Slashdot Mirror
Linux Flourishes In 200-Year-Old Gold Markets
tbarkerload writes "H-Online [a spin off of a major German daily] reports on a gold trader managing over 15 tonnes of gold, worth $660m, with a platform built on open source tech. BullionVault operates a 24-7 electronic market in gold bullion open to both retail and professional traders. Their systems handle thousands of daily transactions from both human traders and bots operating through their API. If Linux has reached the world of hundred year old assaying firms, and Swiss vaults buried in mountains, can final world domination be too far away?"
660 million?
Pitiful.
Hey, guess what OS the stock exchanges of NY, London, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Tokyo, etc are built on?
If you REALLY want to talk about world domination, I'd start there instead of some two-bit (ok, 5.3 billion-bit) gold exchange.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
world's oldest profession
worlds oldest ptofession ... painting?
Its not my fault, someone put a wall in my way.
The term profession is applied to those persons who have specialized and technical skill or knowledge which they apply, for a fee, to certain tasks that ordinary and unqualified people cannot ordinarily undertake.
While I'm not sure prostitutes need specialized and technical skill or knowledge for what they do (I could be wrong, if I am could some prostitute please correct me?). They do get paid, where I doubt Mister stone age Picasso got paid for what he did.
Quick question: Is anyone else buying up physical, in-your-possession gold? Given all that's been going on, it seems like it's virtually impossible for major currencies *not* to get severely devalued. The massive underfunded pension tidal waves, medicare programs, new spending, banks that will be unable to pay back loans...
I recently bought at Bullion Direct, a few Canadian Maple gold coins. Well, Bullion Vault just got some free advertising, because it looks like they offer a better deal on an ounce of gold. But I think you're best off buying in coin form since you may have some defense in the even the government decides to seize gold; it will probably exempt some small amount for "collector's purposes", which wouldn't apply to bars.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
That is if they bother to stay up to date with what bugs are out there on a day to day basis. For most businesses, it's just another OS where they wait for the vendor to release a patch, and then install it at some point.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
No.
One of my Everquest guild mates (from a LONG time ago) was a security admin for a gold mine and he told me that they were training him in breaking Linux. Ironically, he played a rogue and he was a good one. Ever since then I've been thinking about how many high risk/high security places use OSS.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Trust me. The dollar will not fail.
If China allowed the dollar to tank, the American economy would make the current crisis look like paradise. Oil would be unaffordable. Our reserves would be locked up for military use. The power vacuum left by a rapidly destabilized American military would fuck shit up. You'd probably have dozens of wars spring up, especially in the middle east, as Europe and Asia battle over the energy reserves currently under our control. Israel would probably end up dropping a pre-emptive nuke to make everyone think twice about moving in their direction. Who knows which way Russia would swing.
So, the world isn't going to let America fail at the moment, since no one knows how better or worse off they'd be. That's why the dollar is up since the crisis. China may have all of our money, but we still have more military power than the rest of the world combined.
And gold? Gold isn't going to get you to the border, or to any place of safety. You should buy a dirtbike and a shitload of ammunition if you think the dollar is going to fail. Gold won't buy much more than cash if everyone is starving.
Plus, your fears about spending are basically groundless. During WWII we drove up our deficit to unbelievable highs - wars are expensive, that's why taxes should go up when a country goes to war. McCain said in 2003: "The tax cut is not appropriate until we find out the cost of the war and the cost of reconstruction." That was, of course, before he starting toeing the line for the real political power in the GOP.
We can afford national healthcare, stimulus packages, more education, and ponies if we reduce military spending, which is currently at a trillion dollars a year. Empire is what is bankrupting the country, not social spending.
I meant to expand on this, but China doesn't actually have all of our money, just the most out of any foreign country, along with Japan. I still think they hold enough to do some damage, though, if they switch entirely to Euros or something else.
Systems that account for physical possession of gold, whether allocated and stored under individuals' identities, or unallocated and used in other transactions (as banks do with money) do not rely upon any specific accounting or transaction system. There are many ways of keeping track of gold accounts, including purely manual records on paper. They all work, if that is the intent. A gold trader that touts its linux system of accounting and trading as somehow essential, or as giving it some sort of advantage in the world gold market, is suspicious. The key point of this article is that apparently no one is allowed to confirm that the gold actually exists. Good luck.
I'm not sure prostitutes need specialised and technical skill or knowledge for what they do
There are always those without skill in any industry willing to get paid, but quality, D&D free sex workers put exceptional time and training both into their physical and social skills. Low barrier to market (no pun intended) always means more aggressive competition. Nobody makes or pays $500+ an hour without specialised skills. Nobody.
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
If Linux has reached the world of hundred year old assaying firms, and Swiss vaults buried in mountains, can final world domination be too far away?"
Yeah, we just need a few nuclear exchanges. Linux and roaches, FTW!
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
quality, D&D free sex workers put exceptional time and training both into their physical and social skills.
D&D? What does Dungeons and Dragons have to do with the sex trade?
Or is this just a clever commercial for BullionVault being pitched at the Linux loving Slashdot community?
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
... and it wants its "Linux being used in X industry... Yaaay... " story back.
I don't know, when i see a story about handling a lot of money and open source i just can think it's probably because they prefer to have people auditing the code for "free" and fix them quickly. Something that is really hard to achieve with proprietary software as they sometimes go with security through obscurity or take a while to deploy patches.
My doomsday device, sitting quietly in orbit above your precious little planet and patiently awaiting activation, runs linux! Celebrate, puny humans, for soon thou shalt be destroyed by the Great Old Penguin.
weinersmith
Honestly, I've been a Linux advocate since - oh - '96 or so, and a linux user fulltime since 2004. However, I've recently just about given up on Desktop Linux at least. I migrated my primary laptop from Linux (openSUSE) to Vista a few weeks back simply because there were too many things not working the way I felt they needed to be.
I could get around most of the constant need for IE by using Crossover Office or IES4Linux. However, more and more sites are requiring IE7 or plugins which don't work in Wine. Running VirtualBox or VMWare works but drags the computer down way too much. (And I could never convince RIM to make a Blackberry desktop program for Linux, in spite of four years of asking them at least monthly. Oh, and neither VirtualBox nor VMWare seems to let me synch my blackberry when running under Linux.)
I might be wrong, but I see the ease of use of Wintendo much more than of Linux, especially for desktops. Yes, it is true that *nix is already in use on embedded devices such as my DSL router, my ethernet router, my son's Didj handheld game system, my wife's TiVO and on our Satellite NAV system in the car. However, there just "seems" to be something missing from the desktop arena.
Since switching the laptop to Vista (after almost two years on openSUSE), I've noticed a few things. First, it never fails to connect to my wireless (WPA encrypted/no SSID broadcast) network at home. Under openSUSE, I would routinely connect instead to my neighbor's network and have serious trouble connecting to mine, unless I went to the CLI and typed in su rcnetwork restart.
Second, I can now finally fill in PDF forms and save teh data. You wouldnt' think this was a big deal, but it is for me. (I'm a PHB.) There is an OSS java program but it would routinely fail for me.
Third, I can actually get on my corporate WAN via the new Juniper web-based VPN. (Yes, I've written to Juniper to ask them not to use ActiveX for this.)
Fourth, flash based and java based web applications work faster and better. Though I use Firefox, I do have IE tab running.
Now, in fairness, I've had my share of issues. After installing Office2007 (only because OOo 3.x doesn't support comments and versions in documents) I started crashing. I even got a few bluescreens. Also, on about every other day, my laptop will simply shut off. I have no idea why.
Will I continue to use Linux? You bet! I have it running on another older laptop, which i use to SSH into my home network from work or whereever. (I have a static IP at home.) I can use this for a proxy or simply to diagnose an issue my wife or kids might be having.
However, I don't see it taking over the desktop anytime soon. Had this question been asked of me two years ago, I woudl have said and emphatic, "yes." However I think that the window of opportunity has slipped by and that the big money - Microshaft and The-Cult-of-Apple - have made it nearly impossible to let better technology succeed.
Mark me down as a troll if you wish, this is simply my $0.02.
(Oh, and I had to read this page in compatibility mode, because IE8 throws too many errors...)
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
For a while, they deployed OpenOffice as the word processing and spreadsheet application, but ran into problems. The wide range of multimedia documents and complex spreadsheets, often produced by Microsoft Office, that the company received were not reliably imported into OpenOffice. In the worst cases, some spreadsheets would crash OpenOffice Calc. As many of the documents were related to authenticating customers, pragmatism has meant that the company has switched to Microsoft Office, at least for the foreseeable future.
The foreseeable future...considering I heard almost that exact quote 10 years ago I don't think they'll be switching anytime in the next century. And the guy that said
But the whole point of the post was that Linux reached something so archaic -- not something at the forefront.
I hope you're being sarcastic because if not you're very sad and very, very dumb.
Finally! 2009 shall be the Year of Linux on the Mountaintop!
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Oh FFS, the year is 2009 not 1999. Linux being used for servers in big business and multinationals is not newsworthy. Linux is a mainstream server platform. This is a "dog bites man" story and isn't worth our attention.
this is so weird. talking gold investing on slashdot? i like gold but this mainstream attention is driving me crazy - there is a bubble in every market and i can't figure out how much time in this gold bull run we have. i guess its still not considered normal for people to hold gold as an investment like it is with the stock market (or was). concerning inflation - i am not so sure about predicting the outcome. much wealth was wiped out and printing some trillions might not be enough to cause enough inflation. however, in the case of deflation which is happening now (and gold is doing fine) i wouldn't worry about gold either becouse gold is actually money.
This week there are three people who have enticed me to buy gold: 1. My banker 2. My wife 3. Slashdot I am used to the first two trying to convince me to buy something that would fall in value. This is the first time Slashdot has joined them. Et tu Brute. My feeling: $650 per troy ounce by next year.
I said at least 1. from here
September 8, 2008: London Stock Exchange
The London Stock Exchange had to stop trading for more than seven hours due an issue with its new trading platform, co-developed with Microsoft.
They had specificially chosen windows for reliability
The incident could prove to be particularly embarrassing for Microsoft who at the end of 2006 launched a huge advertising campaign stating that the London Stock Exchange had chosen Windows over Linux because of reliability issues. An opinion obviously not shared by the New York Stock Exchange who has been using Linux and AIX for over a year without any outage at all.
note the NYSE is has been running for years with no major outages (even most 'major' outages last an hour not a day)
june 3, 2008: OMX Nordic Exchange and the Oslo Stock Exchange
The OMX Nordic Exchange and the Oslo Stock Exchange opened five and a half hours late due to a problem with the trading system. Just the day before, the start of trading had been delayed by 40 minutes due to the same problem. Stock exchanges in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Helsinki and Oslo were all affected (they use the same backend system).
oh OMX = NASDAQ OMX, but finding out what software they're running is a bit tricky unless microsoft are gloating about the switch (as they were in with LSE)
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
No. The cave artist didn't have any animals to pay cave prostitute, so he was trying to impress her by painting them.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
More revenues for society to not mean the society is healthy, especially if wealth is being concentrated among fewer people. Plus, saying that revenues went up since we started cutting taxes in the 1980s is meaningless. If revenues didn't go up, you wouldn't be beating inflation.
Obviously, there is some point at which raising tax rates becomes damaging to an economy. Our rates seem to be just fine - we just need a simpler tax code that closes loopholes for corporations, since they pay some of the lowest effective tax rates in the industrialized world.
Elements of the Laffer Curve theory would explain why American businesses are doing so well, and middle class American citizens are not.
ok, nice to get the press coverage but an iPhone could probably handle "thousands" of daily transactions. compared to exchanges processing millions per second, this is not so impressive. a lot of them are using linux (NYSE at least uses it for some stuff, although they use AIX or z/OS for lots of stuff, too). it should come as no surprise to anyone that almost all financial markets operate on some type of unix or linux platform. really, what else would you use?
RiotingPacifist, I think you're just upset that you had answers you did not count on here http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1209893&cid=27700467 that are in favor of Windows uptime and stability at a major stock exchange, and for far longer than anything you could put up using Linux. When NYSE gets to 5 years or better of 99.999+% uptime, then & only then RiotingPacifist, might be able to talk (because the best you had from the other stock exchanges that used Linux was what - 2 yrs. at best? Not even 1/2 as much time as Windows had)
The same thing is usually done with AIX, whatever IBM sells for their mainframes, and other business systems that aren't from MSFT. What open source does bring you is the ability for someone to continue support for a product that the vendor has end-of-life'd. The business has the choice of spending money on upgrading to a new product or spending it on 'dead product' maintenance (internally or 3rd party). Unfortunately for MSFT, most business have taken a "hell no, we won't go!" attitude to moving beyond XP. :)
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs