We use JD Edwards from Oracle running off an iSeries server.
Excel is used a lot for putting together large journal entries and analysis. I also have to use PL/SQL quite a bit for pulling data out of various data warehouses we have setup. Those are currently on a cluster but we are working on moving them to a nice netezza system.
Quickbooks is ok for a small business. I've always worked in enterprise so I don't have much experience with it. I tried it at home once and though it sucked.
One of the things I deal with is leases. This includes leases for Right of Way. I've worked for Verizon. I will not name any of my other past or current employers.
Let me tell you a little secret:
We did not even know the locations of all of our right of ways. We would find out about them when someone would bill us for them.
I have worked on the bill pay side of intercarrier compensation and have also worked on the accounting side of intercarrier compensation. I've done this for wireless, CLECs, and for ILECs. The way that a large carrier pays for bandwidth is not like you assume. The carrier will purchase drains with other carriers that have a lot of peering (such as Level3). That drain (usually GigE or 10GigE but there are still OC circuits being used) has three different charges associated with it. The first charge is the access charge, this is just a charge for the circuit and access to the POP that the peered carrier is at. Next you will have a minimum commitment based on a certain amount of bandwidth at the contracted per megabyte rate (which is usually a few dollars per megabyte but it is lower than it sounds when you hear how the bandwidth you are billed for is calculated). Most contracts the bandwidth comes from a sample. For example you might have the prior month split into hour long segments. Level 3 would take the hour that falls into the 75th percentile and bill you based on the number of megs of bandwidth used during that hour.
VZW is on EV-DO Rev. A which supports 3.1Mb transfer speeds NOT 2-300kbps and is MUCH faster than EDGE. HSDPA actually supports up to 18Mb not the 20 you claim. However as seen below you will never see anything close tot hat in the real world.
Also PC World did a piece in June comparing REAL world transfer speeds (http://www.pcworld.com/zoom?id=167391&page=1&zoomIdx=1)
To a previous commenter. The companies doing high frequency trading "are" the brokers. They aren't paying any brokerage fees because they have direct access to the market. Additionally speed is important enough that your computers need to be at least in the same physical vicinity as the trading computers. Literally every millisecond makes a difference.
One of the things explained in the article is because the computers are so fast they can issue and cancel an order before it gets fulfilled. So with the Intel example:
Notice there is a large buying trend in Broadcom
Issue at x and see if there is a match. When a match is found immediately cancel.
Issue at x+1 and see if there is a match. When a match is found immediately cancel.
Repeat until a match isn't found.
Place a huge sell order at the final number a match was found.
PROFIT
Basically the company made a.4% profit in a few seconds on 1.8 million by doing nothing but taking advantage of proximity to the market. This runs against several of the ideas around how an exchange is supposed to work. By the way... if I remember the match correctly that small.4% profit? It becomes huge when you consider this is done every second of every day. All that money those big firms are sucking up are coming from the small investor. The question is what is there to do about it? It will kill any small time daytrader. Someone like me who buys and holds will be alright but man forget trying to trade minute by minute based on technicals.
HCL recently took over a company that we used for various services. I have learned that the folks HCL brought in are very polite, very nice. However, once they get put into a situation that they don't have a prewritten set of instructions on how to handle they completely fall apart. We have hired temps with nothing but highschool diplomas and little to no prior experience that have exhibited better problem solving skills.
So yes, for doing purely mechanical and incredibly boring tasks they are pretty good. Fast turnaround etc. Get them out of that realm and into the realm of "thinking for themselves." Like I said... they fall apart.
I know this isn't how all Indian workers are since I went to school with some that were quite intelligent. The only experience I have with an offshore outsourcing firm is HCL and that has only happened recently.
The reason is that the receiver on the tower picks up signal fine. The tower is connected to a local telco endoffice by multiple T1s. If those T1s get saturated then your speeds are going to go in the crapper. ATT's problem is that (obviously) they don't have enough bandwith to their cellsites. Since they don't seem to be able to count on Apple doing a good job of putting some sort of compression on the iphone and I assume their network management is good. All they can really do is throw bandwith at the problem, which of course gets expensive. And since the plans are all unlimited you don't really get the revenue to support it.
As the husband of an actual Psychologist I feel fairly well qualified to say you are full of shit. Manic episodes of Bipolar disorder don't do anything to your "IQ" (which is a pointless tool anyway). The manic means you are in a "good mood." Not you are magically smarter because you pushed the turbo button in your brain.
I simpler thing to say is: I really only try when I care about something. When I care enough to focus I work with much higher efficiency.
See? That way it doesn't sound like you are blathering on about things you know nothing about.
It seems very plausible that Jobs held back the announcement (or Apple as a company did). To allow company insiders to divest themselves of a significant number of shares.
You would be surprised. I work on the wholesale side for a large CMRS provider. There are hundreds if not thousands of ILECS and CLECS in the United States. Many of them have one or two end office switches to their name and that's it. I've ran into several LECs where the President is also the engineer and accountant and billing person. We call them mom-and-pops and hate dealing with them.
85 and 78 seriously? At 75 I start sweating just by sitting in one place. Maybe if I had the metabolism of a rock it would work though. I leave my thermostat at 73 when I'm awake and at the house and about 68 at night. Any higher during teh day and I sweat, any higher during the night and I have to sleep in my underwear without sheets or I soak the bed. My wife obviously doesn't want me sitting around the house covering everything in sweat.
I work for a bank and deal with this stuff everyday. Your list is basically how it works. We rarely have a day go by that we don't get two or three disupte forms. As far as the merchants, nine out of ten times the merchants are uncooperative and refuse to do anything to help our customers. One merchant went so far as to deny they had charged the card. One really odd thing I have noticed is at least half of our fraud reports are being used to make purchases at hottopic.com. I think that speaks for itself.
More correctly, they engineered the new audio goodies so that you had to use the DRM crippled technology to be able to enjoy them. I personally won't get either an HDDVD or BluRay player for the forseeable future.
In an economics sense, yes Second Life does have real utility (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility). However much utility is up to debate of course since utils are an unquantifiable measure. However the more proper question is: Does Second Life matter enough to be getting all the press especially from slashdot?
I believe my personal value judgement on that would be no.
Your bank is required by law to state return as Annual Percentage Yield (or effective annual rate, both the same thing though). This is because Annual Percentage Rate does not take into account the effects of compounding. APY is usually a bit higher than APR because of the effect of compounding. Which means that it should be even less of a ripoff then you calculated.
(1+r)^12 - 1 = EAR (APY) where r = monthly compounding interest rate (1+x)^12 - 1 =.044
Doing it quick and dirty would give you a monthly interest rate of.359 percent vs your calculated rate of.367 percent. Not much of a difference but I get a little irked when I see incorrect math applied to finance ideas. I guess it is because I'm a senior finance major myself.
Gas is price-inelastic. This means increasing the price has very little effect on how much is consumed
Yes, gas is price inelastic -- in the short term. You are correct that
Thank you for pointing that out. I graduate with my degree in economics this December and I hate it when people don't look at the whole picture. The problem with taxes on gasoline to reduce dependence is one of magnitude to me. Since it is short-term inelastic we have to worry about how much to increase taxes by so that we reduce emissions without causing undue hardship on the people.
One dollar? Two dollars? Three dollars?
What I would suggest is to raise taxes a certain amount, and then wait 12 to 18 months to see the effects and determine if we want to raise taxes again. However where do we decide enough is enough and gasoline consumption has dropped to our liking?
Like I said the problem is in the magnitudes.
Of course the other big problem is how do we spend those taxes, I would suggest spending them on covering shortfalls first, alternative energy second, and infrastructure third.
All of these things happening have about the same chance as a pig flying though.
No, I was simply trying to point out how interesting it is and telling that we hear so much about republican voter fraud but so very little about democrat voter fraud...
Excuses excuses excuses. We see smoke and mirrors from the democratic party that doesn't want to admit that they have been unable the last two presidential elections to present a legitimate contender for president. Trust me if the Democrats could put forward a candidate that was even halfway decent he would win the election in a landslide. Instead we get candidates that are wanted by the leftist fringe that has started to infest the democratic party. Just like the republicans have their anti-science, pro-war, pro-israel right wing idealogues. The democrats have their anti-religion, pro-appeasement, anti-israel etc left wing idealogues. Both of the parties are slowly starting to become controlled by these people. Hopefully it will result in a legitimate third political party with moderate policies (which is what I would like).
Fraud happens, there were several legitimate cases of Democrats committing election fraud such as the son of Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Wis. and some of his friends being arrested for slashing the tires of 25 cars and vans rented by republicans to help get people without transportation to voter sites (http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-01-24-ti res-slashed_x.htm). Also as another voter said democrats nation wide are famous for having dead people vote for them.
It truly depresses me as I see slashdot.org politically becoming like http://dailykos.com/ when really you should be focusing on things besides crying about how the democrats lost the elections and republicans must be evil because (insert celebrity) said so.
Slashdot Mirror
We use JD Edwards from Oracle running off an iSeries server.
Excel is used a lot for putting together large journal entries and analysis. I also have to use PL/SQL quite a bit for pulling data out of various data warehouses we have setup. Those are currently on a cluster but we are working on moving them to a nice netezza system.
Quickbooks is ok for a small business. I've always worked in enterprise so I don't have much experience with it. I tried it at home once and though it sucked.
One of the things I deal with is leases. This includes leases for Right of Way. I've worked for Verizon. I will not name any of my other past or current employers.
Let me tell you a little secret:
We did not even know the locations of all of our right of ways. We would find out about them when someone would bill us for them.
We are in the 38% and have no problem at all affording health insurance for our family.
I have worked on the bill pay side of intercarrier compensation and have also worked on the accounting side of intercarrier compensation. I've done this for wireless, CLECs, and for ILECs. The way that a large carrier pays for bandwidth is not like you assume. The carrier will purchase drains with other carriers that have a lot of peering (such as Level3). That drain (usually GigE or 10GigE but there are still OC circuits being used) has three different charges associated with it. The first charge is the access charge, this is just a charge for the circuit and access to the POP that the peered carrier is at. Next you will have a minimum commitment based on a certain amount of bandwidth at the contracted per megabyte rate (which is usually a few dollars per megabyte but it is lower than it sounds when you hear how the bandwidth you are billed for is calculated). Most contracts the bandwidth comes from a sample. For example you might have the prior month split into hour long segments. Level 3 would take the hour that falls into the 75th percentile and bill you based on the number of megs of bandwidth used during that hour.
VZW is on EV-DO Rev. A which supports 3.1Mb transfer speeds NOT 2-300kbps and is MUCH faster than EDGE. HSDPA actually supports up to 18Mb not the 20 you claim. However as seen below you will never see anything close tot hat in the real world.
Also PC World did a piece in June comparing REAL world transfer speeds (http://www.pcworld.com/zoom?id=167391&page=1&zoomIdx=1)
AT&T averaged: 717 Kb/sec
Sprint averaged: 745 Kb/sec
VZW averaged: 890 Kb/sec
For reliability...
AT&T: 66%
Sprint: 84%
VZW: 83%
Please get out of here with your misinformation.
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
To a previous commenter. The companies doing high frequency trading "are" the brokers. They aren't paying any brokerage fees because they have direct access to the market. Additionally speed is important enough that your computers need to be at least in the same physical vicinity as the trading computers. Literally every millisecond makes a difference. One of the things explained in the article is because the computers are so fast they can issue and cancel an order before it gets fulfilled. So with the Intel example: Notice there is a large buying trend in Broadcom Issue at x and see if there is a match. When a match is found immediately cancel. Issue at x+1 and see if there is a match. When a match is found immediately cancel. Repeat until a match isn't found. Place a huge sell order at the final number a match was found. PROFIT Basically the company made a .4% profit in a few seconds on 1.8 million by doing nothing but taking advantage of proximity to the market. This runs against several of the ideas around how an exchange is supposed to work. By the way... if I remember the match correctly that small .4% profit? It becomes huge when you consider this is done every second of every day. All that money those big firms are sucking up are coming from the small investor. The question is what is there to do about it? It will kill any small time daytrader. Someone like me who buys and holds will be alright but man forget trying to trade minute by minute based on technicals.
HCL recently took over a company that we used for various services. I have learned that the folks HCL brought in are very polite, very nice. However, once they get put into a situation that they don't have a prewritten set of instructions on how to handle they completely fall apart. We have hired temps with nothing but highschool diplomas and little to no prior experience that have exhibited better problem solving skills.
So yes, for doing purely mechanical and incredibly boring tasks they are pretty good. Fast turnaround etc. Get them out of that realm and into the realm of "thinking for themselves." Like I said... they fall apart.
I know this isn't how all Indian workers are since I went to school with some that were quite intelligent. The only experience I have with an offshore outsourcing firm is HCL and that has only happened recently.
The reason is that the receiver on the tower picks up signal fine. The tower is connected to a local telco endoffice by multiple T1s. If those T1s get saturated then your speeds are going to go in the crapper. ATT's problem is that (obviously) they don't have enough bandwith to their cellsites. Since they don't seem to be able to count on Apple doing a good job of putting some sort of compression on the iphone and I assume their network management is good. All they can really do is throw bandwith at the problem, which of course gets expensive. And since the plans are all unlimited you don't really get the revenue to support it.
As the husband of an actual Psychologist I feel fairly well qualified to say you are full of shit. Manic episodes of Bipolar disorder don't do anything to your "IQ" (which is a pointless tool anyway). The manic means you are in a "good mood." Not you are magically smarter because you pushed the turbo button in your brain.
I simpler thing to say is:
I really only try when I care about something. When I care enough to focus I work with much higher efficiency.
See? That way it doesn't sound like you are blathering on about things you know nothing about.
It isn't about Jobs. It is about insiders selling shares before the announcement while at the same time saying he was fine to prop up the price.
See http://finance.yahoo.com/q/it?s=AAPL
It seems very plausible that Jobs held back the announcement (or Apple as a company did). To allow company insiders to divest themselves of a significant number of shares.
You would be surprised. I work on the wholesale side for a large CMRS provider. There are hundreds if not thousands of ILECS and CLECS in the United States. Many of them have one or two end office switches to their name and that's it. I've ran into several LECs where the President is also the engineer and accountant and billing person. We call them mom-and-pops and hate dealing with them.
85 and 78 seriously? At 75 I start sweating just by sitting in one place. Maybe if I had the metabolism of a rock it would work though. I leave my thermostat at 73 when I'm awake and at the house and about 68 at night. Any higher during teh day and I sweat, any higher during the night and I have to sleep in my underwear without sheets or I soak the bed. My wife obviously doesn't want me sitting around the house covering everything in sweat.
Guess you can't watch TV then eh?
Mayfair's DC Heroes, I remember that one. God that was an awesome pen and paper rpg. Did heroes right.
I work for a bank and deal with this stuff everyday. Your list is basically how it works. We rarely have a day go by that we don't get two or three disupte forms. As far as the merchants, nine out of ten times the merchants are uncooperative and refuse to do anything to help our customers. One merchant went so far as to deny they had charged the card. One really odd thing I have noticed is at least half of our fraud reports are being used to make purchases at hottopic.com. I think that speaks for itself.
Your comments about range are rendered worthless when you classify starbucks as being "out-in-the-boonies"
There is ONE starbucks in the town I live in. My hometown has zero starbucks, probably never will.
Agreed, I have a feeling the designs being submitted sucks. The good ol' developers can't take that so they are sueing.
For some reason this type of thing reminds me of the looters in Atlas Shrugged.
More correctly, they engineered the new audio goodies so that you had to use the DRM crippled technology to be able to enjoy them. I personally won't get either an HDDVD or BluRay player for the forseeable future.
Ignorance confirmed :)
A quick jaunt to secondlife.com you would have seen a big orange box proclaiming membership is free.
In an economics sense, yes Second Life does have real utility (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility). However much utility is up to debate of course since utils are an unquantifiable measure. However the more proper question is: Does Second Life matter enough to be getting all the press especially from slashdot?
I believe my personal value judgement on that would be no.
Your bank is required by law to state return as Annual Percentage Yield (or effective annual rate, both the same thing though). This is because Annual Percentage Rate does not take into account the effects of compounding. APY is usually a bit higher than APR because of the effect of compounding. Which means that it should be even less of a ripoff then you calculated.
.044
.359 percent vs your calculated rate of .367 percent. Not much of a difference but I get a little irked when I see incorrect math applied to finance ideas. I guess it is because I'm a senior finance major myself.
(1+r)^12 - 1 = EAR (APY)
where
r = monthly compounding interest rate
(1+x)^12 - 1 =
Doing it quick and dirty would give you a monthly interest rate of
Thank you for pointing that out. I graduate with my degree in economics this December and I hate it when people don't look at the whole picture. The problem with taxes on gasoline to reduce dependence is one of magnitude to me. Since it is short-term inelastic we have to worry about how much to increase taxes by so that we reduce emissions without causing undue hardship on the people.
One dollar?
Two dollars?
Three dollars?
What I would suggest is to raise taxes a certain amount, and then wait 12 to 18 months to see the effects and determine if we want to raise taxes again. However where do we decide enough is enough and gasoline consumption has dropped to our liking?
Like I said the problem is in the magnitudes.
Of course the other big problem is how do we spend those taxes, I would suggest spending them on covering shortfalls first, alternative energy second, and infrastructure third.
All of these things happening have about the same chance as a pig flying though.
No, I was simply trying to point out how interesting it is and telling that we hear so much about republican voter fraud but so very little about democrat voter fraud...
bias anyone?
Excuses excuses excuses. We see smoke and mirrors from the democratic party that doesn't want to admit that they have been unable the last two presidential elections to present a legitimate contender for president. Trust me if the Democrats could put forward a candidate that was even halfway decent he would win the election in a landslide. Instead we get candidates that are wanted by the leftist fringe that has started to infest the democratic party. Just like the republicans have their anti-science, pro-war, pro-israel right wing idealogues. The democrats have their anti-religion, pro-appeasement, anti-israel etc left wing idealogues. Both of the parties are slowly starting to become controlled by these people. Hopefully it will result in a legitimate third political party with moderate policies (which is what I would like).
i res-slashed_x.htm). Also as another voter said democrats nation wide are famous for having dead people vote for them.
Fraud happens, there were several legitimate cases of Democrats committing election fraud such as the son of Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Wis. and some of his friends being arrested for slashing the tires of 25 cars and vans rented by republicans to help get people without transportation to voter sites (http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-01-24-t
It truly depresses me as I see slashdot.org politically becoming like http://dailykos.com/ when really you should be focusing on things besides crying about how the democrats lost the elections and republicans must be evil because (insert celebrity) said so.