No, because you can't cover a put option with stock you don't own. He won't own any of this stock for 5 years.
Recall that US-style puts can be excercised any time before they expire. He also can't cover a "European" put option, because there's no guarantee he'll keep working for Apple and own the stock 5 years from now.
I know we're all supposed to hate Microsoft, but come on.
Here's a story: On the day Microsoft releases IE 8 -- the most popular web browser in the world -- Slashdot doesn't mention it, but posts a trivial article about Google Chrome benchmarks.
Speed: There is a very narrow range of trip lengths for which high-speed rail makes sense.
Suppose this train actually achieves the stated 236 miles per hour. Without making any stops at all, you're still looking at about 13 hours to get from New York to San Francisco. With five or six stops (that's not even one per state), it would approach 20 hours. This is a 6-hour flight. Anywhere farther than 600 miles is going to be faster by air.
For trips less than 250 miles, it's just not worth the hassle of getting to a major rail hub, parking your car (or taking transit and transfering), waiting to board the train, arriving at your destination with no ground transport and having to rent a car, etc.. It's easier to just jump in your car and drive there. Cheaper, too.
Those are best-case scenarios. In reality, the Acela takes 8 hours to get from Boston to Washington, DC -- a flight I've made in about an hour and fifteen minutes.
Cost: Anyone with $50 or $100 million can start their own airline, leasing a few planes and plying low-volume routes to make money for expansion.
Good luck getting a high-speed rail built for less than $50 billion. With that kind of money, you could outright buy 40 or 50 brand-new airliners and hire people to fly them. That lets you provide service to a lot more than just two cities.
Capacity: It would take over a decade and untold billions of dollars to build a track. That's ignoring all the right-of-way and environmental headaches. Once built, the track can't exactly be picked up and moved if peoples' travel habits change. Air routes change all the time, based on passenger demand.
Airspace is already there, and it's free. The only real limit on capacity is landing slots, and big airports like LAX can land over a thousand flights a day.
Security: In flight, the only external threat to an airliner would be from ground-to-air missiles. Those aren't exactly easy to come by. You can't make one in your tool shed. Airliners are very delicate, but they're also very hard to reach, six miles above ground and moving along at mach 0.8..
High-speed rails travel a fixed route at predictable times. You could destroy one pretty easily using an IED. Even a small fuel-fertilizer bomb would be sufficient -- moving at hundreds of miles per hour, anything which gets the train slightly off-kilter is going to cause massive casualties. Patrolling thousands and thousands of miles of rail, 24 hours a day, is impractical and expensive.
I see you've never had to enter a long series of numbers into a database. Entering numbers from the number row above the letters is slow, cumbersome, and error-prone.
I don't do enough data-entry to warrant a numeric keypad. Even if I did, I wouldn't want it glued to the right side of my keyboard, forcing me to reach 3 inches further every time I use the mouse.
The numeric keypad on standard keyboards is literally placed in the worst possible place for anyone except an accountant who doesn't use a mouse -- not surprising since most early computer users were accountants who didn't use a mouse.
For very little money, you can buy a detached numeric keypad which can be shoved out of the way whenever you're not using it. Speaking for myself, I prefer original IBM "Space Saver" keyboards. These are geniune Model M's with no numeric keypad -- they look like this. A few years back, I bought 5 of them for $200, so I'm pretty much set for life.
This summary is bad even by "Slashdot echo chamber" standards. XP is "far faster" than Vista? Here's what you'll find if you actually follow the link:
CPU benchmarks:
XP with SP3: 2053 Vista with SP1 Aero disabled: 2018 (change: -1.7%) Vista with SP1: 1994 (change: -2.8%)
So, basically, your machine will be imperceptibly slower if you want all the whiz-bang 3D and transparency of Vista's UI. Go figure.
Other results from the linked article:
XP boots about 30 seconds faster.
Vista copies a large file about 30 seconds faster.
XP might run faster on machines with 256 MB of RAM. Obviously a huge concern with memory costing about $20 per GB.
I don't mean to challenge anyone's world-view, but the people I know who run Vista are quite happy with it. That includes my wife, who runs Vista Home and Office 2007 on her 6 year old laptop with half a gig of RAM.
So that $250 EVGA 8800GTS I just bought soon will be used for a doorstop?
Count yourself lucky. I already have a Radeon 9700 Pro propping my office door open, so that's out.
And don't even mention the word "paperweight". A pair of SLI Voodoo2's are filling that role nicely.
I worked for a very large (top-3) pharmaceutical for years. They always asked employees to shut off their computers at night when they went home.
Then one day, they sent out a campus-wide email telling people to leave their computers on all night and over the weekend. They used the CPU cycles to run high-performance scientific computing jobs, saving the cost of buying a supercomputer.
Of course, not every company has a need for spare CPU cycles. This place did a lot of protein-shape searches etc..
As others have already pointed out, this isn't a C# problem. The objects weren't getting freed because there were still event handlers referencing them.
Note to beginning C# programmers:
A good way to avoid these types of problems is to use weak references when wiring up a large numbers of events.
I have a little utility class called WeakEvent which just uses an anonymous delegate to check if the object's still alive. If so, it calls the event. If not, the delegate removes itself from the event chain. Problem solved.
Your only other option is to remember to unsubscribe from every event when you're done with a listener object, so that it will be collected -- which pretty much defeats the purpose of using a managed language. Weak references: both.NET and Java provide them, but you have to make proper use of them.
it is crucial that we as a society have high-profile people that can question and critique the status-quo of governments, companies and other powerful groups without great fear of reprisals.
Not sure where you're from, but here in the United States we call those people "citizens".
Those of us who have been in the IT arena for a while remember installing our favorite OS, network client, power application, etc. by feeding the computer what seemed an endless supply of 5.25" soft floppy disks.
Those of us who've been in IT for a long while remember when the OS and power application lived on a floppy, because the computer didn't have a hard disk.
Have you actually looked at a PDF file in a text editor? It's a meaningless pile of spaghetti.
Microsoft's XML Paper Specification (XPS) is already available for anyone to implement. And it's plain, readable XML instead of a 25-year-old printer description language. Your applicaiton can build files using any XML parsing engine, instead of having to license a PDF library.
Already I see a few dozen replies along these lines:
"I should be able to buy my phone and my service as two separate transactions!!"
I don't know about other carriers, but Cingular already does this. Go look at their website. They list a price for the phone, and a price for the phone with a 2-year contract.
For example, a brand new Moto KRZR will set you back $400 with no contract, or $200 with a 24 month contract and a rebate form to fill out. You decide for yourself if 2 years chained to Cingular is worth an $8.33 discount every month.
Most people do commit to the service because they want the discount, and a cell phone isn't much good without service anyway.
You can still get the discount if you don't want a free phone. If your 2-year commitment is up and you want to make some money, go get a new phone at the discounted price, then sell it for a smaller discount on Ebay.
Buy an in-demand phone like the KRZR or Blackjack for $250, then sell it for $350-$400 and pocket the difference. People do this all the time -- go look on Ebay for yourself. You get to pocket some money in exchange for committing yourself to another 2-year contract. The person buying your phone gets a discounted phone, new-in-box, with no contract to worry about.
I guess you didn't get the memo. Turns out RISC wasn't the good idea everyone thought it would be in the 1990's.
RISC worked well when speed of memory and CPU's were at parity. The simplified instructions let the CPU be clocked a lot faster, not to mention their shallow pipelines made it less costly when branch prediction failed. The tradeoff was that it usually took more instructions to accomplish a given task.
But as CPU's have spent more and more time waiting for memory, CISC has really come into its own. Think of CISC as a compression algrorithm: An x86 instruction which fits in 16-32 bits might take 4 or 5 instructions on a RISC processor, weighing in at 96-128 bits. It's no surprise why CISC processors have destroyed RISC in the past decade.
When Flash is cleaned up and opened up enough to be fully intergrated into IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari in the least then it might be worth caring about.
Slashdot Mirror
No, because you can't cover a put option with stock you don't own. He won't own any of this stock for 5 years.
Recall that US-style puts can be excercised any time before they expire. He also can't cover a "European" put option, because there's no guarantee he'll keep working for Apple and own the stock 5 years from now.
"QuickProtect"
I know we're all supposed to hate Microsoft, but come on.
Here's a story: On the day Microsoft releases IE 8 -- the most popular web browser in the world -- Slashdot doesn't mention it, but posts a trivial article about Google Chrome benchmarks.
Speed: There is a very narrow range of trip lengths for which high-speed rail makes sense.
Suppose this train actually achieves the stated 236 miles per hour. Without making any stops at all, you're still looking at about 13 hours to get from New York to San Francisco. With five or six stops (that's not even one per state), it would approach 20 hours. This is a 6-hour flight. Anywhere farther than 600 miles is going to be faster by air.
For trips less than 250 miles, it's just not worth the hassle of getting to a major rail hub, parking your car (or taking transit and transfering), waiting to board the train, arriving at your destination with no ground transport and having to rent a car, etc.. It's easier to just jump in your car and drive there. Cheaper, too.
Those are best-case scenarios. In reality, the Acela takes 8 hours to get from Boston to Washington, DC -- a flight I've made in about an hour and fifteen minutes.
Cost: Anyone with $50 or $100 million can start their own airline, leasing a few planes and plying low-volume routes to make money for expansion.
Good luck getting a high-speed rail built for less than $50 billion. With that kind of money, you could outright buy 40 or 50 brand-new airliners and hire people to fly them. That lets you provide service to a lot more than just two cities.
Capacity: It would take over a decade and untold billions of dollars to build a track. That's ignoring all the right-of-way and environmental headaches. Once built, the track can't exactly be picked up and moved if peoples' travel habits change. Air routes change all the time, based on passenger demand.
Airspace is already there, and it's free. The only real limit on capacity is landing slots, and big airports like LAX can land over a thousand flights a day.
Security: In flight, the only external threat to an airliner would be from ground-to-air missiles. Those aren't exactly easy to come by. You can't make one in your tool shed. Airliners are very delicate, but they're also very hard to reach, six miles above ground and moving along at mach 0.8..
High-speed rails travel a fixed route at predictable times. You could destroy one pretty easily using an IED. Even a small fuel-fertilizer bomb would be sufficient -- moving at hundreds of miles per hour, anything which gets the train slightly off-kilter is going to cause massive casualties. Patrolling thousands and thousands of miles of rail, 24 hours a day, is impractical and expensive.
Depends.. Would that be "Conjugal Visit Prison", or "Pound Me In The Ass Prison"?
I see you've never had to enter a long series of numbers into a database. Entering numbers from the number row above the letters is slow, cumbersome, and error-prone.
I don't do enough data-entry to warrant a numeric keypad. Even if I did, I wouldn't want it glued to the right side of my keyboard, forcing me to reach 3 inches further every time I use the mouse.
The numeric keypad on standard keyboards is literally placed in the worst possible place for anyone except an accountant who doesn't use a mouse -- not surprising since most early computer users were accountants who didn't use a mouse.
For very little money, you can buy a detached numeric keypad which can be shoved out of the way whenever you're not using it. Speaking for myself, I prefer original IBM "Space Saver" keyboards. These are geniune Model M's with no numeric keypad -- they look like this. A few years back, I bought 5 of them for $200, so I'm pretty much set for life.
CPU benchmarks:
XP with SP3: 2053
Vista with SP1 Aero disabled: 2018 (change: -1.7%)
Vista with SP1: 1994 (change: -2.8%)
So, basically, your machine will be imperceptibly slower if you want all the whiz-bang 3D and transparency of Vista's UI. Go figure.
Other results from the linked article:
- XP boots about 30 seconds faster.
- Vista copies a large file about 30 seconds faster.
- XP might run faster on machines with 256 MB of RAM. Obviously a huge concern with memory costing about $20 per GB.
I don't mean to challenge anyone's world-view, but the people I know who run Vista are quite happy with it. That includes my wife, who runs Vista Home and Office 2007 on her 6 year old laptop with half a gig of RAM.Count yourself lucky. I already have a Radeon 9700 Pro propping my office door open, so that's out.
And don't even mention the word "paperweight". A pair of SLI Voodoo2's are filling that role nicely.
Umm, right.
You mean like they charge money for Internet Explorer now (Netscape)? And Media Player (Real)? And the
Oh, wait.. All those competitors are in various stages of demise but the Microsoft products are still free.
I worked for a very large (top-3) pharmaceutical for years. They always asked employees to shut off their computers at night when they went home.
Then one day, they sent out a campus-wide email telling people to leave their computers on all night and over the weekend. They used the CPU cycles to run high-performance scientific computing jobs, saving the cost of buying a supercomputer.
Of course, not every company has a need for spare CPU cycles. This place did a lot of protein-shape searches etc..
Full combat gear during World War 2:
35 pounds
Full combat gear in Iraq, 2007:
80 pounds
The soldiers have also gotten heavier. Unfortunately, ankles are still built about the same.
As others have already pointed out, this isn't a C# problem. The objects weren't getting freed because there were still event handlers referencing them.
.NET and Java provide them, but you have to make proper use of them.
Note to beginning C# programmers: A good way to avoid these types of problems is to use weak references when wiring up a large numbers of events.
I have a little utility class called WeakEvent which just uses an anonymous delegate to check if the object's still alive. If so, it calls the event. If not, the delegate removes itself from the event chain. Problem solved.
Your only other option is to remember to unsubscribe from every event when you're done with a listener object, so that it will be collected -- which pretty much defeats the purpose of using a managed language. Weak references: both
Not sure where you're from, but here in the United States we call those people "citizens".
Have you actually looked at a PDF file in a text editor? It's a meaningless pile of spaghetti.
Microsoft's XML Paper Specification (XPS) is already available for anyone to implement. And it's plain, readable XML instead of a 25-year-old printer description language. Your applicaiton can build files using any XML parsing engine, instead of having to license a PDF library.
Already I see a few dozen replies along these lines:
"I should be able to buy my phone and my service as two separate transactions!!"
I don't know about other carriers, but Cingular already does this. Go look at their website. They list a price for the phone, and a price for the phone with a 2-year contract.
For example, a brand new Moto KRZR will set you back $400 with no contract, or $200 with a 24 month contract and a rebate form to fill out. You decide for yourself if 2 years chained to Cingular is worth an $8.33 discount every month.
Most people do commit to the service because they want the discount, and a cell phone isn't much good without service anyway.
You can still get the discount if you don't want a free phone. If your 2-year commitment is up and you want to make some money, go get a new phone at the discounted price, then sell it for a smaller discount on Ebay.
Buy an in-demand phone like the KRZR or Blackjack for $250, then sell it for $350-$400 and pocket the difference. People do this all the time -- go look on Ebay for yourself. You get to pocket some money in exchange for committing yourself to another 2-year contract. The person buying your phone gets a discounted phone, new-in-box, with no contract to worry about.
RISC worked well when speed of memory and CPU's were at parity. The simplified instructions let the CPU be clocked a lot faster, not to mention their shallow pipelines made it less costly when branch prediction failed. The tradeoff was that it usually took more instructions to accomplish a given task.
But as CPU's have spent more and more time waiting for memory, CISC has really come into its own. Think of CISC as a compression algrorithm: An x86 instruction which fits in 16-32 bits might take 4 or 5 instructions on a RISC processor, weighing in at 96-128 bits. It's no surprise why CISC processors have destroyed RISC in the past decade.
This guy takes the time to quantify his assertions. That's a real scientist.
As a public service, here's a link to the International Earth-Destruction Advisory Board.
Current Earth Status: NOT DESTROYED.
Dupe from at least 2002. Both the slashdot article and the technology.
We've been doing that for 35 years, and it's worked quite well. There is no need to go to the moon, and so we haven't gone.
If people want to fund a joy-ride to the moon or mars with their own cash, by all means go ahead. Doing it with taxpayer money is criminal.
Oddly enough, Microsoft will get there first.
Nope. Launching things into space has been a pretty well-established problem since about the 1940's.
Ad free?
Looks to me like you've simply replaced Business Week ads with Slashdot ads.
Business Week had to pay the author who wrote this story, out of its ad revenues. What right does Slashdot have to those revenues?