Anyone with reasonably deep pockets can build one. Speed advantages in the stock market have always existed. Why do you think the floor brokers are there? They wanted to be able to trade on information first. People are just going all OMG about it because its on computers, and therefore somehow scarier to them (and you even see this on Slashdot, which is strange).
You can't control or direct the market with these systems any more than a guy in the pit that can yell BUY faster than everyone else. You need to shift demand to move the market.
Monopoly on the stock market? Now you are kind of out in left field. How do they in any, way, shape, or form... have a monopoly... on the stock market? I am not even sure what a monopoly on the stock market would look like.
Yet somehow you are marked insightful... blind groupthink strikes again.
This may be somewhat irrelevant since I am not talking about home, not corporate prices, but I have found that for building my own systems, it just doesn't make much sense anymore to build yourself. If you want to really customize, especially with a gaudy blinging case, or are set on some specific motherboard, then it may still make sense, but PC hardware is boring these days, and the big OEM's scale has brought their prices down to the point where building your own doesn't really save much money. Exceptions exist, especially on high end "gamer" machines, but for plain mid to upper tier machines, Dell wins.
If you want to build your own machine for the joy of it, go right ahead. But to build one for others and then have to support it, because it is cheaper... I just don't think it makes sense- especially since to be really competitive with Dell, you are going to have to go to Pricewatch and the like, and buy your parts from 10 different stores, each who happen to be the lowest bidder and the most likely to slam the phone down on you when you want to return something. Don't underestimate a vendor's ability to deflect a problem by blaming your motherboard, or your PSU, or whatever part you didn't buy from him for the problem w/ your component. Also, don't underestimate how difficult it will be to get decent support when you buy from individual suppliers through retail channels and you find that there is an issue with a driver or hardware combo. We saw a bug in our ethernet cards around 2001 that killed performance in certain cases (most notably updating from source control) but were flipped off when calling support. About 9 months later, a patch was released that fixed the problem.
I used to build machines for family and friends, was also a jack of all trades network/system admin at a small shop that I worked at from 1998-2003, and we stopped building our own machines at work around 2001, and I stopped building machines for family/friends around 2004.
I don't feel the impact will be nearly as large. Most people who drive in any town know where they are going. They don't really need to see the street signs. Its people unfamiliar with an area that need to read the signs, and I am confident that is a small, small majority- don't you drive in familiar areas most of the time?
In NYC, street signs are even less important. Most of the streets are on a number system, even in the outer boroughs. Speeds on roads other than limited access highways are rarely over 30 mph. GPS systems are also making street signs less important. Also, if they really wanted to make the signs more readable, wouldn't they just make them larger?- The cost of installing the signs must be equal to or greater than the signs themselves.
All that said, $27.5 million, over 8 years, is about $3 million a year, which in NYC's budget is a scratch on the surface. I actually just looked it up, and I had no idea that NYC has a $62 BILLION annual budget. Wow, where does all that money go?!
Shouldn't you be looking to see if there is some sort of usage by the students first?
I can't help but think that putting laptops and ipads in the classroom is just going to lead to distractions. You can't take notes on Ipads. Even on laptops and using one note, there is just a flexibility to a piece of paper that you can't currently get on a laptop. And for science/math classes, drawing graphs is key and software really sucks at drawing diagrams and graphs. I had a hard enough time staying focused on the professor when I just had pen and paper... If all the wonders of the internet were available, I wouldn't listen at all (and what does 100 laptops clacking away at once sound like?!)
One use I could see for tablets/netbooks is having electronic versions of textbooks. I hated lugging around more than two textbooks and notebooks because they were so damn heavy. I will always prefer paper textbooks to do the heavy learning, but to do problem sets and review, an e-textbook would have done the job at 1/5 the weight.
I don't know... technology in the classroom is misused most of the time. I remember in college the professor putting up powerpoints on a screen, and then yelling at students that they don't need to take notes because he would make them available after class. Well that's great, but guess what a##hole, I learn and have much greater recall by taking notes! Aside from the fact that powerpoint slides are not really "notes," they just drive a presentation.
This just seems like another case of technology being forced into the classroom for the sake of technology. I hope you have some real metrics in your study- as in do the ipad users spend more time studying, are they getting better grades? Do they report that they find their coursework easier because of the device?
(inexplicably, Coke only inflicts HFCS on the US market).
There is actually a simple explanation for this. HFCS is so pervasive in the US because of tariffs and import quotas. Prices for sugar in the US are far higher than the rest of the world to protect US sugar growers (why they are so influential, I have no idea- I couldn't even tell you where in the US they grow sugar). We could happily be importing sugar from the Caribbean and Mexico at a fraction of the cost, but the gov't has not yet reduced the tariffs on sugar. At this point, it is probably because the corn syrup market is gigantic, and the corn lobby is likely actively working against touching those tariffs.
Congress reduced the amount of sugar that can be imported into the US in the early 80's. Coke switched to corn syrup shortly after, and well you know the rest... you can't even eat bread these days without ingesting HFCS.
I recently just gave linux another go-round as a desktop OS. I have done this every 2-3 years since back in 1997 when I first installed Red Hat 5.0, which I bought out of a box. Every time though, there was some hassle involved.
So I recently downloaded the latest Ubuntu distro. This has nothing to do with the distro, but the first pleasant surprise was that I was able to download the entire install image in less than 5 minutes! Yay technology progress and Yay FIOS. If I wasn't doing it over wireless, it might have even been faster. But anyway, I boot it up, and love that you immediately boot into a live cd that gives you a feeling for the OS. I double click install, and off she goes. The whole thing was done quickly and painlessly. I boot up, and log in. I am nervous. I am expecting something to be broken. The first thing I do on any system these days is load up firefox. It works, and my wireless is working out of the box! fantastic! I start pecking around, and two things stuck out: I could figure out how to do everything easily- like update my software, add new packages, etc. For the first time ever, I finally felt that with a clean install I had a usable system that I could use every day. My biggest complaint was that the window bars were rather chunky and took up a lot of screen real estate, but that was fixed by picking a different theme.
Ubuntu is really getting it. They are creating an attractive, easy to use OS, that I now have no problem using at all. In some ways its even easier than windows- I do some arduino development, and the virtual com port driver setups are always getting screwed up. I don't play games, so that hasn't been an issue. The biggest things that windows has going for it still though is universal cut and paste, and more controversially, it has better development tools. I find that Visual Studio really makes coding more enjoyable. I don't know if you can get that running under wine or not, maybe I will give it a shot (VS is free as in beer now). Oh... one thing that still does not work so nicely is sleeping and hibernating. Why is it so hard to get this right? This has been a big issue on windows and linux pc's as long as it has been available. And when it works properly, it really does make life a lot nicer.
I have to say I was impressed. Win7 is pretty nice too, but works my graphics card too hard. We will see if I make "the switch" sometime this year.
Seriously- this. A short list of approved calculators. Should solve the problem. If you want to be really nice, maybe scrum up some of the departmental budget to buy some cheapo 4 function calculators for use during the test for those who bring in the wrong calculators.
TI-30's, which were the standard in my high school until we moved on up to the TI-8x's (which are still somehow over $80?! WTF?!) are about $10 and have all the functionality one could feasibly want (trig functions, exponents, roots, some basic stats, fractions, degrees/radians. Just require them for the course. The $10 will be a mere rounding error compared to their hideously expensive textbooks.
String theory seems like modern day epicycles. Its extremely complicated, and every time someone finds something wrong, they add a whole new layer or three of extraordinarily complicated mathematics at it to fit the new data.
And it has yet to predict anything.
I was a physics minor, and used to read a lot about string theory, but by my senior year I had pretty much decided it was all a waste of time. I don't have any better theories to offer, but applying Occam's razor, I think a much simpler theory will emerge one day, and the legions of PHD's wasting their time with string theory will be out of a job. Even worse, when I was in school, string theory was the hot area, and just about every incoming grad student wanted to get involved in it. So much brain and manpower is being wasted on this, its really rather tragic.
Made fun of or teased anyone in a way which now as an adult you would regret? Held views that you now would be embarrassed by? Were an ardent fan of music or specific bands that might have promoted views of lifestyles you no longer want to be associated with? Enjoyed songs or lyrics that may have others think you are depressed, angry, or prone to violent behavior? Drank alcohol before you were of legal age, or attended parties that might give the appearance that you were drinking before legal age? Experimented with drugs, or you associated with people or groups that may give the appearance that you experimented with drugs? Said anything that could be misunderstood for you saying that you partook in illegal activities including drug use. Spoke in a style (IE LOL, or 1337 speak) that you would be embarrassed by as an adult, or maybe you are not personally embarrassed by on a personal level, but on a professional level you don't want others to see?
It's not about being responsible. Schmidt is just pointing out that now everyone has to essentially conduct their lives as if they are politicians and be very aware of who could be recording their actions and how they could be perceived. This is somewhat acceptable as an adult, but it is an unfair burden to put on kids, especially when a 14 year old is really incapable of understanding how putting lyrics to their favorite rap song on their Facebook page may look down the road to someone doing research on them when they are interviewing at an investment bank.
"External" doesn't necessarily mean a hard drive hooked up via USB. I only have a laptop at home with an 80GB disk, and that works out for most of my needs. However, did want to start backing data up, so I bought a NAS box, and hooked up two 250 GB hd's in a raid1 configuration. The box runs linux, is low power, and allows my data to be accessed over the internet.
So that box now backs up mine and my woman's laptop, and is a data store for our photo's, videos, music, etc. If/when I decide to either buy an xbox or get a home theater pc, the NAS can be used for that purpose as well.
The setup is probably a little intimidating for the average Joe, but a NAS + SSD is probably the best setup for most people.
Well that's just what people remembered most. His whole speech showed a clear misunderstanding of either English or how the internet works. Here are some other gems from that speech:
Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?
I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.
So you want to talk about the consumer? Let's talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren't using it for commercial purposes.
Now, he is either trying to severely dumb things down to...bring things down to the level of education of the senate... or he is really butchering the English language, or he has no understanding of what he is talking about. Occam's razor points to him just not understanding. There are no "clogs" on the internet, except in the case of broadcast storms on localized networks or otherwise sophisticated and abnormal edge cases. The flow through the pipes is the same, how much stuff you get to throw through that pipe might be reduced if many others are, but its not clogged. The analogy doesn't make sense. If he went with a truck and highway metaphor, where each truck is a packet, that *might* have actually been closer.
And he might get a pass if he was my uncle trying to explain the internet to my family at a BBQ. But he is a senator addressing the senate, and with it the entire nation. The potential ramifications of spewing incorrect information to 100 of the most powerful men in the entire world are enormous. Can you imagine if your CEO got in front of the company's shareholders and just started spewing nonsense like this about how his company operates? He would be out the door the next day. The stakes are way higher when you address the senate.
Symbian is all but dead, blackberry is still in the lead, but is losing ground fast- and this is despite the fact that in the business market the blackberry is pretty much ubiquitous. Android is gaining ground at a tremendous rate.
Its funny, the situation kind of reminds me of the Mac back in the days when they started competing against the IBM PC clones. When people select phones, they select the platform the phone is on as well as individual models that run on that platform with the best combo of features. The Mac was cool, in many ways superior, and an early front runner in the personal market, but eventually the PC and its clones took over.
So yeah, you can look at this on a company basis, but I think looking at platforms is more insightful to figuring out where the markets are headed. The fact that there is only a single company behind 2/3 of the platforms, really doesn't matter all that much. Rimm has a wide variety of Blackberry models available. Apple still sells the 3GS on its website right next to the 4G, so to say that there is only one model isn't technically correct.
The fact that Google has opened its platform and gained support of third party companies is great for everyone, especially since MS failed at this.
The fact that IOS4 only runs on two products that are very similar to each other just speaks poorly about Apple's product lineup IMHO. I say this as a 3GS owner who loves his phone (though I would love a physical keyboard!).
We use a similar model, but we only get charged once. We pay somewhere on the order of $100-$150 a GB, once. That covers all costs, forever. $30/GB per MONTH is just absurd. We work in a financial fortune 500 and probably have the worst regulatory/backup burden of any issue that I am aware of (maybe legal or healthcare are worse?). You could hire a few developers for that price. This is how little shadow NAS boxes start showing up on networks and then the admins flip out. Personally, thats what I would do if I were you- just buy a NAS box and throw a few raided terrabytes in there with a backup solution (I assume you have data that is important, but NOT critical, like most orgs). If/when you get caught, it will be a wake up call to management. At least that's been my experience anyway, it always takes a few people outright rebelling against bureaucracy before they loosen the leash a bit.
An aside to this insanity is that in every IT department I have ever worked in, there has been a shortage of space. Development requires lots of space, but in the one size fits all mentality in most large firms, they can't understand why we need so much space when the sales people can store their excel sheets and powerpoints just fine in 1/2 the space. Its insane really- I can't build out of my home directory, so I have to write fairly complicated scripts to copy files over to local disks on the dev boxes and then build. This of course also means that compiling from within an IDE or even vi/emacs is impossible. I don't develop strictly on a local drive of any box because they are not backed up, the boxes frequently go down (forcing me to switch to another box), and those directories are wiped on a monthly basis.
This is why, if I ever become CTO one day, I want to actually have two competing groups within IT, that have to compete for their business from the various groups. I think the competition to bring down costs and deliver better service would far outweigh the reduced overhead of having one single group.
HarvardAve pointed out a link with a copy of the filing below- which includes a copy of the signed contract.
The contract seems to be a typical one lifted from a form book, with a few small hand written amendments that are illegible in the pdf. It is signed by both parties, and the terms seem very clear- I was under the impression this was drafted by ceglia himself.
I am now changing my position- unless this is an outright forgery, this claim seems 100% legit- they even state the name as "the facebook."
It appears he has a legitimate ownership stake in Facebook.... WOW.
The dispersant is there to increase the surface area of the oil so the natural processes and microbes that break down oil can do so much more effectively.
If you really want to learn about how the oil industry works and get in-depth technical details about the spill and what has been done to try and stop the flow, you should read The Oil Drum. Here is an article they did recently on the use of dispersants: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6724
It might be right up your alley, the tone is very serious and comes off as unbiased, but the articles are very pro-environmentalist/conservationist. In general, the site assumes that peak oil is already here or coming very soon, and explores how that will affect us as humanity.
On another note, I think your whole thesis is completely wrong- a centrifuge should be able to separate out oil from water regardless of whatever dispersants are in it. Centrifuges separate based on density. As long as you don't just sit there and let the water stand for awhile before you try to remove the oil, the dispersants should not have an effect.
Well, There are two parts to this- it was a fledgling website, and Zuckerberg was all of what? 23? I too started a website when I was in my early 20's as a side project with a friend- I was a bored programmer in a big bank, my partner a listless real estate agent looking for something more.
We knew from the beginning that this was a for-profit e-commerce site, and so we incorporated and assigned shares and all that, and I initially funded our corporate bank account with some seed money to get us started to buy things like webhosting, etc. We did things pretty fast and loose then, we had almost no record keeping of any sort, doing our taxes the first year was a tremendous scramble. I can only imagine how things were done if this was a website done for fun with no business purpose intended. If we felt we had a much greater chance of success by getting the help we needed by giving up a % of the business we would have, and in several cases we did indeed try that- we tried to get initial inventory to sell by offering to partner up with people as we had almost zero capital.
Shortly after we launched my career started taking off, while the RE market fell off a cliff, and I became less interested in the site, and he more so. He kind of took it and ran with it, and we fell out of touch. He moved to Tampa at least in part to do it full time, and from what I see from the site, he still does so today, though I have no idea if he is making money. I still have ownership in the corporation we used to start the site, but I have no intention of pushing the issue unless I have some indication that there is "real" money involved. My point is that I can understand why this guy sat on this. If he really did live kind of disconnected, he may not have realized how valuable FB had gotten (though that seems strange, especially if this guy was a web designer). He may have thought his contract wasn't enforceable until he mentioned it to a friend who made him go to a lawyer.
Interestingly, facebook just said the lawsuit was frivolous and that it will fight it, and nothing else, at least from what I saw. So this guy may not just be a fraudster crackpot, and the contract, and thus the case, might be legitimate. Unfortunately it is not clear if the complaint includes a copy of the contract, and the document that scribd says it has is garbled after a few pages.
Of course the fact that Ceglia is in a lawsuit over fraud puts a serious dent in his credibility. I am of course just an armchair commentator, but with Zuckerberg's past F ups and his inexperience at the time, I have a feeling that this might be legit. Another interesting question- when a VC funds you, do they do any due dilligence to see if the company is owned by someone else? Could they even find something like this if this is just a contract between two private parties? Also, IANAL, but as I understand it the Statute of Limitations is a piece of cake to get around, especially if there is hard evidence. I also find the timing interesting- in that there is nothing interesting about it at all. As far as I am aware, there is no big news brewing for FB, so its not like he is trying to cash in on an imminent IPO or buyout.
Come on now, I live in NYC, and I assure you this isn't something that happens every day. This is a rare occurrence, it just has a lot of wow factor so it gets attention when it does.
On my list of fear factors, exploding manhole covers is somewhere below rabid squirrels attacking me. Stuff falling off buildings, sidewalk grates/basement access doors, getting hit by a car, getting bitten by someone's dog, and many many other things are higher on the list. This is *not* something I want to pay higher taxes for, or pay higher electric rates for. There are many many more efficient uses of capital to make NY safer. Also, keep in mind that this is NYC, where any sort of trade has a strong union. There could be 75% unemployment, and electricians would still get the prevailing wage, which is somewhere around $40/hour when including benefits.
Just in general, there seems to be a bunch of book reviews on Slashdot lately about really niche subjects with no explanations as to what they are.
I have been a professional software developer for 7 years now in a range of areas, whether it be web development of HR apps based around java to server side financial trading systems in C++, and I consider myself well versed in the universe of technology. So when I hear about something that I have never heard of before, I am surprised, and when I hear that this technology is big enough to have a book written about it, its kind of a jaw dropping moment.
I guess what I am trying to get at is... I kind of wonder who is submitting these reviews- people who are generally interested in the book/subject and wanted to review it, or people who have a vested interest in promoting the book for their own ends. I think its perfectly ok to try to promote books, especially if you think they will be useful to others, but if you have a vested interest in the book, it should be made known. A search for the reviewer, RickJWagner shows only returns two items- both for books recently reviewed and written by a publisher I am not familiar with, Packt Publishing.
I work in the industry. Quote stuffing is BS. If your system falls over due to capacity issues, whoever is in charge of IT over there better fix it ASAP or update their resume. Systems get caught with their pants down from time to time, but usually its localized to a particular instance on a single machine because one stock is going particularly crazy that day and it is generally quiet, or there is some sort of hardware/network issue. Sending tons of quotes out to "ignore your own" doesn't make sense- those quotes are still going to come in over your lines, and you still have to process those messages to see if they are your own. The amount of processing you will save by not updating your book is pretty small. Even if you do this, the amount of quotes you can throw into the system is relatively small compared to everyone else.
Yeah but a more complete picture should include the fact that the supermarket used to buy cans at $1.00, then sell them at a $1.25. Since they can move a lot more cans due to the high speed can buyers, the supermarket now buys cans at $1.00 and sells them for a $1.05. The bid/ask spread, which used to be very large, has tightened down to a penny in some highly liquid stocks. So yeah, the HF guys might be taking a penny from you, he is in some sense saving you 20 cents on that can.
I work in electronic trading, and we aren't really an HF firm, though latency is a concern of ours, and my take on it is this: A certain level of speculative/pure trading activity (IE non-investment activity meant to hold over a short period of time) is healthy for the markets. It does add liquidity, which makes it easier and less risky to trade for everyone. A lot of people tend to think that there are a thousand buyers and sellers out there at any one time for every stock in the universe, and while that is true for the largest stocks, mid or small cap stocks might only have a few trades a day. The problem comes when there are perhaps only X legit investors in the market, but there are 100X traders. Things get out of whack quickly that way- everyone is trading making certain assumptions about the players in the market and rational pricing based on fundamentals of securities. But when you have 100x guys out there buying and selling based on that assumption, yet most of the price movement is based on speculation, trading systems are now trading based on bad models, and things can go wrong quickly.
Automated trading can cause these problems- but to be honest they are better than the panic-prone and potentially corrupt humans they are replacing, and far more efficient. We would probably still be trading in sixteenths of a dollar if it weren't for electronic trading.
This article is missing what I think is the biggest drawback by far for using the Iphone as a business device- it doesn't support outlook meeting invites! My woman is in sales, and on my old blackberry we would email each other meeting invites for social events so we could keep stuff in sync (we both have big families and lots of nieces and nephews on each side that like to book dates far in advance, so conflicts happen often, and its really easy to forget that a month ago you agreed to go to a bday party 6 weeks from now which happens to be the day your buddy just asked you to come over for his bbq). If you use outlook to access your email, its just massively inconvenient to keep in sync, and last I looked, w/ a gmail account, you needed a jailbroken phone to keep your calendar in sync.
I can't imagine the iphone ever getting any traction in the workplace unless it handles outlook meeting invites.
Hi, The idea of programming microcontrollers is interesting to me, can you point me to an introduction or orient me on how to get started and what the possibilites are? Even just a name of a good microcontroller to learn on would do.
But, anyway it goes, there needs to be a complete re-write of the stock market. It's been perverted from the paper trading to a good-ol-boys network of computers with systemic abuses aimed at hurting people trying to use the system in good faith. As it sits now, abolishing the stock market and having companies sell their own stock in paper in person at their corporate headquarters would be a massive improvement. Sadly.
It was hard to decide where to begin with this. The stock market, back in the floor trader days, was massively corrupt. Do you know how easy it is to put your friend's or your own order in ahead of a large customer order when you are just talking over the phone or in person (and the technology to record phone conversations was expensive and lightly deployed if at all)? It happened all the time. Insider trading... happened all the time. You, as a retail investor, had 1/100th the access to the market that investors of size had, let alone professional traders. You have 30k in some brokerage account and trade a few times a year during the crash of 1987- good luck getting your broker on the phone to get out of your positions, he isn't going to take your call for days until all his high net worth and high churn clients are taken care of, if he ever returns your call at all. E-trade and the like leveled the playing field in a massive way. You think you had *any* chance as a retail investor to hear news that Buffet just started buying Pepsi? In 1987, as a retail trader your best bet for stock prices was reading the newspaper the next morning! I could go on and on, but in terms of speed of trading, information available to you, costs of trading, and the audit trails available because of electronic trading, the tables are vastly more level than ever before.
The high frequency guys are not a good ole boys network. In fact, they are highly secretive, and since that piece of the industry is fairly small, they do tend to know each other from previous jobs, but this isn't an industry that is holding conferences and going out to steakhouses on expense accounts with each other. I work in the area, and I can tell you that many of these firms don't have websites, don't advertise where their office is, and won't even tell you what they are doing, even in late stage interviews.
The stock market has ALWAYS had an advantage for guys with better technology. In the 1900's guys with telephones would rip off "bucket shops" and brokerages that didn't have that speed. Up until some point in the mid 2000's, floor traders, guys with bloomberg terminals, and anyone with a seat on the exchange had a massive advantage over retail traders. A summarized quote from one futures trader back in the early 90's: "The floor traders swoop in and react to the news first, then the next day or two the dentists come in, then everyone else comes to push the price up and the traders get out" Better technology has always given a massive advantage to traders. The difference now, between the 80's and 90's, is that its now very difficult to make a few bets on individual stocks and make a significant profit- information travels too quick (those floor traders can't rip you off anymore- the news hits the newswires and the stock price moves instantly). Technology has allowed the ability to make thousands or millions of very small bets for very short periods of time on stocks. So now instead of missing out on a $1 price move, these guys are taking pennies from you, usually due to opportunities you have no idea existed. In fact, what these guys do is often called "picking up pennies in front of a steamroller" because if they are too slow, they get squashed.
Your last comment about companies selling stock directly is pretty childish. From the outside it may look like an exchange is just a chaotic casino with everyone screaming at each other for no good reason. But its not, most of the people there are serving a role to the exchange and have obligations in exchange for the privilege of being there. For instanc
I feel this too, and it is for good reason. Apple is acting far worse than MS ever did (IMHO). MS never, ever, ever prevented software from running on their platform. They may have tried some strong arm business tactics, and giving away products for free so that their product could become a de-facto standard, but they never said "Netscape, you just aren't approved to run on Windows. End of story." I love my Iphone, but Apple telling me what I can and can't run on it is infuriating. The amount of crappy software in the app store is already annoying to deal with, but then to have apple tell Adobe and other quality app makers that they can't play because of some rules they won't even publish? MS never tried to pull that crap.
Apple has always been a control freak about its platform, and it nearly killed the company in the 90's, and IMHO it is likely to kill it again. Take the Iphone- its main competition is the Android. Fragmentation issues aside, I can now buy an Android phone in several different models according to my taste, and to run the software I have become accustomed to using, I don't have to wait around for a conference that occurs once a year where I will hold my breath to see if I will finally get the blatantly obvious feature that every other phone and platform has had for years (IE multitasking, camera flash, adobe flash, a way to freaking organize my apps in a reasonable away, etc). I got hooked on apple when the G1 was still new and still way too green for my liking, but I regret going with apple now. I can also develop for the android from any platform, with reasonable emulators, and not have to worry if my hundreds of hours of hard work will just be given a denied stamp with no explanation.
Everyone used to have their arms up in a rage over MS giving IE away for free, but no one seems to be that angry that you can't run a browser other than safari on the iphone/ipad.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone with reasonably deep pockets can build one. Speed advantages in the stock market have always existed. Why do you think the floor brokers are there? They wanted to be able to trade on information first. People are just going all OMG about it because its on computers, and therefore somehow scarier to them (and you even see this on Slashdot, which is strange).
You can't control or direct the market with these systems any more than a guy in the pit that can yell BUY faster than everyone else. You need to shift demand to move the market.
Monopoly on the stock market? Now you are kind of out in left field. How do they in any, way, shape, or form... have a monopoly... on the stock market? I am not even sure what a monopoly on the stock market would look like.
Yet somehow you are marked insightful... blind groupthink strikes again.
This may be somewhat irrelevant since I am not talking about home, not corporate prices, but I have found that for building my own systems, it just doesn't make much sense anymore to build yourself. If you want to really customize, especially with a gaudy blinging case, or are set on some specific motherboard, then it may still make sense, but PC hardware is boring these days, and the big OEM's scale has brought their prices down to the point where building your own doesn't really save much money. Exceptions exist, especially on high end "gamer" machines, but for plain mid to upper tier machines, Dell wins.
If you want to build your own machine for the joy of it, go right ahead. But to build one for others and then have to support it, because it is cheaper... I just don't think it makes sense- especially since to be really competitive with Dell, you are going to have to go to Pricewatch and the like, and buy your parts from 10 different stores, each who happen to be the lowest bidder and the most likely to slam the phone down on you when you want to return something. Don't underestimate a vendor's ability to deflect a problem by blaming your motherboard, or your PSU, or whatever part you didn't buy from him for the problem w/ your component. Also, don't underestimate how difficult it will be to get decent support when you buy from individual suppliers through retail channels and you find that there is an issue with a driver or hardware combo. We saw a bug in our ethernet cards around 2001 that killed performance in certain cases (most notably updating from source control) but were flipped off when calling support. About 9 months later, a patch was released that fixed the problem.
I used to build machines for family and friends, was also a jack of all trades network/system admin at a small shop that I worked at from 1998-2003, and we stopped building our own machines at work around 2001, and I stopped building machines for family/friends around 2004.
I don't feel the impact will be nearly as large. Most people who drive in any town know where they are going. They don't really need to see the street signs. Its people unfamiliar with an area that need to read the signs, and I am confident that is a small, small majority- don't you drive in familiar areas most of the time?
In NYC, street signs are even less important. Most of the streets are on a number system, even in the outer boroughs. Speeds on roads other than limited access highways are rarely over 30 mph. GPS systems are also making street signs less important. Also, if they really wanted to make the signs more readable, wouldn't they just make them larger?- The cost of installing the signs must be equal to or greater than the signs themselves.
All that said, $27.5 million, over 8 years, is about $3 million a year, which in NYC's budget is a scratch on the surface. I actually just looked it up, and I had no idea that NYC has a $62 BILLION annual budget. Wow, where does all that money go?!
Shouldn't you be looking to see if there is some sort of usage by the students first?
I can't help but think that putting laptops and ipads in the classroom is just going to lead to distractions. You can't take notes on Ipads. Even on laptops and using one note, there is just a flexibility to a piece of paper that you can't currently get on a laptop. And for science/math classes, drawing graphs is key and software really sucks at drawing diagrams and graphs. I had a hard enough time staying focused on the professor when I just had pen and paper... If all the wonders of the internet were available, I wouldn't listen at all (and what does 100 laptops clacking away at once sound like?!)
One use I could see for tablets/netbooks is having electronic versions of textbooks. I hated lugging around more than two textbooks and notebooks because they were so damn heavy. I will always prefer paper textbooks to do the heavy learning, but to do problem sets and review, an e-textbook would have done the job at 1/5 the weight.
I don't know... technology in the classroom is misused most of the time. I remember in college the professor putting up powerpoints on a screen, and then yelling at students that they don't need to take notes because he would make them available after class. Well that's great, but guess what a##hole, I learn and have much greater recall by taking notes! Aside from the fact that powerpoint slides are not really "notes," they just drive a presentation.
This just seems like another case of technology being forced into the classroom for the sake of technology. I hope you have some real metrics in your study- as in do the ipad users spend more time studying, are they getting better grades? Do they report that they find their coursework easier because of the device?
(inexplicably, Coke only inflicts HFCS on the US market).
There is actually a simple explanation for this. HFCS is so pervasive in the US because of tariffs and import quotas. Prices for sugar in the US are far higher than the rest of the world to protect US sugar growers (why they are so influential, I have no idea- I couldn't even tell you where in the US they grow sugar). We could happily be importing sugar from the Caribbean and Mexico at a fraction of the cost, but the gov't has not yet reduced the tariffs on sugar. At this point, it is probably because the corn syrup market is gigantic, and the corn lobby is likely actively working against touching those tariffs.
Congress reduced the amount of sugar that can be imported into the US in the early 80's. Coke switched to corn syrup shortly after, and well you know the rest... you can't even eat bread these days without ingesting HFCS.
I recently just gave linux another go-round as a desktop OS. I have done this every 2-3 years since back in 1997 when I first installed Red Hat 5.0, which I bought out of a box. Every time though, there was some hassle involved.
So I recently downloaded the latest Ubuntu distro. This has nothing to do with the distro, but the first pleasant surprise was that I was able to download the entire install image in less than 5 minutes! Yay technology progress and Yay FIOS. If I wasn't doing it over wireless, it might have even been faster. But anyway, I boot it up, and love that you immediately boot into a live cd that gives you a feeling for the OS. I double click install, and off she goes. The whole thing was done quickly and painlessly. I boot up, and log in. I am nervous. I am expecting something to be broken. The first thing I do on any system these days is load up firefox. It works, and my wireless is working out of the box! fantastic! I start pecking around, and two things stuck out: I could figure out how to do everything easily- like update my software, add new packages, etc. For the first time ever, I finally felt that with a clean install I had a usable system that I could use every day. My biggest complaint was that the window bars were rather chunky and took up a lot of screen real estate, but that was fixed by picking a different theme.
Ubuntu is really getting it. They are creating an attractive, easy to use OS, that I now have no problem using at all. In some ways its even easier than windows- I do some arduino development, and the virtual com port driver setups are always getting screwed up. I don't play games, so that hasn't been an issue. The biggest things that windows has going for it still though is universal cut and paste, and more controversially, it has better development tools. I find that Visual Studio really makes coding more enjoyable. I don't know if you can get that running under wine or not, maybe I will give it a shot (VS is free as in beer now). Oh... one thing that still does not work so nicely is sleeping and hibernating. Why is it so hard to get this right? This has been a big issue on windows and linux pc's as long as it has been available. And when it works properly, it really does make life a lot nicer.
I have to say I was impressed. Win7 is pretty nice too, but works my graphics card too hard. We will see if I make "the switch" sometime this year.
Seriously- this. A short list of approved calculators. Should solve the problem. If you want to be really nice, maybe scrum up some of the departmental budget to buy some cheapo 4 function calculators for use during the test for those who bring in the wrong calculators.
TI-30's, which were the standard in my high school until we moved on up to the TI-8x's (which are still somehow over $80?! WTF?!) are about $10 and have all the functionality one could feasibly want (trig functions, exponents, roots, some basic stats, fractions, degrees/radians. Just require them for the course. The $10 will be a mere rounding error compared to their hideously expensive textbooks.
String theory seems like modern day epicycles. Its extremely complicated, and every time someone finds something wrong, they add a whole new layer or three of extraordinarily complicated mathematics at it to fit the new data.
And it has yet to predict anything.
I was a physics minor, and used to read a lot about string theory, but by my senior year I had pretty much decided it was all a waste of time. I don't have any better theories to offer, but applying Occam's razor, I think a much simpler theory will emerge one day, and the legions of PHD's wasting their time with string theory will be out of a job. Even worse, when I was in school, string theory was the hot area, and just about every incoming grad student wanted to get involved in it. So much brain and manpower is being wasted on this, its really rather tragic.
So when you were younger you never:
Made fun of or teased anyone in a way which now as an adult you would regret?
Held views that you now would be embarrassed by?
Were an ardent fan of music or specific bands that might have promoted views of lifestyles you no longer want to be associated with?
Enjoyed songs or lyrics that may have others think you are depressed, angry, or prone to violent behavior?
Drank alcohol before you were of legal age, or attended parties that might give the appearance that you were drinking before legal age?
Experimented with drugs, or you associated with people or groups that may give the appearance that you experimented with drugs?
Said anything that could be misunderstood for you saying that you partook in illegal activities including drug use.
Spoke in a style (IE LOL, or 1337 speak) that you would be embarrassed by as an adult, or maybe you are not personally embarrassed by on a personal level, but on a professional level you don't want others to see?
It's not about being responsible. Schmidt is just pointing out that now everyone has to essentially conduct their lives as if they are politicians and be very aware of who could be recording their actions and how they could be perceived. This is somewhat acceptable as an adult, but it is an unfair burden to put on kids, especially when a 14 year old is really incapable of understanding how putting lyrics to their favorite rap song on their Facebook page may look down the road to someone doing research on them when they are interviewing at an investment bank.
"External" doesn't necessarily mean a hard drive hooked up via USB. I only have a laptop at home with an 80GB disk, and that works out for most of my needs. However, did want to start backing data up, so I bought a NAS box, and hooked up two 250 GB hd's in a raid1 configuration. The box runs linux, is low power, and allows my data to be accessed over the internet.
So that box now backs up mine and my woman's laptop, and is a data store for our photo's, videos, music, etc. If/when I decide to either buy an xbox or get a home theater pc, the NAS can be used for that purpose as well.
The setup is probably a little intimidating for the average Joe, but a NAS + SSD is probably the best setup for most people.
Well that's just what people remembered most. His whole speech showed a clear misunderstanding of either English or how the internet works. Here are some other gems from that speech:
Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?
I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.
So you want to talk about the consumer? Let's talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren't using it for commercial purposes.
Now, he is either trying to severely dumb things down to ...bring things down to the level of education of the senate... or he is really butchering the English language, or he has no understanding of what he is talking about. Occam's razor points to him just not understanding. There are no "clogs" on the internet, except in the case of broadcast storms on localized networks or otherwise sophisticated and abnormal edge cases. The flow through the pipes is the same, how much stuff you get to throw through that pipe might be reduced if many others are, but its not clogged. The analogy doesn't make sense. If he went with a truck and highway metaphor, where each truck is a packet, that *might* have actually been closer.
And he might get a pass if he was my uncle trying to explain the internet to my family at a BBQ. But he is a senator addressing the senate, and with it the entire nation. The potential ramifications of spewing incorrect information to 100 of the most powerful men in the entire world are enormous. Can you imagine if your CEO got in front of the company's shareholders and just started spewing nonsense like this about how his company operates? He would be out the door the next day. The stakes are way higher when you address the senate.
Symbian is all but dead, blackberry is still in the lead, but is losing ground fast- and this is despite the fact that in the business market the blackberry is pretty much ubiquitous. Android is gaining ground at a tremendous rate.
This was just on slashdot a few days ago:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/android-passes-iphone-for-new-subscribers/
Its funny, the situation kind of reminds me of the Mac back in the days when they started competing against the IBM PC clones. When people select phones, they select the platform the phone is on as well as individual models that run on that platform with the best combo of features. The Mac was cool, in many ways superior, and an early front runner in the personal market, but eventually the PC and its clones took over.
So yeah, you can look at this on a company basis, but I think looking at platforms is more insightful to figuring out where the markets are headed. The fact that there is only a single company behind 2/3 of the platforms, really doesn't matter all that much. Rimm has a wide variety of Blackberry models available. Apple still sells the 3GS on its website right next to the 4G, so to say that there is only one model isn't technically correct.
The fact that Google has opened its platform and gained support of third party companies is great for everyone, especially since MS failed at this.
The fact that IOS4 only runs on two products that are very similar to each other just speaks poorly about Apple's product lineup IMHO. I say this as a 3GS owner who loves his phone (though I would love a physical keyboard!).
We use a similar model, but we only get charged once. We pay somewhere on the order of $100-$150 a GB, once. That covers all costs, forever. $30/GB per MONTH is just absurd. We work in a financial fortune 500 and probably have the worst regulatory/backup burden of any issue that I am aware of (maybe legal or healthcare are worse?). You could hire a few developers for that price. This is how little shadow NAS boxes start showing up on networks and then the admins flip out. Personally, thats what I would do if I were you- just buy a NAS box and throw a few raided terrabytes in there with a backup solution (I assume you have data that is important, but NOT critical, like most orgs). If/when you get caught, it will be a wake up call to management. At least that's been my experience anyway, it always takes a few people outright rebelling against bureaucracy before they loosen the leash a bit.
An aside to this insanity is that in every IT department I have ever worked in, there has been a shortage of space. Development requires lots of space, but in the one size fits all mentality in most large firms, they can't understand why we need so much space when the sales people can store their excel sheets and powerpoints just fine in 1/2 the space. Its insane really- I can't build out of my home directory, so I have to write fairly complicated scripts to copy files over to local disks on the dev boxes and then build. This of course also means that compiling from within an IDE or even vi/emacs is impossible. I don't develop strictly on a local drive of any box because they are not backed up, the boxes frequently go down (forcing me to switch to another box), and those directories are wiped on a monthly basis.
This is why, if I ever become CTO one day, I want to actually have two competing groups within IT, that have to compete for their business from the various groups. I think the competition to bring down costs and deliver better service would far outweigh the reduced overhead of having one single group.
HarvardAve pointed out a link with a copy of the filing below- which includes a copy of the signed contract.
The contract seems to be a typical one lifted from a form book, with a few small hand written amendments that are illegible in the pdf. It is signed by both parties, and the terms seem very clear- I was under the impression this was drafted by ceglia himself.
I am now changing my position- unless this is an outright forgery, this claim seems 100% legit- they even state the name as "the facebook."
It appears he has a legitimate ownership stake in Facebook.... WOW.
The dispersant is there to increase the surface area of the oil so the natural processes and microbes that break down oil can do so much more effectively.
If you really want to learn about how the oil industry works and get in-depth technical details about the spill and what has been done to try and stop the flow, you should read The Oil Drum. Here is an article they did recently on the use of dispersants: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6724
It might be right up your alley, the tone is very serious and comes off as unbiased, but the articles are very pro-environmentalist/conservationist. In general, the site assumes that peak oil is already here or coming very soon, and explores how that will affect us as humanity.
On another note, I think your whole thesis is completely wrong- a centrifuge should be able to separate out oil from water regardless of whatever dispersants are in it. Centrifuges separate based on density. As long as you don't just sit there and let the water stand for awhile before you try to remove the oil, the dispersants should not have an effect.
-K
Well,
There are two parts to this- it was a fledgling website, and Zuckerberg was all of what? 23? I too started a website when I was in my early 20's as a side project with a friend- I was a bored programmer in a big bank, my partner a listless real estate agent looking for something more.
We knew from the beginning that this was a for-profit e-commerce site, and so we incorporated and assigned shares and all that, and I initially funded our corporate bank account with some seed money to get us started to buy things like webhosting, etc. We did things pretty fast and loose then, we had almost no record keeping of any sort, doing our taxes the first year was a tremendous scramble. I can only imagine how things were done if this was a website done for fun with no business purpose intended. If we felt we had a much greater chance of success by getting the help we needed by giving up a % of the business we would have, and in several cases we did indeed try that- we tried to get initial inventory to sell by offering to partner up with people as we had almost zero capital.
Shortly after we launched my career started taking off, while the RE market fell off a cliff, and I became less interested in the site, and he more so. He kind of took it and ran with it, and we fell out of touch. He moved to Tampa at least in part to do it full time, and from what I see from the site, he still does so today, though I have no idea if he is making money. I still have ownership in the corporation we used to start the site, but I have no intention of pushing the issue unless I have some indication that there is "real" money involved. My point is that I can understand why this guy sat on this. If he really did live kind of disconnected, he may not have realized how valuable FB had gotten (though that seems strange, especially if this guy was a web designer). He may have thought his contract wasn't enforceable until he mentioned it to a friend who made him go to a lawyer.
Interestingly, facebook just said the lawsuit was frivolous and that it will fight it, and nothing else, at least from what I saw. So this guy may not just be a fraudster crackpot, and the contract, and thus the case, might be legitimate. Unfortunately it is not clear if the complaint includes a copy of the contract, and the document that scribd says it has is garbled after a few pages.
Of course the fact that Ceglia is in a lawsuit over fraud puts a serious dent in his credibility. I am of course just an armchair commentator, but with Zuckerberg's past F ups and his inexperience at the time, I have a feeling that this might be legit. Another interesting question- when a VC funds you, do they do any due dilligence to see if the company is owned by someone else? Could they even find something like this if this is just a contract between two private parties? Also, IANAL, but as I understand it the Statute of Limitations is a piece of cake to get around, especially if there is hard evidence. I also find the timing interesting- in that there is nothing interesting about it at all. As far as I am aware, there is no big news brewing for FB, so its not like he is trying to cash in on an imminent IPO or buyout.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Come on now, I live in NYC, and I assure you this isn't something that happens every day. This is a rare occurrence, it just has a lot of wow factor so it gets attention when it does.
On my list of fear factors, exploding manhole covers is somewhere below rabid squirrels attacking me. Stuff falling off buildings, sidewalk grates/basement access doors, getting hit by a car, getting bitten by someone's dog, and many many other things are higher on the list. This is *not* something I want to pay higher taxes for, or pay higher electric rates for. There are many many more efficient uses of capital to make NY safer. Also, keep in mind that this is NYC, where any sort of trade has a strong union. There could be 75% unemployment, and electricians would still get the prevailing wage, which is somewhere around $40/hour when including benefits.
Just in general, there seems to be a bunch of book reviews on Slashdot lately about really niche subjects with no explanations as to what they are.
I have been a professional software developer for 7 years now in a range of areas, whether it be web development of HR apps based around java to server side financial trading systems in C++, and I consider myself well versed in the universe of technology. So when I hear about something that I have never heard of before, I am surprised, and when I hear that this technology is big enough to have a book written about it, its kind of a jaw dropping moment.
I guess what I am trying to get at is... I kind of wonder who is submitting these reviews- people who are generally interested in the book/subject and wanted to review it, or people who have a vested interest in promoting the book for their own ends. I think its perfectly ok to try to promote books, especially if you think they will be useful to others, but if you have a vested interest in the book, it should be made known. A search for the reviewer, RickJWagner shows only returns two items- both for books recently reviewed and written by a publisher I am not familiar with, Packt Publishing.
I work in the industry. Quote stuffing is BS. If your system falls over due to capacity issues, whoever is in charge of IT over there better fix it ASAP or update their resume. Systems get caught with their pants down from time to time, but usually its localized to a particular instance on a single machine because one stock is going particularly crazy that day and it is generally quiet, or there is some sort of hardware/network issue. Sending tons of quotes out to "ignore your own" doesn't make sense- those quotes are still going to come in over your lines, and you still have to process those messages to see if they are your own. The amount of processing you will save by not updating your book is pretty small. Even if you do this, the amount of quotes you can throw into the system is relatively small compared to everyone else.
Yeah but a more complete picture should include the fact that the supermarket used to buy cans at $1.00, then sell them at a $1.25. Since they can move a lot more cans due to the high speed can buyers, the supermarket now buys cans at $1.00 and sells them for a $1.05. The bid/ask spread, which used to be very large, has tightened down to a penny in some highly liquid stocks. So yeah, the HF guys might be taking a penny from you, he is in some sense saving you 20 cents on that can.
I work in electronic trading, and we aren't really an HF firm, though latency is a concern of ours, and my take on it is this: A certain level of speculative/pure trading activity (IE non-investment activity meant to hold over a short period of time) is healthy for the markets. It does add liquidity, which makes it easier and less risky to trade for everyone. A lot of people tend to think that there are a thousand buyers and sellers out there at any one time for every stock in the universe, and while that is true for the largest stocks, mid or small cap stocks might only have a few trades a day. The problem comes when there are perhaps only X legit investors in the market, but there are 100X traders. Things get out of whack quickly that way- everyone is trading making certain assumptions about the players in the market and rational pricing based on fundamentals of securities. But when you have 100x guys out there buying and selling based on that assumption, yet most of the price movement is based on speculation, trading systems are now trading based on bad models, and things can go wrong quickly.
Automated trading can cause these problems- but to be honest they are better than the panic-prone and potentially corrupt humans they are replacing, and far more efficient. We would probably still be trading in sixteenths of a dollar if it weren't for electronic trading.
This article is missing what I think is the biggest drawback by far for using the Iphone as a business device- it doesn't support outlook meeting invites! My woman is in sales, and on my old blackberry we would email each other meeting invites for social events so we could keep stuff in sync (we both have big families and lots of nieces and nephews on each side that like to book dates far in advance, so conflicts happen often, and its really easy to forget that a month ago you agreed to go to a bday party 6 weeks from now which happens to be the day your buddy just asked you to come over for his bbq). If you use outlook to access your email, its just massively inconvenient to keep in sync, and last I looked, w/ a gmail account, you needed a jailbroken phone to keep your calendar in sync.
I can't imagine the iphone ever getting any traction in the workplace unless it handles outlook meeting invites.
Hi,
The idea of programming microcontrollers is interesting to me, can you point me to an introduction or orient me on how to get started and what the possibilites are? Even just a name of a good microcontroller to learn on would do.
Thanks,
K
But, anyway it goes, there needs to be a complete re-write of the stock market. It's been perverted from the paper trading to a good-ol-boys network of computers with systemic abuses aimed at hurting people trying to use the system in good faith. As it sits now, abolishing the stock market and having companies sell their own stock in paper in person at their corporate headquarters would be a massive improvement. Sadly.
It was hard to decide where to begin with this. The stock market, back in the floor trader days, was massively corrupt. Do you know how easy it is to put your friend's or your own order in ahead of a large customer order when you are just talking over the phone or in person (and the technology to record phone conversations was expensive and lightly deployed if at all)? It happened all the time. Insider trading... happened all the time. You, as a retail investor, had 1/100th the access to the market that investors of size had, let alone professional traders. You have 30k in some brokerage account and trade a few times a year during the crash of 1987- good luck getting your broker on the phone to get out of your positions, he isn't going to take your call for days until all his high net worth and high churn clients are taken care of, if he ever returns your call at all. E-trade and the like leveled the playing field in a massive way. You think you had *any* chance as a retail investor to hear news that Buffet just started buying Pepsi? In 1987, as a retail trader your best bet for stock prices was reading the newspaper the next morning! I could go on and on, but in terms of speed of trading, information available to you, costs of trading, and the audit trails available because of electronic trading, the tables are vastly more level than ever before.
The high frequency guys are not a good ole boys network. In fact, they are highly secretive, and since that piece of the industry is fairly small, they do tend to know each other from previous jobs, but this isn't an industry that is holding conferences and going out to steakhouses on expense accounts with each other. I work in the area, and I can tell you that many of these firms don't have websites, don't advertise where their office is, and won't even tell you what they are doing, even in late stage interviews.
The stock market has ALWAYS had an advantage for guys with better technology. In the 1900's guys with telephones would rip off "bucket shops" and brokerages that didn't have that speed. Up until some point in the mid 2000's, floor traders, guys with bloomberg terminals, and anyone with a seat on the exchange had a massive advantage over retail traders. A summarized quote from one futures trader back in the early 90's: "The floor traders swoop in and react to the news first, then the next day or two the dentists come in, then everyone else comes to push the price up and the traders get out" Better technology has always given a massive advantage to traders. The difference now, between the 80's and 90's, is that its now very difficult to make a few bets on individual stocks and make a significant profit- information travels too quick (those floor traders can't rip you off anymore- the news hits the newswires and the stock price moves instantly). Technology has allowed the ability to make thousands or millions of very small bets for very short periods of time on stocks. So now instead of missing out on a $1 price move, these guys are taking pennies from you, usually due to opportunities you have no idea existed. In fact, what these guys do is often called "picking up pennies in front of a steamroller" because if they are too slow, they get squashed.
Your last comment about companies selling stock directly is pretty childish. From the outside it may look like an exchange is just a chaotic casino with everyone screaming at each other for no good reason. But its not, most of the people there are serving a role to the exchange and have obligations in exchange for the privilege of being there. For instanc
I feel this too, and it is for good reason. Apple is acting far worse than MS ever did (IMHO). MS never, ever, ever prevented software from running on their platform. They may have tried some strong arm business tactics, and giving away products for free so that their product could become a de-facto standard, but they never said "Netscape, you just aren't approved to run on Windows. End of story." I love my Iphone, but Apple telling me what I can and can't run on it is infuriating. The amount of crappy software in the app store is already annoying to deal with, but then to have apple tell Adobe and other quality app makers that they can't play because of some rules they won't even publish? MS never tried to pull that crap.
Apple has always been a control freak about its platform, and it nearly killed the company in the 90's, and IMHO it is likely to kill it again. Take the Iphone- its main competition is the Android. Fragmentation issues aside, I can now buy an Android phone in several different models according to my taste, and to run the software I have become accustomed to using, I don't have to wait around for a conference that occurs once a year where I will hold my breath to see if I will finally get the blatantly obvious feature that every other phone and platform has had for years (IE multitasking, camera flash, adobe flash, a way to freaking organize my apps in a reasonable away, etc). I got hooked on apple when the G1 was still new and still way too green for my liking, but I regret going with apple now. I can also develop for the android from any platform, with reasonable emulators, and not have to worry if my hundreds of hours of hard work will just be given a denied stamp with no explanation.
Everyone used to have their arms up in a rage over MS giving IE away for free, but no one seems to be that angry that you can't run a browser other than safari on the iphone/ipad.