Savings are not equal to investments

Investment attitude
A typical mass affluent investor is motivated to save, but makes no effort to differentiate between savings and investments.

In an economic sense, savings is the excess of income over expenditure. And investment is the process of routing savings into optimal returns-bearing assets.

The problem is that the mass affluent primarily make investments in March each year to save taxes. The lack of effort to search for optimal investments through informed choices stems from a common complaint — lack of time.

More precisely, the argument is that “the time spent on becoming aware of the investment process can be better spent in the office, generating more income”.

This argument reveals the lack of understanding of the concept of passive income — income earned without being actively involved in its generation.

Investments earn passive income. It, therefore, pays to take time to empower oneself with the knowledge to make discerning investments.

Portfolio tilts
The disinterested attitude towards financial literacy leads to several problems.
One, the portfolio is not constructed to achieve a certain investment objective. Research in the US has shown that the vast difference in wealth among households with similar age and income groups is due to the difference in planning. Failing to channel savings into optimal avenues is a failure to plan. And this could lead to lower-than-desired post-retirement lifestyle.

Two, investing to primarily reduce taxes results in a portfolio which is built one asset at a time. This often leads to concentration of holdings. The reason is that each asset is bought without considering its correlation with other assets in the portfolio.

And three, several mass affluent who do invest, engage in naïve portfolio diversification. If they are introduced to four different products (two of which may be similar and the other, not very different), they often choose to divide their assets equally among all the products. Behavioural economists call this process 1/n heuristics. This could again lead to concentration risk if two or more products carry the same investment style.

Conclusion
The lack of informed choices through mid-career could lead to needless risk-taking behaviour towards retirement. This stems from typical tiered behaviour among individuals — hopes for riches and protection from poverty, which is the reason why an individual buys insurance as well lottery tickets.

Behavioural economists have shown that individuals accept lottery-like odds when they are below their aspiration levels and reject such odds when they are above their aspiration levels.

What happens when an individual realises that her “savings” is not enough to help her lead a desired post-retirement lifestyle? She may be forced to make high-risk investments, perhaps, at a time when she needs more exposure to bond-like investments. This problem can be moderated if optimal investments are made through the working life — a process that can be facilitated through financial literacy.
- B. Venkatesh

What is Defect

Bug. A fault in a program which causes the program to perform in an unintended or unanticipated manner.

Error. (ISO) A discrepancy between a computed, observed, or measured value or condition and the true, specified, or theoretically correct value or condition.

Fault. An incorrect step, process, or data definition in a computer program which causes the program to perform in an unintended or unanticipated manner.

Failure. (IEEE) The inability of a system or component to perform its required functions within specified performance requirements

Acronyms

Below are a list of key acronyms to help understand the terminology commonly used:

BI - Business Intelligence

BPE - Business Process Engineering

BPM - Business Performance Management

BPM - Business Process Management

CPM - Corporate Performance Management

CRM - Customer Relationship Management

DBMS - Database Management System

EAI - Enterprise Application Integration

EPM - Enterprise Performance Management

ERP - Enterprise Resource Planning

SaaS - Software as a Service

SOA - Service Oriented Architecture

Roles

CEO - Chief Executive Officer

CFO - Chief Financial Officer

CIO - Chief Information Officer

COO - Chief Operating Officer

CTO - Chief Technical Officer

FM - Financial Manager

HR - Human Resources

IT - Information Technology

Technical Terms

API - Application Programming Interface

BAM - Business Activity Monitoring

BPEL - Business Process Execution Language

BPMN - Business Process Modelling Notation

EDRM - Electronic Document and Records Management System

GUI - Graphical User Interface

MOSS - Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server

ODBC - Open Database Connectivity

OLAP - Online Analytical Processing

OLTP - Online Transaction Processing

QI - Quality Improvement

R&D - Research & Development

SOAP - Simple Object Access Protocol

SQL - Structured Query Language

XML - Extensible Markup Language

Business Terms

KPI - Key Performance Indicator

LOB - Line of Business

ROI - Return on Investment

VC - Variable Cost

Cookie

A cookie is used to store small piece of information on client machine. A cookie contains page-specific information that a web server sends to a client along with page output. Cookies are used for sending page specific information because HTTP is a stateless protocol and cannot indicate whether page request coming from the same or different client.You can use cookies to keep track of individual user who access a web page across HTTP connection.

There are two types of browser cookies - session and persistent.

First one is Persistent cookies and Second one is Non-persistent cookies.

Persistent cookies :-
Persistent cookies are stored on your computer HardDisk. They stay on your hard Disk and can be accessed by web servers until they are deleted (or)Have Expired. Persistent cookies are not Affected by your browser Setting that delete temporary files when you close your browser.


Non-persistent(or session) cookies:-
Non-persistent cookies are saved only while your web browser is running. They can be used by web server only until you close your browser. They are not saved on your disk.

Single valued cookies and multivalued cookies.
Single valued cookies we can store only one value. In multivalues cookies we can store multiple values.

We cannot write cookie when the cookies can be disbaled in client machine. A cookie can store only up to 4 KB of information. Generally cookies are used to store data which user types frequently such as user id and password to login to a site. You would want to store a user number or other identifier. Then, when the user visits your site again, you would use the user ID to look up user details in a database. We can also say that cookies are the Electronic ID tags sent from a Web server to a user's browser to track and record their Web-surfing patterns, i.e., ads clicked on, products purchased, sites visited and the user's origin. This can enable the site to provide more personalized information to be served upon a return visit to the site.

SQL : How to get 5th max salary from a table

select x.* from (

SELECT SALARY, EMP_ID, RANK() OVER(ORDER By Salary) AS MAX_SALARY FROM employee) X

WHERE X.Max_salary = 5

What is Routing Table

Routing table is actually a electronics table that shows you the routes that you have set on the Windows OS, network routers or other network devices. The computer or network devices will know how to do routing based on this routing table.

The Routing Table is usually stored in a router or networked computer in the form of a database or file. When data needs to be sent from one node to another on the network, the routing table is referred to in order to find the best possible route for the transfer of information.





Here is an example of routing table in Windows OS by just opening the command prompt and then type netstat –r or route print. Quite simple to understand it, the computer will send the network packets to the Gateway that tie to particular Network Destination. Example again, the computer will send the network packets to 192.168.1.250 if the destination is in 224.0.0.0 multicast network. Please note the gateway shown with network destination 0.0.0.0 is default gateway. If no specific route found, all the network traffic will be sent to default gateway for routing.

Hop-by-hop Routing is a common routing method used in networks wherein for each node in the network, the address of the next node leading to the destination is listed. So when a data packet arrives at a particular node, it then refers to the routing table to find the address of the next hop destination. Once it reaches that node, it again refers to the routing table for the address of the next hop and so on, until it reaches the final destination.

For a large network consisting of a number of nodes and routers, the routing tables in all the routers need to be consistent, failing which, routing loops can often develop. This can create problems especially in networks that use the hop-by-hop routing model in which the data packets can end up being sent in an endless loop. Routing loops have always been a recurring problem in networks and one of the major goals of designing routing protocols is the careful avoidance of these routing loops.

Routing tables can generally be maintained manually when the network is small and static. The routing tables for all static network devices never change unless and until the administrator of the network changes them manually. In dynamic routing, the devices themselves automatically build and maintain their own routing tables. They do this by exchanging information regarding the network topology using routing protocols. This enables the devices in the network to automatically adapt to the changes in the network like device failures and network congestion as and when they occur.