CRYPTOCHAOS

My investment/subscription in the safari books service continues to pay off...

Naked short selling is when an investor essentially shorts a stock that he hasn’t actually borrowed. During the worst of the financial crisis some corporate executives blamed the tactic for their companies’ plunging stock prices. In the U.S., regulators put new temporary rules in place to curb the practice in the fall of 2008. That rule was made permanent in July 2009.

Best explanation with illustrations that I've come across....

Over the years I have come to describe Test Driven Development in terms of three simple rules. They are:

1. You are not allowed to write any production code unless it is to make a failing unit test pass.
2. You are not allowed to write any more of a unit test than is sufficient to fail; and compilation failures are failures.
3. You are not allowed to write any more production code than is sufficient to pass the one failing unit test.

You must begin by writing a unit test for the functionality that you intend to write. But by rule 2, you can't write very much of that unit test. As soon as the unit test code fails to compile, or fails an assertion, you must stop and write production code. But by rule 3 you can only write the production code that makes the test compile or pass, and no more.

By agreeing on common specifications for lifecycle resources and the services to access them, we can eliminate traditional barriers between tools and open the door to new forms of collaboration. OSLC can bring value to software delivery teams and tool providers alike, from the most Agile to the most ceremonial of projects, and for commercially-licensed, open source, and internally developed tools.

International Business Machines Corp. is trying to transform itself again, as Chief Executive Samuel J. Palmisano races to stay ahead of the technology industry's fast-changing profit curve.

The top priority this time for Big Blue—which famously dumped its personal computer business in 2004 to focus on consulting and services—is software. Mr. Palmisano wants that high-margin business to account for about half of the company's pretax profit by 2015, up from just over a third in 2003.

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Specialized software, meanwhile, is harder to replicate and still grows at a high rate and commands high margins. Last year, IBM's pretax profit margin was 18.9%, up from 10.6% in 2003. The company's new goal is to reach a pretax margin of 20% by 2015.

Ellison says he has already stopped the carnage at Sun, less than four months after the sale closed in January. "Their management made some very bad decisions that damaged their business and allowed us to buy them for a bargain price," he told Reuters. He added that he expects profit from Sun's operations to boost Oracle's earnings in the current quarter, which ends May 31.

The integration has proceeded swiftly, says Ellison, because a protracted antitrust review in Europe gave Oracle time to draw up an exhaustive plan for resuscitating Sun. In typical Ellison fashion, he took a hands-on approach to the integration, choosing to meet directly with technical managers at Sun as often as four days a week to diagnose its problems, rather than delegating the work to underlings.