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Wall Street Becoming a Linux Stronghold
alphadogg recommends an article about the rise of Linux on Wall Street. We discussed the beginnings of this trend last year. From NetworkWorld:
"Wall Street firms increasingly are buying into Linux, but some still need convincing that open source licensing and support models won't make using the technology more trouble than it's worth. Linux providers, speaking this week at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association conference in New York City, stated their cases that Wall Street firms have nothing to fear about diving into open source. Red Hat and Novell argued that's especially true now that specialized Real Time Linux has been developed that meets strict low-latency and messaging requirements of brokerages and trading firms."
I work at a Big American Investment Bank, right in the heart of the financial district of New York, and I can tell you that one of our most important technologies that supports pretty much all of our trading systems and pricing algorithms is run on an international Linux computing cluster. Hell, they've got us wrappers for all the usual Linux commands (grep, cat, pipes, etc) so we can use them in the Windows command line.
.Net, since that goes pretty well with everybody's WinXP environment.
However, every single person's desktop is a WinXP with all the usual MSFT goodies. Excel is used extensively by everyone that doesn't code but has to work with numbers. Lots of desktop apps are
1. If you think you can get an issue speedily resolved because you paying for the software, then you obviously aren't employed in that sector.
2. Using open source does not mean that you can't buy support, its completely up to you
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Clearly you know nothing about finance. Quants are not IT. They do the mathematical modeling that makes the money. They make more than the IT staff. And anyway, the IT people I know in finance do well are aren't fired as long as they are getting their job done. Besides, in finance they often write much of their own software, since everything is so proprietary.
I work for the most successful Wall St. investment bank and it is true. Pretty much all of our internal server machines are linux, yes they have pretty much pushed solaris out of the picture but no one would foolishy allow windows anywhere in the internal server environment.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
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The GP is almost right, for some very specific applications. Though s/he should probably go back to excel. CICS runs very well on IBM big iron under Z/OS. The railroads also use old-style mainframes for routing and control. Transportation and financial processing both have fairly stringent realtime requirements that a Linux cluster can almost certainly meet. Almost is not acceptable though...
I think the difference comes not when you need a redundancy of computing, but when you need a redundancy of low-level hardware, coupled with rock-solid reliability. The ability to physically separate a single server into multiple elements thousands of miles apart is attractive to certain financial institution, for certain transactions. Think arbitrage transactions amongst multiple international exchanges. If the Berlin portion of the server goes down, the NY portion completes my transaction, albiet with some latency...
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Ironically though, the Wall Street Journal, pride of the überrightwing Murdoch Empire -- News Corpse International -- is still as M$ fan boy as any good rightwinger should be.
According to this article, "Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg flirts with Ubuntu" Walt Mossberg is in Apple's camp. He tried a Dell preloaded with Ubuntu and he wasn't too happy, er said it isn't ready for most users yet.
FalconShould there be a Law?
You really DO know nothing about mainframes, the hypervisor is old and stable on S/390 nee zSeries nee System Z. The hypervisor is called Z/VM and it has its roots in VM/370 which was first introduced 1972, linux ain't replacing it. Also unless you can get JCL and the various other mainframe language/apps to run on Linux it's not going to be the OS-du-jour for the vast majority of installations. They might buy or use some linux licenses because the hardware is there but that won't be the main focus of the box/sysplex and it certainly won't be running the show.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Some things a spreadsheet should not be used for (please add too if you like):
- As a Database.
- As an Statistical Analysis tool.
- A complex programming tool.
A spreadsheet is a tool that is extremely good at manipulating data (I believe the KISS principle should apply here) and graphically presenting data and IMHO that is where it should end. With regard to presenting data what I find useful is the ability of OO Calc to display and rotate in real time 3D data, that to me is more useful than having to write and debug complex VB scripts which could easily be replaced with a good statical analysis package which has a proven track record (ie. vetted by engineers and scientists with mathematical and programming skills). The problem you get with people (eg. a CPA/Manager/Lawyer... normally with little or no formal programming skills) writing their own scripts is that the people and the firm(s) who use these scripts had better be 100% confident that there are no bugs in them. IMHO keeping auditable track of any mathematical process is much better than putting in data to a "black box" and just getting an answer.Once we get over the "mine is better than yours" attitude then maybe you find that there is no fundamental difference between OO Calc and MS Excel since they both are very good at graphically presenting data. Of course the big difference is you can see the source for OO Calc which can be and is vetted by professional engineers and scientists compared to trusting Microsoft's closed source solution see example where simple bugs can translate into millions of dollars of lost money.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Speaking as someone who used to do computational Physics research and now works as a sysadmin for a major Wall Street bank, I know a wee bit about this. The machines that you see on the Top500 aren't Mainframes - they are HPC boxes used mostly by Universities and other organisations to do numerical calculations. The Cray T3E that I used to use wasn't a mainframe it was a massively Parallel machine. They crap on Mainframes for raw CPU power but with the mainframe it's in the bandwidth, reliability and virtualisation features.