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TechQuotes"Ryan didn’t know much about software, except that more and more it seemed to be written by guys with thick Russian accents. The lines were the glass fiber-optic cables that carried the information from one box to another. The single-biggest determinant of speed was the length of the fiber, or the distance the signal needed to travel. Ryan didn’t know what a millisecond was, but he understood the problem with this Kansas City hedge fund: It was in Kansas City. Light in a vacuum travels at 186,000 miles per second or, put another way, 186 miles a millisecond. Light inside fiber bounces off the walls and travels at only about two-thirds of its theoretical speed. 'Physics is physics — this is what the traders didn’t understand,' Ryan says." Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/magazine/flash-boys-michael-lewis.html?_r=0 |