I have talked to people who do this sort of thing. I'm no expert but here is what I think to be the general gist.
These people are known as black box traders or arbitrage traders. They construct computer systems to automatically identify opportunities and execute trades.
There are two parts to the task. Identifying the opportunity and executing the transaction.
Identifying opportunities requires low latency data from the exchanges, which includes not only network latencies but also processing latencies. Opportunities within a single market are essentially non-existent as the various merchant banks and brokerages have been doing automated trading in this space for some time. The more recent black box traders usually focus on arbitrage between exchanges or through synthetic instruments.
Arbitrage between exchanges consists of looking for an instrument that is listed on more than one exchange and identifying when the orders get out of sync, such that you can make money by buying on one exchange and selling on the other. For example, Royal Bank of Canada trades on NYSE and on the Canadian TSX exchange. The stock is traded in US $ on the NYSE and in CA $ on the TSX. Its possible to write software that looks at the orders on these exchanges and at the foreign exchange rate such that opportunities can be identified.
The second group of opportunities is through synthetic instruments. This is much more technical and I don't really understand it. Essentially what is done is that the software identifies inequalities in the market based on a basket of instrument that, when traded together add up to an instrument. These synthetic instruments are made up of various positions on real instrument. For instance the synthetic might consist of an equity and several options to buy or sell that equity.
Once the opportunity is identified then the order must be executed before the market picture changes. For this, low latency order execution is required. I think that traders may use two different boxes, co-located at the data vendor and at the trade execution provider to reduce latency as much as possible.
Big surprise, the video refuses to load unless you have Windows Media Player. Despite the fact that I view wmv's all over the net just fine with mplayer, yet somehow MS can't seem to make this work. Typical. MS needs to get a clue and realize that they can't expect to gain market share in new areas if they lame out all of their products to try and reinforce their OS monopoly. They don't seem to be able to see the flip side of their reasoning, which is that loss of OS market share will be amplified in their other products rather than mitigated.
Do they honestly expect to pull market share from youtube while telling users to go away until they install windows?
I generally agree that this is a big negative for the OS community and IT community in general. However, I think IBM will be more likely to kill off Solaris than stop supporting Linux. They understand that there are more Linux people than Solaris people, even if Solaris is a better os for enterprise computing (IMHO and yes I use both)
The reason Sun is in trouble is 100% a marketing issue. They need to sell their hardware products in a consistent way. People have the idea that their hardware is over-priced and this makes it difficult for people like me (IT professional) to recommend their gear to the boss. What really irritates me is that if I look on their site I see a 5120 for ~$15,000 if I look on Ebay, I see the same server for $5500, and if I bother to contact a reseller they will immediately drop the price to $4500. Now, at $4500 this machine is interesting but at $14,000 its insane. How many people look at the Sun store and say "Holy shit this stuff is over priced".
They should just shut down their online store and point people to resellers. As it is, their store is a big advert that says, "Our stuff is cool but absurdly over-priced".
And their stuff is good. I have a couple 5120s and they run Oracle like you wouldn't believe. They far exceeded my expectations in regards to their ability to handle our application load.
Also, I have never had a problem with installation of Sun gear or any quality concerns. Racking and install always goes tickity with a Sun server. This is unlike any other vendor that I have dealt with.
"You would know what I mean if you had a system that would regularly create and destroy a few million objects quickly. It is simply not possible to do it on Java without a HUGE machine and a lot of RAM."
As it happens I do have a system that creates and destroys objects at a high rate. Our first version was in C++, the second in Java. The performance of the two were similar.
The application processes ~100Mbps of financial data for all of the North American stock exchanges, in real time, and runs easily on a typical 2 cpu intel box. We actually run two instances of the software (one for real time data and one for delayed data) on the same box and a bunch of other stuff too.
JIT's can actually produce code that runs faster than statically compiled C++, as jits have the opportunity to generate statistics on how the software is being used at run time and optimize the compile around that data.
If you are going to post negative comments about a particular technology they should be fact based as opposed to gut based. I think programming languages are largely a matter of choice, almost any one can be made to work for 99% of tasks. At least that's been my experience, I've seen big PHP shops that make just as much money as big Java shops or Ruby shops.
There is a lot of focus on being skeptical when learning new ideas, but one should be just as skeptical of things we have previously decided are true.
Even more so we must be skeptical of our selves, our reasons for taking a thing as true or false.
Your brain is the most amazing and capable computer you will ever have access to. Learn the system, and then hack the system, to make it do what you want.
I don't really have any comment and I didn't read the article, but I just thought this might be my lucky day to be in the first 10 posts.
here goes nothing...
Like the US Parachute Association can be trusted. I have a more reliable documentary film which clearly displays the dangerous nature of parachuting. The documentary is called Terminal Velocity.
I suggest you rent it and prepare to be horrified.
I didn't think that the mac went beyond the local net, its not part of ip packets. So changing it might theoretically prevent your local provider from tracking you. But then they know what port you are coming from and can always sniff that.
But 9,901,010 km of it is a frozen frikin' wasteland. Basically like Australia except with more ice and fewer road warriors. Nobody lives in the north of Canada. We all congregate, shivering, as close as possible to the US. Truth be told, we'd all be in Florida or California if we could breach the fortress America they got going on. I guess at some level, Mexicans must be just plain tougher than Canadaians, or more bulletproof. Maybe its just easier to walk 50 miles in the desart than 50 miles in snow.
Given the amount of time it takes for MS to produce a new version of their OS, I think its unlikely that they will have a Linux/Office version in two years. They would have to be demonstrating "beta" versions now to make that deadline. I imagine it would take a company of that size about 5-10 years. Not to say that the dev task is all that difficult, just a comment on the innovative paralisys that grips large organizations.
I CAN'T SEE ANY REASON TO REMOVE THE CAPS LOCK BUTTON. IT IS POSSIBLY THE MOST IMPORTANT KEY EVER MADE. I LEAVE MINE ON SO THAT MY EMAILS HAVE EXTRA PUNCH. AND WHEN I WANT TO GET SOME ATTENTION IN A POST, WHAT I DO IS THIS:
i click the caps lock off so that i make little print and this gets the attention of my reader.
I HAVE NEVER HEARD OF SUCH A CRAZY IDEA AS GETTING RID OF THE CAPS KEY. YOU MIGHT AS WELL DO AWAY WITH THE "HOME" KEY OR THE WINDOWS KEY. I WOULD BE LOST WITHOUT THOSE KEYS TOO.
THE WRITER SHOULD CLUE IN, THE TREND IN THE INDUSTRY TO ADD MORE KEYBOARD BUTTONS, NOT FEWER. I HAVE BUTTONS TO OPEN MY EMAIL AND BUTTONS TO CLOSE IT DOWN AGAIN. I ALSO HAVE BUTTONS TO OPEN MY EXPLORER AND OTHER BUTTONS THAT SCROLL THE TEXT IN CASE I DON'T WANT TO USE MY MOUSE. STILL, I COULD USE EVEN MORE BUTTONS, I HAVE A QUAKE 4 BUTTON, BUT NO CIVILIZATION 3 BUTTON. HOW CAN I START CIV 3 WITHOUT A BUTTON?
I won't argue that religion has been used to justify awful behaviour, but "the largest source"? I think you may be overlooking nationalism. For examples of fevent nationalism run amok, see WW1 and WW2. Talk about your blood baths. In WW1 it wasn't uncommon for countries like England to lose tens of thousands of men a day. With that comparison, Al-Queda seems to pose a threat closer to that of your average serial killer than to a war.
"The Cosmological Constant is a mathematical representation of the energy of empty space, also known as "dark energy", which exerts a kind of anti-gravity force pushing galaxies apart at an accelerating rate."
I don't think that it has to be "anti-gravity", it can go either way depending on whether you are trying to fudge an expanding or contracting universe. Einstein was shocked by the prediction of GR that everything in the universe would be moving apart. A steady state universe seemed more correct to him, so he introduced the constant so that the equations predict a static universe. Years later, Hubble discovered that the universe is indeed expanding, hence Einstein's remark that it was his biggest blunder.
You can't trust web stats, that much I agree with. The rest is a bunch of hand waving.
DSL customers do not get a new IP every time they turn on their computer. Maybe some do, but my IP changes maybe once every few months, max.
He fails to mention the effect of NAT'ing and mega proxies, both of which are in heavy use and have the OPPOSITE effect. All of AOL emerges through a small number of IP addresses, clearly more eyeballs than IPs.
I agree that IP != eyeball, but that's it, there could be more eyeballs than ips or less, who knows, and it probably varies from site to site, based on demographic. There is no way to know for sure. Cookies will only tell you the number of computers.
Slashdot Mirror
This is taken from http://tententwo.com/
I have talked to people who do this sort of thing. I'm no expert but here is what I think to be the general gist.
These people are known as black box traders or arbitrage traders. They construct computer systems to automatically identify opportunities and execute trades.
There are two parts to the task. Identifying the opportunity and executing the transaction.
Identifying opportunities requires low latency data from the exchanges, which includes not only network latencies but also processing latencies. Opportunities within a single market are essentially non-existent as the various merchant banks and brokerages have been doing automated trading in this space for some time. The more recent black box traders usually focus on arbitrage between exchanges or through synthetic instruments.
Arbitrage between exchanges consists of looking for an instrument that is listed on more than one exchange and identifying when the orders get out of sync, such that you can make money by buying on one exchange and selling on the other. For example, Royal Bank of Canada trades on NYSE and on the Canadian TSX exchange. The stock is traded in US $ on the NYSE and in CA $ on the TSX. Its possible to write software that looks at the orders on these exchanges and at the foreign exchange rate such that opportunities can be identified.
The second group of opportunities is through synthetic instruments. This is much more technical and I don't really understand it. Essentially what is done is that the software identifies inequalities in the market based on a basket of instrument that, when traded together add up to an instrument. These synthetic instruments are made up of various positions on real instrument. For instance the synthetic might consist of an equity and several options to buy or sell that equity.
Once the opportunity is identified then the order must be executed before the market picture changes. For this, low latency order execution is required. I think that traders may use two different boxes, co-located at the data vendor and at the trade execution provider to reduce latency as much as possible.
Big surprise, the video refuses to load unless you have Windows Media Player. Despite the fact that I view wmv's all over the net just fine with mplayer, yet somehow MS can't seem to make this work. Typical. MS needs to get a clue and realize that they can't expect to gain market share in new areas if they lame out all of their products to try and reinforce their OS monopoly. They don't seem to be able to see the flip side of their reasoning, which is that loss of OS market share will be amplified in their other products rather than mitigated. Do they honestly expect to pull market share from youtube while telling users to go away until they install windows?
I generally agree that this is a big negative for the OS community and IT community in general. However, I think IBM will be more likely to kill off Solaris than stop supporting Linux. They understand that there are more Linux people than Solaris people, even if Solaris is a better os for enterprise computing (IMHO and yes I use both)
The reason Sun is in trouble is 100% a marketing issue. They need to sell their hardware products in a consistent way. People have the idea that their hardware is over-priced and this makes it difficult for people like me (IT professional) to recommend their gear to the boss. What really irritates me is that if I look on their site I see a 5120 for ~$15,000 if I look on Ebay, I see the same server for $5500, and if I bother to contact a reseller they will immediately drop the price to $4500. Now, at $4500 this machine is interesting but at $14,000 its insane. How many people look at the Sun store and say "Holy shit this stuff is over priced".
They should just shut down their online store and point people to resellers. As it is, their store is a big advert that says, "Our stuff is cool but absurdly over-priced".
And their stuff is good. I have a couple 5120s and they run Oracle like you wouldn't believe. They far exceeded my expectations in regards to their ability to handle our application load.
Also, I have never had a problem with installation of Sun gear or any quality concerns. Racking and install always goes tickity with a Sun server. This is unlike any other vendor that I have dealt with.
Isn't craigslist technically guilty of living off the avails of prostitution? I mean, they are taking money to market prostitutes right?
"If there's room, a reference telling how to program a reader for the disk and a reader for the graphics standards you've used would be best too."
If you can leave a reference manual why not just leave the photos instead?
How many watts does a star produce when parked 93 million miles above your head? about 2w at 1cm I think....
Devices like sonos.com also pull internet radio.
"You would know what I mean if you had a system that would regularly create and destroy a few million objects quickly. It is simply not possible to do it on Java without a HUGE machine and a lot of RAM."
As it happens I do have a system that creates and destroys objects at a high rate. Our first version was in C++, the second in Java. The performance of the two were similar.
The application processes ~100Mbps of financial data for all of the North American stock exchanges, in real time, and runs easily on a typical 2 cpu intel box. We actually run two instances of the software (one for real time data and one for delayed data) on the same box and a bunch of other stuff too.
JIT's can actually produce code that runs faster than statically compiled C++, as jits have the opportunity to generate statistics on how the software is being used at run time and optimize the compile around that data.
If you are going to post negative comments about a particular technology they should be fact based as opposed to gut based. I think programming languages are largely a matter of choice, almost any one can be made to work for 99% of tasks. At least that's been my experience, I've seen big PHP shops that make just as much money as big Java shops or Ruby shops.
There is a lot of focus on being skeptical when learning new ideas, but one should be just as skeptical of things we have previously decided are true.
Even more so we must be skeptical of our selves, our reasons for taking a thing as true or false.
Your brain is the most amazing and capable computer you will ever have access to. Learn the system, and then hack the system, to make it do what you want.
Hating Java is a /. tradition. There is nothing to understand, you just need to get with the program and start spewing anti-Java rhetoric.
shit.
I don't really have any comment and I didn't read the article, but I just thought this might be my lucky day to be in the first 10 posts. here goes nothing...
While I hate to be a fear monger. The symptoms of lower dose radiation poisoning are headaches and then vomiting. But then so is the flu.
Like the US Parachute Association can be trusted. I have a more reliable documentary film which clearly displays the dangerous nature of parachuting. The documentary is called Terminal Velocity.
I suggest you rent it and prepare to be horrified.
They probably lose a few every year when the chutes don't open.
"external consultants or forensics experts -- should be selected prior to an event, experts say."
What a shocker...
I didn't think that the mac went beyond the local net, its not part of ip packets. So changing it might theoretically prevent your local provider from tracking you. But then they know what port you are coming from and can always sniff that.
Am I off base here?
But 9,901,010 km of it is a frozen frikin' wasteland. Basically like Australia except with more ice and fewer road warriors. Nobody lives in the north of Canada. We all congregate, shivering, as close as possible to the US. Truth be told, we'd all be in Florida or California if we could breach the fortress America they got going on. I guess at some level, Mexicans must be just plain tougher than Canadaians, or more bulletproof. Maybe its just easier to walk 50 miles in the desart than 50 miles in snow.
"a learning process modeled on Microsoft's management techniques."
I guess that means that the 4 year process will now take upwards of 10 years and have large portions of the curriculum removed to make the deadline.
Given the amount of time it takes for MS to produce a new version of their OS, I think its unlikely that they will have a Linux/Office version in two years. They would have to be demonstrating "beta" versions now to make that deadline. I imagine it would take a company of that size about 5-10 years. Not to say that the dev task is all that difficult, just a comment on the innovative paralisys that grips large organizations.
I CAN'T SEE ANY REASON TO REMOVE THE CAPS LOCK BUTTON. IT IS POSSIBLY THE MOST IMPORTANT KEY EVER MADE. I LEAVE MINE ON SO THAT MY EMAILS HAVE EXTRA PUNCH. AND WHEN I WANT TO GET SOME ATTENTION IN A POST, WHAT I DO IS THIS:
/. filter) ,mfg/ fgklgk
i click the caps lock off so that i make little print and this gets the attention of my reader.
I HAVE NEVER HEARD OF SUCH A CRAZY IDEA AS GETTING RID OF THE CAPS KEY. YOU MIGHT AS WELL DO AWAY WITH THE "HOME" KEY OR THE WINDOWS KEY. I WOULD BE LOST WITHOUT THOSE KEYS TOO.
THE WRITER SHOULD CLUE IN, THE TREND IN THE INDUSTRY TO ADD MORE KEYBOARD BUTTONS, NOT FEWER. I HAVE BUTTONS TO OPEN MY EMAIL AND BUTTONS TO CLOSE IT DOWN AGAIN. I ALSO HAVE BUTTONS TO OPEN MY EXPLORER AND OTHER BUTTONS THAT SCROLL THE TEXT IN CASE I DON'T WANT TO USE MY MOUSE. STILL, I COULD USE EVEN MORE BUTTONS, I HAVE A QUAKE 4 BUTTON, BUT NO CIVILIZATION 3 BUTTON. HOW CAN I START CIV 3 WITHOUT A BUTTON?
STUPID, STUPID, MAN
(hack around
ak;jsdhf lkdsafjlkdsajf sdflkjdskl sdflk dlkfjsd sdl dsdslkdslkfdslkfsdl sdlkdlkdslkfdslkfjdslk ddskljdlkj dkldk dlkjdlkirwupoiwiew rip poxcjvpoewpof kjvjp9-9w4 fpofi-v jvdfpogfpoigf-00-0 f0g f0-gf gfdpo[k ffd fd0fg9=0g =jvlvc 0909f sd-cljv;cx;lvcxv09g 09 fgfssk;lv;lxv0vghjjnvb.,mnmnhj0-0-0rtu9wwenrn tt0r9/.g
(end hack)
I won't argue that religion has been used to justify awful behaviour, but "the largest source"? I think you may be overlooking nationalism. For examples of fevent nationalism run amok, see WW1 and WW2. Talk about your blood baths. In WW1 it wasn't uncommon for countries like England to lose tens of thousands of men a day. With that comparison, Al-Queda seems to pose a threat closer to that of your average serial killer than to a war.
Someone should tell them that they put their firewall in backwards.
"The Cosmological Constant is a mathematical representation of the energy of empty space, also known as "dark energy", which exerts a kind of anti-gravity force pushing galaxies apart at an accelerating rate."
h tml
I don't think that it has to be "anti-gravity", it can go either way depending on whether you are trying to fudge an expanding or contracting universe. Einstein was shocked by the prediction of GR that everything in the universe would be moving apart. A steady state universe seemed more correct to him, so he introduced the constant so that the equations predict a static universe. Years later, Hubble discovered that the universe is indeed expanding, hence Einstein's remark that it was his biggest blunder.
http://super.colorado.edu/~michaele/Lambda/blund.
You can't trust web stats, that much I agree with. The rest is a bunch of hand waving.
DSL customers do not get a new IP every time they turn on their computer. Maybe some do, but my IP changes maybe once every few months, max.
He fails to mention the effect of NAT'ing and mega proxies, both of which are in heavy use and have the OPPOSITE effect. All of AOL emerges through a small number of IP addresses, clearly more eyeballs than IPs.
I agree that IP != eyeball, but that's it, there could be more eyeballs than ips or less, who knows, and it probably varies from site to site, based on demographic. There is no way to know for sure. Cookies will only tell you the number of computers.