Well, I have found some of the 261/262 useful for financial analysis (personal/not job), and for the GRE (but that's not real life;).
Front page ads?
on
Pods Unite
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
Ok, I've gotten used to the ads posing as articles for different software projects, but now we're advertising cars on the front page of slashdot? There's really nothing technically important here... ooo... I have a tape adapter and an mp3 player with my new car... big freaking whoop.
From my experience, some people's parents were cheap:(. You can't have an effective war with one transformer, but you could take the same money and get a dozen gobots and have a righteous galactic battle.
Yes, but with the DMCA, you're not allowed to steal anyone's identity using the default password, "password".::knock, knock:: Whoops... I've said too much.
Second, they wanted me to invest money in the stock market indexes when I was clearly observing a downward trend. I only gave them the first thousand because I wanted to see where it went. It was guaranteed not to lose money, but had a cap at 6% return. So far, it has not made a dime while my fixed interest CDs are rocking away at 3.75 %.
Please don't pay too much attention to short-term trends (anything less than 10-20 years). The immediate past is a poor predicter of future returns. It's impossible to routinely predict the direction of the market.
Even though I have money invested, I'd be quite happy to see the value of that investment decrease significantly. Because as it goes down, I will continue to purchase shares at better and better valuations, which will lead to improved returns as the market reverts to its historical trends. I don't know when the market will turn back up (or down again), so I will keep investing as it goes down because it will go back up.
I don't mind losing some of my investment from time to time for an overall long-term gain of ~10%. 3.75% may look nice in the current market, but over a few decades, it's not much to write home about.
First off, they explained that because I am "young" I can "risk" more and not be dead in the water because I can always "make it up later". I think this is a crappy approach to investment.
I generally don't hold financial advisors in high regards (would rather accumulate my own knowledge and information), but I'm going to have to agree with their statement. What this means is that you can ride out the short term fluctuations of the market for their long-term returns. You have a better tolerance for short-term risk to gain a more predictable long-term return. Risk != being careless and brash. Once you start needing your invested money within 5-10 years, that tolerance drops, and you should move more of your funds to investments with reduced short-term risk (5 year treasuries or inflation adjust bonds for example). But you will pay with reduced long-term gains.
I'm going to have to respectfully disagree adamently. Having someone else handling your bills may be alright, but no one is going to be as conscious of your situation as you are. And if you don't have a good eye on your finances, don't be surprised if you run into problems that could have easily been avoided.
As for preparing for retirement, don't trust your money with any manager, plan it out yourself. Brokers are salesmen. There are few industries that are as fundamentally at odds with their customers as the finance industry. They make money by getting you to do things with your money that will give them slices of your money.
And with a couple quality books on investing under your belt, you'll know more than most of them. Being in IT, your math skill are probably better than theirs anyway.
My reading list: By William Bernstein: "The Four Pillars of Investing", and if you want more math analysis, "The Intelligent Asset Allocator".
"A Random Walk Down Wall Street" (already mentioned)
"Security Analysis" or "The Intelligent Investor" if you want to pick individual stocks.
Also, I'll second the other person who mentioned reading The Motley Fool, and their "Money Guide" is VERY practical.
I don't think you're going to get too much from slashdot. Wait 'till you're older brother. You'll be wanting something like this from the school your children go to.
Though, I'd agree they need to change the authentication system.
Unfortunately for yahoo, that's basically what I used the dmoz-based Google directory for. Shoot, I even check my spelling with Google (hint hint Taco).
I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me, but for a market to be efficient, it assumes a rational valuation of the commodity. P/E multiples at that level still echo more of gambling to me than sound analysis.
Plus, the sector STILL appears to be overvalued. Amazon and Yahoo! are all still priced at over 80 times 2003 estimated earnings. That needs to come down significantly more before I'd be happy to see it start going up again.
Although I agree with your point that XML is overhyped and people are thinking about using it in cases where it may not be useful. I also think the opposite extreme, bashing every use of XML, is a little short sited.
You're not saying everything xml is bad, but while not being sure how much you've worked with xslt, I have to disagree with you and say that it's rather nice and useful for the task it was designed for. Using a well-formed description to manipulate another one seems logical to me. The syntax is all uniform, which is nice (if you've every looked at what PHP looks like embeddeded with HTML, you'll know what I'm talking about).
And without the language, which echos of Prolog and Lisp to me, people would probably use procedural methods common to what most people are used to, instead of a more recursive model that lends itself well to document processing. I'm scared to think of what a procedural type language defined in XML would look like, but recursive instruction look quite elegant.
I, for one, just think it was a wise path to take for a needed tool.
For any of you that subscribe to MIT's Technology Review, it has a good brief in the current issue about some efforts to use CPU time as a method of thwarting bulk mailers.
To sum up, requiring a cpu intensive calculation to send off email would limit the number of emails that a person could send off per day (a 10 second calculation would limit a spammer to 8k messages per day, but would still be bearable for you and me).
Won't stop the tide, but could help stem it's growth. Would raise the cost for sending spam dramatically. Bulkmail renderfarms anyone?
On the database level, I think you were confusing what I was saying? Don't store xml, but it would be nice (and there are) dbs that return xml result sets. Instead of having an record structure of some sort, you have a record element with fields as child elements instead of as something like an indexed array. No added complexity at all (assuming you're using built in libraries in languages like java and c# just as you already would with a database).
RMI is nice for what it does, and if you have complete control over the environment and the future direction of the product, it can be used well. XML interchange just gives you some more flexibility for the future in my eyes, when you don't know what programs in what languages will be using your program.
You can, of course, write you own protocols, but unless you need some serious optimization or something that can't be expressed in xml, why re-invent the wheel each time?
Slashdot Mirror
this was supposed to be a microsoft article. It's sco, riaa, microsoft, not sco, riaa, nokia.
Well, I have found some of the 261/262 useful for financial analysis (personal/not job), and for the GRE (but that's not real life ;).
Ok, I've gotten used to the ads posing as articles for different software projects, but now we're advertising cars on the front page of slashdot? There's really nothing technically important here ... ooo ... I have a tape adapter and an mp3 player with my new car ... big freaking whoop.
How about MSNbotulism?
Wow! I'm amazed. I had no idea our coast could handle an impact like that. The wave just dissipates right on our shore. The US is indestructible!
Are my dimes now worth 18 cents?
.. and the stock market, spurred on by slashdot, drops from fears of deflation.
From my experience, some people's parents were cheap :(. You can't have an effective war with one transformer, but you could take the same money and get a dozen gobots and have a righteous galactic battle.
Because the last developer they hired had 14 years of html/dhtml experience on their resume, and they thought 10 would be fair.
To reach a rational conclusion:
1)Read or skim Lawrence Lessig's "Code and other laws of cyberspace".
2) think a bit about the DMCA and DRM (assuming you oppose them).
3) if you still think this is a good idea, please click here to find practical help in your area.
Yes, but with the DMCA, you're not allowed to steal anyone's identity using the default password, "password". ::knock, knock:: Whoops ... I've said too much.
Second, they wanted me to invest money in the stock market indexes when I was clearly observing a downward trend. I only gave them the first thousand because I wanted to see where it went. It was guaranteed not to lose money, but had a cap at 6% return. So far, it has not made a dime while my fixed interest CDs are rocking away at 3.75 %.
Please don't pay too much attention to short-term trends (anything less than 10-20 years). The immediate past is a poor predicter of future returns. It's impossible to routinely predict the direction of the market.
Even though I have money invested, I'd be quite happy to see the value of that investment decrease significantly. Because as it goes down, I will continue to purchase shares at better and better valuations, which will lead to improved returns as the market reverts to its historical trends. I don't know when the market will turn back up (or down again), so I will keep investing as it goes down because it will go back up.
I don't mind losing some of my investment from time to time for an overall long-term gain of ~10%. 3.75% may look nice in the current market, but over a few decades, it's not much to write home about.
First off, they explained that because I am "young" I can "risk" more and not be dead in the water because I can always "make it up later". I think this is a crappy approach to investment.
I generally don't hold financial advisors in high regards (would rather accumulate my own knowledge and information), but I'm going to have to agree with their statement. What this means is that you can ride out the short term fluctuations of the market for their long-term returns. You have a better tolerance for short-term risk to gain a more predictable long-term return. Risk != being careless and brash. Once you start needing your invested money within 5-10 years, that tolerance drops, and you should move more of your funds to investments with reduced short-term risk (5 year treasuries or inflation adjust bonds for example). But you will pay with reduced long-term gains.
I'm going to have to respectfully disagree adamently. Having someone else handling your bills may be alright, but no one is going to be as conscious of your situation as you are. And if you don't have a good eye on your finances, don't be surprised if you run into problems that could have easily been avoided.
As for preparing for retirement, don't trust your money with any manager, plan it out yourself. Brokers are salesmen. There are few industries that are as fundamentally at odds with their customers as the finance industry. They make money by getting you to do things with your money that will give them slices of your money.
And with a couple quality books on investing under your belt, you'll know more than most of them. Being in IT, your math skill are probably better than theirs anyway.
My reading list:
By William Bernstein: "The Four Pillars of Investing", and if you want more math analysis, "The Intelligent Asset Allocator".
"A Random Walk Down Wall Street" (already mentioned)
"Security Analysis" or "The Intelligent Investor" if you want to pick individual stocks.
Also, I'll second the other person who mentioned reading The Motley Fool, and their "Money Guide" is VERY practical.
Really!! I found the kitchen sink in mozilla, where is this feature hidden?
I don't think you're going to get too much from slashdot. Wait 'till you're older brother. You'll be wanting something like this from the school your children go to.
Though, I'd agree they need to change the authentication system.
From the article, 11 legal suits are involved which reference 27 different patents from either side.
Unfortunately for yahoo, that's basically what I used the dmoz-based Google directory for. Shoot, I even check my spelling with Google (hint hint Taco).
Errata (2003-04-03)
Added Addendum: "Analysis of Chapter 16 Methods in the Real World: OMG!!!"
I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me, but for a market to be efficient, it assumes a rational valuation of the commodity. P/E multiples at that level still echo more of gambling to me than sound analysis.
Plus, the sector STILL appears to be overvalued. Amazon and Yahoo! are all still priced at over 80 times 2003 estimated earnings. That needs to come down significantly more before I'd be happy to see it start going up again.
wow, just looked it up, it's $38k now, I guess it was needed.
Yeah, it's crouching up on $36k+ by now, but did that actually warrant a name change?
Although I agree with your point that XML is overhyped and people are thinking about using it in cases where it may not be useful. I also think the opposite extreme, bashing every use of XML, is a little short sited.
You're not saying everything xml is bad, but while not being sure how much you've worked with xslt, I have to disagree with you and say that it's rather nice and useful for the task it was designed for. Using a well-formed description to manipulate another one seems logical to me. The syntax is all uniform, which is nice (if you've every looked at what PHP looks like embeddeded with HTML, you'll know what I'm talking about).
And without the language, which echos of Prolog and Lisp to me, people would probably use procedural methods common to what most people are used to, instead of a more recursive model that lends itself well to document processing. I'm scared to think of what a procedural type language defined in XML would look like, but recursive instruction look quite elegant.
I, for one, just think it was a wise path to take for a needed tool.
For any of you that subscribe to MIT's Technology Review, it has a good brief in the current issue about some efforts to use CPU time as a method of thwarting bulk mailers.
To sum up, requiring a cpu intensive calculation to send off email would limit the number of emails that a person could send off per day (a 10 second calculation would limit a spammer to 8k messages per day, but would still be bearable for you and me).
Won't stop the tide, but could help stem it's growth. Would raise the cost for sending spam dramatically. Bulkmail renderfarms anyone?
Weren't they the first to have banner adds?
Haven't read the application, but I assume they have some "novel" way of including advertisements.
On the database level, I think you were confusing what I was saying? Don't store xml, but it would be nice (and there are) dbs that return xml result sets. Instead of having an record structure of some sort, you have a record element with fields as child elements instead of as something like an indexed array. No added complexity at all (assuming you're using built in libraries in languages like java and c# just as you already would with a database).
RMI is nice for what it does, and if you have complete control over the environment and the future direction of the product, it can be used well. XML interchange just gives you some more flexibility for the future in my eyes, when you don't know what programs in what languages will be using your program.
You can, of course, write you own protocols, but unless you need some serious optimization or something that can't be expressed in xml, why re-invent the wheel each time?