Posts

Showing posts from May, 2010

A Layman’s Explanation of The Derivatives Market and Crash

  This was passed on to me by a good friend, and I found the analogy so compelling that I decided to share it: Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Detroit . She realizes that virtually all of her customers  are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar. To solve this problem, she comes up with new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later. She keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers loans). Word gets around about Heidi's "drink now, pay later" marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi's bar. Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in Detroit. By providing her customers' freedom from immediate payment demands, Heidi gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer, the most consumed beverages. Consequently, Heidi's gross sales volume increases ma

Upgrading to WCF RIA Services v1.0 and Ria Services Toolkit

The kind folks on the Silverlight and RIA Services teams have come out with v1.0 of RIA Services. However, the instructions they provide can be a bit misleading as to “What does what”. Here’s the skinny: 1) You can download the Silverlight 4 Tools installer, dated 5/13/2010 here . This will uninstall previous interim versions of the SDK, runtime and RIA Services – you do not have to uninstall anything before running it. 2) However, the above WILL NOT refresh the RIA Services Toolkit. That you must uninstall first, and then run the new Toolkit installer, dated 5/14/2010, which is here . I like the Web Platform Installer, but you can never be absolutely sure what exactly you are getting with it because the installation process is much more opaque than using an MSI installer file. If you use the above two steps, you are pretty much guaranteed to be 100% up to date! And don’t forget – you can run the tools installer from a DOS prompt with the /x option to extract everything to th