Motley Fool investing tips

The Motley Fool is running an article titled Tips for Investors at Every Level.

The article is a short one that introduces concepts useful for the beginner, intermediate and advanced investor. Topics covered include:

• Beginning investors:




• Index investing


• The P/E ratio


• Dollar cost averaging




• Intermediate investors:




• Free cash flow mojo


• Cash flow from operations and net income


• Return on assets, equity, and invested capital




• Advanced investors:




• Compounding and discounting


• Shorting


• Margin

Useful to read to know just what they mean and what they can do for the investor.

One billionth Unix second has passed

On Sunday, September 9, 2001 at 9:46am and 40 seconds (Singapore time), the Unix Operating System ticked past its one billionth second.

This doesn't mean that Unix has existed for one billion seconds (about 31 years). Rather, one billion seconds has passed since the time considered as 'time zero' in Unix which is midnight on January 1, 1970.

Other than being a rather nice number (and possibly causing a few bugs in unix programs that can't parse 1,000,000,000), it doesn't have much significance. The 'troublesome' date will be in 2038 when 32-bit Unix systems (which counts time in seconds) runs out of space to hold the count.

Of course, by then, we should have all shifted to 64-bit (or bigger) sytems...hopefully.

In case the above has got you confused, or if you just want to know more, this Wired article gives a reasonable summary of what the fuss (or lack of a fuss) is about.