Ultimately, the bets Corzine placed wound up better than the firm itself. The European debt trades were profitable, though too late for MF Global. Before Congress on Thursday, Mr. Corzine continued to emphasize how well his trades held up. “As of today, none of the foreign debt securities that MF Global used,” he said, “has [...]
Archive : business
The Future of USPS
The USPS can’t be faulted for providing a top-notch in-store experience and extremely reliable delivery service. In fact, their delivery service is the yardstick by which all other delivery services should be measured. Over the decades, they have made it possible for people to purchase goods from a Sears Roebuck catalog, rent movies that arrived [...]
Hyperbolic Discounting Bias
From the WSJ: For some pension recipients, the deals seem like the way out of a financial crisis. Joseph Serina, a metal-fabrication worker who spent 21 years in the Navy, received $57,450 three years ago from a group of investors in return for promising them $125,280 in pension payments over eight years. [snip] The biggest [...]
Popularity of MapReduce
Though enterprise users with heavy demand and big budgets might be willing to pay for a commercial system and all the tools, support, and service agreements those systems provide, users with more modest budgets or requirements find open source systems more attractive. – Stonebraker et al, MapReduce and Parallel DBMSs: Friends or Foes? Communications of [...]
Google Chrome: The App Store and the OS
Today marks approximately two years since the day Google first announced the Chrome browser. Since then, I have not only been using it as my primary browser but have also been avidly following the developer mailing lists of the chromium and chromium os projects. Well today Google officially introduced us to the Chrome web store [...]
Nobody Cares About Your Social Network Startup
Several weeks ago I was at a <insert name of programming language> user group meeting where a couple of start-ups were demoing the applications that they had developed. As is typical of such demos, the presenter explained what the application did, showed off some of its features and then got into the technical implementation details. [...]
Success in denying a client
Most engineering or design projects start off with a great deal implicit complexity in the requirements. The people responsible for producing the final deliverable bear the burden of reducing this complexity to acceptable and sane levels.
Google Wave is a …
… real-time comment system. This tweet made me laugh and the it made me realize that the walled nature of Wave means that it can’t be successful as an email system but it may well find a second life-line as a website comment system. People discuss ideas using natural conversations. But today’s comment systems essentially resemble [...]