And I can't afford $99 a year for free apps that I code once and forget about.

Then don't write them. Free [as in beer] software that is not open source is the worst of both worlds.

I'd rather pay for a decent app than get it for free.

A good developer's time is worth more than $99/hour, so the $99 fee per year is really inconsequential in the long run.

Now, they'll ask for a ban of the device and people who will preorder will take the risk of waiting for ages before having their brand new phone...

Doubtful. The stock shows no sign of this worry. And I find it extremely unlikely that a US court is going to bow to a Korean company to ban a product in the US. There is little to gain for a judge in that position. Justice is not blind.

IMO HFT also "steals" a lot of top scientific and engineering talent from fields that _are_ socially useful The result is, these great minds aren't researching anything but how to pick other people's pockets.

Besides the fact that high frequency trading adds liquidity to markets that might otherwise be illiquid (and thus overall creates more efficient markets), quantitative trading has pushed the boundaries of the high performance computing market for the last few years, and continues to do so.

Network and compute companies are making better products, in part, because of a demand created for them within the financial industry.

Of course the real question is why you'd be trading in Hong Kong from the US when you can co-locate your servers in Hong Kong and run your trading algorithms there.

The strategy your parent is alluding to is a straight up latency arbitrage where you trade instrument X in market Z based on you getting information from market Y before anyone else.

Stephen Greenfield, the best professor I ever had, happened to be one who mainly taught undergraduate math to math, physics, and engineering students and graduate math. However, he had a passion for teaching unlike I'd ever seen and he worked on a course at Rutgers to teach math to non-sciency types.

The last paragraph on this page has a description of the course.

The course diary has tons of material in it.

If you browse Stephen Greenfield's homepage, you'll find a wealth of teaching that might be able to be applied. He's since retired, but his page is still up, so make use of it!

In addition, many Costco labs (at least by me) are covered under this list of color profiles, often with specific information about the paper type and which printer was used to do the profile.

Since it is on multiple RAID 5 devices and I run a cron job that checks the MD5 sigs against a database I know that it is in good condition.

I applaud your desire to maintain integrity, but if something goes bad, you have to manually restore it. I, too, keep MD5 or SHA hashes of important stuff, but I rely on ZFS and 'scrubbing' for verifying integrity. The benefit is if a bit does flip, it will be corrected, and I will be told.

You should consider it.

You know, someone could write an allegory about the desire for the geeks to have the consumer appliance "du jour" run an unadulterated Linux distribution. Call the appliance a toaster for all I care. It doesn't matter, because the story is always the same.

10 years ago we wanted some fancy hard drive based MP3 player to run our favorite distro. Now, it's phones. The cycle repeats.

The reason that the geeks will perpetually never be satisfied? We meet women*, we fall in love, we get married, we buy a house, etc.

At some point, you say, "I just want a damned insert name of appliance that works." And hence, Apple.

Fight it all you want, but mark my words.

* - Hopefully.

I may hate Groupon, but this person has no one to blame but herself. Do the math. If you sell that many coupons, even if only a fraction of them are redeemed, that's a lot of cupcakes.

CS is programming.

âoeComputer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.â -- Edsger Dijkstra

It sounds like you are the one conflating things and causing confusion.

Better idea - add a low fixed tax on any stock trade, regardless of value or size. Just a $0.01 per transaction would make HFT extremely costly- if you're executing millions of trades per second, that quickly brings you up to billions of dollars per trading day. HFT can't be that profitable. Yet it wouldn't really affect people making actual investments - ones where you actually investigate the company to make sure it knows how to earn a profit.

Yea, what a horrible idea. You'll realize how bad an idea that is when you want to go unload your "investment" and no one wants to buy it.

Liquidity comes at a price. Those who provide liquidity take on risk. It's a generally accepted practice to pay people for taking on risk (see, for example, interest rates).

Come back when you understand how markets work.

However, the amazing advancement in network technology and all these crazy RDMA and 10G user-space network stacks is literally due to the HFT community

This is completely true. Financial applications are driving HPC components in a way that educational and government spending haven't in years and years of use.

Where do you get these price feeds from (or route the prices to) ? surely you could save 5e-7s just by using shorter cables or putting the mic and speakers closer to the traders.

Nearly all market data is transmitted from the exchanges via IP multicast. Typically you will have servers in each exchange to trade on that exchange, but you also will have links pulling in market data from every other relevant venue as well.

See, for example, Spread Networks who made a lot of money by digging a really straight trench from Chicago to New Jersey in order to get CME data to the NJ metro area as fast as possible.

there is absolutely nothing, whatsoever, 'valuable' behind a credit default swap. it is a bet. that is a fact, and its not rocket science, and its not a conspiracy theory, and its not "the ignorant and alarmist" decrying some nefarious boogey man.

You're completely wrong. If you buy a bond from company X, it certainly makes sense to have insurance that if company X goes out of business, you still get your money. And hence, the credit default swap was born. The fact that someone may use the instrument to speculate is a separate issue.

People speculate on everything. It's what you do when you stock up on cans of soup when it's on sale. You speculate that the price is going to go up next week.

If this is the case, you're an idiot. I'm sorry; I don't know an easier way to put it.

There is no appreciable difference between Debian and OS X in setting up a desktop environment to develop in other than that in Debian, it might make take me some time to figure out what video card driver to use.

What the hell took you 4 hours in Debian? It should take you about 15 minutes on Debian, or Ubuntu, or OS X.