The 3 Billion Dollar Typo 398
Rand310 writes "Mizuho, the world's second largest bank based in Japan, with total assets of nearly the GDP of France (around 1.2 trillion USD) accidentally sold 610,000 shares, valued at $3.1 billion... for 1 yen each. A 27 billion yen loss would almost match Mizuho Securities' group net profit of 28.1 billion yen for the financial year ended in March, though... the incident would not threaten the brokerage's financial stability. FYI 1 yen is about .83 cents. Yesterday one share was selling at $5,065, today you could theoretically have bought 610,000 shares for $.0083 each. An expensive switch of variables."
Data Validation (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm... misleading post? (Score:5, Insightful)
Error prevention? (Score:3, Insightful)
Creators of nothing (Score:2, Insightful)
So much capital floating around based on the creation of nothing. Is there a more apt description of the modern world?
Re:Would be nice, but not really... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a constant grip of mine. I hate unneccesary confirmation dialogs (the result being I hate alost all of them). I can just about tolerate "This will overwrite a file", or "Save before quit" ones, but I keep running across designers who think insist on using modal dialogs for feedback. "You have just pressed a key. OK/Cancel". I make a point of querying this behaviour any time a designer comes up with it.
May also not even be true (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, what do you think that chances of this happening twice are? Yeah, that's what I thought.
Re:Use http://www.xe.com/ucc (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Simpson's reference (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Would be nice, but not really... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup. As others have pointed out, this is yet another usability problem. If one simply mistake can cause so much damage, then it should raise a warning flag. Which it did, but apparently the warning flag was utterly useless. Silly "ok/cancel" dialogs are not enough to cause the user to stop and think about what he is doing. If such dialogs were correctly implemented, they would be extremely annoying which would lead to two things: 1) it'd be much more unlikely to make a mistake and 2) as another poster pointed out, almost *all* such dialogs are for something minor (do you really want to quit??) and better safeguarded against in some other way (e.g. "undo"), and thus would [hopefully] quickly disappear if they must be extremely annoying rather than merely annoying.
Raskin's suggestion for a dialog that would work is something like: "You are about to perform dangerous and undoable action X. If you wish to proceed, type 'Yes, perform action X' followed by the [11th] word of this sentance." You'd be asked to type a different word each time so you could not memorize it and learn to confirm the action without thinking. Highly obnoxious, yes. Hopefully designers would learn to only make use of it when absolutely necessary.
P.S. I'd just like to say that Firefox without the SessionSaver extension is painful. Why on earth isn't SessionSaver included by default? "You have 9 tabs open that took you many hours to arrange. Close them all forever: yes/no?". And if something crashes, you don't even get the annoying dialog...
Re:You've got to admire the Mizuho execs... (Score:3, Insightful)
"Look Ma! I led a company into a miserable state, fired 3,000 employees because of it, and gave myself a 10% raise! Wow I must be good!"
Re:Give them my number (Score:4, Insightful)
In this case, it would spot that you were about to do something *very* odd, and print:
"Are you sure?"
'Y'
"Are you *really* sure?"
'Y'
"Ok, so what are you so sure you want to do?"
'... uhm'
Re:You've got to admire the Mizuho execs... (Score:5, Insightful)
A lesson I learnt from a former boss: Someone screwed-up bigtime on a project, potentially costing us an important client. They realised their mistake and told the boss. The boss didn't explode, shout, or fire the employee, he just very calmy asked that everyone help to rescue as much as we could from the situation. When I spoke to him later about it, he said that it would have been counter productive to blame someone who new they had made a mistake and probably felt very bad about it. In my book, that's a good people manager.
Re:You've got to admire the Mizuho execs... (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't take this as a defense of American corporate ethos, or a criticism of Japanese ones, though. The two countries simply have different Zeitgeists. For whatever reasons the massive conglomerates that dominate Japan are never upset by newer competition. What I've yet to discover, is whether the privitization of Japan Post is a signal that the day of ruling families is over, or whether it's a signal that the government will no longer compete with them.
Re:Would be nice, but not really... (Score:3, Insightful)
No. I went into the property pages for fun, made modifications because I was bored, then hit Apply by accident.
Yes of COURSE I want to make the changes you stupid software, argh!
Re:The End Of Slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Creators of nothing (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a reason for this. Entrepreneurs and executives *need* access to capital markets. They need private equity funds and public market access to grow their businesses. Banks bring trust, reputation, financial expertise and legal expertise to the table. Sure, I think fees for some transactions are too high, but you can always go to somebody else. The bank scrapes a couple percent off the top for each transaction. Really, is this so terrible for the value they provide? Most companies don't seem to think so. The reason they make so much money is that they do tons and tons of deals, and a few percent on the really big deals adds up to a lot of money.
Re:The End Of Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Now please go troll somewhere else - Slashdot has enough of them as it is. I hear that Digg is looking for more so go play in their yard.
PS - I have Digg as one of my home pages on Firefox so I do check/read both sites so please no flames about "You don't know what you're talking about since you obviously don't dig Digg!"
Re:Give them my number (Score:3, Insightful)
YASPVG (Score:3, Insightful)
Yet Anotehr Slasdhot Page View Generator. Brilliant! Instead of quoting exchange rates based on the unit denomination of the two countries (as is customary), quote them using one of either country's smaller denominations. In this case, US pennies. You only need one person to misread it and think that the exchange rate has a misplaced decimal. If it will make you feel any better, I almost fell for this myself. I've said it before and I'll say it again, errors on /. stories aren't mistakes. They're pure pageview generating genius! Hats off.
Re:Would be nice, but not really... (Score:3, Insightful)
If I were to write a Window Manager, any program with input focus and has had keystrokes in the last 3 seconds *cannot* lose focus to *anything* short of something actually crashing.
Also, any confirmation dialogs would have no default button selected, so hitting enter or space would do nothing.
Making mistakes (Score:4, Insightful)