laptops with longer battery lives, and quieter desktops that also require less cooling. You are right that SSD's aren't suitable for mass storage, I think for at least 5 years we will see hybrid setups, and then gradually we will see a move towards SSD only systems.
There is real value in adding an SSD today though, IMHO.
Pretty telling that you couldn't actually respond with an answer.
VS makes me want to code. It makes browsing code so much easier. Debugging is so nice that I will often fire up a debugger and step through code if I have a hard time figuring out what something is doing. I have been in several situations where my entire team couldn't find a multithreaded related crash using gdb, but I have never had a bug escape me when debugging through Visual Studio. You can actually control administer your machine a lot more efficiently through VS than you can by clicking through the control panel. Its easy on the eyes, though you don't get "hardcore" points w/ coworkers for a black background with neon text. In my opinion, coding is easier, bugs get found faster, code gets written faster. Compile error? click on the error, and it will take you to the offending line. Huge convenience. And note I am talking about raw C++ here- no managed code,.net, or any other stuff.
Clearly there are drawbacks- Intellisense just stops working sometimes, for no apparent reason. The build system is different than make, and can be annoying at times, but its way easier than fighting with autotools, though CMAKE is a little nicer (though fortunately CMAKE can generate vcproj files). Integration w/ source control other than VSS is a pain- usually I just avoid that altogether and leave them unintegrated.
I have tried alternatives- I used Emacs in college exclusively, until I got sick of a million meta commands and having to write programs just to configure my IDE the way I like it (a little exaggeration there, but not much). browsing between files on large projects was too cumbersome.
I have tried Eclipse and its god awful view system, where god forbid I click the wrong place or hit the wrong button my whole screen just gets deranged. I find the Eclipse model very awkward, the plugins are buggy, and intellisense works even less frequently than VS. For Java, Eclipse is good.
I tried QTCreator, which was alright, but seemed very focused around building QT apps. I just wanted to do general dev, and the UI was too Apple-ish for me- I don't need a shiny IDE, just one that is pleasant to look at and lets me get things done.
I have not tried net beans for C++, mostly because Eclipse CDT has lead me to believe that java IDE's shoe-horned to C++ IDE's don't seem to work that well. I could give Code::Blocks another shot as well.
So seriously, what do you recommend? And what specifically do you think your recommendation does better than Visual Studio?
Maybe not in the spirit of your post, but I don't think you should read this series until it is done.
I read the first book of the series, a Game of Thrones, after hearing it was awesome. I used to be a very heavy reader of sci-fi in my teens, and I was looking to getting back to some of that, so I figured this would be a good re-entry. The first book was really historical fiction, there was nothing fantasy about it. There were knights and all that, and talk of dragons, and something scary in the icy north, but the actual magical elements in the story are miniscule.
The book was very heavy and overdone. I have long felt that there is no reason any fiction book should be more than 500 pages, and at 900 pages, GOT convinced me I should make a rule about not reading excessively long books. One thing that really bugged me is that there are tons of characters, and they are all pretty much introduced at once. At one point I actually started taking notes, as most people had nicknames, and I guess to keep things from being repetitive, how characters would be referred to was constantly changing (IE for a character named Dirk Fantasyman, he might be referred to as dirk, fantasyman, some nickname he had, his title, by his relation to another character (IE the cousin of lord somethingorother). It made things quite confusing, especially as the changeups weren't even consistent in a single conversation. Many times I would sit there and be like whoa, where did the cousin of lord somethingorother come in, then I would reread until I remembered that Dirk was that cousin... annoying.
GOT in the end was a good book. But it was rather drawn out, and when the first book is 900 pages and is convoluted with many plot lines, I just don't think that bodes well for the rest of the series. Martin seems like the type that just likes to drag things out, and there just seem to be a lot of parallel's with the Wheel of Time series. I personally am waiting for the series to end before I decide to finish the series.
Do you realize where flash orders came from? In your example, the grocery store is the exchange. And you know who pushed Flash orders to market? The exchanges! There was a lot of controversy over flash orders before they were rolled out in 2009, and to be quite honest, few people wanted them, and many were against the idea.
The basic premise behind flash orders was this: Customers can save money by having their orders only sent to participants trading on their exchange- the orders would not be publicly displayed, and would not be router to away markets (its more expensive for exchanges to have their trades executed off their exchange, and IIRC they don't get to report that in their volume statistics). If the order doesn't get filled in that 500ms, the order gets cancelled back and they can send it out to the rest of the market. It was really a way for exchanges to try and compete with the various dark pools out there- the liquidity didn't have to be publicly displayed before the trade was executed, which was a big draw to dark pools- customers with large orders didn't want to "tip their hand" so to speak. The exchanges pushed this, not the HFT guys. An analogy would be going to a flea market, and some guy at the door saying "hey man, if you agree to try and shop with only me first, I will cut the sales tax in half."
Despite the debate, flash orders were pushed through. Enterprising electronic traders saw that these orders were not filling very often, and that they were essentially orders that would hit the market that haven't yet. For larger orders, they would probably have market impact and move the market. So these enterprising guys went and bought ahead of the flash orders, hoping that they could profit from a price move.
The key here is that they were taking advantage of a feature the exchanges pushed for their own benefit. In the hierarchy of Wall St, exchanges are fairly low on the prestige and brain power rankings, as counter-intuitive as that may seem.
If there is any bad guy when it comes to flash orders, its the exchanges- they pushed them, and continued to allow them when they saw people were taking advantage. Flash orders were only even really allowed because of a loophole of sorts that says when another market has a better price than you, you have 1 second to route it out. Technology advanced from when that rule was made, changing that 1 second interpretation change from "As soon as possible" to "we have a whole second to play with this order before we have to give it up." Traders did what they always do- exploit inefficiencies for profit, same as they have done since back in Sumeria.
that's just plain arbitrage. That's been going on since there have been markets. LeFevre talks about similar stuff in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, back in the 1920's.
FYI- I have been involved in AMM since 2003, including PCX. In fact, when I started we did a major overhaul to pretty much prevent a situation like that from ever occurring.
I don't think the US has any concerns about being attacked by an Iranian nuclear weapon. However, a nuclear armed Iran would alter the balance of power in the middle east, away from US interests.
Perhaps most importantly, you have an unstable country that hates Israel and is right next door. A leader of a failing gov't that is also a religious extremist might lob a nuke at Israel either as an attempt at a saving throw for his regime, or a last act in the name of religion or his own glory. A nuclear weapon lobbed at Israel, especially by a muslim country, would almost definitely lead to a larger regional war in the middle east, which isn't good for anyone, and could possibly lead to another world war.
The future is already here to some extent- I can control my cable box from my iphone. If it had an IR transmitter, I could do a lot more with it, but even so, my blu ray player is connected to the network, and new TV's have network connectivity in many models now.
I am a little fancy, but I actually have a NAS at home, with a webcam set up to it. I use it as a security camera of sorts and to see if my dog has destroyed the house yet if I am running late coming home.
To be honest, I don't see the microwave and stove ever having these features (think of the security implications), but certainly I can see thermostats, security systems, A/V systems, etc being controlled this way- in fact I saw an apartment a few months ago that was wired up all crazy with speakers in each room and you could control it remotely through your phone.
Probably because your spreadsheet has updated at the same rate for the past 15 years- instantaneously.
I can tell you that my number one cycle killer that I actually wait on has reduced tremendously over time- compiling. There was an XKCD on this, but back in the day, even for smallish projects, for a full build you would go and get coffee, probably even lunch, and possibly just went home for the day or bothered your coworkers (how far we have come from the days of P4 when a process could peg your computer!). A good deal of those reduced times come from better compiler technology, better code practices, and even better languages (IE C++-> Java/C#), but I am still doing C++, and doing full builds on the same size large systems I was working on 10 years ago now only call for a trip to the bathroom, and maybe a cup of coffee, though due to the wonders of multi-core machines, it is not a problem to surf/. and compile.
Pro tip: If you are going to send her roses at work, send them on a Monday. Flowers at work also serve the purpose of being shown off to coworkers, and to maximize her enjoyment and gloating, you should get them on Monday, as most flowers are unlikely to last more than 7 days, and start looking worse for the wear after 5.
I learned this from my girlfriend, who is now my fiance.
That is a completely false statement. Small firms are a lot more likely to use colos than the big banks. As I posted before, there is information on how to get colocated with NYSE right on their website: http://www.nyse.com/technologies/sfti/1228187874506.html
The costs run about $10k/month/rack if I remember right.
And its not necessary to colocate to have a profitable HFT system. A guy I know has a strategy running on the side, not colocated at all, and he says he makes a decent chunk off of it.
Actually, HFT is largely a small firm game. Some big banks do it, but not all, and they are usually small operations.
The typical profile of an HFT firm is 20 guys in a smallish but nice office, kind of like a startup's, but a bit more grown up. It's not that hard to get your box in a colo w/ NYSE, you just have to pay them. They recently built a huge new datacenter for this very purpose.
I haven't personally made the call to ask about requirements, but I worked at an 8 man startup firm and we threw around the idea of colocating. Being able to was never an issue, it was the cost that deterred us.
This "special" access is available to anyone willing to pay for it. If you choose not to pay the higher price for faster market data, then I don't think you can blame the other guy for being faster. For what its worth, the really cutting edge market data solutions are all third party and available to anyone who will write a check. The costs of these things quickly skyrocketed past the point where it made sense for each firm to build their own system.
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Oh yeah? You made the switch? I have been looking for someone like you, none of my friends have gone iPhone-> Android, and I am seriously considering making the switch myself, but I want to see what the next iPhone offers, as well as some Android phones that will be released this fall.
What do you think Android does better? Do you find the "polish" is good enough on Android? I really like that the iPhone just works. I like to tinker with some things, but my phone... should Just Work. Is battery life an issue?
I already get the philosophical reasons, I was really pissed when Android had real multi-tasking, and could open ICS files and Jobs pretty much just told everyone "eh you don't want that."
I meant in size and/or technology- IE AMOLED, which has lower power consumption, not resolution.
Well there are some fairly safe assumptions one can make about the new iphone:
It is almost definitely going to have the A5 processor from the iPad, which will be a big bump in speed. Similarly, I think its safe to assume that there will be more memory. A camera that is probably bumped up in specs, as well as some sort of screen upgrade. Its also pretty safe to assume that the new phones will be 4G- and that will be enough for most to make the upgrade.
If you are a happy apple customer like my wife, and you are due for a new phone, you are going to buy whatever Apple releases unless they really screw something up. And keep in mind that this includes not only rabid apple fans who will buy anything Jobs puts out there, but also people who have 2 year contracts, have seen the iphone4 and decided its something they definitely want.
My iPhone 3GS is the first and only apple product I have ever bought, and it is a great product. I would be in the "sight unseen" category if it wasn't for Android making some huge leaps in the past year.
Just because it is new, doesn't mean it is better. At this point, why even put a version out there at all. Just call it firefox, and hideaway a build number in the about box and be done with it. The version number is supposed to convey some meaning to the user, and it does not. Just take it off.
At least with chrome, they did it like this from the beginning and didn't build a plugin process around it- there is a big assumption on google's part that Chrome is just going to continually be updated, which is find for an immature product used by home power users, but I would be really surprised if you ever see Chrome being installed on corporate desktops doing that. I think that model is going to really burn them when they have their first major regression too. People aren't going to trust google to auto update anymore, meaning they will probably just shut the mechanism off altogether.
This is lunacy, and just because Linus is doing it, doesn't mean it makes sense. I am supposed to read in-depth changelogs all the time just to see if there are any significant features I might want, or if I want to hold off and let the early adopters shake out the bugs in a major subsystem overhaul? In the end, this hurts the marketing/PR for the product as well. When there was a major number switch, it kind of sounded the alarm that its time to pay attention to what those guys are doing over in Firefox land.
This is definitely true. Concepts were supposed to fix this problem, but they were booted out at the last minute. Like most compiler errors though, you start associating those walls of text with common errors after a few times. STL isn't the worst offender by far in my opinion though, boost is. Most of Boost is hard to really consider C++ anymore, its template meta programming. C++ is there in the core, but if you show a circa 1998 (IE pre-templates) developer most boost libraries, they probably wouldn't recognize it as C++.
A NYTimes article about this very subject said another likely cause is the sharp drop in lead levels in blood, especially in kids: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24crime.html?scp=1&sq=crime%20rate&st=cse Apparently high lead rates lead to a lot more aggressive and violent behavior.
After reading this and recalling what it was like going to NYC in the 1980s, and what it is like going to the "bad neighborhoods" now, I feel as a whole US society is a lot nicer and safer. My neighborhood itself, not too long ago considered to be a "bad" neighborhood, now resembles what my grandparents told me about 1940's Brooklyn or a sitcom (everyone knows each other, says hello, hangs out with each other, etc). When I am in a bad neighborhood now, I feel a lot safer than I did on a typical subway ride in the late 80s. Now some of that may be attributed to me be being a child in the 80s, and I have probably grown a lot more urbanized. But a thought did occur to me: Perhaps high incarceration rates have produced something of a tipping point- you take enough aholes out of the neighborhood, and people are no longer afraid, and thus aren't hiding, and invest time/money to make their property nicer. About a year ago I had to walk to a store about a half mile from the subway in the South Bronx- one of the worst neighborhoods in the entire city, but I never once felt like I was in a dangerous situation like the many times you would see real junkies on the subways ranting and raving. Its not a place I would want to live, but it certainly didn't live up to descriptions from "the Bronx is burning" era.
The Times also mentioned the drop in crack use, and the relative replacement of that with marijuana. Crack can take an otherwise nice person and make them crazy enough to steal and murder. Marijuana takes an otherwise nice person and makes them a bit poorer, and less motivated, but certainly not to murder, and maybe in extreme cases slightly more prone to steal.
I would think that most if not all new houses these days are wired up in each room for cable and ethernet/phone. Is this not the case? Obviously you still want wireless to work, as I constantly walk around my house with my phone and laptop, but for the most part these problems should be easy to mitigate.
Personally I would be very wary about buying new construction that didn't have wiring to the rooms- who knows where else they may have cut corners!
Its not just visibility, its availability too. If I have a question about how some component works, or have some compile error that I just need a second pair of eyes on, I am not going to contact the guy at home, I am going to walk over to the nearest cube, not send an email/IM, or call someone, unless they are the only person that can answer that question. People get promoted by being the go-to guy, and its really hard, if not impossible, to be that guy if you are not available in person.
You also miss out on design and other technical discussions that just pop up in the office. Its hard to keep up with the pack when you miss out on all that stuff.
They were making them longer than 5 years ago, but still to this day they aren't selling them in any significant numbers. Flame away, but I have worked with a lot of developers over the past 4 years since I have used my NAS, and I have never come across anyone else who has one. Most are not even that familiar with what they can do.
I was not precise when I used the word "unheard." I really meant it was unheard of to actually have one installed, not that no one had ever heard of one.
-K
I disagree- People left friendster and myspace because there were parts of the experience they were unhappy with and the new social network offered them a compelling reason to switch. I think Facebook will be here to stay because it has reached a "good enough" point that it is going to be difficult to get users to switch to another social network. I honestly can't even remember why I left friendster, but I definitely remember leaving Facebook because of the eye bleeding pages and flash players. Facebook was clean, simple, and relatively stable. FB also utilized ajax for as long as I joined, which was a huge improvement.
Could someone innovate on the social network concept and cause facebook to fall? I suppose its possible, but FB seems to be quite nimble and has a huge amount of resources at its disposal. When foursquare came around and threatened to eat some of FB's lunch, they cloned it quickly.
Look at it like the browser wars. Everyone used to jump from IE to netscape, then back to IE, and then Firefox came along and out innovated all the others. It was damn good, and even though chrome has come along, and is arguably better, it hasn't really eaten into FF's userbase all that much.
Its interesting you mentioned shared network storage. After I ditched my desktop 4 years ago and just went laptop, I decided to buy a NAS for mass storage. At the time, my motivation was mostly due to the fact that I was living in a small Manhattan apartment, and laptop disks were relatively slow and expensive. I was ahead of the curve then, but at the time it was unheard of even in geek circles- I am glad it is getting mentioned on slashdot and is thus getting a bit more prominence. I can definitely see this being the model of the future.
The fact that my NAS box is essentially a shoe box sized low powered linux server that could I could access from anywhere on the net is a huge plus too. (I have a synology ds211j).
Considering flash was about $7.50/gb in 2007, $3.80 in 2009, and is now down to about $1.71/gb, all the while capacities are increasing, I think pricing will be "competitive" in a year or two. Also we are just beginning the release cycle of the next generation- OCZ and crucial are set to release their products this month, so price/$GB could drop further in the very immediate future. Speeds are still increasing by leaps and bounds with each generation- the new vertex 3's, in real actual use, have seen sustained transfer rates over 400 MegaBYTES per second.
Adding an SSD is the best upgrade you can do to increase performance. If you look at the videos on you tube, they show that loading even the largest, slowest apps like Photoshop, CAD, WoW, etc are more than 2x as fast as a hard disk- most app loads are instantaneou-, and thus halve boot times. SSD's use a fraction of the energy, which means cooler laptops with longer battery lives, and quieter desktops that also require less cooling. You are right that SSD's aren't suitable for mass storage, I think for at least 5 years we will see hybrid setups, and then gradually we will see a move towards SSD only systems.
There is real value in adding an SSD today though, IMHO.
Pretty telling that you couldn't actually respond with an answer.
VS makes me want to code. It makes browsing code so much easier. Debugging is so nice that I will often fire up a debugger and step through code if I have a hard time figuring out what something is doing. I have been in several situations where my entire team couldn't find a multithreaded related crash using gdb, but I have never had a bug escape me when debugging through Visual Studio. You can actually control administer your machine a lot more efficiently through VS than you can by clicking through the control panel. Its easy on the eyes, though you don't get "hardcore" points w/ coworkers for a black background with neon text. In my opinion, coding is easier, bugs get found faster, code gets written faster. Compile error? click on the error, and it will take you to the offending line. Huge convenience. And note I am talking about raw C++ here- no managed code, .net, or any other stuff.
Clearly there are drawbacks- Intellisense just stops working sometimes, for no apparent reason. The build system is different than make, and can be annoying at times, but its way easier than fighting with autotools, though CMAKE is a little nicer (though fortunately CMAKE can generate vcproj files). Integration w/ source control other than VSS is a pain- usually I just avoid that altogether and leave them unintegrated.
I have tried alternatives- I used Emacs in college exclusively, until I got sick of a million meta commands and having to write programs just to configure my IDE the way I like it (a little exaggeration there, but not much). browsing between files on large projects was too cumbersome.
I have tried Eclipse and its god awful view system, where god forbid I click the wrong place or hit the wrong button my whole screen just gets deranged. I find the Eclipse model very awkward, the plugins are buggy, and intellisense works even less frequently than VS. For Java, Eclipse is good.
I tried QTCreator, which was alright, but seemed very focused around building QT apps. I just wanted to do general dev, and the UI was too Apple-ish for me- I don't need a shiny IDE, just one that is pleasant to look at and lets me get things done.
I have not tried net beans for C++, mostly because Eclipse CDT has lead me to believe that java IDE's shoe-horned to C++ IDE's don't seem to work that well. I could give Code::Blocks another shot as well.
So seriously, what do you recommend? And what specifically do you think your recommendation does better than Visual Studio?
Maybe not in the spirit of your post, but I don't think you should read this series until it is done.
I read the first book of the series, a Game of Thrones, after hearing it was awesome. I used to be a very heavy reader of sci-fi in my teens, and I was looking to getting back to some of that, so I figured this would be a good re-entry. The first book was really historical fiction, there was nothing fantasy about it. There were knights and all that, and talk of dragons, and something scary in the icy north, but the actual magical elements in the story are miniscule.
The book was very heavy and overdone. I have long felt that there is no reason any fiction book should be more than 500 pages, and at 900 pages, GOT convinced me I should make a rule about not reading excessively long books. One thing that really bugged me is that there are tons of characters, and they are all pretty much introduced at once. At one point I actually started taking notes, as most people had nicknames, and I guess to keep things from being repetitive, how characters would be referred to was constantly changing (IE for a character named Dirk Fantasyman, he might be referred to as dirk, fantasyman, some nickname he had, his title, by his relation to another character (IE the cousin of lord somethingorother). It made things quite confusing, especially as the changeups weren't even consistent in a single conversation. Many times I would sit there and be like whoa, where did the cousin of lord somethingorother come in, then I would reread until I remembered that Dirk was that cousin... annoying.
GOT in the end was a good book. But it was rather drawn out, and when the first book is 900 pages and is convoluted with many plot lines, I just don't think that bodes well for the rest of the series. Martin seems like the type that just likes to drag things out, and there just seem to be a lot of parallel's with the Wheel of Time series. I personally am waiting for the series to end before I decide to finish the series.
Do you realize where flash orders came from? In your example, the grocery store is the exchange. And you know who pushed Flash orders to market? The exchanges! There was a lot of controversy over flash orders before they were rolled out in 2009, and to be quite honest, few people wanted them, and many were against the idea.
The basic premise behind flash orders was this: Customers can save money by having their orders only sent to participants trading on their exchange- the orders would not be publicly displayed, and would not be router to away markets (its more expensive for exchanges to have their trades executed off their exchange, and IIRC they don't get to report that in their volume statistics). If the order doesn't get filled in that 500ms, the order gets cancelled back and they can send it out to the rest of the market. It was really a way for exchanges to try and compete with the various dark pools out there- the liquidity didn't have to be publicly displayed before the trade was executed, which was a big draw to dark pools- customers with large orders didn't want to "tip their hand" so to speak. The exchanges pushed this, not the HFT guys. An analogy would be going to a flea market, and some guy at the door saying "hey man, if you agree to try and shop with only me first, I will cut the sales tax in half."
Despite the debate, flash orders were pushed through. Enterprising electronic traders saw that these orders were not filling very often, and that they were essentially orders that would hit the market that haven't yet. For larger orders, they would probably have market impact and move the market. So these enterprising guys went and bought ahead of the flash orders, hoping that they could profit from a price move.
The key here is that they were taking advantage of a feature the exchanges pushed for their own benefit. In the hierarchy of Wall St, exchanges are fairly low on the prestige and brain power rankings, as counter-intuitive as that may seem.
If there is any bad guy when it comes to flash orders, its the exchanges- they pushed them, and continued to allow them when they saw people were taking advantage. Flash orders were only even really allowed because of a loophole of sorts that says when another market has a better price than you, you have 1 second to route it out. Technology advanced from when that rule was made, changing that 1 second interpretation change from "As soon as possible" to "we have a whole second to play with this order before we have to give it up." Traders did what they always do- exploit inefficiencies for profit, same as they have done since back in Sumeria.
I hope this clears some things up.
that's just plain arbitrage. That's been going on since there have been markets. LeFevre talks about similar stuff in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, back in the 1920's.
FYI- I have been involved in AMM since 2003, including PCX. In fact, when I started we did a major overhaul to pretty much prevent a situation like that from ever occurring.
I don't think the US has any concerns about being attacked by an Iranian nuclear weapon. However, a nuclear armed Iran would alter the balance of power in the middle east, away from US interests.
Perhaps most importantly, you have an unstable country that hates Israel and is right next door. A leader of a failing gov't that is also a religious extremist might lob a nuke at Israel either as an attempt at a saving throw for his regime, or a last act in the name of religion or his own glory. A nuclear weapon lobbed at Israel, especially by a muslim country, would almost definitely lead to a larger regional war in the middle east, which isn't good for anyone, and could possibly lead to another world war.
The future is already here to some extent- I can control my cable box from my iphone. If it had an IR transmitter, I could do a lot more with it, but even so, my blu ray player is connected to the network, and new TV's have network connectivity in many models now.
I am a little fancy, but I actually have a NAS at home, with a webcam set up to it. I use it as a security camera of sorts and to see if my dog has destroyed the house yet if I am running late coming home.
To be honest, I don't see the microwave and stove ever having these features (think of the security implications), but certainly I can see thermostats, security systems, A/V systems, etc being controlled this way- in fact I saw an apartment a few months ago that was wired up all crazy with speakers in each room and you could control it remotely through your phone.
Probably because your spreadsheet has updated at the same rate for the past 15 years- instantaneously.
I can tell you that my number one cycle killer that I actually wait on has reduced tremendously over time- compiling. There was an XKCD on this, but back in the day, even for smallish projects, for a full build you would go and get coffee, probably even lunch, and possibly just went home for the day or bothered your coworkers (how far we have come from the days of P4 when a process could peg your computer!). A good deal of those reduced times come from better compiler technology, better code practices, and even better languages (IE C++-> Java/C#), but I am still doing C++, and doing full builds on the same size large systems I was working on 10 years ago now only call for a trip to the bathroom, and maybe a cup of coffee, though due to the wonders of multi-core machines, it is not a problem to surf /. and compile.
Pro tip:
If you are going to send her roses at work, send them on a Monday. Flowers at work also serve the purpose of being shown off to coworkers, and to maximize her enjoyment and gloating, you should get them on Monday, as most flowers are unlikely to last more than 7 days, and start looking worse for the wear after 5.
I learned this from my girlfriend, who is now my fiance.
forward me a copy of the email, or paste the contents here.
That is a completely false statement. Small firms are a lot more likely to use colos than the big banks. As I posted before, there is information on how to get colocated with NYSE right on their website:
http://www.nyse.com/technologies/sfti/1228187874506.html
The costs run about $10k/month/rack if I remember right.
There is no spooky back-room stuff going on here.
How about right on the NYSE website- they even have a phone number you can call- http://www.nyse.com/technologies/sfti/1228187874506.html Btw... all I did was google "NYSE colocation" and this was the first link.
High speed market data? Call up 29West or Exegy.
And its not necessary to colocate to have a profitable HFT system. A guy I know has a strategy running on the side, not colocated at all, and he says he makes a decent chunk off of it.
Actually, HFT is largely a small firm game. Some big banks do it, but not all, and they are usually small operations.
The typical profile of an HFT firm is 20 guys in a smallish but nice office, kind of like a startup's, but a bit more grown up. It's not that hard to get your box in a colo w/ NYSE, you just have to pay them. They recently built a huge new datacenter for this very purpose.
I haven't personally made the call to ask about requirements, but I worked at an 8 man startup firm and we threw around the idea of colocating. Being able to was never an issue, it was the cost that deterred us.
This "special" access is available to anyone willing to pay for it. If you choose not to pay the higher price for faster market data, then I don't think you can blame the other guy for being faster. For what its worth, the really cutting edge market data solutions are all third party and available to anyone who will write a check. The costs of these things quickly skyrocketed past the point where it made sense for each firm to build their own system.