The secret world of hedge funds

The secret world of hedge funds

USA: Assault on Reason

Book Excerpt: The Assault on Reason

Consumer JRE again

I think this is really exciting news: Chet Haase about Consumer JRE

Consumer JRE

Consumer JRE

JRE of a 2-3 MB Size?

Then that would be exciting! What would be even better would be to have this JRE shipped with Firefox…

JavaFX

Cedric’s rant against JavaFX seems widely unjustified to me.

JavaFX vs. Swing
Some people prefer to use scripting languages and actually might find the use of JavaFX easier than just coding Swing user interfaces in POJ (Plain Old Java).
Matisse is still the easier way to quickly develop user interfaces anyway. So Swing POJ or JavaFX, let the community decide.
A really cool technology is actually F3 (Sun acquired Seebeyond in Sept 05), and I would be more interested to know what Sun intends to do with F3 than with JavaFX.

JavaFX vs. Groovy
Same argument as above, if people want to use Groovy, let them use it. Having a competitor is not so bad after all. Personally I do not give a damn, but I know one thing, I’d rather have the choice than no choice at all.

Netbeans
If Sun tries to make people use their IDE, so what? It is fair. They offer a free, not-so-bad IDE, getting better and better to developers…what should we do? Abandon NetBeans, IntelliJ (dying IDE I think anyway) and embrace Eclipse? No way. Again, I’d rather have the choice.
BTW, an Eclise plug-in is also available there: https://openjfx.dev.java.net/#downloads

Sun does not care about Java
Quite a statement: why would Sun not care about a mainstream language that helps selling hardware and consultancy, a language that put Sun on a map, a language used everywhere, in all organizations? I think Sun cares but Jonathan Schwartz needs to focus on making Sun a profitable, efficient, competitive and innovative company. After all, if Java dies, Sun certainly will follow Java in the grave. Now that Java is Open Source, Sun’s focus has changed a bit: they are no longer the sole force behind the Java platform, it is just normal that their priority shifts a little.

Groovy in the Financial Sector
One of the readers comment was actually not quite right: “Groovy is in pretty heavy use in the financial sector”, so is Java, C#, C++, Perl, … you name it. As a rule of thumb, Java is mainly used on the server side (market connectivity, quote engines, …), C/C++ mainly used for the quant libraries, Java Swing, Eclipse RCP & C#.NET more or less equally sharing the client space. I only talk about what I know, i.e., front office applications…so ‘heavy use’ is quite an over-statement. Surely, Groovy is not yet used for critical applications.

A voté

Le vote, plus qu'un droit, un devoir!

Housing Market, LTCM & Swans

Suggested books & articles:

Housing Market
Watch out for the cracks

LTCM
When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management and the related article Hedge funds may pose huge market risk: Fed

Swans
Look out for the The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

That's it... oil has peaked

Is that it? Is this finally happening? We might have passed the oil peak… time to prepare ourselves for the 100$/barrel, clean out the bicycles, and burn dead wood in your flat: Saudi Arabian oil declines 8% in 2006

Sarko ou Royale?

I watched the debate, and I must say I was quite surprised by the aggressiveness of Mme Royale. She acted on a different registry, unusual, more right-ish than I expected. What strikes me is that she does not want to take a clear stand on anything. I am not really sure that her temper will go down well when dealing with foreign politics: how realistic it is for France to boycott the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics?

Mme Royale did not know how many Nuclear Submarines France has… (She thought 1!)

They got it wrong on the part of nuclear in electricity. Every French person knows that Nuclear power accounts for about 78% in France’s Electricity, not 17%, nor 50%.

What France needs: reforms, everybody knows that. Actually, we have known that since the seventies. Why do we have to face the wall to act?
When I see the PS’ programme.. hhmmm, hold on, do they have any? Same old stuff: Royale is a pretty face hiding a bunch of old trees.

Let me take just one example: I have been living in London since 1999 (before the Euro was officially adopted)… and the number of French people coming here has grown to a staggering number of 250,000 or more! Why? Because work is flexible, you can find a job within 2/3 weeks, because if you are smart and work hard, employers give you chances, responsibilities, regardless of how old you are, or which school you are from. I think that overall, unless I am mistaken, French people seem happier here! (Do not get me wrong, there are issues here as well, but this is not the point).

I am currently watching “The Daily Politics”, and they are saying, ‘on the left, they have no programme, apart from the fact that we should be happier”, “on the right, he is the right-wing Thatcher that will bring reforms”. It is quite funny to think that the country Thatcher admired the most in her time was…. France.

However, Mr Sarkozy, do not rest assured. If you are elected, you will have to do what you said, implement the reforms promised. Otherwise…

ping

PING localhost (127.0.0.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.068 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.081 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.070 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.082 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.084 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=64 time=0.083 ms
^C
--- localhost ping statistics ---
6 packets transmitted, 6 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.068/0.078/0.084/0.006 ms