Hashemian Blog Web Tools, Financial Markets, Technology Monday, January 29, 2007 Bypassing Dell for HP  In a not too distant past Dell was king of the hill, at least when it came to computer hardware. I still remember their old one page ads on the backs of PC magazines taunting Compaq and bragging about their cheaper prices. Dell was unstoppable and its stock was a reflection of how rapidly this company grew to become the favorite destination of many PC buyers. Some might even believe that the decline of Gateway came as a result of Dell's efficiency. There were also a number of years that Dell and Compaq (later acquired by HP) were locked in heated battle of who has shipped the most PC's. Dell is still a powerhouse, but HP wasn't about to lay down its arms and surrender. Because I am programmer somehow people believe I can give good advice on buying a PC or laptop. I used to keep things simple and tell them to shop Dell. But the other day when my wife asked me to help her choose a laptop, I just flat didn’t even mention Dell. I checked out HP, Toshiba, and IBM (Lenovo) but didn't even bother with Dell. Then I wondered why. Dell has been getting quite a string of bad press lately. Perhaps the worst was the Laptop battery fiasco. But the bad news also involved their poor customer service. Bad press leads to a bad image and it's hard to battle back. Redemption takes a lot of work and patience. But for me Dell's tarnished image goes beyond the bad press. It's based on first-hand experience I've had with their servers where I work. I have had a number of problems with their servers I manage for my company. We have been plagued with bad parts and faulty firmware for quite some time. Dell's customer service has been relatively responsive, but dealing with so many headaches has left a bad taste in my mouth and while their consumer products might not suffer from the same problems, the Dell logo has lost a lot of its appeal for me. So we finally settled for an HP laptop. Of course when I tried to place the order online, the order wouldn’t go through and I was forced to call the HP customer service to finish the transaction. Calling customer service meant being transferred to an Indian call center. These guys aim to please, but heavy accents abound and a quick call turns into a long conversation punctuated by a number of "what?" and "Can you repeat that?" This is by no means exclusive to HP. That's an economic reality firmly proven to me when I called my calling card company a few hours later to report a problem. But that's a different topic. We'll see how the HP laptop, preloaded with Windows Vista, works out when it arrives in a few days. dell,hp,laptop,call center,customer service,ibm,toshiba,servers,pc Labels: computers, customer service <Bypassing Dell for HP> // posted by rh 3 comments Sunday, January 21, 2007 Lotto Mystery  I dabble occasionally in Lotto and most of the time I forget to check my numbers until a couple of weeks after the drawings. What’s the point of being punctual? They're all losers anyways. At least I can stretch the fantasy-time by delaying the number-checking. Playing Lotto is a matter of fortuity for me. If I am at a store and I happen to see the Lotto counter as I happen to pass by it and the attendant happens to be free and I happen to have a couple of dollar bills or a few quarters I want to unload, and the jackpot happens to be enticing enough, I might give it a shot. I understand all about criticizing those who only play when the jackpot exceeds $100 million or something. It's not like I'm a snob and turn my nose up to a $100 grand or even $20 for that matter. It's just that part of playing Lotto is the fantasy of winning big and never having to worry about money. Sorry, but a million bucks isn’t what it used to. I find it just too pathetic to fantasize about a measly million. And a million dollar Lotto pot is hardly a million anyways. On a 21-payment deal and after taxes and other fees are done nibbling at it, you’d be lucky to get $30k per year. That's like working full-time making $15 an hour – not bad but this isn’t fantasy material. But no matter how much the jackpot is, it must hurt to find out too late that you were a winner and didn't act fast enough to claim your loot. That is exactly what's about to happen on a Connecticut Lotto ticket whose numbers came up on Feb, 14, 2006. Every now and then when I surf on to the CT Lotto site to check my weeks-old numbers (so I can toss my tickets with the confidence of a loser), I see the message about the $3.5 million unclaimed jackpot. Could it have been my ticket? I play the CT Lotto occasionally and I'm sure I've lost tickets before. I doubt it's mine though, but whoever owns that ticket doesn’t have much time to make that claim. Chances are that whoever the winner is, he/she is totally unaware of this. Maybe she tucked away the ticket and then passed away or had a stroke. Or maybe it was left in the back pocket of someone's jeans and got tossed into the washer and disintegrated. Or perhaps fell out of the owner's wallet onto the street and got battered by cars and the weather. Or maybe it was a going away gift for someone visiting Katmandu and the visitor decided to take up a primitive one-year residence at the base of a Himalayan mountain. I like to think the ticket's owner is just planning on surprising everyone by showing up at the claims office at the last possible moment. That might generate some extra income like going on talk show circus, getting a book deal, or even starting a blog. Who can survive on a mere $3.5 million these days? Here's the unclaimed jackpot page: CT Lottery - Classic Lotto - February 14, 2006 Jackpot Ticket lotto,jackpot,unclaimed lotto Labels: lotto <Lotto Mystery> // posted by rh 1 comments Sunday, January 14, 2007 Penny Options  It wasn't long ago when stock shares in the US markets were quoted in increments of 1/16 of a dollar or 6.25 cents. I always wondered why the system was designed that way. It seemed unfair that there was always a 6.25-cent margin between the ask and bid prices, while any other product bought and sold in this country was priced in penny increments. While average traders had to contend with such a big margin, you knew there was always some middle guy skimming from this system, pocketing nice profits. There was some concern about changing the system to penny increments. Perhaps people worried that the systems wouldn’t be able to handle the stress and the penny system would have been unwelcome news to those playing the margins. The change came to pass and the sky didn’t fall. Today the average trader can specify his stock buy or sell in penny increments and we're all better for it. Options pricing have had a similar drawback. They are still quoted in nickel increments and the average trader is shackled by this unfair system. Why should an options contract have an ask price of $.05 and a bid price of $0, when perhaps in reality its ask/bid should be $.04/$.03? Today a buyer for that particular option has two bad choices. Either pay the expensive $.05 to buy the contracts or forego the trade. The seller, would have to rely on luck to unload the contracts at $.05 or hold onto to them until they expire worthless. Options are priced similar to insurance premiums. Prices are based on their expiration times and factors associated with their underlying instruments such as volume, inherent risk, volatility and others. That generally shouldn't lead to nickel increments. That's about to change on January 26th when CBOE (the giant options market in Chicago) will kick off a pilot program to make 13 classes of options available with penny increments. They are: IWM - Ishares Russell 2000 INTC - Intel QQQQ - QQQQ CAT - Caterpillar SMH - SemiConductor Holders WFMI - Whole Foods GE - General Electric TXN - Texas Instruments AMD - Advanced Micro Devices FLEX - Flextronics International MSFT - Microsoft SUNW - Sun Micro A - Agilent Tech I hope the pilot proves successful and it eventually expands to include all options. We'll all be better for it. stocks,options,cboe,bid,ask,financial markets,trading Labels: business-finance <Penny Options> // posted by rh 0 comments Wednesday, January 10, 2007 HTML Forms, Part 2  Click here to read Part 1 There are really many steps that a browser goes through to display a web page or post some data to it. For the purposes of this discussion, a simplified process consists of a request and a response. The browser makes a request to a server for a particular page, and the server returns the data to the browser in the form of a response. There are a few types of requests a browser can issue using commands that are generally known as 'verbs'. The most widely used verb is GET. Whenever you visit a web page, your browser issues a GET command to the server along with some other parameters and the server obliges by returning the data for the particular page. In fact you are reading this very page because your browser made a GET request to www.hashemian.com and specified this page. The server then returned this page to your browser in a raw format. Your browser then rendered it as you see now. But what happens when you submit a form to a page? In that case the page generally contains a FORM tag like this: <form method="POST" action="some_page"> some form elements such as <INPUT> here a submit <BUTTON> here </form> Notice the POST verb specified as an attribute of the form tag. When you click on the Submit button, the data you entered on the form is sent to some_page using the POST verb. The POST verb is similar to the GET verb but there are some additional data. The browser contacts some_page, issues the POST command, it also specifies Content-Length and Content-Type. Content-Length is the character length of the data that you have submitted to the page, while Content-Type specifies the format of the data. The data format, known as MIME type, is generally specified as application/x-www-form-urlencoded. That signals to the server that data was encoded in a specific format so the server can figure out how to decrypt and use the data. We'll delve into more details on POST in part 3. html,forms,get,post,url Labels: programming, web <HTML Forms, Part 2> // posted by rh 0 comments Monday, January 01, 2007 The Dollar in 2007  Happy new year! Somewhere among the new-year vows of weight loss, self-improvement, and advancing one's education, there are inevitable thoughts about money; how to make more, how to save more, and how to better invest the hard-earned dollars. Unfortunately the outlook for the dollar remains poor for 2007 and there is fear that it will continue its slide. Some evidence of that can be seen through the stances taken by a few central banks. Iran has indicated that it is moving away from its dollar reserves, gradually replacing those with euro-based instruments. UAE is also boosting its euro reserves considerably while paring its dollar holdings. Before you dismiss these moves as political and confined to a few countries, you should keep in mind that no country would sabotage its own economy deliberately even if it is at odds with the United States. And UAE has been an ally of the US for a long time. The point is that these countries have seen that holding dollar reserves is not in their best interest. As the values of their stash keeps shrinking they have become increasingly concerned and are now taking steps to correct their lop-sided positions in the dollar. True, these countries by themselves may not have a considerable impact on the dollar. What is disconcerting, however, is that many other central banks are mulling over the same issue and might soon begin to dump their dollar reserves. If a selling frenzy ensues, even a mild one, it could have devastating effects on the dollar. So what does that mean for the average American citizen? Quite a bit actually. First off, if a dollar crash begins to look imminent, the federal reserve would have no choice but to lift the interest rates (perhaps considerably) to defend the currency. Why defend the currency? For one thing to protect the consumers. Those cheap Chinese imports would no longer be so cheap if the dollar keeps on falling. A falling dollar means more expensive products here in the US. But what about American-made products? The US is no longer the manufacturing powerhouse it once was, but even for the domestically made products other regions of the world will look far more lucrative than the US market. The US is a capitalist market. That means that whoever pays the highest price, gets to buy the products. With the weakened dollar, the local consumer will have to pony up a lot more money to compete with the ones abroad. This is already happening. There was a news item a few days ago regarding milk and dairies price hikes for the new year. One reason given was the elevated levels in foreign purchases of dairy products, no doubt due to the cheaper dollar. Recently New York City has been running advertising campaigns in foreign countries highlighting the cheap dollar as a means to visit the city more cheaply. I can imagine that hotels, restaurants, bars and taxi cabs might raise their prices as tourists flush with dollars bought cheaply in their own countries, would be less resistant to higher prices. The higher interest rates set by the Fed to defend the dollar might stanch the bleeding a bit, but not before its repercussions are felt throughout the banking industry in the form of higher borrowing costs. Yes, that means higher mortgage rates, higher credit card interest rates, and higher business loan interest rates, which will ultimately contribute to higher prices in a continuous cycle. If you are worried, as I am, rather than buying euros and stuffing them under the mattress, it might make sense to invest in some reputable international funds for 2007. This will provide a bit of international exposure with good returns if the dollar malaise continues to worsen. dollar,euro,currency,inflation,exchange rate Labels: business-finance <The Dollar in 2007> // posted by rh 1 comments

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