I am a consultant. I get to work with very big banks as well as much smaller ones and with brokers. Generally the word "Bank" means strong processes and a general respect for the idea that as they sit on other people's money they should behave accordingly. Brokers don't take deposits so there is less control and an eye on costs. The biggest problem seems to happen in a brokerage that has been acquired by a bank. They have loose controls (the business prefers "flexibility and low infrastructure costs") and now suddenly they have the full end to end process including clearing and settlement. You can then forget the IT solutions until somebody works out the politics (generally Compliance and Risk).
Small items that can be readily resold are readily targetable. Of corse, the real value would be to hijack a load of CPU chips, preferably in OEM rather than retail packaging. Certainly a higher value by weight than gold and generally not so well protected. I seem to remember that there were alerts about certain CPU serial numbers before that came from hijacked loads.
I know more than a little about this. Traditionally exchange members have used leased data circuits between them and the exchange. This gives predictable performance, particularly around price delivery and execution time. However leased circuits remain expensive. These days an institution tends to be a member of multiple exchanges. They will continue to use circuits for the markets where they execute at high volume but for other markets they may typically use an Internet connection and FIX. The older exchanges tend to use closed protocols and some at least have session authentication and encryption. Newer exchanges, typically alternate trading facilities such as Chi-X and so on have moved to FIX with its attendant problems. Although fixed links are more predictable, they also require at least doubling up because they can fail. The difference between the fixed link and the Internet is that you only need redundancy as far as your ISPs rather than the entire journey.
The real problem starts when I'm a smaller broker in NY and somebody asks me to buy some NOK (Nokia) shares. These are listed in the US on the NYSE and Europe. Maybe Europe offers a better price at the volume my customer wants so I need to get the order over to XETRA (a Frankfurt based trading system). The way they do it is to contact a broker in Europe and pass the order onto them for execution. Your link with that broker is via the Internet and the FIX protocol. When you only issue a couple of orders a week, you are not going to pay for your own link to XETRA or even to the XETRA member.
Yes, I am aware of the world of pain around the trading links and sensible banks/brokers will carefully build the interconnected systems in a DMZ. Most FIX engines are closed source but there is at least one that is truely open. A good institution will use VPN or STUNNEL to establish their links, but many don't.
A specialist actually has to provide liquidity, which means they are under obligation to always be able to quote a stock (for buy or sell) where they are specializing within a specified time and the quote must remain valid for a set period of time. For this, you take on a whole lot of risk. To a certain extent, the issuers help you out as a liquidity provider
In any case there is a huge spread within the securities industry with the outriders like certain heads of desks making up to $20M in one year but most others in the $150K-200K range, which sounds good but not so much when you look into the hours and the pressure. However bonuses shouldn't be so good this year particularly in light of the credit derivatives meltdown.
Horses for courses. As you note, the OLPC is bigger and heavier but it is a lot more robust. Would you take your Eee on the beach and risk sand getting into the connectors/keyboard? OTOH, if you were wanted something to whip out in the departure lounge befor your flight, then the Eee is fine. When you add the N810 in as well, the thing becomes a lot more complicated.
Your second application sounds more like something for the OLPC. The Wii is ultra-portable but the OLPC is more robust and has a daylight readable screen. Two things which I thought was absolutely ideal for rural conditions in places like India (dust in Summer and humidity during Monsoon). The weird thing is that the OLPC is only being targeted at education, when in reality it is an excellent outdoor platform for all kinds of field workers.
Joking aside, the Tata group started in steel production hence also the interest in car manufacture. Nowadays they do all kinds of things. Their IT consultancy group is known as Tata Consulting Services or TCS and is one of the largest in India. Will those TCS consultants be chasing after these cars, no, probably BMWs as before.
I once sent back my Swiss army knife (really glad not to lose it). The mailer cost me £3 (=$6). I guess the airport was making something off it, but it left me a happy customer. The security guys were actually quite nice about it as well. I've travelled a bit (US, Europe, Africa & Asia) since 9/11 but haven't seen anyone else doing anything similar. The closest is left luggage but that means leaving the security queue.
Seen at London City airport in London by security - a vending machine selling pre-stamped mailers and a post collection point. Such a small thing to organise but how many passengers feel happier not having to 'lose' stuff at security.
You keep saying "store the codecs" which means you're not thinking about this problem in a sane fashion.
You must store the codecs because you are still talking about mapping between R,G and B channels (or YUV or whatever), n sound channels and a single stream of data. Yes, I know that some file systems store multiple streams in one file but this must be synchronised.
You don't compress
You do, but you do it in a lossless way and with an open codec. For audio, we know about things like FLAC, but there are also ways to do it for video. Examples include ffmpeg and Lagarith amongst others.
Fluids on a plane has been forced through just about everywhere (mostly on US insistance). Extra immigration controls mean much larger quues at major entry-points. The main problem is the visa waiver scheme is being constrained (e.g., if you forgot to check out with an immigration official, you are an overstay and the waiver no longer applies) and those who need a visa have to go through a scheme designed to discourage tourists and many businessmen. Already, conferences are moving to the Carribean or Mexico as it becomes easier for foreign participants to come.
I'm not in the UK so often but I have a little Hauppauge USB card for my notebook. It pulls in the DVB-T signal quite well both in London and Leeds with just the indoor antenna supplied. I've also tried in both NL and Germany, and the later in a small town and it still worked out fine. Note that many newer houses/appts have cable sockets throughout.
It takes a very small patch to change a secure system into an insecure one, or even worse, selectively insecure. Any component that is implemented at a higher access level can potentially compromise the system as a whole. This is true for any system, whether Windows, Linux. With a vendor built system there are fewer eyes and even though QA may be good, it can never check every possible item. As for independent testing labs, well we know they certify a given baseline of a system, that is all. Do they then verify every patch?
We know that Microsoft remains weak on QA. They are weak on basic engineering (it is a business decision of Microsoft as good engineering is very expensive). Having worked at companies with a strong process (i.e., real time process control), proper project and quality management costs time and resources. In the case of would not be difficult to ship a clean system and then to ship patches that interact with the baseline to compromise the security gates.
The question here isn't about open source or the open source QA process, but given the number of eyes on the system, the number of people compiling from source (and with different compiler versions) it does appear that problems get spotted sooner.
Most HF and LF transmissions are designed to be caught and bounced by the ionosphere. VHF and UHF transmissions are designed to shoot horizontally rather than vertically. Yes, they will still eventually go 'over the horizon' but they will be much attenuated by then. For BMEWS ansd so on, yes they are intended to go into space but again, they aren't necessarily directional enough. However, they did manage to get a false-alarm triggered by a moon-rise off Thule.
As for pulses suggesting an artificial origin, there have been some issues with this before (discovery of pulsars).
That was made abundantly clear by the commercial failure of the Concorde by the beginning of the 21st century (the last flight was in 2003, but it would have failed much sooner if not for supplemental financial support by the French and British governments). There is simply not enough demand, at the high ticket prices necessitated by exorbitant fuel and maintenance costs, to justify the service.
Whilst living in Germany, I met some people who worked for the board of a large bank. In the dot-com boom, they were happily following their masters by Concorde to NY sometimes a couple of times a week. One person had over a dozen return trips. For their bosses, even with the Frankfurt London hop, it was still a lot faster than a conventional jet and you could go there and back in a day.
As the manufacturing debts had been written off by the governments, the flights were quite profitable. In 2000, there was the crash which required adding weight to the aircraft in the form of extra protection for the wing-tanks and in 2001, two things happened the dot-com crash and after 9/11, the kind of people that would happily fly Concorde discovered the joys of private/chartered jets. Even a first class passenger faces onerous security checks and the UK one-bag restriction. However the security rules exclude aircraft under a certain weight flying from a private field. When the bosses travel now, they often go private.
Um, someone is paying $$$ for the right to overlay ads to the NFL. Overlay technologyt is very clever now so advertisements may only be inserted where the content provider agrees.
What? Airbus is doing well? Really? What school of business did you go to? The only reason they will still be making some planes is that Boeing can't fulfill all the orders.
Might be to do with building something priced in Euros versus Dollars. The manufacturing screwups on the 380 (primarily caused by incompatible CAD s/w versions) seem to be echoing now with the 787.
read a front-page Wall Street Journal article a while back that said that Putin is wildly popular with Russian citizens because he's been successful at revitalizing the Russian economy.
This is a perception enjoyed by people living in the richest cities, outside in the oblasts (regions), things remain pretty dire. The crash of 98 happened because Russia depended so much on energy exports and had overborrowed by selling too many GKOs (short-term, zero-coupon treasury bills). The last bit is solved, but it remains in Russia's interests that energy prices remain high because manufacturing has not been sufficiently developed
Putin has been successful in changing all that; I would imagine the giving people enough to eat and decent housing can excuse a lot of police-state abuses.
Pensions and dtste workers (teachers) are being paid on time, but that is more to do with the government derived profits from energy exports.
Once your company gets to a certain size, you will find that you acquire a new director, usually a 'grey man' who goes on about security but knows little of your industry. These directors are generally retired FSB/SVR people or sometimes ex-senior military officers. They are there to keep you in line (and to enjoy a nice pension supplement at your expense).
For example, in our field, there are very few large Russian IT consulting/outsourcing companies. They have a very skilled workforce, but where are their Infosys, TCS, Wipro or whoever? Russian universities continue to produce skilled graduates but it seems that India has far overtaken them in this area. Most such companies prefer remaining small to stay under the state's radar. Away from IT services, unlike China, Russia has failed to develop its manufacturing industry, it remains dependent on commodities. Unfortunately, there too are issues. It is up to question whether Russia's state energy company has the capability of developing fields itself and bring their products to market. Western partners are more warey after problems such as the ill-fated BP-TNK operation.
The typical 'olde' English village was designed for carriages as best, the kind towed by horses. If you happen to be in an HGV, things are not going to end nicely and it is going to take a lot longer than half an hour to explain the damage to the plod. Fact is an HGV is designed for traversing A roads between ports and industrial centres. Smaller trucks exist for a reason.
Of course, the sad thing is the removal van. It has to be able to get wherever people live including villages up tight country lanes. Often they don't!!
The UK is well served by the Ordinance Survey for several hundred years before the advent of GPS. It did show the different road classes, but as you well know, a British B-road can cover all manor of evils whilst a A road can take most things. However with such aids, lorry drivers usually had few problems. What is wrong now? It can't be the GPS because something like a TomTom will happily tell you the road classification (i.e., it knows whether you are on the M5, the A5 or the B5). It can also show awkward kinks in the route. The only thing that I can see is that nobody bothers to look at the route in its entirety so they don't have a clue that the proposed route will take them down a 90 degree turn in a small village until too late.
Then perhaps the truck is too large for the road. The UK is one of the densest populated countries in Europe (and unlike NL, roads are constrained by the terrain). A truck with a trailer that may fit well in somewhere like a German autobahn ain't going to work in a British village. Actually it won't work well in a German village either which is why they place access restrictions. Switzerland has been somewhat wiser placing size restrictions on all trucks passing through.
Have you ever been to a local, state, or government site that has documents available in pdf? Why should a two page text file be two megabytes?
The EU distribute their directives and regulations in html and pdf forms. I have seen smaller documents at 58KB (6 pages) and much larger documents with a hundred plus pages. However it still usually remains less than half a meg. I only have found reports to get really large and that because of graphics. My only gripe is that they should bookmark better for navigation (both html and pdf).
Not quite true, SarbOx may constrain write-down, but it does not prevent the addition of new features. Apple sees a revenue stream from the air-time reseller - this is the key item. If it doesn't, it needs to realise those costs up front. As far as ongoing firmware updates, these are generally a combination of ongoing support (needed for the lifetime of the warranty or contract) and new functionality. There is nothing to stop Apple from separating the firmware fixes from those that add functionality, but that would cost more. Warranties in Germany for electronic goods are two years as standard.
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I am a consultant. I get to work with very big banks as well as much smaller ones and with brokers. Generally the word "Bank" means strong processes and a general respect for the idea that as they sit on other people's money they should behave accordingly. Brokers don't take deposits so there is less control and an eye on costs. The biggest problem seems to happen in a brokerage that has been acquired by a bank. They have loose controls (the business prefers "flexibility and low infrastructure costs") and now suddenly they have the full end to end process including clearing and settlement. You can then forget the IT solutions until somebody works out the politics (generally Compliance and Risk).
Small items that can be readily resold are readily targetable. Of corse, the real value would be to hijack a load of CPU chips, preferably in OEM rather than retail packaging. Certainly a higher value by weight than gold and generally not so well protected. I seem to remember that there were alerts about certain CPU serial numbers before that came from hijacked loads.
I know more than a little about this. Traditionally exchange members have used leased data circuits between them and the exchange. This gives predictable performance, particularly around price delivery and execution time. However leased circuits remain expensive. These days an institution tends to be a member of multiple exchanges. They will continue to use circuits for the markets where they execute at high volume but for other markets they may typically use an Internet connection and FIX. The older exchanges tend to use closed protocols and some at least have session authentication and encryption. Newer exchanges, typically alternate trading facilities such as Chi-X and so on have moved to FIX with its attendant problems. Although fixed links are more predictable, they also require at least doubling up because they can fail. The difference between the fixed link and the Internet is that you only need redundancy as far as your ISPs rather than the entire journey.
The real problem starts when I'm a smaller broker in NY and somebody asks me to buy some NOK (Nokia) shares. These are listed in the US on the NYSE and Europe. Maybe Europe offers a better price at the volume my customer wants so I need to get the order over to XETRA (a Frankfurt based trading system). The way they do it is to contact a broker in Europe and pass the order onto them for execution. Your link with that broker is via the Internet and the FIX protocol. When you only issue a couple of orders a week, you are not going to pay for your own link to XETRA or even to the XETRA member.
Yes, I am aware of the world of pain around the trading links and sensible banks/brokers will carefully build the interconnected systems in a DMZ. Most FIX engines are closed source but there is at least one that is truely open. A good institution will use VPN or STUNNEL to establish their links, but many don't.
A specialist actually has to provide liquidity, which means they are under obligation to always be able to quote a stock (for buy or sell) where they are specializing within a specified time and the quote must remain valid for a set period of time. For this, you take on a whole lot of risk. To a certain extent, the issuers help you out as a liquidity provider
In any case there is a huge spread within the securities industry with the outriders like certain heads of desks making up to $20M in one year but most others in the $150K-200K range, which sounds good but not so much when you look into the hours and the pressure. However bonuses shouldn't be so good this year particularly in light of the credit derivatives meltdown.
Horses for courses. As you note, the OLPC is bigger and heavier but it is a lot more robust. Would you take your Eee on the beach and risk sand getting into the connectors/keyboard? OTOH, if you were wanted something to whip out in the departure lounge befor your flight, then the Eee is fine. When you add the N810 in as well, the thing becomes a lot more complicated.
Your second application sounds more like something for the OLPC. The Wii is ultra-portable but the OLPC is more robust and has a daylight readable screen. Two things which I thought was absolutely ideal for rural conditions in places like India (dust in Summer and humidity during Monsoon). The weird thing is that the OLPC is only being targeted at education, when in reality it is an excellent outdoor platform for all kinds of field workers.
Joking aside, the Tata group started in steel production hence also the interest in car manufacture. Nowadays they do all kinds of things. Their IT consultancy group is known as Tata Consulting Services or TCS and is one of the largest in India. Will those TCS consultants be chasing after these cars, no, probably BMWs as before.
I once sent back my Swiss army knife (really glad not to lose it). The mailer cost me £3 (=$6). I guess the airport was making something off it, but it left me a happy customer. The security guys were actually quite nice about it as well. I've travelled a bit (US, Europe, Africa & Asia) since 9/11 but haven't seen anyone else doing anything similar. The closest is left luggage but that means leaving the security queue.
Seen at London City airport in London by security - a vending machine selling pre-stamped mailers and a post collection point. Such a small thing to organise but how many passengers feel happier not having to 'lose' stuff at security.
Fluids on a plane has been forced through just about everywhere (mostly on US insistance). Extra immigration controls mean much larger quues at major entry-points. The main problem is the visa waiver scheme is being constrained (e.g., if you forgot to check out with an immigration official, you are an overstay and the waiver no longer applies) and those who need a visa have to go through a scheme designed to discourage tourists and many businessmen. Already, conferences are moving to the Carribean or Mexico as it becomes easier for foreign participants to come.
I'm not in the UK so often but I have a little Hauppauge USB card for my notebook. It pulls in the DVB-T signal quite well both in London and Leeds with just the indoor antenna supplied. I've also tried in both NL and Germany, and the later in a small town and it still worked out fine. Note that many newer houses/appts have cable sockets throughout.
It takes a very small patch to change a secure system into an insecure one, or even worse, selectively insecure. Any component that is implemented at a higher access level can potentially compromise the system as a whole. This is true for any system, whether Windows, Linux. With a vendor built system there are fewer eyes and even though QA may be good, it can never check every possible item. As for independent testing labs, well we know they certify a given baseline of a system, that is all. Do they then verify every patch?
We know that Microsoft remains weak on QA. They are weak on basic engineering (it is a business decision of Microsoft as good engineering is very expensive). Having worked at companies with a strong process (i.e., real time process control), proper project and quality management costs time and resources. In the case of would not be difficult to ship a clean system and then to ship patches that interact with the baseline to compromise the security gates.
The question here isn't about open source or the open source QA process, but given the number of eyes on the system, the number of people compiling from source (and with different compiler versions) it does appear that problems get spotted sooner.
Most HF and LF transmissions are designed to be caught and bounced by the ionosphere. VHF and UHF transmissions are designed to shoot horizontally rather than vertically. Yes, they will still eventually go 'over the horizon' but they will be much attenuated by then. For BMEWS ansd so on, yes they are intended to go into space but again, they aren't necessarily directional enough. However, they did manage to get a false-alarm triggered by a moon-rise off Thule.
As for pulses suggesting an artificial origin, there have been some issues with this before (discovery of pulsars).
Whilst living in Germany, I met some people who worked for the board of a large bank. In the dot-com boom, they were happily following their masters by Concorde to NY sometimes a couple of times a week. One person had over a dozen return trips. For their bosses, even with the Frankfurt London hop, it was still a lot faster than a conventional jet and you could go there and back in a day.
As the manufacturing debts had been written off by the governments, the flights were quite profitable. In 2000, there was the crash which required adding weight to the aircraft in the form of extra protection for the wing-tanks and in 2001, two things happened the dot-com crash and after 9/11, the kind of people that would happily fly Concorde discovered the joys of private/chartered jets. Even a first class passenger faces onerous security checks and the UK one-bag restriction. However the security rules exclude aircraft under a certain weight flying from a private field. When the bosses travel now, they often go private.
Um, someone is paying $$$ for the right to overlay ads to the NFL. Overlay technologyt is very clever now so advertisements may only be inserted where the content provider agrees.
This is a perception enjoyed by people living in the richest cities, outside in the oblasts (regions), things remain pretty dire. The crash of 98 happened because Russia depended so much on energy exports and had overborrowed by selling too many GKOs (short-term, zero-coupon treasury bills). The last bit is solved, but it remains in Russia's interests that energy prices remain high because manufacturing has not been sufficiently developed
Pensions and dtste workers (teachers) are being paid on time, but that is more to do with the government derived profits from energy exports.
Once your company gets to a certain size, you will find that you acquire a new director, usually a 'grey man' who goes on about security but knows little of your industry. These directors are generally retired FSB/SVR people or sometimes ex-senior military officers. They are there to keep you in line (and to enjoy a nice pension supplement at your expense).
For example, in our field, there are very few large Russian IT consulting/outsourcing companies. They have a very skilled workforce, but where are their Infosys, TCS, Wipro or whoever? Russian universities continue to produce skilled graduates but it seems that India has far overtaken them in this area. Most such companies prefer remaining small to stay under the state's radar. Away from IT services, unlike China, Russia has failed to develop its manufacturing industry, it remains dependent on commodities. Unfortunately, there too are issues. It is up to question whether Russia's state energy company has the capability of developing fields itself and bring their products to market. Western partners are more warey after problems such as the ill-fated BP-TNK operation.
The typical 'olde' English village was designed for carriages as best, the kind towed by horses. If you happen to be in an HGV, things are not going to end nicely and it is going to take a lot longer than half an hour to explain the damage to the plod. Fact is an HGV is designed for traversing A roads between ports and industrial centres. Smaller trucks exist for a reason.
Of course, the sad thing is the removal van. It has to be able to get wherever people live including villages up tight country lanes. Often they don't!!
Someone was telling me that they even use SGML in the EU which is what makes their absence of navigation markers so annoying!
What do you have, a hummer?
Actually a truck could just carry on towards Bristol and pick up the A3029. Not a long detour.
The UK is well served by the Ordinance Survey for several hundred years before the advent of GPS. It did show the different road classes, but as you well know, a British B-road can cover all manor of evils whilst a A road can take most things. However with such aids, lorry drivers usually had few problems. What is wrong now? It can't be the GPS because something like a TomTom will happily tell you the road classification (i.e., it knows whether you are on the M5, the A5 or the B5). It can also show awkward kinks in the route. The only thing that I can see is that nobody bothers to look at the route in its entirety so they don't have a clue that the proposed route will take them down a 90 degree turn in a small village until too late.
Then perhaps the truck is too large for the road. The UK is one of the densest populated countries in Europe (and unlike NL, roads are constrained by the terrain). A truck with a trailer that may fit well in somewhere like a German autobahn ain't going to work in a British village. Actually it won't work well in a German village either which is why they place access restrictions. Switzerland has been somewhat wiser placing size restrictions on all trucks passing through.
Not quite true, SarbOx may constrain write-down, but it does not prevent the addition of new features. Apple sees a revenue stream from the air-time reseller - this is the key item. If it doesn't, it needs to realise those costs up front. As far as ongoing firmware updates, these are generally a combination of ongoing support (needed for the lifetime of the warranty or contract) and new functionality. There is nothing to stop Apple from separating the firmware fixes from those that add functionality, but that would cost more. Warranties in Germany for electronic goods are two years as standard.