Posts by Billa Bong

Re: err @ ip and LAMP holes lol

> so for the statement made to be true doesnt [sic] also require PHP or MySQL to be used.

OMG, you're killing me here. "LAMP has holes" != "Apache/Linux has holes". You specified issues with a LAMP stack, so it does require MySQL and PHP in your argument. Otherwise it's not a LAMP stack, is it?

And you suppose that because they advertise for a job on PHP/MySQL (no L or A mentioned in your post at least) that this means all of their internet facing machines run LAMP, and that's how the hackers got in? That's already been dis-proven.

Great detection skills...

Re: Biased from the start - That moment of realization

"Note 1: I suspect some CIO's do. But like a useless manager reading a Dilbert cartoon, they laugh without realising that they are the butt of the joke."

Wait... that's me... *sobs quietly until home-time*

Re: Fantastic... this is going to be such a FAIL!!!

I don't think you've understood how trading futures work (CME doesn't trade equities, only options and futures - the article title doesn't make that clear). Futures are all about predictable service and price. Futures only requires 2 things:

1. A provider willing to guarantee that for a particular period of time in the future he will provide a specific service for a specific sum of money

2. A consumer willing to take that service at that cost

Everything else that happens in the middle is fluff.

If I was running a cloud service, and was able to sell a contract for £10 to provide a service to whoever held that contract from 1st Jan 2015-1st Jan 2016 at a price of £5/month then assuming I'm reasonably confident that I can indeed provide that service for that price and still make a profit it's guaranteed income in the future for me (plus gets me a bit of cash in the drawer right now).

If I'm a commodity broker who sees that the cloud provider is selling a contract at that price, and believes that the going market rate for that service during 2015 will be, let's say, £10/month then I'd happily buy it, because just before 2015 I sell the contract for £50 to someone who *actually* wants the service (i.e. is in the right location or whatever), at a profit to me (£40) and an overall saving for them (£110 instead of £120).

To address your points:

1. At the point that an individual actually wants to make use of that service they will buy that either from a broker with the right contract for the contracts value (unless they had the forethought to purchase such a contract early on) or from the cloud provider themselves for the market rate; the overall prices will be comparable, the only thing that changes is who makes the profit.

2. The contract value is somewhat divorced from the actual service cost. Wheat futures are traded well in advance of farmers growing and the price of the actual item varies wildly depending on the weather, etc., etc. - but the contract is to buy at a set price no matter what, so the value of that contract will increase/decrease over time as conditions change (i.e. my contract that I bought for £5 for a tonne of wheat at £5 when the real cost of the wheat is closer to £50 can be sold on for anything up to £45).

3. Please do build a data center. Would you consider accepting some money now to sell a contract of service at a set price that you won't need to deliver on until you have built it, thereby allowing you to build it? If so, you've just traded your first cloud derivative on CME. :o)

PS. I'm not 100% convinced it will work just because a pig is a pig - you don't have lots of choices, how many legs it'll have, how many ribs, etc. Cloud contracts can be very variable. If there's a market for such futures contracts then maybe it'll bring providers into conformity, but that in itself is unhelpful to those people who want to tailor their cloud solution for their specific requirements - like buying an off the shelf web hosting package with a lot of crap you don't want just because you wanted ssh access.

Maybe the last microwave beeper and smoke alarm were real...

Too soon?

Re: Is there a benefit?

I can't tell whether this is a sarcastic comment or not... The point is to _be_ the fastest so you can _be_ the winning participant. If a company announces lay-off's, it can't be doing very well, so the trick is to catch the news and put in an offer to sell all your shares at a (not so reasonable) price before everyone interested in buying realize that you're now trying to offload something that's not worth what you're asking. I.e. the trick is to offload something worth 2p for £2 before everyone else realizes it's not worth £2. At the end of the day rapid selling only helps you increase the gap between what "everyone else" thinks a stock is worth and what you think it's worth.

Now scale that up - not only do you need to watch the news, but you also watch what other traders are doing, trying to infer meaning from their activity. The big players can really screw up the market simply by deciding to cash in and sell all their shares for _no_ reason, resulting in other algo's figuring that "they must know something we don't" and also selling up - no human intervention, yet the value of the stock falls significantly.

The principle of a free market is that I can buy whatever I want provided I'm willing to pay the price being asked by the _seller_. If you as the exchange enforce a fixed price, you're effectively saying "yes, you own it, but I'm telling you that you can't sell it for more/less than this price". It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I'm sure you wouldn't like it if ebay told you that your car is only worth £6000 today and therefore that's all you can sell it for.

If this was the case I'd also be out of a job since I work for one of the low-latency market data vendors!

No, logic pass

See reply to Mr. Cheese above, and stop duplicating threads which is how this whole FAIL happened in the first place.

"but only after being told how"

Or after the programmer has figured out how and programmed the phone to run the same logic.

Yes, it's a machine that simply does what it's told. Yes, it's not hard for a piece of software to solve a cube. Most innovations (e.g. auto-parking on BMW's) are the same sort of innovation. For goodness sake, see it for what it is... *lego* connected to a mobile *phone* to do something pointless *really* fast.

I want one!

Beer, because these guys deserve one. More than one. But they only have 5.3 seconds to drink them.

Oh, and let's not forget...

That in order to correctly identify all the meta data for the *content* of a file that you're going to need in order to file things in a way that's easily locatable by *position* on the hard driver, you'll need to not only see the future, require about 10 times the hard drive space for the meta-data and soft-links to the file in question but you'd lose probably about a year of your life per file doing the categorizing and organizing.

Hey, maybe I could employ a librarian to keep my computer organized? Nah, I'll just download Google Desktop. Oh, Sh...