Put in a market buy order with no limit, and you open yourself to limitless losses if there's nobody willing to sell at the moment. You'll match the first offer to sell no matter how high it is.
Put in a market sell order with no limit, and if there's no covering buy order you just put in a request to give it away for a penny a share.
This wasn't a BSOD or General Protection Fault kind of crash, or even a DIV/0. It was an order that didn't have any of the safety measures that should have been there, any one of which could have prevented this from making news. So, there's a new rule... if somebody yells "SELL!" and no buyers show up... they don't fill orders for a penny, they stop, report there's a crazy man in the room, and then there's an auction held to determine who the lucky bidders are.
The problem was in bad design... nobody bothered to check that there were enough offers to buy to satisfy the sale. If they wanted to offer it all at a reasonable price, all they had to do was specify a limit price and wait for the buyers to show up. If they wanted to sell quick, they should have known there weren't enough offers to buy to satisfy their sale, so you'd have a market order that would fall to zero on them and somebody should stop that from happening.
Not quite. A stock's quote price is the last price at which a bidder's offer matched a seller's asking price. A "level 2" quote has two parts, the highest bid price that hasn't been matched up yet, and the lowest asking price that hasn't matched up yet. The true value is somewhere in between these two, but nobody knows where until somebody steps in between the high bid or low offer or somebody moves their price to get a deal.
Any computer programmer should check that there's matching orders on the other side of their trade before placing a large order. A program that doesn't will execute just fine, but crash the economic system.
Here's the way this went down. Because this malfunction dumped market (not limited) sell orders without matching buys, they quickly soaked up all of the buy bids that were on the market, leaving only outrageously low buy bids that usually don't see the light of day at the top of the pile. Those got filled too, and suddenly you've got everything trading at 90ish% off what it was a moment before. CNBC and other instant media realizes that something's amiss... Jim Cramer happened to be making his regular afternoon visit to the daytime programming and shouted out a pretend limit buy order for the stock he was scheduled to say was overvalued... he then "sold" that order a few moments later to show there was instant profits to be made by somebody. This selloff was nonsense, and the market quickly recovered to where it was before minus some losses for the fact that some of the investing public was losing faith in the system.
Now, since this was a malfunction, the people who lost 90% instantly and the people in the other side of those trades who made 80% did so by foul play. The flash crash trades were busted (market regulators ordered them undone) and the world went on like this never happened.
There used to be rules that if there was nonsense at the NYSE, the specialist on the floor would ask questions and stop processing trades. If there was no news to make a fundamental change in the stock and there were suddenly sellers but no legit-priced buyers... just shout out that this was going on and some buyers would be sure to show up.
But now, with many electronic places competing with the NYSE, an NYSE-only stop to computers damage that needs to be routed around, and the crash continued at these exchanges. So, the SEC at its level over all of these systems is establishing rules under which every exchange has to stop processing trades in the affected issues until there's enough time for the news of the event has spread and everybody's had a chance to react.
Market rules are based on trying to give everybody involved a fair chance to trade. Trading on information you have that isn't public yet is not allowed. Martha Stewart went to jail because she had money in IMClone, and was called before the news was out by somebody telling her an FDA trial had a failed result. She sold immediately, and then we she realized she had fouled, faked her phone records about the call. Gotta play fair... they are watching.
You misread. Red Hat is a business built around giving the Microsoft-like treatment to Linux. They'll train, support, and give you somebody to complain to when it's not working.
Many people don't write a separate check for the insurance, they pay into an escrow account with their loan holder that pays for the insurance, taxes, and other required homeowner expenses. If you can't pay the insurance or taxes, you're already in default of your mortgage.
Microsoft will provide their army of lawyers to argue against that injunction. Sure, it's not a foolproof solution, but it's the best one money can buy.
Yep. That damn Windows desktop license fee will surely lead to Linux on the desktop right about... uh, okay, give it time.. uh, keep waiting. It'll finally be this year..... uhm.
One of the reasons why big business loves Windows and isn't that interested in Linux other than maybe Red Hat is because if things go horribly wrong, there's somebody with deep pockets to sue. What Microsoft is offering here is a classic part of their business plan... if somebody comes up with a submarine patent they'll take the legal pain so their customers don't have to.
Remember the lesson of SCO and Darl McBride.... even though the claims had no legal merit, they still were messy enough that it was cheaper to pay the settlement price than fight them and win the case. When faced with such a problem, any sane business man will take the less expensive option even if it's not the one that's good for the world.
So, this license fee can be seen as an insurance policy against such patent claims that could bite the handset maker for a mistake the software writers made.
Here's another web board gone wrong... G4TV's Forums After aquiring TechTV and then banning anybody who posted they wanted Leo Laporte and Patrick Norton back on The Screen Savers, they had a mess of a forum trying to sell their current programming, which was unlike anything either the video game centric G4 or tech business channel TechTV had aired in the past.
Now, it's a banning offense to claim that Olivia Munn is not the host of Attack of the Show, despite the fact she's made more appearances this year on NBC promoting her upcoming role on a sitcom called Perfect Couples and as a correspondent on The Daily Show. Yep, that's right... there's been an endless series of female guest hosts "filling in" for her ever since the network's E3 specials. Sorry, airing the Stand Up For Cancer event that she was a part of, to promote her NBC series, doesn't count.
Why can't they admit she's moved on to bigger and better things and promote the people that actually are the future of their network?
Banning or shaming customers who disagree with you and publicly say so is no way to run a business. It doesn't leave you in the perfect world where everybody agrees with you, it leaves you in a world where nobody cares about you and you go away.
Also in the business-model-change department that users of this site will care about, ZoneEdit is transitioning accounts to a new business model soon. People who enjoyed five free domains worth of DNS service will see their free service cut to two domains (potentially leaving some forgotten-about sites unreachable) unless they've paid for credits for their premium services at some point in the past. They're also multiplying stored credits by 12 because they're going monthly instead of annual credit usage.
Setting up such a bookmark/password/sync app takes a lot of time, and it's a pain to switch services. People who use it already would rather pay than see it go away.
These "We're shutting down... oh no we're not!" stories remind me of a electronics/appliances store around here called Bernie's. See, they were losing money and decided to go out of business. They started a Going Out of Business sale and under state law, you can't advertise a Going Out of Business sale without going out of business immediately afterwards. But, a funny thing happens when you start discounting things like TVs and Monster Cables below their minimum advertised price and offering your customers good value for what they pay and cutting down on returns with an All Sales Final policy. You become... gasp... PROFITABLE!
It's legal to bring in new inventory even during a Going Out of Business sale, so they're restocking with versions of products that didn't exist when the "Going Out of Business Sale" and they've been stuck going out of business for years. It's a business model that works for them.
Google's Ad business is critical to the American and world economy. Billions change hands every day based on users who are connected to businesses by the Google Ad Network, not just on the search engine but thousands of content sites. If it were to vaporize, there's nothing that would be able to fill the void fast enough.
You have a point... as the goo.gl site says "All goo.gl URLs and click analytics are public and can be shared by anyone."
Then again, it's the first URL shortening site that has a too-big-to-fail company behind it so we don't have to worry about a tr.im-like shutdown threat.
If you're good enough to be sold on Amazon, you're automatically in on IMDB. If you say that you're ignoring Amazon and the kind, expect to be ignored by IMDB.
Slashdot Mirror
Put in a market buy order with no limit, and you open yourself to limitless losses if there's nobody willing to sell at the moment. You'll match the first offer to sell no matter how high it is.
Put in a market sell order with no limit, and if there's no covering buy order you just put in a request to give it away for a penny a share.
Limit orders rule.
This wasn't a BSOD or General Protection Fault kind of crash, or even a DIV/0. It was an order that didn't have any of the safety measures that should have been there, any one of which could have prevented this from making news. So, there's a new rule... if somebody yells "SELL!" and no buyers show up... they don't fill orders for a penny, they stop, report there's a crazy man in the room, and then there's an auction held to determine who the lucky bidders are.
The problem was in bad design... nobody bothered to check that there were enough offers to buy to satisfy the sale. If they wanted to offer it all at a reasonable price, all they had to do was specify a limit price and wait for the buyers to show up. If they wanted to sell quick, they should have known there weren't enough offers to buy to satisfy their sale, so you'd have a market order that would fall to zero on them and somebody should stop that from happening.
Not quite. A stock's quote price is the last price at which a bidder's offer matched a seller's asking price. A "level 2" quote has two parts, the highest bid price that hasn't been matched up yet, and the lowest asking price that hasn't matched up yet. The true value is somewhere in between these two, but nobody knows where until somebody steps in between the high bid or low offer or somebody moves their price to get a deal. Any computer programmer should check that there's matching orders on the other side of their trade before placing a large order. A program that doesn't will execute just fine, but crash the economic system.
It had nothing to do with the operating system. The program gone amok was running in user space.
"Prevent" is such a strong word. They're good at keeping bad things from happening, just not perfect.
Here's the way this went down. Because this malfunction dumped market (not limited) sell orders without matching buys, they quickly soaked up all of the buy bids that were on the market, leaving only outrageously low buy bids that usually don't see the light of day at the top of the pile. Those got filled too, and suddenly you've got everything trading at 90ish% off what it was a moment before. CNBC and other instant media realizes that something's amiss... Jim Cramer happened to be making his regular afternoon visit to the daytime programming and shouted out a pretend limit buy order for the stock he was scheduled to say was overvalued... he then "sold" that order a few moments later to show there was instant profits to be made by somebody. This selloff was nonsense, and the market quickly recovered to where it was before minus some losses for the fact that some of the investing public was losing faith in the system.
Now, since this was a malfunction, the people who lost 90% instantly and the people in the other side of those trades who made 80% did so by foul play. The flash crash trades were busted (market regulators ordered them undone) and the world went on like this never happened.
There used to be rules that if there was nonsense at the NYSE, the specialist on the floor would ask questions and stop processing trades. If there was no news to make a fundamental change in the stock and there were suddenly sellers but no legit-priced buyers... just shout out that this was going on and some buyers would be sure to show up.
But now, with many electronic places competing with the NYSE, an NYSE-only stop to computers damage that needs to be routed around, and the crash continued at these exchanges. So, the SEC at its level over all of these systems is establishing rules under which every exchange has to stop processing trades in the affected issues until there's enough time for the news of the event has spread and everybody's had a chance to react.
Market rules are based on trying to give everybody involved a fair chance to trade. Trading on information you have that isn't public yet is not allowed. Martha Stewart went to jail because she had money in IMClone, and was called before the news was out by somebody telling her an FDA trial had a failed result. She sold immediately, and then we she realized she had fouled, faked her phone records about the call. Gotta play fair... they are watching.
You misread. Red Hat is a business built around giving the Microsoft-like treatment to Linux. They'll train, support, and give you somebody to complain to when it's not working.
Many people don't write a separate check for the insurance, they pay into an escrow account with their loan holder that pays for the insurance, taxes, and other required homeowner expenses. If you can't pay the insurance or taxes, you're already in default of your mortgage.
Microsoft will provide their army of lawyers to argue against that injunction. Sure, it's not a foolproof solution, but it's the best one money can buy.
In Microsoft's bank accounts we trust.... and just who is MontaVista?
Yep. That damn Windows desktop license fee will surely lead to Linux on the desktop right about... uh, okay, give it time.. uh, keep waiting. It'll finally be this year..... uhm.
Sorry. The protection is against mistakes Microsoft makes, not your own legal stupidity.
One of the reasons why big business loves Windows and isn't that interested in Linux other than maybe Red Hat is because if things go horribly wrong, there's somebody with deep pockets to sue. What Microsoft is offering here is a classic part of their business plan... if somebody comes up with a submarine patent they'll take the legal pain so their customers don't have to.
Remember the lesson of SCO and Darl McBride.... even though the claims had no legal merit, they still were messy enough that it was cheaper to pay the settlement price than fight them and win the case. When faced with such a problem, any sane business man will take the less expensive option even if it's not the one that's good for the world.
So, this license fee can be seen as an insurance policy against such patent claims that could bite the handset maker for a mistake the software writers made.
Here's another web board gone wrong... G4TV's Forums After aquiring TechTV and then banning anybody who posted they wanted Leo Laporte and Patrick Norton back on The Screen Savers, they had a mess of a forum trying to sell their current programming, which was unlike anything either the video game centric G4 or tech business channel TechTV had aired in the past.
Now, it's a banning offense to claim that Olivia Munn is not the host of Attack of the Show, despite the fact she's made more appearances this year on NBC promoting her upcoming role on a sitcom called Perfect Couples and as a correspondent on The Daily Show. Yep, that's right... there's been an endless series of female guest hosts "filling in" for her ever since the network's E3 specials. Sorry, airing the Stand Up For Cancer event that she was a part of, to promote her NBC series, doesn't count.
Why can't they admit she's moved on to bigger and better things and promote the people that actually are the future of their network?
If your own forums about yourself are a circus, you're clearly doing something wrong.
Banning or shaming customers who disagree with you and publicly say so is no way to run a business. It doesn't leave you in the perfect world where everybody agrees with you, it leaves you in a world where nobody cares about you and you go away.
Also in the business-model-change department that users of this site will care about, ZoneEdit is transitioning accounts to a new business model soon. People who enjoyed five free domains worth of DNS service will see their free service cut to two domains (potentially leaving some forgotten-about sites unreachable) unless they've paid for credits for their premium services at some point in the past. They're also multiplying stored credits by 12 because they're going monthly instead of annual credit usage.
Setting up such a bookmark/password/sync app takes a lot of time, and it's a pain to switch services. People who use it already would rather pay than see it go away.
These "We're shutting down... oh no we're not!" stories remind me of a electronics/appliances store around here called Bernie's. See, they were losing money and decided to go out of business. They started a Going Out of Business sale and under state law, you can't advertise a Going Out of Business sale without going out of business immediately afterwards. But, a funny thing happens when you start discounting things like TVs and Monster Cables below their minimum advertised price and offering your customers good value for what they pay and cutting down on returns with an All Sales Final policy. You become... gasp... PROFITABLE!
It's legal to bring in new inventory even during a Going Out of Business sale, so they're restocking with versions of products that didn't exist when the "Going Out of Business Sale" and they've been stuck going out of business for years. It's a business model that works for them.
Google's Ad business is critical to the American and world economy. Billions change hands every day based on users who are connected to businesses by the Google Ad Network, not just on the search engine but thousands of content sites. If it were to vaporize, there's nothing that would be able to fill the void fast enough.
I can't wait to see this added to the Six Flags health plan.
Let's put the Google Instant censorship team on this one quick...
You have a point... as the goo.gl site says "All goo.gl URLs and click analytics are public and can be shared by anyone."
Then again, it's the first URL shortening site that has a too-big-to-fail company behind it so we don't have to worry about a tr.im-like shutdown threat.
If you're good enough to be sold on Amazon, you're automatically in on IMDB. If you say that you're ignoring Amazon and the kind, expect to be ignored by IMDB.