Slashdot Mirror
NYSE Moves to Linux
blitzkrieg3 writes "The New York Times is reporting on how the NYSE group now feels that Linux is 'mature enough' for the New York Stock Exchange. They are using commodity x86 based Hewlett-Packard hardware and Linux in place of their traditional UNIX machines. From NYSE Euronext CIO Steve Rubinow: 'We don't want to be closely aligned with proprietary Unix. No offense to HP-UX, but we feel the same way about [IBM's] AIX, and we feel the same way to some extent about Solaris. Other reasons cited for the switch were increased flexibility and lower cost.'"
...I one-upped the people that skip reading article summaries and skipped reading the title.
It should be noted that the problems the NYSE is dealing with are very remote from those that the average desktop user is.
Now I know this seems obvious, but the "WOW if the NYSE is doing it!" crowd should try and control themselves at least a little.
Funny how the preceding article to this one on the main page is about Failure Cascades.... ;)
And who wins? HP of course. Who loses? Sun. Now if they had switched to/from Windows, then it'd be big news. As it is, it's not that big of a deal since Linux is in plenty of mission critical systems. The hospital I used to work at had Linux machines controlling their linear accelerators in radiation oncology.
Another story the Linux fanboys can spank it to.
"If there's one thing the market hates, it's crashes."
I work in Healthcare IT, and as much as I like Linux, it is my experience that Linux is not yet reliable for mission critical stuff. It can't compare with HP-UX or AIX. Heck, it is even worst than Windows. I understand the desire of lowering the costs, but how much is an hour of downtime? I guess they will find that out pretty soon.
So apparently 2007 is- err, was- the year of Linux on the desktop- err, the New York Stock Exchange. Anyway, w00t.
Linux this, KDE that, Wikipedia here... What all of Free has in common is "Openness" - imagine twenty years from now: I believe that more and more content will move towards a modern variation of the "stone soup" parable until its the defacto standard. Openness allows the rapid creation and innovation of practically anything under the sun. And that pool only gets larger everyday. The only thing that can stop it is if government explicity steps in and makes giving away your effort illegal - other than that it is simply inevitable, give or take twenty years - that Openness will be the primary regulating force for all manner of content.
Shh.
The proof is in the pudding.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.godhatesfags.com
(I also go by gQuigs)
It doesn't worth being slashdoted at all.
If they moved all their computers using ANY OS including MS's, that might be a good story.
Until then, THANK YOU, COME AGAIN!
Read and Comment at my BLOG
!!!
The NASDAQ exchange, which has always focused more on technology, is totally a Microsoft fanboy. Maybe that's because MSFT is the largest stock on the NASDAQ exchange.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
FTW!!!!!
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
'We don't want to be closely aligned with proprietary Unix. No offense to HP-UX, but we feel the same way about [IBM's] AIX, and we feel the same way to some extent about Solaris. Other reasons cited for the switch were increased flexibility and lower cost.'"
I thought Solaris was open-source?
Linus Torvalds, Congratulations. MJ
"If there's one thing the market hates, it's crashes."
No fooling.
I used to work on Amdhall's unix for their mainframes. Among other things it was used by brokerages to support trading and all the Baby Bells to support data collection for billing.
If a baby bell's billing system went down all the phone calls dialed, started, or completed while it was down were free. This made downtime cost something like $4 million / hour.
Brokerage support going down cost far more.
So imagine a trading system going down (equivalent to all the brokerages going down at the same time...)
Needless to say, much of the point of mainframes is to keep this from ever happening.
So the hardware is built so it performs the correct computation despite component failures, radiation-flipped bits, or on-the-fly hardware changes (adding/deleting/resizing peripherals, CPUs memory, switching out failing components), etc. And the software is built to similar standards.
This can cause problems. Like sizing event counters to stand uptime measured in decades. Or getting non-critical patches installed. (I recall a minor patch to a driver, too small to rate forcing a couple million bux worth of reboot, that had been installed on all the customers' machines to go live at the next reboot. Two years later (last I heard) they were still supporting the bug because some systems hadn't rebooted yet...)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Why? Because you have a bug up your ass about MS?
When is the nancy boy Linux crowd worry about improving their offering instead of the evil Microsoft? This isn't about computing, it's about being the biggest kid on the block.[...] Well, you're either a troll or a shill, but I'll toss you a bone either way.
The 'nancy boy' Linux crowd will worry about improving our offering when my cd case at work, for fixing Windows desktops with a blown up registry, is full of Microsoft live cds that I can respin and burn at my will.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
it's like writing bad checks to cover bad checks.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/14/opinion/14krugman.html?em&ex=1197781200&en=36b8826fa6894b94&ei=5087%0A
time to get real yet? let's think for a moment where all the real money is going/has gone forever.
it could never happen here in the land of the scriptdead pr ?firm? georgrwellian fairytail?
all the software in the universe will never be able to balance those books. you, & yOUR children, will be paying for this mess (in several ways) for decades to come.
I never thought I'd see these two words together. UNIX is what happens when you meet a set of interfaces defined by a standards body known as The Open Group.
...the latest issue of the "Highly Reliable Times".
Consulting for several large companies, I'd always done my work on
Windows. Recently however, a top online investment firm asked us to do
some work using Linux. The concept of having access to source code was
very appealing to us, as we'd be able to modify the kernel to meet our
exacting standards which we're unable to do with Microsoft's products.
Although we met several technical challenges along the way
(specifically, Linux's lack of Token Ring support and the fact that we
were unable to defrag its ext2 file system), all in all the process
went smoothly. Everyone was very pleased with Linux, and we were
considering using it for a great deal of future internal projects.
So you can imagine our suprise when we were informed by a lawyer that
we would be required to publish our source code for others to use. It
was brought to our attention that Linux is copyrighted under something
called the GPL, or the Gnu Protective License. Part of this license
states that any changes to the kernel are to be made freely available.
Unfortunately for us, this meant that the great deal of time and money
we spent "touching up" Linux to work for this investment firm would
now be available at no cost to our competitors.
Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any
products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to
its source code released. This was simply unacceptable.
Although we had planned for no one outside of this company to ever
use, let alone see the source code, we were now put in a difficult
position. We could either give away our hard work, or come up with
another solution. Although it was tought to do, there really was no
option: We had to rewrite the code, from scratch, for Windows 2000.
I think the biggest thing keeping Linux from being truly competitive
with Microsoft is this GPL. Its draconian requirements virtually
guarentee that no business will ever be able to use it. After my
experience with Linux, I won't be recommending it to any of my
associates. I may reconsider if Linux switches its license to
something a little more fair, such as Microsoft's "Shared Source".
Until then its attempts to socialize the software market will insure
it remains only a bit player.
Thank you for your time.
the Solaris that is paid for and is required for a sun supported platform, is NOT OpenSolaris, however much may be in common. Solaris is closed source, period.
wow, this is so lame
If Linux has a bug that diminishes uptime at the NYSE and if the Linux "team" of volunteer programmers does not offer a fix within 24 hours, then HP management will order its commercial slave programmers to develop a solution -- pronto.
If a you or I encountered a bug in our Linux downloaded from the Web for free, we would have no immediate remedy to our problem. We must wait for the next release, which could take weeks.
Who is the bastard who tagged this as "badidea"?
Why would conversion to Linux be a bad idea?
The other thing is: How is the NYSE handling integration of Linux into a windows network? I am sure there are a few windows boxes at the exchange. There is this guy at www.linux.com who is claiming or alleging that Ubuntu is hard to integrate in a Windows network. Here is the link http://www.linux.com/feature/122681
On a personal note, I'd rather have Linux have better configuration tools OR the same or similar format in its configuration text files. One particularly hard configuration file to modify is the Dovecot/Postfix LDA. This is what I mean, have a look:
dovecot unix - n n - - pipe
flags=DRhu user=vmail:vmail argv=/usr/lib/dovecot/deliver -d ${recipient}
Yes, you have to deal with this stuff, and only God knows what those "-" mean. For those that might not know, the user's line above one MUST look alike for the server to work. This is a far cry from Samba's configuration files that are much simpler.
Last but not least, can the folks at the NYSE confirm or deny that all server tasks are now handled by Linux? I hope they are, but would not be surprised if they come out and say they cannot confirm or deny that very fact.
"It's the smell ... don't you agree, Mr. Anderson?"
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Well Guys...
For what it's worth:
When I went to Iraq, I had a laptop running ubuntu. I setup apache2, php5, and mysql5. We created our own "series of tubes" in our barracks area and I supplied our own intranet website (read: porn server). Oh, and America's Army server.
This thing ran for several months at a time without a reboot. The only reboots were due to other problems, like when a stray 7.62mm bullet knocked out our generator one time, but as for linux running...this thing ran like a champ. In 11 months of service, it never had a problem.
Of course, it wasn't under the same kind of load. But my NIC was usually maxed out for 40% of the day.
For consumer-grade hardware with free and open software, 0% downtime not energy related, I feel that Linux did a fine job. Seriously, 11 months, 3 reboots due to power. Nice.
THL phish sticks
Sure, those options work, but I think you overlooked one of the most obvious solutions. If you're running a business that depends on a Linux-based solution, and you encounter a bug that seriously degrades your platform's stability, you always have the option of hiring a programmer to develop a patch.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Quote; And who wins? HP of course.
HP does indeed win, but I have to say I never thought I'd see the day when HP offered Linux over HP-UX on their servers. That alone is as significant as IBM's push on selling Linux-based server systems when they own AIX. Things have really changed, for the better I think.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Very few businesses really care much about the sticker price of an operating system. What many businesses are catching on to is that Linux has little to no vendor lock-in. It goes something like this:
Develop all your software and systems on one Linux. Then find out you don't like HP? Fine.. take your business to Dell. The distribution they're running on starts to suck rocks? No problem, switch to RHEL. RHEL starts to not meet your needs? Customize your own distribution.
Not being tying your business to the whims of whatever company you're dealing with is truly powerful. If you ask me, that's the real power of Linux, and open source software. Linux makes operating systems into a true commodity like grain, where switching to another vendor is low cost.
AccountKiller
NYSE moves to Nonstop on Itanium2, and oh yeah also some GNU/Linux x86 servers on the side. Time will tell if Nonstop is as good on Itanium as it was on MIPS.
If I recall correctly, 1 year and a half ago only IBM was able to put 64 CPUs on a Xeon based architecture. SLES 9 was only certified for up to 16 CPUs. The 64 bits version did not even support NUMA, and that had a direct impact on OS performance under high load, which I was able to measure very easily. The memory bus could saturate just because the OS was not able to put the processes on the memory chip which was near the assigned processor. That distribution had a 2.6.5 kernel version. Redhat was almost on the same kernel version. The version under development was 2.6.17. Suse said that NUMA was going to be supported in SLES 10, which shipped one year ago. I don't know if it did.
I guess the situation has improved in the last year, but my point is that linux is a newcomer in the big iron world.
But the point is that Sun/HP/IBM have been managing big irongs with more than 64 cpus for 5-10 years already, in critical mission bussiness.
This is a political decision. Not a technical one. Linux has it's role in the server market, and it's a very important one. But I think it's not still mature enough to compete in high-performance, high scalable, mission critical environments with OS/400, AIX, Solaris, etc. Neither are the OS suppliers, Suse and Redhat.
Oi vey, what schmucks.
I wonder what will happen to regular slashot ads of Get the facts - "Roll over this ad to know why NYSE switched to Windows Server from Linux to lower its TCO". /duck
-- "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" - TAE --
Psssst... The NYSE has been running on an IBM mainframe for quite sometime now.
They had a choice of moving from a 1,600 MIPS mainframe to a 2,500+ MIPS mainframe OR rewriting all the code and moving to a distributed setup. They chose the distributed setup to avoid hardware related vendor lock-in, not because of software.
Even though they're saying "We don't want to be closely aligned with proprietary Unix," he said. "No offense to HP-UX, but we feel the same way about [IBM's] AIX..." their new system will be IBM p servers running AIX and x86 HP servers running Linux.
FYI - Their mainframe was running COBOL and JCL
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
In other news, it's also not the same as running it on a mobile phone.
Nor is it the same as flying a plane.
Was there actually any point to your post at all?
Considering that their electronic division has big problems paying for software they buy, the fact that they go to a "free" option is a HUGE shock.
NOT!
Hopefully their application developers are getting substantial percentages in advance.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Been running one of the redhat rip-offs for a while now. CentOS I believe?
Buy hey, glad to know the 'old boys' are finally catching up.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Microsoft stock plummeted 100 points as soon as Linux took over.
Yeah, my karma sucks....but so do the mods.
Most recently notable comes from the Gartner group : Here
The Gartner group, while I've never completely believed in, states that Linux will kill off most large installations of Iron Unicies by 2009. While I believe this is a bit optimistic and the reality is that it will never truly die, Linux continues to take more market share away from other UNIX installations than Windows.
the answer to five 9s uptime is to stop building systems that rely on single points of failure. Compare Google's approach to processing and uptime to that of the mainframe era. Totally different infrastructures with similar goals and globally, similar uptimes/reliabilities. Design your systems such that any component (any switch, router, power supply, hard drive, server ... to a certain degree, even any individual data center) can fail without resulting in a loss of data. Sure, it's complicated - but it can be done, and it's definitely the direction that network and systems architectures are headed.
illum oportet crescere me autem minui
No, their mainframe was running OS/390.
JCL is the mainframe equivalent of bash or csh.
COBOL is the business world equivalent of C/Java/Basic.
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
John 8:32(King James Version)
Like excrement, this thread contains just enough kernels of nourishment to satisfy the free-tard movement. Please---stop posting from your mom's basement and get real.
and:
I take that to mean exactly what I just said. If you have any references to more information to support what you're saying about hardware, please reveal them. Otherwise I'll trust the article, and the implications of the statements.
AccountKiller
Having worked in Silicon Alley I can tell you its all about speed and stability. Thats why they are moving to Linux - end of story. Oh and the NYSE has been itegrating Linux into thier systems for a while now. Old news...
They've been planning it for a long time.
Since I'm not going to do a LexisNexis search for you, here's the next best thing:
http://www.google.com/search?q=nyse+aix+linux
http://www.google.com/search?q=nyse+1600+mips+2500+mips
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Perhaps a nice hook for Linux into some businesses (like NYSE) is the "no conflict of interest" thing. If NYSE was a big customer of a company on its market, there may be some question about propriety.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
by Microsoft
Or develop to POSIX and it doesn't matter which Unix. Or develop on Java and it doesn't matterr which OS. (At least theoretically.)
While portability between distributions may be useful, as a technological base, I don't see what Linux offers that is better than Solaris 10 (and I've used Solaris, Linux, and several BSDs over the past decade--currently favouring Solaris (though FBSD ports still kicks ass)).
(Heh, CAPTCHA is "idealize".
The money system is an insane illusion which either by mistake or design, keeps people enslaved. It has been falling apart of late. (Like a pyramid scheme run by lunatics, it cannot persist).
I've always thought of Linux as being aligned with truth and light, etc., When you shine that flashlight into a corrupt system, things realign to match reality, which in this case, first means total collapse.
It's all metaphoric, of course, but in a universe made out of energy infused with consciousness, it could be argued that this whole world is just a collection of metaphors for various thought patterns. Whatever the case, it's not a bad idea to have a bit of extra food packed away. . .
-FL
Windows costs less fud campaign... maybe just maybe the biggest stock exchange in the U.S. might know a little about value.
I worked for the RI Sec of State's office for nearly four years. In that time I saw us go from a 90% OSS shop to a 50% OSS shop because the incoming I.T. director was a Windows only guy.
But the best part is the Windows migration isn't going so well. I left back in September but they had just bought new servers about five months before. They got no further than Server 2003 being installed on them due to documentation procedures, etc.
One server was to be an Exchange 2003 server to replace the Qmail server they were using. I just got email from someone there the other day and guess what, it's still Qmail.
The big push to Exchange btw was a woman named Catherine Avila, the Director of Administration. She was petrified that I.T. could potentially read her email because Qmail stored everything in the users home folder.
When I'd left the tally for hardware and software was up around $60,000. Both we systems guys loudly protested the Exchange bit. Also told them that if you were going to present an Exchange box to to world, you damn well better put something in front of it to stop the bullshit.
And of course when I left I made a prediction that within two months of my departure there'd be some catastrophic event. Sure enough, their web server crapped. The server in question was a LAMP box, and MySQL needs to be tuned occasionally to fix kludgy indices and queries. And that's what brought their web server down. There was a MySQL slave on the box that started consuming mass CPU cycles because of bad queries.
The PR guy said it was a rootkit. I call bullshit.
Somewhere, there are a lot of dead mainframe programmers who just shivered in their graves.... I'm sure of it.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
So how would a return to a gold standard work with international trade? The amount of currency is fixed, so paying off our national debt would lead to massive deflation, leading to a recession and a general economic fuckup.
I guess for the 2.0 version of Gandhi, they decided that passive resistance wasn't the best design.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
this sux. they should move to windoze vista home basic
Perhaps he meant a proprietary _implementation_ of Unix, such as IBM's and HP's offerings; however if this is the case I don't know why he put Solaris with it to, now that Solaris is open-source (CDDL)...
Back this up with facts.
Show me a Wall Street Journal article that shows this.
I love Linux but you pretty much have the following:
The Old Linux Guys who beat their chests and pull out hair
The New Guys who won't listen to anything unless it says Linux is the best and then they get into a distribution arguement
Then you hear from the people that ACTUALLY WORK IN A COMPANY ENVIRONMENT that realize that Linux has its place for certain system applications. They also realize that it actually does cost money to switch to Linux.
Yeah Linux is free and takes less hardware...but there is a little thing called OVERTIME.
You want me to pay people to learn a new system and them pay them overtime because they went home to their Windows/Apple system, forgot how Unbuntu/Slackware/Fedora/Gentoo+KDE&GNOME worked and had to come in on the weekend?
No. Ain't happening. You all had your shot 10 years ago and all that is happening now is another generation of recruited zealots (kids) are trying and failing to succeed but they are succeeding at annoying actual professionals.
A friend of mine in the air force is in Iraq right now. As part of an "anti-freeware" policy, they won't let him load Linux on his laptop or even visit ubuntu.com in his web browser. Are things different in the army?
Yeah. I think that trying to fix a single element of the existing system would be like trying to re-structure a house of cards.
But systems tend to automatically correct themselves given enough time. A bit of mass-chaos and starvation will lead us to an answer as to how things might better work. It's that uncomfortable period of dark-age in between which nobody likes. --And which explains all the crazy stories of underground bases and general end-of-times preparations which the super-wealthy are running around hoping will save their spotted rear-ends. Until greed and psychopathy are removed from the equation, even a system founded on sense and rationality will break down.
-FL
.... don't talk about it. Honest, you just look stupid.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You're comparing Linux to Windows. In this case the transition was from commercial Unix to Linux.
But if we remove the idea of scarcity from both sides. Infinite labor supply also means an infinite demand for your product, even if almost everyone thinks it's useless. Course, then you get into the problem of distrubuting an infinite number of a worthless product across an infinite space... which starts to sound a lot like most of the stock traded on NYSE.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
I mean, you might as well go for broke.
:-)
Enron did
Insert
Maybe you !write code.
Microsoft continues to plow through the small and medium business market with SBS installations and continues the current uptake rate IIS has over Apache... while Linux zealots continue to focus on the desktop... while touting victories over.... main frames? uhh...?
:( Even mentioning Linux makes these people think you're some kind of evil super hacker. I just say 'open source' based now, to avoid unapproving looks.
Do the majority of linux/open source advocates realize that SMB is where its at right now in terms of market growth? The majority of them are obviously from the development side of things... it's like they're not even paying attention to the consultants.
I've been running Linux since 95'(slackware baby!), yet I find I am unable to push a Linux solution for most small businesses except for gateway/firewalls and NAS stuff. Please don't talk to me about exchange alternatives and/or open office. SMB's want their Word/Excel/Exchange.
... we're talking.
;-) -- lives with occasional hiccups. More than once I had my email client unable to use over-the-network folders (which theoretically are safer).
The government, for instance -- and don't ask how I know
Application servers are out now and then. Heck, some are even rebooted on purpose every night, because they fear service would degrade without that.
This Christmas, all the evil commercialization aside, brings nonetheless some useful observations. Stores are not allowed to stop, because they're full of customers until midnight and everyone is tired. Many point-of-sale terminals use Linux. I even know of a chain supermarket which had a very old setup, with WindowMaker terminals running curses-based apps.
Well, they replaced the terminals with XP machines -- connected to a Linux server still running the same curses-based apps! Tell me about hating crashes!
That happens when you let clueless people who are proud of their Windows certifications mess with it.
I know several companies and research institutions where people who probably got less pay set up a Linux based system that just works. Flawlessly.
Linux from Scratch?
Probably RedHat - it's IMO about as proprietary as the rest of the commercial Unices mentioned - if not more, if you consider Solaris vs. OpenSolaris.
It has some nice kicks, but trying to do anything with it that doesn't come out-of-the-box is a nightmare.
Just try maintaining a Typo3 installation on it...
But for the NYSE-stuff (which is probably mostly J2SE/J2EE stuff), it should be good.
I'd still prefer Solaris for that, though.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Sigh, how did that get modded up?
This anecdote of some n00b's pr0n server running on a laptop in Iraq of all places could not be LESS relevant to conditions in the NYSE's data centre.
UNIX has had magnificent uptimes since about 1973. If anyone is surprised UNIX/Linux servers are reliable, they have been living under a rock (or maybe living in Windows-alterna-world).
you had me at #!
I wonder what major IT infrastructure still belongs to proprietary Unix or "Windows". It's funny to me to even mention the name "Windows" because it see,s so silly for an operating system to be named for a feature of a graphical user interface. Suppose they named it Microsoft "Menus" or Microsoft "Buttons"...
Freedom is free.
I am using the same OS as the NYSE? I feel unclean!
"The NYSE's shift toward Linux and x86-based hardware illustrates why consulting firm Gartner Inc. is predicting a slight decline in Unix server revenues over the next five years"
Is it true that people are only moving from Unix to Linux. If a CIO installs Linux on a new site, how is this a loss for 'Unix' but not for Windows, the logic escapes me.
davecb5620@gmail.com
The servers that were replaced were HPPA boxes running HPUX. HP make a lot of money selling these old boxes. They were replaced with commodity x86 boxes running Linux. That's got to be a big decrease in revenue for them.
The tech guys at SIAC (the IT group at NYSE) has been wanting to do this for over 10 years now. It's taken them that long to get all the software ported over (they run a lot of proprietary code). They are very, very cautious, and would not even think about a switchover like this without extensive research and testing. One of the big plus features of Linux is that they can go in and look at the code to the kernel and understand the performance impact of different design choices. The reason they don't like virtualization is that it adds uncertainty to the system's response time, and they do NOT like uncertainty.
And, at least to my knowledge, there are NO Microsoft products involved in the critical operation of the NYSE. They do not trust Windows. At all. As I said, they really like repeatable, predictable, operation, snd you just can't get that with Windows. There may be a few Windows machines here and there but they are basically passive clients that will not disrupt anything when they have problems.
The NYSE guys are no tech slouches. They have very extensive development and test facilities. The bonus structure of upper management is set up to strongly encourage minimizing downtime. The failures they have suffered in the distant past are deeply etched in their memories and they work very hard to make sure that they will never happen again.
"If a you or I encountered a bug in our Linux downloaded from the Web for free, we would have no immediate remedy to our problem. We must wait for the next release, which could take weeks"
..
Well, personally speaking I emailed one of the developers and got back a reply within the same day. Contrast that with the 'commercial model'. What 'Guarantee of Reliability' does the commercial software sector offer, ninety days or your money back. Certainly no guarantee against some crooks running off with your entire customer database.
was Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free (Score:5, Interesting) yet another mod troll
davecb5620@gmail.com
I don't think that any large scale collapse will happen because of cheaper/better solutions. It only means that more people are able to accomplish more things, cheaper/faster/better. The same will happen when we'll finally get insanely cheap energy (hopefully within the next 3-5 decades so I'll be around to witness :). All the collapse that will happen is that antiquated business can't force-feed bad stuff down our throats any more imho.
AFAIK the NYSE doesn't run 24/7, and it only opens for a short time. So while it's not trivial, you can actually fix broken stuff after it closes, and you have quite a lot of time to do it.
Whereas if you have something very important that runs 24/7 you need a system which you can fix while it's running. These type of systems can be a fair bit more complex, so if you don't have good admins they could cause the system to have even more downtimes, negating all that clustering and redundant stuff.
That reminded me of the scene where Bernard Hill in heavy makeup was snarling in Christopher Lee's voice. *
/. have seen the LotR films...
To be fair, a better comparison to that scene would be Microsoft saying, "If we go, this business dies."
* Deliberately obfuscated. Surely most people on
Wow, someone still uses COBOL?
I remember being told I had to learn it as part of my curriculum back in 1994 because the instructor said you might find out someone is using it.
It only took 14 years!
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
John 8:32(King James Version)
Indeed - I used to work desktop support at a financial/insurance company, and some of the crap I saw on some of the users' mainframe sessions (you'd think that mainframe programmers should be able to figure this stuff out, but I guess instead of waiting for someone to build a better idiot, Microsoft just makes everyone look like an idiot) was unlike anything I'd seen, until I started poking around on Wikipedia and figured out that what they were doing on "the AS360" (can't remember the number, mainframe wasn't our problem) was this bizarre database (or something) programming language called RPG... oddly enough, saw a COBOL printout on that same person's desk.
Evidently there's still money to be made in selling your soul to IBM and supporting stuff that hasn't been unplugged for decades, much less upgraded.
There's an old saying that says pretty much whatever you want it to.
>>Since I'm not going to do a LexisNexis search for you
Ooohhhh... you are soooo elite with your lexisnexis access.
Linux is the kernel, licensed under the GNU GPL, but the Linux Kernel project is not part of the GNU project. Obviously it's not all GNU software because it's GNU/Linux which means the Kernel is non-GNU software. Also, in any GNU/Linux, you're going to be compiling with the GCC and using libc. GNU software is at the heart of most any GNU/Linux distro. Get it right man, the GNU project and the GNU GPL came before the Linux Kernel. GNU/Linux is GNU-based, not "Linux-based".
Freedom is free.
Freedom is free.
Software programmers have a habit of fixing things that are not broke. The NYSE is literally handling billions of dollars per day. They can't, and I mean literally can't move to something else just because it does not have the latest and greatest feature. All the NYSE cares about is a working system... Sometimes I wish programmers and developers would keep that in mind.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Stock Exchanges around the world are making the switch - mostly from HP Non Stop Kernel (NSK) Tandem platforms over to either Linux or Windoze. The Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX Group) is following the NYSE lead and just started the plunge into production to (RedHat) Linux as well this past Friday to try and save lots of $ by getting off of the HP Tandem. http://www.tsx.com/en/trading/tsxquantum/news_product_info.html http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/Information-Architecture/80e2b1ee-2430-48c0-86ba-7e39ef356a52.html At this point they only have their symbol (X) on the stock exchange but expect to rollout in 2008 with the rest of the stock symbols. If they have a system crash (not because of Linux but the app of course) similar to a few times in the 90s they will have their name all over the news in Canada.
Where did people get the idea to re-brand "free software" as "open source"
You can blame/credit Eric S Raymond for that one. IMO he correctly identified that calling it "Free Software" was an appearance problem for a lot of people. People inherently distrust anything that says "free" (as in beer), as there's almost always a catch. I think he may have even coined "open source", but at the very least he's one of the larger pushers of that term. Geeeks don't like to think language matters, but in the rest of the world it does.
Anyway, I have to disagree with your categorization of the GPL as the power of open source. It's just one license among many. I use software that's under the GPL, under the Apache License, and under the BSD license. I really don't care which one it is.
AccountKiller
Correct, except maybe that Cobol ( I don't like it but ) is way over C/Java in business. Once you have done fixed point calculations in C (Java,C++,C#,,,pick your language..) you start understanding what it means to trust the language doing the right thing. Also, I still hope other languages would get the native data types, no problems moving from one platform to another. And maybe another thing about mainframes, you can run 10K+ servers ( Linux ) in one box that will not break down. Now, it depends of application types, should you? Huge transactions, lot's of data, are the best in mainframe, think moving data in xxx GB's/second between your servers without external lines, controllers, switches, and so on, almost at memory speed through standard TCP/IP connections. Think about systems with hundreds of CPU's where one, two, three, .. failures only means slowing down a little and only if you are already running near %100 capacity. Of course workload balancing may actually be a little more tricky than in distributed servers but other reasons which can be learned. Stock exchange transactions are small (actually very small) so they may be better in server farms today but the design is not easy, who wants to lose a $100 million sale / buy order! Also, I wonder how they handle the timings? Remember last panic, everybody selling, servers queuing hours, arguments later whose transaction was 1 microsecond before some other? It took years, FCC and courts to solve. Anyway, hats of for NYSE, I remember when Tandem was an unknown and some stock exchanges and banks took the leap and trusted them. Correctly built Tandem systems are still the only real NonStop systems but need skills you can't easily find today. And HP is not helping on that because, like it or not, Tandem is a niche system today and HP doesn't like diversity.
As rumor has it, Hybrid market is going to be shut down and all matching engines moved to ARCA execution platform sometime soon. ETFs are already there. Unfortunately, ARCA listed stock engine is not capable of handling even current load sufficiently well so move is somehow complicated. So really, this is not news worthy. Apparent purpose of Hybrid engine always was to keep specialists goons in business longer.
I would bet that most people when given the words "free software" would think gratis not libre. Also freeware (which is an obvious contraction of the words free and software) has always meant gratis software that is usually written by one or two people. "Open source" isn't a perfect term either but IMO it is far less likely to give the wrong impression than "free software".
As for why the name linux was picked up I'm not sure but I have several ideas. Firstly it is a far nicer name than GNU, secondly afaict linus was the one took gnu, built the crucial missing component (which had been missing for some time due to GNUs dicking arround with microkernels) and put together a system that could actually run on it's own.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
It was Richard Stallman and his GPL that built the Free Software Movement. Before that, there was no idea that proprietary software was anti-ethical (Free Software); the momentum created by the Free Software movement spawned the Open Source movement, with the idea that proprietary software is inefficient.
Without Richard Stallman, Free Software would probably be restricted to university projects.
There's three (at my last count: Red Hat, Suse and Debian) that HP support, so it's likely that the NYSE has its admins working with Debian.
Normally Telco billing systems are multi-tiered, and one of those tiers is what collects CDRs, as the switches have minimal persistent storage.
Whatever collects the CDRs has to be _rock solid_, so is usually an IBM zSeries, Tandem NonStop, or the like, is what processes and stores the detail records from the switch. They are then batched up, as you suggest, for processing in whatever billing system (Amdocs, etc.) the telco is afflicted by , err I man, uses.
-Stu