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
It is possible, maybe even likely that the
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.
Edit/Delete Message
I'm not sure why anyone refers to employment as a games developer as "steady". They are precarious outfits, pathetically dependant upon "hits" that may or may not come again, until they burn you out and drop you like a stone.
An easy explanation for developers "going rogue" is that the pay is so very very bad that the difference between unemployment and salary whilst you write the code is so small that it is not as hard a decision as in other lines of work.
A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson
