Basically the only thing pushing back against the tide are around 2,000 nutjobs with homebrew Asterisk servers trying to robodial back against 100,000+ autodialers dumping billions of calls on the telecom network.
Thanks to robodialers being employed everywhere, they're pushing voice calls into obsolescence. My job moved to a closed SIP network off of PSTN years ago, and I only have 2 relatives left alive who send me PSTN calls, the rest text. When those 2 people die---no more need for voice service.
As far as the transgender issues go I've yet to see a published ISO spec for what a gender field should look like.
How many chars of storage should be devoted to it? Is there at least a unicode symbol to denote a non-binary agender anteater-kin? Or should the field be stored as a BLOB and always rendered as a memo field? In fact, I just typed "agender" into Firefox and it's not even in Firefox's dictionary. That's highly problematic.
I loved this story from the era of Byte. Most of my penile-brethern in the industry are not old enough to be connected to the earlier eras of computing where women were far more involved in the process. Not just the hardware, but also in software.
It is Grace Hopper who was among the early pioneers to crystallize the idea of a high level computer language (COBOL), and unlike a lot of other languages that have come and gone, COBOL is still around and much of Western civilization still depends on it, hidden away in the logic of CICS transactions. The role of women in computing was actually a lot more involved in its early years than now. To sell very expensive mainframes to corporations, ad men had to sell the idea that the machines were easy to use and took advantage of the "WOMEN R DUMB" stereotype by involving women nearly everywhere around the system from the operator console down to the armies of women driving IBM 029 card punch machines to enter lines of text in "files" of punched cards. System brochures nearly always featured women at the terminals, loading the tapes and pouring through printouts. That legacy showed itself again when the Y2K crisis hit and there was a sudden desperate urge to find COBOL programmers. I remember departments filled with nothing but old-hat ladies who still remembered how to set up their JCL and editing their "job cards" [IBMspeak for 'lines of text'] to test date-fixed code. Seated nearby was a team C++ where if there were 100 of them, perhaps only 1 would be female. The C++ males, all in their 20s, were working on cheap PCs. The grandma coalition next door had control over a Sysplex beast with a $2 million dollar lease in a center with its own air conditioning plant.
When CompSci took off, computing was a new, unknown science to laypeople and it was sexy and exciting, much like biochem is now to girls who are being woo'd at to pursue a major in STEM. Women filled jobs as cryptoanalysts and manually programmed sorting machines with jumper plugs. Women dominated the role of the Systems Analyst, a job type that's still with us and is a role that many women still fill. In many fields of business, women still dominate user communities as women still outnumber men as users of tech.
The problem that exists right now is that there's not a lot of women who are writing instructions to feed into a compiler. I'm in a skyscraper with over 30 floors and I think I can count on one hand the number of women right now who are churning out code and with two hands the number who are debugging and syncing repos to GitHub.
Back when society was far more unkind to women, women had far more influence in tech than they do now. Now that there are legal protections, women have been enticed by recruiters into other sciences (there's a lot more women studying Chemistry than CompSci). The problem today isn't with some perceived gender barrier, or a glass ceiling. The problem is that male programmers haven't had any inclination to walk up to women that they know, show them what they do, how creative programming and system architecture can be, and that it's potentially lucrative and exciting.
STEM conferences only do so much, and nobody gives a rat's ass what celebs and pandering politicians have to say. It's really the folks who actually code day-in day-out who could help get more women back into a field they used to be in with far more gusto.
Considering how many people in Philadelphia have criminal convictions, I don't feel like playing therapist to baby-momma-drama. It's easier to just shut them down. If you want your bars back, then step off the subway and talk on the platform and get on the next train.
I can tell you with what joy it is to live in a city where listening to B-grade hip hop music on tinny cell phone speakers is the norm. That you can't stop, but when I have to be subjected to a very lengthy screaming match between baby-momma and her baby-daddy, with a push of a button I can cut that nonsense out. If you want to do that nonsense, then get off the train at the next stop and have your bitch fest there.
I can't do much about the panhandlers that pass through the trains hocking bootleg DVDs, scented oils or begging for quarters, but I CAN do something about the chaff of society who can't keep their Jerry Springer drama to themselves, and so I shut them down with a jammer. If an emergency crops up, I turn the device off.
Seems like every big HW mfg's wants to be an IBM Global Services. Does HP really want to give up that long-term cash flow to go chase its dreams? Maybe the shareholders can get rid of Leo before Leo gets rid of HP's future profitability.
The Aussie government failed to recommend a standard that supplants PDF in such a way that it handles all the cases one would expect to handle. So what's the point of this exercise that the OZ gov't did other than basically say without words... 'we should publish everything in XML documents since at least those can be parsed to some degree?
You know, there should be an industry-standard sheet of paper (Letter/AF) that meets the JAWS difficulty test, much in the same way there are test HTML pages that test web browser compliance with HTML 1.1/5.0.
Needless to say, blind people already have solutions for reading printed text that is not braille. Print the PDF and then scan it back into OCR-to-speech software. I'm sure someone by now has invented the OCR-capable print driver that eliminates the need to print to paper to reach the step of reading scanned paper.
Create a PDF document that has radially-printed text, "The green fox slept and fellated the brown dog." printed in a straight line, then printed in a spiral, and then printed upside down.
Then for Hebrew and Arabic (RTL languages), the same type of sentence... printed in RTL in various configurations.
Then the newsprint column layout, etc. etc. etc.
Point JAWS at the PDF, or use the PDF reader's built in speech interpretation, and let PDF vendors attain for certified compliance from the accessibility software industry.
I don't dispute that at all. SAP owes money. Question is how much. Did SAP really capitalize and make any gains off the back of Oracle that warrants a gigantic payout by SAP? That's what the trial is all about.
SAP did make some very smart buys by the way. BusinessObjects was probably their best purchase ever and probably was a huge thorn in Oracle's butt... and Leo was lucky to be present on the closing of that deal. Oracle has yet to come up with a decent fully-integrated BI suite to match what BO users are doing with that software. And now that BO is permanently married to SAP, Oracle has to steer their customers away from what is actually quite a nice product.
Well, Leo Apotheker wasn't anything to write home about. And you have to wonder why HP---which has boardroom problems galore, hired him. Fiorina was a big problem, Hurd was a big problem... and Leo was a money-loser the entire time he was head of SAP. HP is doomed.
Too bad it's not a jury of dimwits that gets to determine the award. Then they'll have to ask themselves in a conference room if Larry's crocodile tears are worth excising a large sum of money from one of Germany's largest companies and giving it to a douchebag who already has loads himself.
Maybe if there's some scarlet twist to this suit that hasn't been made public yet----like SAP had intended to modify Oracle's code to make the database columns with German identifiers like SAP's?
I cannot tell you with what joy I have going into transaction SE38, then digging through ABAP code, then trying to figure out what column identifiers (like LOGIKZW, STABPRRT) means...
Another lie the chairs of NASDAQ and NYSE love to tell the world is that HFT speeds up price discovery.
How is this even POSSIBLY true??? They are algos. Those algos don't have any clue what the future performance of a company is. The algos are not going to tell you how successful AAPL's iPhone 5 will be, or when the next class action lawsuit is coming.
And algos break ALL THE TIME. It has been happening more often these days because stocks are breaking 120DMA more often, and most of these algos are doing nothing but backtracing trends on top of their arbitrage schemes. When a big investor comes in the room, they jump on him like nervous poodles.
That's why the May 6 event was such an eye opener. Waddle and Reed didn't cause the flash crash. They executed a normal transaction that wasn't even a Big Fish transaction, and all the algos went haywire.
It's a SIN because the heads of NYSE and NASDAQ continue to spread this lie that HFT shops contribute liquidity to the system. THEY DO ANYTHING BUT!
Have you seen the offices these HFT shops rent out in New Jersey and CT? They're cheap Class B space, warehouse loft and other low-rent space. They don't have the capital it takes to be a market maker. They just have capital---and they aren't going to sit in the market when it is hurting and make trades no sane person would make to keep liquidity flowing.
That is the job of a REAL market-maker. A market-maker will step in and be the counterparty to keep the issues they are responsible on the exchange moving.
What the fuck do you think happened on the May 6 flash crash? Almost all the HFT shops ran to their server rooms and SIGSEGV their software and pulled out to avoid taking more pain. The bids all dried up on the NYSE which is why the first crazy market order for $0.01 a share came to the exchanges, NASDAQ cleared it so for a while, several stocks were at zero print... like Accenture.
When you have the most top companies on your exchange printing zero in the flash of an eye... YOUR MARKET IS BROKEN. How is this even debatable?
Why would I want to put the kids college fund money in this fucking disaster?
I pulled out 100K out of the markets because I can't just put up with HFT anymore. So Buy and Hold was a bad idea. Now investing is a bad idea.
You can't put in a stop-loss order anymore on anything you own because every day you have to worry if a mini-flash crash hit one of your issues and triggered it, then the SX won't unwind YOUR trade but they are glad to unwind the fuck-up trades the HFT guys caused.
Actually there WERE enough orders to satisfy the selling, the problem was that the order volume was mostly HFTs that were trading with each other in S&P e-minis. The algorithm was judging the liquidity of the market based on VOLUME, not based off absorption of the securities.
Absorption is when some buyers enter the market, buy stuff, then walk away and sell it at a much later time while everyone else in the market has moved on. They may come back a few hours later to re-sell now that the price has gone higher, but they're not recycling the same securities and getting them handed back to them on the very next trade.
Look at it this way from a programming point of view. You have 2 threads that are sitting on the side, and juggling the same balls between each other. The balls are worth $1,000 each and there are 100 of them being juggled.
So as the stupid hedge fund manager, you insert an order to sell off 5,000 balls at $999 a piece. The order fills for $950 and the two threads pick up the extra 5,000 balls. And now they are trading 5,100 balls between each other, and the price now stabilizes between $950 and $960 per ball. The new balls being passed around have less value because there's more of them in the market so there is dilution, but there is trading volume---which PORTENDS a normal investor to think there is liquidity, but there isn't---because there is no absorption and there's no sideline money... it's an empty market with a few players doing a massive amount of volume.
So take the same situation but now the stupid hedge fund manager starts POURING balls into the 2 threads. Now they are overloaded with volume and trading activity is higher, but there's no sideline money and the number of threads hasn't changed, so now the market has gone beyond saturated. The price per ball plummets.
The balls are linked to other objects which have value, and these start going down (we're talking futures contracts now). Because the OUTSIDE market is already heavily down, the futures that were being depressed triggered program trading---sell sell sell... cover your ass, don't get burned, don't ride this ship down. So now you have a full-on stampede.
NOW you have people that were holding the e-mini contracts that were asleep during this episode suddenly awake with alarm, and they start to sell because now their contract hedge is going down the toilet. You now have a perfect shitstorm of selling.
When Arca put on SLOWDOWN and the e-mini pit recovered after the order finished executing, then you had a stampede of buying from all the traders who saw immediate discounts on everything---everything is now on sale at Dollar Store discount bargain prices. So in a split second, it's now BUY BUY BUY!!!
And more than 50% of that snap recovery were all the folks and program traders trying to reverse their downside trades. They sold low---so they tried to grab all their positions back before they had to print a loss for the day.
In other words, a shitstorm of VERY smart people dumped into unloading a lot of holdings just because one simple program went "BOO!". They saw their collective mistake, and in a few minutes, they tried to reverse the damage so they wouldn't have to report losses.
While the episode went down though, a LOT of people in the tri-state area were having heart attacks.
You use a market order if you have no time to sit and wait for your limit to trigger and you're very motivated to buy or sell to get rid of a stock or to pick a stock up off the floor.
Market orders rule when it's 3:59:50 and you WANT to get that trade done so you don't get exposed to overnight trading and the morning futures market.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically the only thing pushing back against the tide are around 2,000 nutjobs with homebrew Asterisk servers trying to robodial back against 100,000+ autodialers dumping billions of calls on the telecom network.
Thanks to robodialers being employed everywhere, they're pushing voice calls into obsolescence. My job moved to a closed SIP network off of PSTN years ago, and I only have 2 relatives left alive who send me PSTN calls, the rest text. When those 2 people die---no more need for voice service.
This is the best way to get rid of robocalls.
Someone should tell lawyers what MAC addresses are.
No, wait. Don't.
The story is on Slashdot because you do not get to edit Slashdot. Sorry.
As far as the transgender issues go I've yet to see a published ISO spec for what a gender field should look like.
How many chars of storage should be devoted to it? Is there at least a unicode symbol to denote a non-binary agender anteater-kin? Or should the field be stored as a BLOB and always rendered as a memo field? In fact, I just typed "agender" into Firefox and it's not even in Firefox's dictionary. That's highly problematic.
I watch a lot of long-docos on YouTube on an old AppleTV.
Please don't piss off GOOG, APPL.
Bet he could type faster if he switched to emacs.
Time to QoS our links to .RU, .CN origin routes.
I loved this story from the era of Byte. Most of my penile-brethern in the industry are not old enough to be connected to the earlier eras of computing where women were far more involved in the process. Not just the hardware, but also in software.
It is Grace Hopper who was among the early pioneers to crystallize the idea of a high level computer language (COBOL), and unlike a lot of other languages that have come and gone, COBOL is still around and much of Western civilization still depends on it, hidden away in the logic of CICS transactions. The role of women in computing was actually a lot more involved in its early years than now. To sell very expensive mainframes to corporations, ad men had to sell the idea that the machines were easy to use and took advantage of the "WOMEN R DUMB" stereotype by involving women nearly everywhere around the system from the operator console down to the armies of women driving IBM 029 card punch machines to enter lines of text in "files" of punched cards. System brochures nearly always featured women at the terminals, loading the tapes and pouring through printouts. That legacy showed itself again when the Y2K crisis hit and there was a sudden desperate urge to find COBOL programmers. I remember departments filled with nothing but old-hat ladies who still remembered how to set up their JCL and editing their "job cards" [IBMspeak for 'lines of text'] to test date-fixed code. Seated nearby was a team C++ where if there were 100 of them, perhaps only 1 would be female. The C++ males, all in their 20s, were working on cheap PCs. The grandma coalition next door had control over a Sysplex beast with a $2 million dollar lease in a center with its own air conditioning plant.
When CompSci took off, computing was a new, unknown science to laypeople and it was sexy and exciting, much like biochem is now to girls who are being woo'd at to pursue a major in STEM. Women filled jobs as cryptoanalysts and manually programmed sorting machines with jumper plugs. Women dominated the role of the Systems Analyst, a job type that's still with us and is a role that many women still fill. In many fields of business, women still dominate user communities as women still outnumber men as users of tech.
The problem that exists right now is that there's not a lot of women who are writing instructions to feed into a compiler. I'm in a skyscraper with over 30 floors and I think I can count on one hand the number of women right now who are churning out code and with two hands the number who are debugging and syncing repos to GitHub.
Back when society was far more unkind to women, women had far more influence in tech than they do now. Now that there are legal protections, women have been enticed by recruiters into other sciences (there's a lot more women studying Chemistry than CompSci). The problem today isn't with some perceived gender barrier, or a glass ceiling. The problem is that male programmers haven't had any inclination to walk up to women that they know, show them what they do, how creative programming and system architecture can be, and that it's potentially lucrative and exciting.
STEM conferences only do so much, and nobody gives a rat's ass what celebs and pandering politicians have to say. It's really the folks who actually code day-in day-out who could help get more women back into a field they used to be in with far more gusto.
Good luck searching the train to find out who has the jammer.
Considering how many people in Philadelphia have criminal convictions, I don't feel like playing therapist to baby-momma-drama. It's easier to just shut them down. If you want your bars back, then step off the subway and talk on the platform and get on the next train.
I can tell you with what joy it is to live in a city where listening to B-grade hip hop music on tinny cell phone speakers is the norm. That you can't stop, but when I have to be subjected to a very lengthy screaming match between baby-momma and her baby-daddy, with a push of a button I can cut that nonsense out. If you want to do that nonsense, then get off the train at the next stop and have your bitch fest there.
I can't do much about the panhandlers that pass through the trains hocking bootleg DVDs, scented oils or begging for quarters, but I CAN do something about the chaff of society who can't keep their Jerry Springer drama to themselves, and so I shut them down with a jammer. If an emergency crops up, I turn the device off.
Seems like every big HW mfg's wants to be an IBM Global Services. Does HP really want to give up that long-term cash flow to go chase its dreams? Maybe the shareholders can get rid of Leo before Leo gets rid of HP's future profitability.
Since Leo Apotheker is there now, you can pretty-much bank on it.
I give it one month before someone figures out how to make a dildo with it.
The Aussie government failed to recommend a standard that supplants PDF in such a way that it handles all the cases one would expect to handle. So what's the point of this exercise that the OZ gov't did other than basically say without words... 'we should publish everything in XML documents since at least those can be parsed to some degree?
You know, there should be an industry-standard sheet of paper (Letter/AF) that meets the JAWS difficulty test, much in the same way there are test HTML pages that test web browser compliance with HTML 1.1/5.0.
Needless to say, blind people already have solutions for reading printed text that is not braille. Print the PDF and then scan it back into OCR-to-speech software. I'm sure someone by now has invented the OCR-capable print driver that eliminates the need to print to paper to reach the step of reading scanned paper.
Create a PDF document that has radially-printed text, "The green fox slept and fellated the brown dog." printed in a straight line, then printed in a spiral, and then printed upside down.
Then for Hebrew and Arabic (RTL languages), the same type of sentence... printed in RTL in various configurations.
Then the newsprint column layout, etc. etc. etc.
Point JAWS at the PDF, or use the PDF reader's built in speech interpretation, and let PDF vendors attain for certified compliance from the accessibility software industry.
Problem solved.
Yeah no kidding. That kind of statement needs a WikiLeak to back it up.
I don't dispute that at all. SAP owes money. Question is how much. Did SAP really capitalize and make any gains off the back of Oracle that warrants a gigantic payout by SAP? That's what the trial is all about.
SAP did make some very smart buys by the way. BusinessObjects was probably their best purchase ever and probably was a huge thorn in Oracle's butt... and Leo was lucky to be present on the closing of that deal. Oracle has yet to come up with a decent fully-integrated BI suite to match what BO users are doing with that software. And now that BO is permanently married to SAP, Oracle has to steer their customers away from what is actually quite a nice product.
Well, Leo Apotheker wasn't anything to write home about. And you have to wonder why HP---which has boardroom problems galore, hired him. Fiorina was a big problem, Hurd was a big problem... and Leo was a money-loser the entire time he was head of SAP. HP is doomed.
Too bad it's not a jury of dimwits that gets to determine the award. Then they'll have to ask themselves in a conference room if Larry's crocodile tears are worth excising a large sum of money from one of Germany's largest companies and giving it to a douchebag who already has loads himself.
Maybe if there's some scarlet twist to this suit that hasn't been made public yet----like SAP had intended to modify Oracle's code to make the database columns with German identifiers like SAP's?
I cannot tell you with what joy I have going into transaction SE38, then digging through ABAP code, then trying to figure out what column identifiers (like LOGIKZW, STABPRRT) means...
Another lie the chairs of NASDAQ and NYSE love to tell the world is that HFT speeds up price discovery.
How is this even POSSIBLY true??? They are algos. Those algos don't have any clue what the future performance of a company is. The algos are not going to tell you how successful AAPL's iPhone 5 will be, or when the next class action lawsuit is coming.
And algos break ALL THE TIME. It has been happening more often these days because stocks are breaking 120DMA more often, and most of these algos are doing nothing but backtracing trends on top of their arbitrage schemes. When a big investor comes in the room, they jump on him like nervous poodles.
That's why the May 6 event was such an eye opener. Waddle and Reed didn't cause the flash crash. They executed a normal transaction that wasn't even a Big Fish transaction, and all the algos went haywire.
So much for the quants and their MIT-smartness.
Yes it IS a sin.
It's a SIN because the heads of NYSE and NASDAQ continue to spread this lie that HFT shops contribute liquidity to the system. THEY DO ANYTHING BUT!
Have you seen the offices these HFT shops rent out in New Jersey and CT? They're cheap Class B space, warehouse loft and other low-rent space. They don't have the capital it takes to be a market maker. They just have capital---and they aren't going to sit in the market when it is hurting and make trades no sane person would make to keep liquidity flowing.
That is the job of a REAL market-maker. A market-maker will step in and be the counterparty to keep the issues they are responsible on the exchange moving.
What the fuck do you think happened on the May 6 flash crash? Almost all the HFT shops ran to their server rooms and SIGSEGV their software and pulled out to avoid taking more pain. The bids all dried up on the NYSE which is why the first crazy market order for $0.01 a share came to the exchanges, NASDAQ cleared it so for a while, several stocks were at zero print... like Accenture.
When you have the most top companies on your exchange printing zero in the flash of an eye... YOUR MARKET IS BROKEN. How is this even debatable?
Why would I want to put the kids college fund money in this fucking disaster?
HFT sucks.
Hear hear.
I pulled out 100K out of the markets because I can't just put up with HFT anymore. So Buy and Hold was a bad idea. Now investing is a bad idea.
You can't put in a stop-loss order anymore on anything you own because every day you have to worry if a mini-flash crash hit one of your issues and triggered it, then the SX won't unwind YOUR trade but they are glad to unwind the fuck-up trades the HFT guys caused.
Actually there WERE enough orders to satisfy the selling, the problem was that the order volume was mostly HFTs that were trading with each other in S&P e-minis. The algorithm was judging the liquidity of the market based on VOLUME, not based off absorption of the securities.
Absorption is when some buyers enter the market, buy stuff, then walk away and sell it at a much later time while everyone else in the market has moved on. They may come back a few hours later to re-sell now that the price has gone higher, but they're not recycling the same securities and getting them handed back to them on the very next trade.
Look at it this way from a programming point of view. You have 2 threads that are sitting on the side, and juggling the same balls between each other. The balls are worth $1,000 each and there are 100 of them being juggled.
So as the stupid hedge fund manager, you insert an order to sell off 5,000 balls at $999 a piece. The order fills for $950 and the two threads pick up the extra 5,000 balls. And now they are trading 5,100 balls between each other, and the price now stabilizes between $950 and $960 per ball. The new balls being passed around have less value because there's more of them in the market so there is dilution, but there is trading volume---which PORTENDS a normal investor to think there is liquidity, but there isn't---because there is no absorption and there's no sideline money... it's an empty market with a few players doing a massive amount of volume.
So take the same situation but now the stupid hedge fund manager starts POURING balls into the 2 threads. Now they are overloaded with volume and trading activity is higher, but there's no sideline money and the number of threads hasn't changed, so now the market has gone beyond saturated. The price per ball plummets.
The balls are linked to other objects which have value, and these start going down (we're talking futures contracts now). Because the OUTSIDE market is already heavily down, the futures that were being depressed triggered program trading---sell sell sell... cover your ass, don't get burned, don't ride this ship down. So now you have a full-on stampede.
NOW you have people that were holding the e-mini contracts that were asleep during this episode suddenly awake with alarm, and they start to sell because now their contract hedge is going down the toilet. You now have a perfect shitstorm of selling.
When Arca put on SLOWDOWN and the e-mini pit recovered after the order finished executing, then you had a stampede of buying from all the traders who saw immediate discounts on everything---everything is now on sale at Dollar Store discount bargain prices. So in a split second, it's now BUY BUY BUY!!!
And more than 50% of that snap recovery were all the folks and program traders trying to reverse their downside trades. They sold low---so they tried to grab all their positions back before they had to print a loss for the day.
In other words, a shitstorm of VERY smart people dumped into unloading a lot of holdings just because one simple program went "BOO!". They saw their collective mistake, and in a few minutes, they tried to reverse the damage so they wouldn't have to report losses.
While the episode went down though, a LOT of people in the tri-state area were having heart attacks.
You use a market order if you have no time to sit and wait for your limit to trigger and you're very motivated to buy or sell to get rid of a stock or to pick a stock up off the floor.
Market orders rule when it's 3:59:50 and you WANT to get that trade done so you don't get exposed to overnight trading and the morning futures market.