Google the names of senior executives at MTA and have conversations than slander their sexual habits, lack personal honesty, cruelty to animals and studying at a Bible University. Pepper your speech with copious profanity in multiple languages, making the task of humans who listen to this crap more onerous. Feel free to have such conversations, even if you are alone, which at the least will get you a seat to yourself.
I ask you not to advocate any act of violence against anyone in this, but you can be creative. You and your (imaginary) friend can talk of how your coven of Devil Worshippers plan to put a curse on named senior execs at the bus company....or have loud conversations about how you're going to hold noisy messy protests outside the homes of named executives.
The poor sods who have to monitor this will have to pass the 'threats' up the management chain. Enough false positives will make them reconsider their approach.
I have had serious problems with the aggressively incompetent HSBC 'fraud' detection.
The 'best' was when they claimed the reason they had (again) blocked my card was that a whole batch of cards had been compromised and it wasn't just my card.
Sadly for the liar at HSBC was I'm a tech journalist, so I immediately contacted their PR department who denied any knowledge of the breach.
I entirely believe you can fill one "relevant" course with 50% women, what does that prove ?
It proves there is some demand, not that there is a horde of women desperate to learn how to drill wells in the 3rd world....maybe there is, but there is no evidence for it.
I'm a science grad, I like this "evidence" thing.
There are a good number of people studying the Klingon language, yet I rather suspect that if every university offered such a course the places would not be filled. This is the same logic, "I've got a course that we get people to take, therefore it can scale"
Of course I don't *know* that the demand for Klingon is relatively small, *because I require evidence* before I know anything.
The whole idea of relevance strikes me as deeply patronising, the idea that women shouldn't concern themselves with men's issues, like money and innovation, but should be some sort of carer, either wiping things up if from a poor parental background or doing a PhD in caring for 3rd worlders if she has richer parents.
The 10 year horizon offers no step change in our space exploration to discover life. We certainly won't visit the gas giant moons that seem promising within a decade, NASA can't send humans to Mars within a decade, SETI continues good but unrewarded work, we have no new physics to peer more closely at extrasolar planets and even if we did, NASA can't build *anything* new in less than a decade.
So you basically have to ask, "will today's tech with a slight upgrade do something basically different in the next decade ?"
Maybe, but probably not.
NASA exists only to distribute pork according to the demands of incumbent politicians.
What we have here is in no useful way different from the Disney Hype for the next Star Wars film. Indeed I expect more surprises from SW7 than from NASA in the next decade, which is bloody sad.
Wasn't making that comparison, indeed Hitler had much little personal for most of his time, even when the war started. Also of course he fought for country in WWI doing a very dangerous role, got decorated. Obama never served, GW Bush's daddy got him the job of defending Florida from North Vietnam, Clinton dodged the war altogether, Reagan never saw action, etc.
McCain did do serious military service, yet in free and fair elections the American people rejected him for President.
I mention this because of the sheer number of films where the US President is portrayed as a cross between a Captain America and Batman., Independence day, White House Down, Olympus Has Fallen, Air Force One et al.
Yet the reality is that US Presidents cower in corners.
As a loyal citizen o Her Britannic Majesty, I ind this whole thing hilarious.
You need a castle mate. All this bollocks about fences "looking like a prison" is failure of imagination on a galactic scale. For centuries people from less happy lands have crossed our silver sea to raise the hand of war against out kings and queens but their knavish tricks have been frustrated by our castles.
They are so aesthetically pleasing that millions of tourists flock to them, The Tower of London has no moat but would remain fast against any plausible attack. We use it to store the Crown Jewels.
If your Mr. Obama would care to contact Her Majesty then I'm sure she would supply the plans as a gift, I have her address if you need it.
Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Queen of Canada,Queen of Australia,Lord of Man,Overlord of Sark Defender of the Faith Buckingham Palace London SW1A 1AA
Imagine a world where conservatives saw a genetic treatment and passed legistlation to allow it. Imagine a world where they listened politely to the faith groups, but listened more intently to doctors and sufferers from a horrible disease. Imagine that the leader of the conservatives went to one of the top 10 universities on the planet because he was smart, not because his dad gave them money.
Imagine that the leader of said party had been required to understand the difference between backwards E and upside down A as part of his course which included Goedel's incompletness theorem.
Imagine (and I'm getting silly now) that the leader of this conservative party pledged that under his leadership spending on socialised medicine would increase in real terms. Imagine further that his own children used the sociliased medial system.
Then on this planet, the leader of the conservatives pushed through laws in the teeth of faith group opposition to allow gay people to get married, because he believes in marriage and has a firm conviction that its benefits should be open to all.
Imagine a political leader who will leave officer *poorer* than when he started ?
This strange planet is called "Britain", David Cameron is the leader of the *Conservative* party.
He does politics for a living and has succeeded in a competitive domain, we should listen.
The issue is that Gerrymandered seats are safer, the elected official *is* communicating with voters, but the electorate he must worry most about is his own party in the primaries.
If you have a seat that is safe for one party then you get elected by activists of that party, not voters in general which leads to people getting elected from both parties who would never win on their own merits if they had to "communicate" with a more representative portion of the electorate.
They don't get re-elected by doing a good job, they get it by convincing activist members of their own party that they "represented our values".
They don't get fired by screwing up, but because some faction of their own party, be it unions, Tea party, some religious or ethnic group don't like them or because they sleep with someone that causes a fuss.
So the surprise is not that elected official are less than the best, the surprise is that they know such advanced maths as "some numbers are bigger than others" and that grasp foreign politics well enough to know that the Queen of England isn't a New York bar.
Imagine that we believe that "two women talking about something other than men" was a good test, we'd therefore lose:
Colonel Samantha Carter, PhD Physicist, intergalactic heroine, smarter than God. Can program, fly fighter jets & alien spaceships, shoot and do things that they don't bother to explain because they are simply beyond us poor males to understand. So that's Stargate gone.
Lt Uhura: Dr Martin Luther King who *some people* see as quite into rights loudly praised her character, but I can't recall her talking to women much, except maybe some of the aliens might have been female, so that's Star Trek gone.
ST in it's various forms look remarkably feminist (usually) women commanded warships in ST long before the US Navy let them, they are engineers, scientists, doctors and of course inexplicable nexus of unknown forces.
Ripley from Alien, Aliens, Alien3, Return of the Alien, The Alien strikes back, Alien Resuscitation. Smart, hard, no bimbo, the Aliens are apparently female, she kills them, conversation with them is rare. The men are a) weak, b) stupid, c) dishonest, d) weak, stupid and dishonest
X-Files : Scully is smart and hardly ever talks to women.
Agents of SHIELD: Loads of women programming, analysing and occasionally shooting at people. The inter-female dialog is rare.
Babylon 5: Strong women, being heads of security, scientists, highly cultured aliens.
Torchwood : Strong female lead, again almost no inter-female dialog.
Under the Dome : The main character is a strong woman, all the weak bad people are men
Terminator 1,2,3, Sarah Connor : Oh look ! what a surprise a strong woman in a world of defective men
I've not yet seen Interstellar, but let me guess, the women in it are smart and honest and whoever is screwing things up is a man ?
I can't be the only person who's noticed that in many SciFi and action films a dumb American male is accompanied by a highly educated woman who actually understands what is going on, whilst he shoots at it.
If you can explain it in ways they can understand then its probably not worth much and if you do explain it they can share it with others. You're really lucky you have an algo where they can see the effect, leave it like that.
They want a cash flow over time, which means:
1: Patent protection
2: A version 2,3,4,5, read up on Dolby Studios, they started decades ago doing the same thing but for hissy audio tape, still going N versions later on totally different media.
3: Get the word "mobile" in this. VCs are obsessed with mobile currently, I assume this will make phone pictures better ?
4: They want an exit strategy, is this going to be sold to join people's patent armouries or a firm they can float ?
5. Have you talked to Google, this sound like just what they might want for YouTube and to stop others getting it.
Your advertisers only want to reach people that are useful to them. Cross the two. Facebook et al try to steal personal data, why not negotiate with users ? Treat them like adults, say “you are going to get one ad per 5 page views, so why not tell us what sort of ad you want ?”. I care about storage, you probably don’t, so why not honestly ask the readers ? You’d have a higher quality product to sell and readers would be bugged less.
Also, make a virtue about only having non-irritating ads and be honest that having the ad pays for the content, so that people ad your site to their exception list.
The thing I hate about most ads is that their server slows down your page load, that's fixable, and would cause a lot less use of blockers.
I can't add anything to the RF debate, but be aware that being next to any major bit of infrastructure can be a real pain in the ass.
It will need fixing, and since phone companies show contempt for us all, you can assume that if it's cheaper and easier to make your life hell with noise etc, when they do maintenance or upgrade work, then that is what they will do.
You might believe in aliens, homeopathy or the existence of Sarah Palin's brain, but can you imagine a supervisor at a telco saying "no we can't do the work now, it might wake people up".
That won't always be 'working hours' either, you might never notice a drill during the day, but at 4AM you will.
I agree, but I think we both get some entertainment from reviews of crap. Also it would warn people away from wasting their money. Games are not cheap, and some are bought by wholly clueless adults for children. A grandparent who thinks they are buying a real treat, only to see the kids face drop hard deserve a bit of objective advice.
>You don't spend $30 million dollars and purchase a company if you aren't moving your software to that platform.
I did explicitly say that the quality of IT decisions at the LSE were terrible...
But yes, you do, indeed I did a similar thing when I ran the development of trading systems elsewhere. The existing system that I inherited was a pain to develop so I spent money on a parallel development to see if that would go better. As it happened we could replace it, but this was an experiment, not a deterministic plan.
This is a common pattern in large scale s/w development. Big firms often have competing product development teams, or there may be major components where you spend real money so that at the end of the day you have a high chance that at least one works. This is not limited to s/w, car firms may have different engine teams, and Intel has any number of groups that are in effect competing. And yes, the losing effort is in a sense "wasted", but it is an insurance premium.
I wonder is there a book on the management of large scale s/w development (>100 developers) ?
>This process is much further along the road than you seem to think. You must remember that I'm a headhunter of Old London town, also as it happens someone who has done Unix porting and debugged MS source code, so actually I get to hear lots of things, and although I agree that the reason for buying this thing is that it may be close to maturity it will require substantial customisation.
I also do occasional consultancy for banks, (although obviously not for the LSE), and the first question I asked when LSE people told me about this move was "where are the programmers" ?
It did not surprise me that they were overseas, though the footprint in London was so small I wondered how they could possibly support a system where direct feedback from the users is so important. But as far as I can tell, this was "business driven". Forgive me I don't know what industry or country you are in, but for me this means that they had nice discussions with senior management, perhaps over golf.
I would bet money that there is no lock-in for the developers, who may walk, indeed the lack of programmer involvement that I perceive (as an outsider) does not exclude the possibility that they have walked away already. They possess skills (high speed C++ for trading) that is actually in some demand, even in this tighter market, and by moving to London and working for one of my clients they could earn literally 5 to 10 times as much money. Yes, really, I do this for a living.
It's quite easy to lock such developers in, you give them money in a form that makes leaving unattractive.
By "easy", I mean it is not hard to understand this process, it is in fact "hard" because the politics of the firm typically are horrible, and I won't be the only headhunter sharking around these people.
Open source does not protect you from catastrophic staff loss. This will be a huge body of code, and even if it is well documented and designed will be tough for good people to come in cold. But of course being an outsourced project it will be very very difficult for them to get good people since the project is in a low cost country where real time trading is unknown to pretty much everyone outside this team. You ought to get people from London or NY to pug gaps, but that will be expensive,and thus avoided until it is too late.
As the above might show, I have experience of death march projects...
Firstly, the costs will go up, not down. That's because they don't trust the new solution to deliver, so for quite some time they will run both developments. *If* the systems is good enough then they migrate, but the LSE track record on technology is either funny or shameful, but certainly I would count them picking your system as an "endorsement" of the same order as being Bernie Madoff's accountant...
Next of course, it is not an open source solution, Oracle is not open source, trust me on this.
The critical term here is latency, the LSE wants as much algotrading as it can get, and a barrier to this has been the fact that Accenture has been "helping". (Imagine Bernie Madoff having a system built by the Goa'uld,, powerful, evil but ultimately doomed). It will not shock any Accenture watchers that the CIO of the LSE had been an Accenture employee.
So what we have is a more interesting thing, a competition between a partly open source system and.NET.
It is possible, maybe even likely that the.NET solution will be beaten, but that has not happened yet. MS can be expected to fight back, pride intersects with commercial interests here, Oracle is no more friend of MS than Linux.
I am no fan of MS, but it saddens me when open source fanbois distort facts to make it look like they've won, even when the real story offers an opportunity to beat their "enemies" in a more conclusive way.
>But we now have clear evidence that the real >cost to society of these behaviors is not in >billions but in trillions of dollars.
I will introduce you to a piece of advice I give to newbie bankers (I headhunt maths geeks for banks).
*Every cent* a banker makes is by providing some sort of service. Some of it is obvious stuff like interest, fees for advice or moving the stuff from one place to another, or carry out a specific trade for a customers personal holdings.
But liquidity and price discovery are services as well, even if you are not allowed to know who you are providing them to.
A major problem at the moment is the lack of liquidity and price discovery, we have in effect regressed to the 1950s. To take your analogy of the US army, it provides security to many people who it does not know by name, but who still exist. It is also in the nature of armies that they provide security to people who not only do not thank them, but fight them for doing so.
Of course like armies, banks screw up sometimes. Armies attack the wrong enemies, banks buy the wrong stocks or lend money to the wrong people.
>The average bonus on WS less than a year after these companies were going bankrupt was over half a million dollars.
That simply untrue. Have you been watching Fox news ?
>Lay 6,000 people off and get a 100,000,000 dollar bonus. But you can only buy 5 or 6 tv's and 3 or 4 cars. So overall demand for product is reduced.
That's true, but you have not asked what else can be done with the money ? Most gets spent or taxed.
>I now have 4 friends laid off and three who are on the edge of being laid off.
I've been let go myself, more than once. Not nice. no one has ever found a solution to this. Most of the tries have left a notable % of the population dead.
>It's like ignoring the price of having the U.S. Army all over the world protecting oil interests in the real price of oil.
Again the numbers do not support this. A critical reason the US has had such a poor time in Iraq is that nearly all the US armed forces have been doing something else. There is not much oil in Germany, Hawaii, Afghanistan, Korea, Japan and many other places US troops are to be found in serious numbers. US nuclear forces have not been used either...
>When are we going to stop all this behavior by 2% of the population which is hurting the other 98%?
So your behaviour has no bad consequences ? You're an American, so I'd bet real money that even though I earn more than you, both of my cars do vastly better gas mileage. indeed I mostly use public transport. Do you walk every journey you can ? Doubt it.
We screwed up, no question.
But look at what we did before, and what we will do again. Without modern finance there would be no Chinese or Indian economic miracles. Growth on the planet would have been 1-2% less every year. We have taken half a billion people out of abject poverty.
The screwup means we will have to wait longer for Africa, and that's tragic, but don't kid yourself that aid does anything but stop kids dying in such awful numbers. The fix is growth. You need credit for that, and you can no more run a 21st economy with 19th century banking than you can run it with 19th century transport or mechanical adding machines.
Technology will cause shit to happen. Planes crash and spread swine flu (though not at the same time). Mechanisation means industrial killing machines, and modern medicine meant that GW Bush did not die of his chemical abuses. Phototography brought child porn, and that in some years cars kill more people than guns on this
planet.
>Corporations have been hijacked by the executive class for their own benefit- not societies benefit. I interview bankers for a living, and will share that they come from a wider range of backgrounds than any type of people I interact with. There is a stronger negative correlation with parental income. The % of first / second generation immigrants is high.
What you have here is a meritocracy, which is of course, not a popular form of social organisation.
And yes, I'm a pimp for bankers, I know how grossly imperfect it is, you got a better one you can point to ?
In my experi8ence (as a headhunter for banks), most MBAs fail to exhibit any knowledge of maths beyond high school level. Actually that's unfair...
Although of course MBAs are a very wide range of people, I have noticed that many actively dislike maths, more than can be attributed to lack of ability.
I can't play the guitar or paint, and my knowledge of the political structure of Renaissance Venice is quite pathetic.
But I'm not proud of these ignorances, nor indeed am I proud of not knowing the plural of "ignorance":)
But often MBAs are, same with technology and if one more of them says "this is a people industry" to me, I may just strangle them.
This is an outstandingly bogus article, what happens when arts graduates attempt to understand anything except celebrity gossip.
>It is the hot new thing on Wall Street, The first algotrading I encountered was in the early 1990s at Deutsche, and they senior guys there told me of some of the mid80s stuff they'd done. Not new.
>a way for a handful of traders to master the stock market, Although algotrading is not exactly mass market, it is about as exclusive an activity as getting drunk.
>peek at investorsâ(TM) orders That's not algotrading.
>and, critics say, even subtly manipulate share prices. A major topic in algotrading is actually market impact modelling, ie working out how to make prices move less when they trade.
>Nearly everyone on Wall Street is wondering how hedge funds and large banks like Goldman Sachs are making so much money so soon after the financial system nearly collapsed. High-frequency >trading is one answer. Actually they're working out how to employ these guys since they've often been shafted by the GS bonus scheme.
>software that a federal prosecutor said could âoemanipulate markets in unfair waysâ â" it only added to the mystery. He was fed this line by GS as part of a dispute over an algotrader's pay. There is no suggestion that GS was being "unfair", just addressing the issues caused by GS having an inferior tech infrastructure for AT than may competitors.
>"This is where all the money is getting made,â said William H. Donaldson". I'd love to see the original quote before editing. Bet it was a lot less sexy.
>For most of Wall Streetâ(TM)s history, stock trading was fairly straightforward: For an arts graduate the writer is terribly ignorant of history, as well as trading. For instance is he not aware of how the Kennedy family got rich as part of causing the crash of 1929 ?
>Joseph M. Mecane of NYSE Euronext, which operates the New York Stock Exchange. âoeMarkets need liquidity, and high-frequency traders provide opportunities for other investors to buy and sell.â It's more complex than that. Some ATs are consumers of liquidity, others provide it, and there exist models that imply that heavy AT activity drives liquidity away.
>Average daily volume has soared by 164 percent since 2005, according to data from NYSE. Although precise figures are elusive, 164% is a surprisingly "precise" figure, which PR bunny fed that to him ? Wonder why the PR wouldn't give more ?
>"The result is that the slower-moving investors paid $1.4 million for about 56,000 shares, or $7,800 more than if they had been able to move as quickly as the high-frequency traders." That's really quite amazingly precise. So precise that I believe not a word of it. Edit/Delete Message
Slashdot Mirror
Google the names of senior executives at MTA and have conversations than slander their sexual habits, lack personal honesty, cruelty to animals and studying at a Bible University. Pepper your speech with copious profanity in multiple languages, making the task of humans who listen to this crap more onerous.
Feel free to have such conversations, even if you are alone, which at the least will get you a seat to yourself.
I ask you not to advocate any act of violence against anyone in this, but you can be creative. You and your (imaginary) friend can talk of how your coven of Devil Worshippers plan to put a curse on named senior execs at the bus company. ...or have loud conversations about how you're going to hold noisy messy protests outside the homes of named executives.
The poor sods who have to monitor this will have to pass the 'threats' up the management chain. Enough false positives will make them reconsider their approach.
Note how sympathetic the BBC is to homeopathy, giving a soft ride to someone who makes money from punting it.
Apparently that's "balance".
Next week the BBC will run an article on the different viewpoints on the square root of 16, giving equal time to those who say it is 8.
A perfect philosophical question, impossible for me to answer but ultimately it doesn't matter which bit of HSBC were lying.
I have had serious problems with the aggressively incompetent HSBC 'fraud' detection.
The 'best' was when they claimed the reason they had (again) blocked my card was that a whole batch of cards had been compromised and it wasn't just my card.
Sadly for the liar at HSBC was I'm a tech journalist, so I immediately contacted their PR department who denied any knowledge of the breach.
It was just made up to make me go away.
I entirely believe you can fill one "relevant" course with 50% women, what does that prove ?
It proves there is some demand, not that there is a horde of women desperate to learn how to drill wells in the 3rd world. ...maybe there is, but there is no evidence for it.
I'm a science grad, I like this "evidence" thing.
There are a good number of people studying the Klingon language, yet I rather suspect that if every university offered such a course the places would not be filled.
This is the same logic, "I've got a course that we get people to take, therefore it can scale"
Of course I don't *know* that the demand for Klingon is relatively small, *because I require evidence* before I know anything.
The whole idea of relevance strikes me as deeply patronising, the idea that women shouldn't concern themselves with men's issues, like money and innovation, but should be some sort of carer, either wiping things up if from a poor parental background or doing a PhD in caring for 3rd worlders if she has richer parents.
The 10 year horizon offers no step change in our space exploration to discover life.
We certainly won't visit the gas giant moons that seem promising within a decade, NASA can't send humans to Mars within a decade, SETI continues good but unrewarded work, we have no new physics to peer more closely at extrasolar planets and even if we did, NASA can't build *anything* new in less than a decade.
So you basically have to ask, "will today's tech with a slight upgrade do something basically different in the next decade ?"
Maybe, but probably not.
NASA exists only to distribute pork according to the demands of incumbent politicians.
What we have here is in no useful way different from the Disney Hype for the next Star Wars film.
Indeed I expect more surprises from SW7 than from NASA in the next decade, which is bloody sad.
Wasn't making that comparison, indeed Hitler had much little personal for most of his time, even when the war started. Also of course he fought for country in WWI doing a very dangerous role, got decorated. Obama never served, GW Bush's daddy got him the job of defending Florida from North Vietnam, Clinton dodged the war altogether, Reagan never saw action, etc.
McCain did do serious military service, yet in free and fair elections the American people rejected him for President.
I mention this because of the sheer number of films where the US President is portrayed as a cross between a Captain America and Batman., Independence day, White House Down, Olympus Has Fallen, Air Force One et al.
Yet the reality is that US Presidents cower in corners.
Depends whether you think that the White House will be attacked by a major nation state ?
The diligent historians amongst us will remember that when the White House was attacked by a nation state, it got trashed big time...
As a loyal citizen o Her Britannic Majesty, I ind this whole thing hilarious.
You need a castle mate.
All this bollocks about fences "looking like a prison" is failure of imagination on a galactic scale.
For centuries people from less happy lands have crossed our silver sea to raise the hand of war against out kings and queens but their knavish tricks have been frustrated by our castles.
They are so aesthetically pleasing that millions of tourists flock to them, The Tower of London has no moat but would remain fast against any plausible attack. We use it to store the Crown Jewels.
If your Mr. Obama would care to contact Her Majesty then I'm sure she would supply the plans as a gift, I have her address if you need it.
Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Queen of Canada,Queen of Australia,Lord of Man,Overlord of Sark Defender of the Faith
Buckingham Palace
London
SW1A 1AA
I'm glad that each system now makes more money for Oracle, I knew there was a reason for buying Sun/Oracle gear, it makes them richer.
Just for a moment I thought there might be a reason *for me*.
Imagine a world where conservatives saw a genetic treatment and passed legistlation to allow it.
Imagine a world where they listened politely to the faith groups, but listened more intently to doctors and sufferers from a horrible disease.
Imagine that the leader of the conservatives went to one of the top 10 universities on the planet because he was smart, not because his dad gave them money.
Imagine that the leader of said party had been required to understand the difference between backwards E and upside down A as part of his course which included Goedel's incompletness theorem.
Imagine (and I'm getting silly now) that the leader of this conservative party pledged that under his leadership spending on socialised medicine would increase in real terms. Imagine further that his own children used the sociliased medial system.
Then on this planet, the leader of the conservatives pushed through laws in the teeth of faith group opposition to allow gay people to get married, because he believes in marriage and has a firm conviction that its benefits should be open to all.
Imagine a political leader who will leave officer *poorer* than when he started ?
This strange planet is called "Britain", David Cameron is the leader of the *Conservative* party.
He does politics for a living and has succeeded in a competitive domain, we should listen.
The issue is that Gerrymandered seats are safer, the elected official *is* communicating with voters, but the electorate he must worry most about is his own party in the primaries.
If you have a seat that is safe for one party then you get elected by activists of that party, not voters in general which leads to people getting elected from both parties who would never win on their own merits if they had to "communicate" with a more representative portion of the electorate.
They don't get re-elected by doing a good job, they get it by convincing activist members of their own party that they "represented our values".
They don't get fired by screwing up, but because some faction of their own party, be it unions, Tea party, some religious or ethnic group don't like them or because they sleep with someone that causes a fuss.
So the surprise is not that elected official are less than the best, the surprise is that they know such advanced maths as "some numbers are bigger than others" and that grasp foreign politics well enough to know that the Queen of England isn't a New York bar.
Imagine that we believe that "two women talking about something other than men" was a good test, we'd therefore lose:
Colonel Samantha Carter, PhD Physicist, intergalactic heroine, smarter than God. Can program, fly fighter jets & alien spaceships, shoot and do things that they don't bother to explain because they are simply beyond us poor males to understand. So that's Stargate gone.
Lt Uhura: Dr Martin Luther King who *some people* see as quite into rights loudly praised her character, but I can't recall her talking to women much, except maybe some of the aliens might have been female, so that's Star Trek gone.
ST in it's various forms look remarkably feminist (usually) women commanded warships in ST long before the US Navy let them, they are engineers, scientists, doctors and of course inexplicable nexus of unknown forces.
Ripley from Alien, Aliens, Alien3, Return of the Alien, The Alien strikes back, Alien Resuscitation. Smart, hard, no bimbo, the Aliens are apparently female, she kills them, conversation with them is rare. The men are a) weak, b) stupid, c) dishonest, d) weak, stupid and dishonest
X-Files : Scully is smart and hardly ever talks to women.
Agents of SHIELD: Loads of women programming, analysing and occasionally shooting at people. The inter-female dialog is rare.
Babylon 5: Strong women, being heads of security, scientists, highly cultured aliens.
Torchwood : Strong female lead, again almost no inter-female dialog.
Under the Dome : The main character is a strong woman, all the weak bad people are men
Terminator 1,2,3, Sarah Connor : Oh look ! what a surprise a strong woman in a world of defective men
I've not yet seen Interstellar, but let me guess, the women in it are smart and honest and whoever is screwing things up is a man ?
I can't be the only person who's noticed that in many SciFi and action films a dumb American male is accompanied by a highly educated woman who actually understands what is going on, whilst he shoots at it.
If you can explain it in ways they can understand then its probably not worth much and if you do explain it they can share it with others.
You're really lucky you have an algo where they can see the effect, leave it like that.
They want a cash flow over time, which means:
1: Patent protection
2: A version 2,3,4,5, read up on Dolby Studios, they started decades ago doing the same thing but for hissy audio tape, still going N versions later on totally different media.
3: Get the word "mobile" in this. VCs are obsessed with mobile currently, I assume this will make phone pictures better ?
4: They want an exit strategy, is this going to be sold to join people's patent armouries or a firm they can float ?
5. Have you talked to Google, this sound like just what they might want for YouTube and to stop others getting it.
Readers block your ads because they are crap.
Your advertisers only want to reach people that are useful to them.
Cross the two.
Facebook et al try to steal personal data, why not negotiate with users ?
Treat them like adults, say “you are going to get one ad per 5 page views, so why not tell us what sort of ad you want ?”. I care about storage, you probably don’t, so why not honestly ask the readers ? You’d have a higher quality product to sell and readers would be bugged less.
Also, make a virtue about only having non-irritating ads and be honest that having the ad pays for the content, so that people ad your site to their exception list.
The thing I hate about most ads is that their server slows down your page load, that's fixable, and would cause a lot less use of blockers.
Fair point, but being near two sources of disruption is worse than being near one.
Also, I wonder about the long term legal issues about a roof with expensive infrastructure on it ?
I'm not qualified to have a good opinion on RF, but I do know that professional equipment can be badly affected by malfunctioning domestic kit.
Some friends of mine have a heavy duty mulcher and pump for their toilet, and it sent spikes down the mains which crashed PCs, sometimes.
This took a while to track down, one does not normally try to correlate flushing with crashing.
That was merely a funny story for them, but if my equipment made the telco stuff go wrong expensively, that could get painful.
I can't add anything to the RF debate, but be aware that being next to any major bit of infrastructure can be a real pain in the ass.
It will need fixing, and since phone companies show contempt for us all, you can assume that if it's cheaper and easier to make your life hell with noise etc, when they do maintenance or upgrade work, then that is what they will do.
You might believe in aliens, homeopathy or the existence of Sarah Palin's brain, but can you imagine a supervisor at a telco saying "no we can't do the work now, it might wake people up".
That won't always be 'working hours' either, you might never notice a drill during the day, but at 4AM you will.
I agree, but I think we both get some entertainment from reviews of crap.
Also it would warn people away from wasting their money.
Games are not cheap, and some are bought by wholly clueless adults for children. A grandparent who thinks they are buying a real treat, only to see the kids face drop hard deserve a bit of objective advice.
If a magazine or website is really scoring out of 10 or out of 100, then we ought to see some 1's and 2's.
But we don't do we ?
The researchers would find more utility in measuring the correlation between ad spend and score.
Anyone think these two variables don't correlate strongly ?
>You don't spend $30 million dollars and purchase a company if you aren't moving your software to that platform.
I did explicitly say that the quality of IT decisions at the LSE were terrible...
But yes, you do, indeed I did a similar thing when I ran the development of trading systems elsewhere. The existing system that I inherited was a pain to develop so I spent money on a parallel development to see if that would go better. As it happened we could replace it, but this was an experiment, not a deterministic plan.
This is a common pattern in large scale s/w development. Big firms often have competing product development teams, or there may be major components where you spend real money so that at the end of the day you have a high chance that at least one works. This is not limited to s/w, car firms may have different engine teams, and Intel has any number of groups that are in effect competing.
And yes, the losing effort is in a sense "wasted", but it is an insurance premium.
I wonder is there a book on the management of large scale s/w development (>100 developers) ?
>This process is much further along the road than you seem to think.
You must remember that I'm a headhunter of Old London town, also as it happens someone who has done Unix porting and debugged MS source code, so actually I get to hear lots of things, and although I agree that the reason for buying this thing is that it may be close to maturity it will require substantial customisation.
I also do occasional consultancy for banks, (although obviously not for the LSE), and the first question I asked when LSE people told me about this move was "where are the programmers" ?
It did not surprise me that they were overseas, though the footprint in London was so small I wondered how they could possibly support a system where direct feedback from the users is so important.
But as far as I can tell, this was "business driven". Forgive me I don't know what industry or country you are in, but for me this means that they had nice discussions with senior management, perhaps over golf.
I would bet money that there is no lock-in for the developers, who may walk, indeed the lack of programmer involvement that I perceive (as an outsider) does not exclude the possibility that they have walked away already. They possess skills (high speed C++ for trading) that is actually in some demand, even in this tighter market, and by moving to London and working for one of my clients they could earn literally 5 to 10 times as much money. Yes, really, I do this for a living.
It's quite easy to lock such developers in, you give them money in a form that makes leaving unattractive.
By "easy", I mean it is not hard to understand this process, it is in fact "hard" because the politics of the firm typically are horrible, and I won't be the only headhunter sharking around these people.
Open source does not protect you from catastrophic staff loss. This will be a huge body of code, and even if it is well documented and designed will be tough for good people to come in cold.
But of course being an outsourced project it will be very very difficult for them to get good people since the project is in a low cost country where real time trading is unknown to pretty much everyone outside this team. You ought to get people from London or NY to pug gaps, but that will be expensive,and thus avoided until it is too late.
As the above might show, I have experience of death march projects...
It's more complex than this...
Firstly, the costs will go up, not down.
That's because they don't trust the new solution to deliver, so for quite some time they will run both developments.
*If* the systems is good enough then they migrate, but the LSE track record on technology is either funny or shameful, but certainly I would count them picking your system as an "endorsement" of the same order as being Bernie Madoff's accountant...
Next of course, it is not an open source solution, Oracle is not open source, trust me on this.
The critical term here is latency, the LSE wants as much algotrading as it can get, and a barrier to this has been the fact that Accenture has been "helping". (Imagine Bernie Madoff having a system built by the Goa'uld,, powerful, evil but ultimately doomed). It will not shock any Accenture watchers that the CIO of the LSE had been an Accenture employee.
So what we have is a more interesting thing, a competition between a partly open source system and .NET.
It is possible, maybe even likely that the .NET solution will be beaten, but that has not happened yet. MS can be expected to fight back, pride intersects with commercial interests here, Oracle is no more friend of MS than Linux.
I am no fan of MS, but it saddens me when open source fanbois distort facts to make it look like they've won, even when the real story offers an opportunity to beat their "enemies" in a more conclusive way.
>But we now have clear evidence that the real >cost to society of these behaviors is not in >billions but in trillions of dollars.
I will introduce you to a piece of advice I give to newbie bankers (I headhunt maths geeks for banks).
*Every cent* a banker makes is by providing some sort of service. Some of it is obvious stuff like interest, fees for advice or moving the stuff from one place to another, or carry out a specific trade for a customers personal holdings.
But liquidity and price discovery are services as well, even if you are not allowed to know who you are providing them to.
A major problem at the moment is the lack of liquidity and price discovery, we have in effect regressed to the 1950s.
To take your analogy of the US army, it provides security to many people who it does not know by name, but who still exist. It is also in the nature of armies that they provide security to people who not only do not thank them, but fight them for doing so.
Of course like armies, banks screw up sometimes. Armies attack the wrong enemies, banks buy the wrong stocks or lend money to the wrong people.
>The average bonus on WS less than a year after these companies were going bankrupt was over half a million dollars.
That simply untrue. Have you been watching Fox news ?
>Lay 6,000 people off and get a 100,000,000 dollar bonus. But you can only buy 5 or 6 tv's and 3 or 4 cars. So overall demand for product is reduced.
That's true, but you have not asked what else can be done with the money ? Most gets spent or taxed.
>I now have 4 friends laid off and three who are on the edge of being laid off.
I've been let go myself, more than once. Not nice. no one has ever found a solution to this. Most of the tries have left a notable % of the population dead.
>It's like ignoring the price of having the U.S. Army all over the world protecting oil interests in the real price of oil.
Again the numbers do not support this.
A critical reason the US has had such a poor time in Iraq is that nearly all the US armed forces have been doing something else.
There is not much oil in Germany, Hawaii, Afghanistan, Korea, Japan and many other places US troops are to be found in serious numbers. US nuclear forces have not been used either...
>When are we going to stop all this behavior by 2% of the population which is hurting the other 98%?
So your behaviour has no bad consequences ?
You're an American, so I'd bet real money that even though I earn more than you, both of my cars do vastly better gas mileage. indeed I mostly use public transport. Do you walk every journey you can ?
Doubt it.
We screwed up, no question.
But look at what we did before, and what we will do again.
Without modern finance there would be no Chinese or Indian economic miracles. Growth on the planet would have been 1-2% less every year. We have taken half a billion people out of abject poverty.
The screwup means we will have to wait longer for Africa, and that's tragic, but don't kid yourself that aid does anything but stop kids dying in such awful numbers.
The fix is growth. You need credit for that, and you can no more run a 21st economy with 19th century banking than you can run it with 19th century transport or mechanical adding machines.
Technology will cause shit to happen. Planes crash and spread swine flu (though not at the same time). Mechanisation means industrial killing machines, and modern medicine meant that GW Bush did not die of his chemical abuses.
Phototography brought child porn, and that in some years cars kill more people than guns on this
planet.
>Corporations have been hijacked by the executive class for their own benefit- not societies benefit.
I interview bankers for a living, and will share that they come from a wider range of backgrounds than any type of people I interact with. There is a stronger negative correlation with parental income. The % of first / second generation immigrants is high.
What you have here is a meritocracy, which is of course, not a popular form of social organisation.
And yes, I'm a pimp for bankers, I know how grossly imperfect it is, you got a better one you can point to ?
In my experi8ence (as a headhunter for banks), most MBAs fail to exhibit any knowledge of maths beyond high school level.
Actually that's unfair...
Although of course MBAs are a very wide range of people, I have noticed that many actively dislike maths, more than can be attributed to lack of ability.
I can't play the guitar or paint, and my knowledge of the political structure of Renaissance Venice is quite pathetic.
But I'm not proud of these ignorances, nor indeed am I proud of not knowing the plural of "ignorance" :)
But often MBAs are, same with technology and if one more of them says "this is a people industry" to me, I may just strangle them.
False orders go at least back to the Kennedys in the 1920s.
I'm not sure what you mean by "retired" ? You do know about my hobby ?
There has been no quantum leap.
(bad pun)
This is an outstandingly bogus article, what happens when arts graduates attempt to understand anything except celebrity gossip.
>It is the hot new thing on Wall Street,
The first algotrading I encountered was in the early 1990s at Deutsche, and they senior guys there told me of some of the mid80s stuff they'd done.
Not new.
>a way for a handful of traders to master the stock market,
Although algotrading is not exactly mass market, it is about as exclusive an activity as getting drunk.
>peek at investorsâ(TM) orders
That's not algotrading.
>and, critics say, even subtly manipulate share prices.
A major topic in algotrading is actually market impact modelling, ie working out how to make prices move less when they trade.
>Nearly everyone on Wall Street is wondering how hedge funds and large banks like Goldman Sachs are making so much money so soon after the financial system nearly collapsed. High-frequency >trading is one answer.
Actually they're working out how to employ these guys since they've often been shafted by the GS bonus scheme.
>software that a federal prosecutor said could âoemanipulate markets in unfair waysâ â" it only added to the mystery.
He was fed this line by GS as part of a dispute over an algotrader's pay. There is no suggestion that GS was being "unfair", just addressing the issues caused by GS having an inferior tech infrastructure for AT than may competitors.
>"This is where all the money is getting made,â said William H. Donaldson".
I'd love to see the original quote before editing. Bet it was a lot less sexy.
>For most of Wall Streetâ(TM)s history, stock trading was fairly straightforward:
For an arts graduate the writer is terribly ignorant of history, as well as trading.
For instance is he not aware of how the Kennedy family got rich as part of causing the crash of 1929 ?
>Joseph M. Mecane of NYSE Euronext, which operates the New York Stock Exchange. âoeMarkets need liquidity, and high-frequency traders provide opportunities for other investors to buy and sell.â
It's more complex than that. Some ATs are consumers of liquidity, others provide it, and there exist models that imply that heavy AT activity drives liquidity away.
>Average daily volume has soared by 164 percent since 2005, according to data from NYSE. Although precise figures are elusive,
164% is a surprisingly "precise" figure, which PR bunny fed that to him ? Wonder why the PR wouldn't give more ?
>"The result is that the slower-moving investors paid $1.4 million for about 56,000 shares, or $7,800 more than if they had been able to move as quickly as the high-frequency traders."
That's really quite amazingly precise. So precise that I believe not a word of it.
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