CPAN 2.0

Greatest announcement since Perl 5.12 GA.

Status update 5

Lack of change control is maddening. I spend way too much effort fixing things that shouldn't be broken. Reference data is ill thought out. Is the New York Stock Exchange represented by the ISO standard code XNYS or NYSE or N? Is Arca represented by XPSE or ARCAX or ARCA or PCOAST or P or . . . you get the idea.

Maybe I should take a job picking nits. At least when you're done, you have a juicy pile of nits to dig into for dinner.

Non-ECC memory considered harmful

For me, bitflips due to cosmic rays are one of those problems I always assumed happen to “other people”. I also assumed that even if I saw random cosmic-ray bitflips, my computer would probably just crash, and I’d never really be able to tell the difference from some random kernel bug.

A few weeks ago, though, I encountered some bizarre behavior on my desktop, that honestly just didn’t make sense. I spent about half an hour digging to discover what had gone wrong, and eventually determined, conclusively, that my problem was a single undetected flipped bit in RAM. I can’t prove whether the problem was due to cosmic rays, bad RAM, or something else, but in any case, I hope you find this story interesting and informative.

Yes, that is how markets work.

On the "Trade-at" regulations being proposed:

Institutional investors using dark pools to avoid market impact could also suffer, brokers argued. That's because the operator of the pool would be forced to sweep the public markets to keep the trade in-house, UBS told the SEC. The sweep could act as a signal there was large buying or selling interest, UBS said. That could impact the price of the stock, negating the benefits of the dark pool.

Yes, that is how efficient markets usually work in economics.

Worst bug resolution ever

In summary: Guy opens a bug against Visual Studio, problem with the German language version. Bug is more or less closed with the resolution "Learn English".

Thank you Microsoft.

The end of the exchanges

As NYSE passes its regulatory power to FINRA, the meaning of the word "exchange" loses relevance.

It was announced a month ago, on May 4, and was greeted without much fanfare: The New York Stock Exchange will delegate to FINRA responsibility for performing market surveillance and enforcement over trading on the NYSE.

To comply with the niceties of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the NYSE will retain responsibility for making sure that FINRA is doing its job. Lawyers will prepare appropriate procedures to demonstrate that this oversight function is being carried out properly. But, I very much doubt that anyone believes this will amount to anything more than window dressing. The NYSE's oversight role will be mainly perfunctory.

Comparison of Windows NT networking protocols

What a blast from the past.