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Comment: Re:Screw The Big Traders (Score 1) 126

by wienerschnizzel (#44047877) Attached to: HFT Nothing To Worry About (at Least In Australia)

The upshot: "Based on the vast majority of the empirical work to date, HFT and automated,competing trading venues have substantially improved market liquidity and reduced trading costs for all investors. Share prices are almost surely higher as a result of this reduction in trading costs, benefiting long-term investors. Higher share prices also have favorable implications for firms\ cost of equity capital. "

You are mixing apples and oranges here. Automated trading and HFT are not the same thing. Automated trading does provide substantially improved liquidity and reduced trading cost. HFT on the other hand does not demonstrably reduce trading costs (or at best the jury is still out on that) and the liquidity it provides means your transaction can go through in a fraction of a second rather than in one second. It provides no liquidity when the market is under stress as the HFT machines are plugged out immediately in non-standard situations. On the other hand, HFT takes a lot of capital out of the market for that 'service'. Is that fraction of a second of additional liquidity worh it? IMHO not.

There is so much FUD around HFT it is hard for people to think rationally about it. I had wasted the following study on a troll once already earlier this morning and therefore it would be a shame not to repost it: http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/HFT0324.pdf [wsj.com]

That article is funded by Citadel LLC that owns a HFT platform. It provides no hypothesis, no metrics, no tangible goals. It's pretty much an essay reiterating a couple dozen pro HFT papers and press pieces

Maybe you could educate yourself as well and listen to some other opinions - like that of one of the fathers of automated trading.

Comment: Re: What is 300 trillion ? (Score 1) 205

Over the past 20 years the currency supply as estimated by the Fed themselves has gone from $400 billion to $3,000 billion dollars - a gain of $2,600 billion.

You don't know what you are talking about. The Fed did not print all that money. It's the so called M2 type of money that has grown so rapidly. Please, educate yourself a little bit before you start spewing fire all over the internet about it.

Comment: Re:Consoles aren't profitable? (Score 1) 316

by wienerschnizzel (#43848233) Attached to: Console Manufacturers Want the Impossible?

I don't necessarily disagree. But I thought the comment I was reacting to was too one-sided. True, the expectations about the production values and the price level are stricter. But development in general is cheaper and the customer base is larger.

Additionally, the expectations on game graphics are not that hard on the developers. A new iteration of an existing engine is enough - sometimes with barely noticeable changes.

Comment: Re:Consoles aren't profitable? (Score 2) 316

by wienerschnizzel (#43839041) Attached to: Console Manufacturers Want the Impossible?

On the other hand, the software development industry has moved on significantly since the early 1990's:

.
- development tools are more reliable, languages more fool-proof
- there are extensive frameworks available - graphics, communication, logging - myriads of well tested libraries for pretty much anything
- development processes are better understood and are readily supported by various development tools
- automated testing and building software is much better
- operating systems are much more robust

These are all things that make development much cheaper and more stable.

And then we see the presentation of the new Call of Duty and its great new innovation is the inclusion of a dog. Where exactly do the $100 million (or whatever the ridiculous amount is) go?

Comment: Re:Nice idea, wrong problem (Score 1) 193

While mostly valid points, there are a couple of strange ones:

Cooling; To charge and run properly batteries must be cooled which further restricts the form of the battery and vehicle.

Why should this be a problem for a battery switching system? Isn't it much easier to cool the batteries when they're outside of the car? Seems like this is a case of an advantage for the swapping system.

Duplication; High performance batteries are expensive. There would have to be multiple batteries in multiple places to support one vehicle. There would be tens of thousands of dollars in batteries sitting waiting to be used. Someone would have to pay for that.

This is also an advantage of the swapping system. Batteries are the most rapidly degrading part of the car. Assuming they are good for 500 charges and the range is 100 miles, they will need to bee replaced after 50 000 miles. So you'll need more batteries than cars upfront, but in the long run, you will keep discarding the degraded batteries without an additional hassle to the owners and it will even out.

Comment: Re:The farmer's recourse is to sue to sell (Score 1) 579

by wienerschnizzel (#43729673) Attached to: Supreme Court Rules For Monsanto In Patent Case

I was wondering why Monsanto didnt sue the elevator instead

It's because he was the one who infringed on the patent - he used Roundup on his crops meaning he actually used Monsanto's technology. Also, the elevator most probably sold the soybeans legally - for processing, not for planting.

Comment: Re:Glitches (Score 1) 144

I still see no 'hacking' part in it

Consider a case where you have a senile cashier in your local grocery store and you find out that if you buy a certain combination of items and give him a 10 dollar bill, he'll confuse it with a 100 dollar bill and give you $92 back.

Would you call that hacking?

However, if you notice that the elderly clerk is not at the register and ask the manager to call him because you really like to do business with him personally, you might be conducting a fraud.

Comment: Business cycles and regulation play a role (Score 1) 614

by wienerschnizzel (#43663129) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Why Won't Companies Upgrade Old Software?

Many companies - especially the industrial ones - work on long business cycles. Things like assembly lines or CT scanners are supposed to run for decades.

Imagine a company producing CT scanners who's been on the market for some time. They would have dozens of versions of their scanners in the field, some of them more than a decade old, using old software. To update an old system with new software (such as one supporting new browsers) requires to run a full round of system tests. In the case of medical software, it's even mandated by government regulation.

This would mean you would have to rebuild all 20 (or more) machines in your test lab to perform the tests (simulators are not good enough for FDA) at a huge cost. On top of that, you might not even be able to get some of the parts for the machines that were produced in the previous millennium.

Comment: Re:Glitches (Score 5, Informative) 144

I assume you didn't read into the case. The prosecutors were never trying to argue that Nestor (the accused) used hacking to find the glitch. They were trying to argue that the combination of keys that activates the glitch is so complex that it should by itself be considered 'hacking'.

However, the 'combination of keys' used was not that extraordinary - all were legal game-play moves. Boiled down to the fact that switching a denomination of a game could change the payout the machine would give you on games you already won (but did not cash out yet).

The prosecution was trying to paint is as access rights violation but they failed to show just what exactly did the defendants do that they were 'not entitled' to do.

It still might be a fraud. Especially since Nestor convinced the operator in one case to switch on the feature that enabled the glitch. But hacking is out of the question.

Comment: Re:Not really (Score 3, Insightful) 717

Gun related crimes are not being done using legally held weapons. You're no better off with a printed gun than you are with a black market S&W. In one case you leave traces of your presence in the black market, in the other you leave traces of downloading the schematics from the internet. In the long run owning a 3D printer and gun schematics will be equal to having the means to murder someone. If your average Joe Blow has an opportunity and a motive on top of that, he'd still get busted.

Comment: Who wants your stuff? (Score 1) 205

The most important thing is to show them that there is a demand for what you do. This is where great ideas make it or fail. Henry Ford didn't invent mass production. It's just that nobody thought there would be enough demand for so many automobiles. Same goes for every other successful enterprises. Who would want a personal computer? Who would want a phone without physical buttons?

So who wants your stuff? How much do they want it? How much are they willing to pay for it?

Comment: Re:I'm tired of H1B politics (Score 1) 419

I blame the lack of programming apprenticeships, personally.

I wholly agree on that. But in addition, the deeper problem seems to be that the incentive for the colleges is to have as many graduates as possible - that's where the cash flow comes from. I think that's the reason why they've become a bit loose on the requirements.

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