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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."
what you term as 'left wing' news in /. pertains to freedom of the masses in regard to life and internet, what you term as 'psuedo-politics' affects the lives of ALL of us and what we care on the tech world. if many small fights were not won in the areas you so ignorantly despise, today red hat and novell would not be able to make a speech to wall street praising linux.
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Excuse me? He could tell them that only changes to the actual code need to be contributed back to the community, and furthermore, that code used within the company and never released does not have to be contributed.
But what does this spokesman for Linux say? That it's illegal but that there's no way to get caught? Does he work for Microsoft?
The article includes a lot of confusion and/or FUD about licensing.
Someone needs to sit down with some of these people and explain to them what the GPL actually says. It doesn't require software written to run on Linux to be GPL'd. Even if you had some reason why you wanted to modify the Linux kernel itself (and why the hell would a Wall Street firm want to!?), you wouldn't need to GPL your modifications unless you were turning around and selling or distributing the modified version publicly.
We seem to be getting a lot of this kind of idiocy recently. Maybe it's good news -- it might just be a sign that a lot of PHBs are getting open source on their radar for the first time. But you'd think that lawyers and journalists would at least get it straight before they published their thoughts on the web.
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It's these trying times, defined as they are by political extremism everywhere threatening our once-secure way of life. I'm sure many of us hope to return to a more relaxed atmosphere, so we can once again afford the luxury of political apathy. I know I do!
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Or badly quoted out of context.
But The Linux Foundation needs to IMMEDIATELY address that with the CORRECT quote or the context.
Either that or immediately kick his idiot ass to the curb.
You don't remember such a time, because such a time never existed. For either contention.
Have you ever actually tried blaming your software vendor when a project you were in charge of cratered? As a strategy it is highly over-rated.
That, in my opinion, is the best thing about Free Software. You can actually set it up and try it out before you pull out your checkbook and commit to paying a vendor. If the Free Software solution doesn't work, you've wasted a bit of time, but you haven't saddled yourself with a vendor that already has your money. Heck, if your problem is interesting enough, it might even get fixed.
You can always break out your checkbook later and pay a commercial vendor if the Free Software solution doesn't fit your needs. If you bet on a commercial solution first, and it doesn't work, then you have to write off your wasted licensing fees.
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The list that proves you wrong is right here
Now go back to the kid's table and play with your toys. The grownups are talking important business. We know you're enthusiastic about today's fad but we don't care. We have work to do and that means using tools that don't have the lifespan of a McDonald's Happy Meal toy.
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That's true. Being the third largest international company in our field, we've enjoyed this benefit many times.
But... Linux vendors let you do it, no matter who you are.
Let me guess... Microsoft made the other components? And, at one time, they used to have competitors.... but no longer?
The list is compiled every six months. It takes a while for the results to be tabulated and validated. New results for May 2008 will be available soon.
The upper pie is based on the share of systems by operating system family. That giant pac-man shape represents the 85% share tux had in November. The Windows sliver represents 1.2% or roughly six or seven systems in the top 500 most powerful computers publicly known, for all versions of Windows.
The bottom pie is different because it represents the operating system family's share of processing power. Here you'll note the Windows systems have disappeared entirely. Usually this represents that the scarce Windows systems were in the bottom end of the range or older systems that are not maintaining a proportional share of processing power.
Since you're making the observation that the data is seven months old, are you anticipating some upswell in adoption of Windows among the HPC crowd, who are presumed to know what they're doing and be unswayed by political or marketing concerns? That would be remarkable. If the petaflop Cell processor supercomputer IBM just built called RoadRunner runs Windows I'll eat an original IBM punch card.
What's also remarkable is that Microsoft with its billions can't build and keep a few in-house systems high in this list just to build their HPC credibility and assist their marketing in this area - which they would dearly like to have.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
"Hard" real time is industrial robotics and missile guidance systems. This is very much "soft" realtime.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
IBM sells more mainframes running Linux than running anything else. Several of the top500 are linux clusters (several built by IBM.) Linux is gaining more traction all the time. Why wouldn't Visa's transaction processing systems eventually run on it? Some of the largest and most reliable sites/systems/et cetera run on Linux right now. Why wouldn't it be only a matter of time?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Of course you can do concept studies and prestudies, and you should, no matter what software you are using. Free Software just makes that easy. What's more, you don't have to worry about ballooning license fees as your project grows.
I suppose that my real point is that if you are evaluating software you need to start somewhere. Why not start with Free Software? There might be a project that is precisely what you are looking for, and if there isn't, you can always get out your checkbook.
Then again, I make a living dealing with Free Software, so I might be biased.
Actually, with the top of the range Sun support contract you get (or at least got, with all the layoffs and out-sourcing this may no-longer be the case) straight through to a dev team if there was a software problem. A hotfix would be yours within hours, possibly with a software engineer ON-SITE.
This is/was probably the case for IBM as well. They know where their bread is buttered.
I very much doubt that this would be the case for tiny outfits such as Redhat.
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When you spend $0 for software, $500k for staff starts to look like a good cost-cutting target for that asshole PHB exec! And when you used to spend $2,500,000 on IT (including licensing fees), and you now spend $1M (not including licensing fees), it looks to management like you more than halved your budget (while still delivering the same or better service), when, in fact, you doubled your budget.
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- the top500 machines are made for showing off computerpower. whereas mainframes have not so much to do with clock cycles, more with handling heavy loads. Probably there are a lot of mainframes in use that can be easily outperformed by my EEE, but do it reliably for years after each other, whereas my EEE would probably be molten by the continuous load.
- because of this, expenses go to fast cpus and fast networks, not so much solid data storage. Of course there is some terabyte storage present, but these are for scratch data storage mostly, there are no backups (some PhD ignored the warning, everything went well of course for a long time. that time was unfortunately before writing the thesis together, so all calculations had to be redone in a few months)
- same for redundancy. If part of a supercomputer goes down, anything running on it is lost. Bad news for a scientist running on it, he needs to restart his work. Impossible news for a Wall Street data processing machine.
- actually I call bogus on this list. The list has become a political cause on itself for countries/organisations to put themselves in the spotlight. Many of the supercomputing tasks could be done more effectively on local smaller clusters. In practice, a supercomputer is built to run as soon as possible the top500 benchmark, after which for the actual users several years of pain start including
MPI hardware incompatibilities, sudden events of slow data access, badly configured queueing systems because the staff is already busy enough dealing with getting the machine to work at all.
- see it like this: probably every machine on that list is a 1st generation product. It has too be, otherwise it is too slow. That means that the staff is faced with a shitload of first generation bugs for which there is no standard protocol to go by. By the time they ironed it out, the machine has gotten redundant, a new "state of the art" has been ordered, and the whole shitty process starts again. I hope it is clear that all these points are not good properties for a mainframe that manages stock handling
I am also wondering if the tone of the parent post is fitting, as the poster seems not to know very much what he is talking about himself. Of course a big part of banking is now also to do simulations of economics, for which they will need clusters. But that work is additional to the mainframe administrative jobs, not substituting it.molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
No you certainly can't do that with a proprietary OS. The move to Linux on Wall Street was largely driven by the decisions of CTOs looking to reduce the bottom line by moving towards commodity hardware (as others have mentioned here), BUT all the geek engineers on Wall St. love the practical aspects of working in open source. Some of us love the philosophical aspects of open source too! as in
-as easy to identify bugs
-no problem contacting the right people (developers)
-bugs getting fixed on a reasonable timescale