Let me add another (unfortunately realistic) possibility to your list:
1) The devs configuring the system didn't properly account for the sheer scale of the stress on their systems.
2) The smaller vendors took the change more seriously, and being smaller and more flexible, successfully updated their systems to interact properly with the new systems.
3) Documentation provided to vendors is either incorrect or sufficiently vague that some software shops interpret the spec incorrectly and end up depending on the equivalent of "undefined behavior". The behavior appears correct up until the minute that someone with a fat wallet looks at it—at which point everything breaks.
If this has been Windows story, there would be much frothing at the mouth and blame on Microsoft. Since it is Linux, the blame magically lies with the implementation.
Nobody is blaming the LSE's implementation. The LSE (and MilleniumIT) has provided a new system and interface. Many third-party vendors (Reuters, Trading Technology, Interactive Brokers, etc.) write adapter software which consumes that interface and exposes it through their own standard (but usually slower or less powerful) interfaces. It is typically cheaper and easier for traders to use these vendor interfaces to connect to a variety of exchanges, instead of forcing every trader to adopt the raw (high-performance and bandwidth-intensive) interfaces provided by the LSE. Those vendors now have bugs in their software, but the LSE is taking the heat. That's not right.
It isn't clear is if it is 100% Windows. Is it? Many companies rely on a variety of technologies and platforms like NASDAQ above.
I would imagine that there are a variety of technologies in use by any exchange. OTOH, DirectEdge is smaller (and newer) than NASDAQ so it's possible that they're a single-platform shop. Their web server identifies itself as Microsoft-IIS/7.0.
"Both the Direct Edge and ISE platforms had been built on Windows Server technology," says Bonanno. "It's where our expertise lies. Based on our experience with those systems over five years, we felt that Microsoft had what it took to be a mission-critical, high-performance platform. It had always been a requirement of our earlier systems to handle massive numbers of transactions, and to do so quickly. For example, we built a real-time processing engine on Microsoft technology that published several hundred thousand transaction messages per second. If Microsoft hadn't been able to meet our needs, we'd have looked elsewhere—but there was no need to."
So both DirectEdge and ISE used MS as a platform prior to the case study, and DirectEdge sounds like happy customers. Amusingly, the lead-in there seems to imply that they chose the platform because of their own knowledge base, not because it was actually better:
This is the point in the story at which most companies would consider their technology options—but not Direct Edge.
"Both the Direct Edge and ISE platforms had been built on Windows Server technology," says Bonanno. "It's where our expertise lies. [et cetera]"
A non-custom CMS like WordPress is very often the target of massive automated attacks: a new bug is discovered in WP and a tool is written to seek out vulnerable installations and exploit that bug. If you have the skill or $$ to pour over the code, you can probably find your own bugs before they become publicly known
Wordpress is a particularly bad example. There are a lot of features it supports that a custom CMS may not support that make security more difficult. It's not unreasonable to expect a custom-build solution to be more secure than the generic solution if the generic solution has many more features (and thus more complexity and potential for nuanced bugs).
Even on the tubez, do you think is better to have unlimited but QoS-es traffic or a limited traffic quota with no QoS?
The former. Proper QoS does absolutely nothing when there is bandwidth available, and it prioritizes light, latency-sensitive and interactive traffic over bulk downloads when there is competition. Even with "no QoS", routers and switches eventually have to choose a packet to drop when queues fill up, so this choice is a false dichotomy.
Maybe you're thinking of "Evil/Stupid QoS" which penalizes destinations that don't Pay Up to the telco mafia every month. That's a horse of a different color.
So where do you look for an international company then?
If a company has a presence in your country, then you look under your country's TLD. It's not much different than multinational companies now such as Amazon that have amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.de (curiously enough, no amazon.us). If they're international but not interested in your nation, then guess based on a larger nearby nation. It's not difficult at all: "multinational" just means more chances at guessing right the first time!
Unfortunately, many people use the same argument without joking. I've heard that more black dogs are put to sleep by animal shelters than any other fur color. Does that mean black dogs are unloved? Well, I don't know, it depends on how common black dogs are. But it's "heartless" to bring up the topic of conditional probability.
We also ask them to die for their country before they're allowed to imbibe. And for many people, abstinence-only sex education makes sense. And we never say "quaff" (except for potions).
Theaters only exist because once upon a time it was impractical to show films in any other way. Modern technology has made them mostly pointless, but society has its own flavor of inertia that keeps things like theaters around long after they're useful.
I don't think so. Maybe if the only intrinsic value of going to the theater is to view a film, then technology has made them pointless. However, not everyone has a THX-certified viewing/listening environment. Furthermore, most people consider "going to the movies" to be a social event, and no amount of technology will replace that in-person human interaction.
What I would like to see is people forget the damn spelling rules and simply spell words as the sound as that allows people to concentrate on getting ideas across instead of worrying about spelling "to/too" correctly.
Realize that "to/too" spelling does allow people to concentrate on getting ideas across. Consider these two sentence fragments:
I want it to
I want it too
The former leaves a reader waiting for another word, whereas the latter is easily understood to mean agreement. In spoken language this is probably resolved by a combination of pitch and inter-word spacing.
I guarantee it costs a lot more for those lawyers to 'draft up a C&D' (despite them probably being rather generic templates with form fields) then it does to [...anything else...]
Not if the lawyer is a salaried employee of the company. I imagine Activision is big enough to have someone already available to do this sort of thing.
Giving me the option to give some of my money back to you when I say I'm not paid enough is not logic that I can wrap my mind around.
Learn the difference between a stock option and a stock grant.
I've never heard of a stock grant before. I just did some reading, thanks. But I don't see what you are arguing: either a stock option or a grant has a value that is related to the price of the stock at one point in time. If that price tanks in the future, then the option/grant is not worth what it was originally. However, you have still essentially accepted it at the original value, meaning you got screwed relative to a cash equivalent. It's not like the options/grants come out of thin air, they could have been some other incentive.
In any case, I never want stock in the company I work for. That's like doubling down a bet: if the company collapses, I'm out both my stocks and my income!
It sounds like the boss doesn't know the difference between "nice to have" and "need to have." (Among other things like common sense managing people.)
Yeah I've heard the "everything is equally top priority" from a manager before. My rebuttal of "oh, well then everything is also bottom priority" helped her to turn that collection into a priority queue.
Slashdot Mirror
3) Documentation provided to vendors is either incorrect or sufficiently vague that some software shops interpret the spec incorrectly and end up depending on the equivalent of "undefined behavior". The behavior appears correct up until the minute that someone with a fat wallet looks at it—at which point everything breaks.
Nobody is blaming the LSE's implementation. The LSE (and MilleniumIT) has provided a new system and interface. Many third-party vendors (Reuters, Trading Technology, Interactive Brokers, etc.) write adapter software which consumes that interface and exposes it through their own standard (but usually slower or less powerful) interfaces. It is typically cheaper and easier for traders to use these vendor interfaces to connect to a variety of exchanges, instead of forcing every trader to adopt the raw (high-performance and bandwidth-intensive) interfaces provided by the LSE. Those vendors now have bugs in their software, but the LSE is taking the heat. That's not right.
I would imagine that there are a variety of technologies in use by any exchange. OTOH, DirectEdge is smaller (and newer) than NASDAQ so it's possible that they're a single-platform shop. Their web server identifies itself as Microsoft-IIS/7.0.
So both DirectEdge and ISE used MS as a platform prior to the case study, and DirectEdge sounds like happy customers. Amusingly, the lead-in there seems to imply that they chose the platform because of their own knowledge base, not because it was actually better:
I do.
Wordpress is a particularly bad example. There are a lot of features it supports that a custom CMS may not support that make security more difficult. It's not unreasonable to expect a custom-build solution to be more secure than the generic solution if the generic solution has many more features (and thus more complexity and potential for nuanced bugs).
The former. Proper QoS does absolutely nothing when there is bandwidth available, and it prioritizes light, latency-sensitive and interactive traffic over bulk downloads when there is competition. Even with "no QoS", routers and switches eventually have to choose a packet to drop when queues fill up, so this choice is a false dichotomy.
Maybe you're thinking of "Evil/Stupid QoS" which penalizes destinations that don't Pay Up to the telco mafia every month. That's a horse of a different color.
FTFY.
Oh good. For a minute, I was really worried that my investment advisors would lose their domain!
If a company has a presence in your country, then you look under your country's TLD. It's not much different than multinational companies now such as Amazon that have amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.de (curiously enough, no amazon.us). If they're international but not interested in your nation, then guess based on a larger nearby nation. It's not difficult at all: "multinational" just means more chances at guessing right the first time!
But you'll miss out on all of the synergy!
To error is human.
To errno is divine.
Unfortunately, many people use the same argument without joking. I've heard that more black dogs are put to sleep by animal shelters than any other fur color. Does that mean black dogs are unloved? Well, I don't know, it depends on how common black dogs are. But it's "heartless" to bring up the topic of conditional probability.
But, but, there might be alcohol in your trunk! Alcohol on its way to a teenager party!
We also ask them to die for their country before they're allowed to imbibe. And for many people, abstinence-only sex education makes sense. And we never say "quaff" (except for potions).
Doesn't seem to be an issue for me:
Maybe the client was requesting a keep-alive, as all modern browsers expect to do? Or maybe it's an HTTP/1.0 vs. /1.1 difference.
I don't think so. Maybe if the only intrinsic value of going to the theater is to view a film, then technology has made them pointless. However, not everyone has a THX-certified viewing/listening environment. Furthermore, most people consider "going to the movies" to be a social event, and no amount of technology will replace that in-person human interaction.
What?
Today's mathematical lesson is going to be about disjoint sets, kids!
Realize that "to/too" spelling does allow people to concentrate on getting ideas across. Consider these two sentence fragments:
The former leaves a reader waiting for another word, whereas the latter is easily understood to mean agreement. In spoken language this is probably resolved by a combination of pitch and inter-word spacing.
Not if the lawyer is a salaried employee of the company. I imagine Activision is big enough to have someone already available to do this sort of thing.
Yeah, the website full of loosers!
OTOH, it might make the web more interesting if the WHATWG adopts a more Gygaxian approach to standards development.
I've never heard of a stock grant before. I just did some reading, thanks. But I don't see what you are arguing: either a stock option or a grant has a value that is related to the price of the stock at one point in time. If that price tanks in the future, then the option/grant is not worth what it was originally. However, you have still essentially accepted it at the original value, meaning you got screwed relative to a cash equivalent. It's not like the options/grants come out of thin air, they could have been some other incentive.
In any case, I never want stock in the company I work for. That's like doubling down a bet: if the company collapses, I'm out both my stocks and my income!
Yeah I've heard the "everything is equally top priority" from a manager before. My rebuttal of "oh, well then everything is also bottom priority" helped her to turn that collection into a priority queue.