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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."
This will surely usher in the year of Linux on the desktop!
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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I have the same problem at my work. I want to automate and speed up a lot of the reporting my coworkers do by moving the processing over to one of our Linux servers, but Excel is always a problem. Some of our people actually see Excel as a platform in itself. It's become kind of a joke among some of us there. "Excel would make a great Operating System if only it had a decent spreadsheet."
Some of our macros can take upwards of twenty minutes to run.
I suppose they could use OpenOffice-server, and I've considered playing around with it, but it seems like too much unnecessary overhead. Right now I think I'm gonna give JExcelAPI a whirl as soon as I get a break in between projects.
Are your friends still employed?
I would warn potential FOSS adopters of the unintended consequences of their altruism: you might be out of your job.
When you spend $2M for software licensing fees, $500k for IT staff doesn't look bad.
When you spend $0 for software, $500k for staff starts to look like a good cost-cutting target for that asshole PHB exec!
Also consider that when something goes wrong with Solaris or Windows, you file a ticket and come out smelling like roses when it's speedily resolved. When something goes wrong with FOSS that you advocated for, more often then not it's your ass.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Best joke today...
And Linux will never replace mainframes. Nothing will.
At the risk of being modded troll, OO Calc will probably never replace Excel - other than Suns and big iron, corporate america runs on Microsoft Excel (not necessarily a good thing, but still).
OTOH, I know companies that are still running their websites and outward-facing interface systems on hardware and software that could be easily replaced by off-the shelf open source stuff, which will probably save them a lot of money.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
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.
Find free books.
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!
Caveat Utilitor
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
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.
The kind of use they're talking about isn't really about quants and their modeling. It's about transactional throughput, enterprise messaging, and the guaranteed delivery of various business events (along with the relevant data) to a wide variety of systems across front, mid, and back office domains within a very constrained time window.
As for quants, they often like Linux for a completely seperate reason, specifically because they can use it for Shadow IT purposes without the IT department getting all pissy. Also, many of their favored math packages are old school C and they learned to use them in school on Linux so they tend to gravitate toward it in work as well.
At least that's what I've seen over the last 10-20 years or so since quants have become all the rage.
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
Actually, yes i have had to blame a vendor for a disaster.
It was cause for us to switch vendors afterwards. Ironically, back to a Microsoft solution as it was less expensive and integrated with other components.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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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You've enabled the trading of trillions of dollars and ginormous salaries for hedge-fund managers based on volunteer-ism.
Nice job! You really showed the capitalists.
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?
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?
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I used to have a position where I met quarterly with most of the major Wall Street CTOs/CIOs. Every one of them was heavily involved in deploying Linux. You could sum up their reasons quite simply: commoditization yields cheaper computing.
All of them were tired of being locked into the hardware that Solaris required (i.e., Sun's vertical stack), and paying Veritas Foundation Suite licensing on top of that. (I mean, come on, no big enterprise shop ever used Solaris Disk Suite as a standard!)
Sure, today you can run Solaris on x86 more credibly and there's ZFS, but three years ago that was still vapor. Sun was too late with them.
The writing on the wall for Sun's big servers has been there for some time. Sun could not afford to cannibalize its enterprise offerings by going whole-hog into Solaris x86, which is why it's always been the poor stepchild. In the meantime, Linux came along, reached maturity, and now anyone wanting to buy a Unixy system can let Dell, HP, IBM, Sun, etc. compete to deliver a cheap x86 box. There's no important differentiation between them, and very few people are buying giant Sun servers any more. Heck, Sun's big Lonestar supercomputer sale was commodity x86 running Linux.
Linux deployments, at least in the sector I worked with, were mainly Unix replacements.
Oh, and a couple responses to the above:
Advice: on VPS providers
Microsoft, ironically, tends get these sorts of wins as well. After all, everyone has Microsoft software sitting around. It's almost as easy to get rolling on a skunkworks Microsoft project as it is to roll one out with Free Software.
Well done dodging the vendor meltdown bullet, however. In my experience that basically never works. After all, it is pretty rare that a vendor can't point to other customers with successful implementations. Generally speaking when a customer has to flush a large investment down the tubes the guys that chose the tools and then were unable to implement the solution get run as well.
Let's just say I'm not a firm believer in the "throat to choke" theory of choosing software.
My real question for you is why did you move away from the less-expensive, integrated Microsoft solution that worked to something more expensive and less integrated. Nothing personal, but that doesn't sound like the sort of thing that any of the people I've ever worked for would blame on a vendor.
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.
Blaming the vendor really only works if you brought in an army of consultants first, and even then it reflects poorly on the management that brought them in.
As a practical matter, I've noticed that IT tends to congregate around their vendors, so you'll have a Microsoft group and a Novell group and a Unix group and so on. People in these groups usually realize that they need to defend their vendor at all costs or the other groups will steal their budgets. So there's very little practical impetus to blame the vendor unless everything's really gone to hell.
What vendors are really good for, politically, is stalling. "RedHat says this feature will be in the next version!", or "We've filed a bug!". But if you just downloaded it from the internet, you don't have this sort of cover.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
- 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
You said you find bugs and report them so they get integrated back into the kernel. Is that a specialty of OSS, or do you also get this with other proprietary products?
as in
-as easy to identify bugs
-no problem contacting the right people (developers)
-bugs getting fixed on a reasonable timescale