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Comment Use good passwords (Score 4, Insightful) 150

A good password for wifi, since it doesn't really need to be memorized, is one generated by something like keepass2: 15 characters long random letters numbers and punctuation:

DHDukBDL04Pt2ZT

for example (note that is not a password I use, just one I randomly generated).

Since no-one actually has to type this in more than once per device, it's really not a major problem that you can't memorize it.

Comment Re:It's all just enabling more bullshit (Score 1) 203

You might think this is true, but it's not. The first thing is that you give priority to earlier bids/asks which changes the incentive structure, second off, you have a single point of arrival (a timestamper network border machine), third off, you specify in the law that the clock of that point of arrival must be within 1/2 second of correct relative to some UTC standard, but that so long as it is, the time of arrival at that location according to that clock is definitive. Third off you specify the granularity of the timestamp as 1ms so that an easily attainable granularity is all that is required. This is after all a relativistic problem, there is no such thing as universal simultaneity of an action spread out around the globe (diameter of the earth is around 8000 miles so two points can easily vary in their perception of what's simultaneous by 43 ms or so)

Finally, the existence and openness of the call market changes the incentive. People can obtain liquidity by offering or asking, then canceling orders. It's not just "place orders, at the end clear them" but place orders, during the 5 second interval publish the bid/ask/quantity/spread and allow people to cancel and re-order so that the market price settles into an agreed stable level. Currently the HFT people are "eating" that bid/ask/spread/liquidity uncertainty, letting people signal their liquidity would give you all the liquidity advantage without any of the real resources (electricity, computer networks, people's time) being used up by HFT.

HFT is a loss to the world because there exists alternatives where essentially all the liquidity benefit is gotten and essentially none of the limited resources currently being used are in fact used.

Comment Re:It's all just enabling more bullshit (Score 1) 203

The other option would be to make all markets call markets with 5 second rounds... https://www.investopedia.com/t... Everyone places their trade orders, those that match at the end of 5 seconds clear. The whole thing starts again...

This puts a 5 second granularity on all transactions, they clear at specific 5 second intervals. There is absolutely no real value created by greater than 5 second resolution. It's not like the world needs you to trade your stock within the next 3 seconds and 5 seconds from now is too late. Sorry.

Putting 1% transaction taxes is a lot, that would reduce liquidity quite a bit. But a call market structure doesn't reduce liquidity, and still eliminates the problem of people making money by sniping orders instead of providing a useful service.

Comment Re:Sounds iffy (Score 5, Insightful) 237

It's pretty easy to run water through a gas chromatograph / mass spec and see if it has anything other than water in it, and how much of that stuff it has. A bit harder to figure out exactly what the pollutant is, but if you have a sample of the fracking water it's easy to look at the peaks the fracking water has and see if they appear in the drinking water even if you don't know the identity of the chemicals.

Comment Re:semi serious question (Score 5, Informative) 130

Higher density at constant speed means higher signalling rates now vs before. We're already reading more off the disk per second at 7200 rpm than we were at 7200 rpm back when 200GB was big. Power requirements have taken a bigger position, and also at the higher densities tolerances need to be more exact and even more so at higher speeds. Going to lower spinning speeds allows you to get better results without tightening tolerances as much.

Comment Re:Excellent (Score 1) 177

Newton's law of gravitation F = G * m * me/r^2 where m is your mass and me is the mass of the earth, r is the distance between you and the earth... well, this approximation only works if you're far from the earth and can treat the earth like a point. To do it properly when you're standing on the earth you actually have to integrate over the volume of the earth all the contributions from point-like sub-regions of the earth. But you can think of W = m g where g is the acceleration at the surface of the earth, and g depends on the mass of the earth and its distribution in space as a big sum of me_i/r_i^2 for i going from 1 to a really large number and each chunk of the earth has a different index i and a different distance r_i from you.

Comment Re:NTP, GPS, PTP all have problems (Score 4, Insightful) 290

Look if the options are 24 minutes of random error or say 24 seconds of consistently biased error in all the devices in the hospital, I'll take the consistent bias any day. The point of all of this is so that a nurse walking into the room and seeing a blue lipped coma patient can determine things like how long has it been since the monitor whose leads fell off last recorded an accurate O2 saturation.

Comment Re:Why is it strange that NJ dominates the USA cit (Score 1) 118

It may be almost 5.5 times the population density of California as a whole state, but consider the following, there are 8.8 Million people in NJ but compare with the actually populated portions of CA:

Los Angeles County: 9.8 M people, 2400 per square mile
Orange County: 3 M people, 3800 per square mile
San Francisco County: 0.8 M people, 17200 per square mile!
Alameda County: 1.5 M people, 2000 per square mile.
Santa Clara County: 1.8 M people, 1400 per square mile

Total population of those counties: > 16M people

and that doesn't even consider the portions of those counties that are parks etc (especially significant for Alameda I think)

So the majority of people in California live in a region that is more dense than NJ, and the total number of people involved is close to double the entire population of NJ.

http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=DEC_10_SF1_GCTPH1.US05PR&prodType=table

Books

Philip K. Dick's Exegesis To Be Published In 2011 82

Dynamoo writes "The NYT reports that a two-part edition of PKD's Exegesis will be published next year. This huge work, a combination of journal and philosophical treatise, has been published in part before, but this is the first time that the whole version will be made generally available."
Government

Secret Service Runs At "Six Sixes" Availability 248

PCM2 writes "ABC News is reporting that the US Secret Service is in dire need of server upgrades. 'Currently, 42 mission-oriented applications run on a 1980s IBM mainframe with a 68 percent performance reliability rating,' says one leaked memo. That finding was the result of an NSA study commissioned by the Secret Service to evaluate the severity of their computer problems. Curiously, upgrades to the Service's computers are being championed by Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who says he's had 'concern for a while' about the issue."

Comment Too bad this is based on completely false data (Score 1) 834

See Andrew Gelman's article in American Scientist that debunks the statistics behind the "having more daughters" data at least. The largest credible effect on sex ratio is around 3% differences between boys and girls among those in famine conditions... and this effect is due primarily to nonsurvival of boy fetuses in famine conditions. The more daughters from beautiful parents effect has been overstated to be on the order of 15 to 30% differences, absolutely absurd if you even stop to think about it. The original studies do not have the statistical power to distinguish between random fluctuations and a real effect and therefore they overstate any effect that you find by the size of the standard error rather than the size of the effect..

  I can certainly believe that beautiful women have more children on average though....

Scientists show that even scientists rarely really understand statistics...

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