Quick Joke.
Q: What is the difference between a banker and a trader?
A: A banker will try and tell you a 10% loss followed by a 10% gain is breaking even.
On The Hysteria Over “The Cloud”
Today’s question is: “should your mom use Google search?” It it is a good thing that Google has directly told us that their motto is “don’t be evil,” as their systems are subtle and difficult to evaluate.
Microsoft is once again going to try its hand at retail stores (for example see the following CNET article). From my experience I think this is going to be horrible. But it does not have to be- Microsoft (if it had the will) could produce a great store that is profitable and improves the world. Here is my quick history and wish list.
A bit of a tempest in finance news involving accusations of sensitive code stolen from a major trading desk. For emerging details see:
How do you get access to current and historical research articles if you are not affiliated with a university or large research organization? Our second public service article discusses some useful online research archives. Read more…
This is a public service article encouraging all of us to back up our data (which more and more is our lives). I sketch some methods and resources for doing this.
As more of our life becomes digital (work, finances, passwords, pictures, contacts,dairies,videos and email) we must be more diligent in backing up our data. If your hard drive fails at work you might lose some spreadsheets (and you might not lose anything if your IT department is on their toes) if you computer fails at home you lose your wedding album. Your hard disk will fail and try to take all of your data (life) with it- it is a matter of when not a matter of if. You want this to be an inconvenience, not a disaster. Become expert at backing up and take the time to help others.
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I recently had the pleasure of finding a copy of the manual for my favorite calculator. I know it is incredibly nerdy to have a favorite calculator (and even more nerdy to read the manual), but it really got me thinking. Read more…
There is plenty of blame to go around from the current global financial crisis. But, I would like to point out that it is not “all the quants’ fault.” We are all now, unfortunately, sitting in the middle of a high quality (and extremely expensive) lesson in financial mathematics. I would hate for some of the truly important points to be lost to paying too much attention to some of the shiny details.
Some time ago I subscribed to The Database Column because it would be fun to see what these incredible people wanted to discuss. We owe much of our current database technology to Professor Stonebraker and Vertica sounds like an incredible product. And I definitely want to continue to subscribe.
However, the reading experience is marred by some flaw in their RSS system that keeps marking the article “MapReduce: A major step backwards” as a new article. This causes the article to appear in my RSS reader every few weeks as “new.” This wouldn’t bother me too much except that the article runs so counter to experience that it is itself offensive.
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