Not true. You may not be competent enough to tell what product will or won't work for you, but a bureaucrat is even less qualified to make those decisions for you. Government regulation in markets gives the illusion of safety but opens the door for corporate rent seeking and blocking competition in business more than it offers safety. The truth is isthat USA has grown the be a wealthy and safe place IN SPITE OF all the regulations we throw on business.
The smallest set of components you need to insure that food won't give you botulism is (1) you having the ability to sue a store that harms you by selling tainted food and (2) business being forced to show up front how much liability insurance they carry. That's it. The price of insurance, the cost of a lawsuit, and the sense of fairness of a jury will keep business honest and safe and responsible to a standard that will morph over time as business changes and people change and technology changes. Nothing more is needed to insure reasonable safety in any market and anything more gives businesses to game the rules seek rent.
Even with the growing quagmire of regulations in our country we still have fewer than most countries out there, and there by have grown economically faster than our peers but still far slower than we could have. Google "economic freedom index" for more.
It's simple. We're having this problem because the government runs the educational system. You should be free to believe whatever you want and teach your kids whatever you want. So you send your kids to go learn about God and ID and I'll send my kids to go learn science and economics. Then my kid gets to be your kid's boss and lay him off so he can stand in the unemployment line with all those Saudi Princes with Ph.D's in theology. Problem solved.
When I asked this question to a bunch of suits they told me a story (no idea if this is true) about a time when Sun accidently released the.h file to the driver for their high end video card. Six months later some no-name company released an exact cheap clone of their video card. Apparently they were able to reverse engineer the chip from just knowing what registers where what based off the header file.
While fears like no longer apply to chips as complex as we use now, stories like this don't seem to ever die when passed from one CEO to another.
I'm sorry. They might be as crazy as SCO but private property is private property.
If the neighbors or the city really has something to gain with their house looking good they should either offer to pay for more attractive tin foil or offer to buy their house from them. Forcing a private property owner to decorate their home a certain way at gunpoint is not part of a free society.
Y sperm are fast and flimsy. X sperm are sturdy and slow. The more chemically hostile a woman's body is the more likely the flimsy Y sperm are to die and the more likely the study X sperm are to fertilize the egg. When a woman is "turned on" her body "tries" harder to become pregnant by changing the chemical nature of her reproductive tract, making it more likely that she will become pregnant (and also much more likely she will have a boy).
Men who are really amazing lovers tend to only have boys.
Given that tenacious problem solvers engineers are, I don't find this article surprising at all.
The point of the signature is not to protect YOU, the card holder from fraud, it's to protect the merchant from fraud. If someone steals your card and buys things with it, ultimately it is the merchant, not YOU, who will pay for it. The merchant collects the signature to prove to the bank that YOU were at the point of sale, not a thief, so the merchant bank does not take the sale funds away from them if you cry foul. If they do not accept a valid signature from you that just means they are not losing a enough money to fraud to care one way or the other. So they are putting their asses on the line (not yours) with the signature issue.
I had it done a year ago and I am so happy. It's way more than being free of glasses or contacts. You seriously feel superhuman after wards. My eyesight now is way better than it ever was with glasses. Especially if you have astigmatism, glasses can make things clearer but they cant get rid of ghosting or fix the interference with parallel lines (ever notice how people with astigmatism can't hang pictures straight?).
Anyhow... Save up money for a doctor with good equipment. I paid $2000 per eye and it was so worth it. You don't need to worry about holding still, they lock your eye still with a suction cup and the all laser machines shut off instantly if somehow your pupil starts to wander.
Ask your doctor about his success ratio. What percentage of people have to come back for corrections and also what he considers success. Cheap places will say that 20/40 vision is a success (you still need glasses) and won't do a touch up if thats as far as you get. A decent doctor will draw the line at around 20/25 and do a follow up if need be. My doctor had over 20,000 surgeries under his belt and had zero injuries and only a handful of people who he couldn't get to 20/25.
Also check out the "Wavefront" technology. They do a high res scan of your eye and custom cut to fix your exact defects which usually results in vision around 20/15 or 20/10 (twice as good as perfect!). It's amazing. I had a friend who had it done (my eyes were too bad to try) and he can things I can't even imagine!
The risk of injury is basically nil if you get a good doctor. The parts that actually suck are as follows: the surgery doesn't hurt but the smell of cooking flesh really gets to you, the fact that you can't rub your eyes or get them wet for a few weeks is really annoying, and lastly the fact that you need to use eye drops for about a year is by far the worst part. But even with all that it's still worth it!
When the plow was introduced to Europe and suddenly one person and a horse could do the work of 20 people, there was fears of rampant unemployment and a suffering economy. Instead we got the Renaissance.
Every so often a new idea or technology destroys an industry and the luddites. The printing press, the cotton gin, steam engine, and open source. It frees up hands and mind to work on the next level of civilization.
TrustCommerce has a great system called BillingID's where you can submit all your credit card info for storage on our secure Linux servers. You are given a handle that you can use bill the customer at any time through our cool GPL'ed client API. Retrieval of the CC info is impossible so even if your server is compromised the hacker can't get your credit card information. This lets you bill customers at your leisure but lets you offload all the extra security responsibility onto us. Security is, after all, what we do.
</shameless plug>
Where does society get off saying what people can and can't do with their own bodies, given that they are aware of the risks (or at least aware that the risks are not known). These are not questions for the government or society to ask. These are questions for individuals to ask. "Is this a good choice for me and my body?"
Better than having more layers, just add more bits. Case and point: 2048 bit encryption is not twice as hard to break as 1024 (with twice as many bits). It's closer to 2^1024 times as hard (with 1024 more bits). Crypto can always keep ahead of brute force attacks by adding more bits. The real danger is some kind of algorithm that would make the brute force unnecessary..
This is an anecdote about installing it. There was no mention of how it handles Office200/XP document importing and exporting. There was no mention on how stable it was. There was no mention of how well it integrates with the KDE or Gnome desktops, cut and paste, drag and drop. There was no mention on how it's usability has evolved.
There are MUCH bigger issues with Start Office than does it install quickly or does it hog the screen. How about, can it gracefully replace MS Office for a MS Office user and if not why not?
The big three apps are Outlook, IE, and Office. We have Evolution, Mozilla and ???? A contender for the missing piece of the desktop puzzle deserves a better review than this.
I bet the US patent office would shape up really quick if they were liable for all the court costs companies incur defending themselves from hogwash like this.
Proper billing information security involves two steps: first, the ordinary system security that we all know about - protecting your system from breakins, physical security of the machines, etc. This is a big job in and of itself. On top of that, you then need to worry about encryption of the account information, so that if there is a break-in (either virtual or physical), you are not in a position to be blackmailed by the crackers.
More details can be found on my company's page about security, here. Allow me to boast for a moment and state that we are one of the only payment processors that uses a fully encrypted data storage system: no unencypted card numbers are ever writen to disk. Cool, eh?
As long as I'm evangelizing our service, I will also mention our Billing ID system. This is probably exactly the sort of thing you should be using for this application: not only does it do automated recurring billing, but it actually stores all the info in an encypted database so that you don't have to be responsible for holding that information locally. You can run transactions on the account either by using the six digit Billing ID returned by the original store transaction, or by scheduling one-time or repeated transactions through either the web interface or the TCLink API. It's a pretty nifty system, you might want to check it out for your app.
I got a copy of a few weeks ago and I have to say I loved it. The single player game is simple and fast paced. There's no hunt for the secret door or figuring out complex puzzles. There just a lot of running around killing things with a big sword and occasionally going back to find that door or ledge you walked past. Most single player doom-ish games try and be sooo tricky with all there puzzles to make the game take longer, where as Rune is just a really long, forgiving hack-fest. The first couple of levels are a little dull since they are just getting you used to the controls but it picks up steam and just gets better and better to a very satisfying end.
Mind you I have not played with the death match much but it does indeed look like quake with all bfg's.
TrustCommerce offers a drop in.pm module as well for people writing perl front ends to their web sites. The Raven SSL package allows apache to serve https, not make ssl connections from a perl program. The trouble with SSL in perl is not serving https+mod_perl, its in writing those easy drop in.pm modules for connecting to the eCommerce gateways. Lucky for all you eCommerce site developers, we gateway programmers get to worry about that, not you.
I don't think Adam's comment was meant to detract from the power of something like Mason and mod_perl for developing web site front ends. It was just that of all the API's we have open source libraries for (C, Perl, J2SE, J2EE, Python, PHP and ColdFusion), the Perl module was by far the hardest to develop as the existing tools lack some important features.
I keep a close eye on what bills are being passed and contact my representatives when they must or must not be supported. I write letters to the editors of news papers when they write rather informed or uninformed articles. I donate time and money to organizations that push for change. I spark debate on public web boards. I challenge everyone I know with fact-backed debate and try to change minds one at a time.
I'm sorry I spoke to harshly to you earlier. You caught me in an unusually bad mood. But, yes, that totally apathetic attitude does bother me when I think of the two million people rotting in jail for stupid laws that exist because too many people are apathetic.
I don't want to put my chip on your shoulder, that's a lot to carry. But if you know that these things are wrong what justice does it do you to espouse the opposing rhetoric? All I really want is for you to at least understand the issues you are speaking out on. We are so close to a truly great society and there is just a gap of information to bridge.
While I will refrain from commenting on this individual in this case, it must be said that we in a free society need to always be on our guard as to what the laws are, why they are, and how they are being carried out.
Why can a man in Virginia be throw in jail for going down on his wife in the privacy of their bedroom?
Why does crack cocaine have harder sentences than powder?
Why do blacks make up 15% of the US drug using population but 36% of the drug arrests?
Why can consenting adults be jailed for what they do behind closed doors? [ prostitution, assisted suicide, drug use, sodomy ]
Why, when people break the law, do we enroll them institutions that teach them how to harder criminals and then let them back into society?
Why do we say we are rehabilitating criminals when we only punish them?
The Price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance.
Sheep like you are the reason things are the way they are.
I'd be willing to bet that within a year of the release Microsoft will release the "XBox Center" or some other snazzy marketing name yielding the ability to play Xbox games on your PC.
No, the "XBox Center", or whatever it will be called, will let you do all the non-game things you need a computer for on the XBox. A USB keyboard and mouse, MS Office, IE, MSN, et al. This will be Microsofts dive into the home PC market. It has a hard drive so you can install 3rd party software. It has fixed hardware specs so Microsoft can focus on stable/fast drivers.
It's cheap. It plays games like the best of em. It doesn't need a monitor. It's a full blown PC.
Listen! Loki is only $400,000 in debt. That's not that much. "Will someone with deep pockets save Loki?" No. But we can! They may have gone chapter 11 but the web site is still taking sales.
I don't know what their overhead is but let's assume they make $20 on each sale. That means they only need to sell 20,000 games to be back at ground zero. That's a small percentage of the slashdot population! I know many of us are starving college students and trolls but most of us are well-to-do IT people making real money!
Why stick out necks out to save Loki? I'll tell you why. They have not only made games on linux a reality, but they have made the ability to have games on linux a reality. They made SDL one of the best media layers for any platform. They made OpenAL, the only cross architecture 3D sound library. They pushed the XFree and Mesa developers giving them the need and the user base to make OpenGL on Linux stop being "ok" and start to "kick ass". If it were not for Loki, there would be no Maya for Linux, there would be no glx in XFree86, there would be no SDL. If they go we will lose one of the biggest forces pushing the linux desktop's quality. All of you who remember what 3D, 2D and sound were like on Linux 4 years ago - you KNOW how far we have come, and we owe much of it to Loki.
I know money is tight (it's always tight), but we have an opportunity to save one of the coolest Linux companies around. Like games? Buy some right now, while we still can. Don't like games? Make a 'donation' to Loki to say thanks for all their hard work. Poor? Get one of the older 'on sale' games. Company just IPO'ed? Get two of each and give them to your friends. There are SO many of us!! Sure, Linux companies are dropping like flys but none fill the niche that will be left empty once Loki is gone.
Linux and other free or open source software has its best showing in the webserer market. You can use Netcraft to examine webserver/OS choice of banks and other large companies and present them as examples. I doubt that those companies would be willing to give you more detailed specifics, but you could go ahead and ask them anyway.
The example you mentioned in parathesis sounds more like a backend thing. Backends, especially in the banking industry, tend to be so old that they predate both open source and Microsoft in the server domain. Those systems tend to be running AIX or SCO.
You're welcome to use my company, TrustCommerce, as an example. We use open source software for pretty much everything, both web stuff and backend. Our processor runs millions of transactions a month and hasn't had a single moment of downtime in over a year. All of our web and frontend stuff is using open source software as well, but there are plenty of good examples of that from companies that will be far better known than us.
Slashdot Mirror
As a gamer and someone who's made enough money to retire ten times over I have to tell you it just ain't so.
What we all REALLY want is to feel like we're making a difference; that we're accomplishing something important.
The right career CAN give you that, and if its not you should consider a new one. I love games... but they are accomplishment porn.
The satisfaction is hollow compared to the real thing.
Not true. You may not be competent enough to tell what product will or won't work for you, but a bureaucrat is even less qualified to make those decisions for you. Government regulation in markets gives the illusion of safety but opens the door for corporate rent seeking and blocking competition in business more than it offers safety. The truth is isthat USA has grown the be a wealthy and safe place IN SPITE OF all the regulations we throw on business.
The smallest set of components you need to insure that food won't give you botulism is (1) you having the ability to sue a store that harms you by selling tainted food and (2) business being forced to show up front how much liability insurance they carry. That's it. The price of insurance, the cost of a lawsuit, and the sense of fairness of a jury will keep business honest and safe and responsible to a standard that will morph over time as business changes and people change and technology changes. Nothing more is needed to insure reasonable safety in any market and anything more gives businesses to game the rules seek rent.
Even with the growing quagmire of regulations in our country we still have fewer than most countries out there, and there by have grown economically faster than our peers but still far slower than we could have. Google "economic freedom index" for more.
That's because Aliens cause global warming.
s _quote04.html
Excellent speech. Please read.
http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeche
http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches _quote04.html
It's simple. We're having this problem because the government runs the educational system. You should be free to believe whatever you want and teach your kids whatever you want. So you send your kids to go learn about God and ID and I'll send my kids to go learn science and economics. Then my kid gets to be your kid's boss and lay him off so he can stand in the unemployment line with all those Saudi Princes with Ph.D's in theology. Problem solved.
When I asked this question to a bunch of suits they told me a story (no idea if this is true) about a time when Sun accidently released the .h file to the driver for their high end video card. Six months later some no-name company released an exact cheap clone of their video card. Apparently they were able to reverse engineer the chip from just knowing what registers where what based off the header file.
While fears like no longer apply to chips as complex as we use now, stories like this don't seem to ever die when passed from one CEO to another.
I'm sorry. They might be as crazy as SCO but private property is private property.
If the neighbors or the city really has something to gain with their house looking good they should either offer to pay for more attractive tin foil or offer to buy their house from them. Forcing a private property owner to decorate their home a certain way at gunpoint is not part of a free society.
Y sperm are fast and flimsy. X sperm are sturdy and slow. The more chemically hostile a woman's body is the more likely the flimsy Y sperm are to die and the more likely the study X sperm are to fertilize the egg. When a woman is "turned on" her body "tries" harder to become pregnant by changing the chemical nature of her reproductive tract, making it more likely that she will become pregnant (and also much more likely she will have a boy).
Men who are really amazing lovers tend to only have boys.
Given that tenacious problem solvers engineers are, I don't find this article surprising at all.
The point of the signature is not to protect YOU, the card holder from fraud, it's to protect the merchant from fraud. If someone steals your card and buys things with it, ultimately it is the merchant, not YOU, who will pay for it. The merchant collects the signature to prove to the bank that YOU were at the point of sale, not a thief, so the merchant bank does not take the sale funds away from them if you cry foul. If they do not accept a valid signature from you that just means they are not losing a enough money to fraud to care one way or the other. So they are putting their asses on the line (not yours) with the signature issue.
PogoLinux.Com StorageWare
I had it done a year ago and I am so happy. It's way more than being free of glasses or contacts. You seriously feel superhuman after wards. My eyesight now is way better than it ever was with glasses. Especially if you have astigmatism, glasses can make things clearer but they cant get rid of ghosting or fix the interference with parallel lines (ever notice how people with astigmatism can't hang pictures straight?).
Anyhow... Save up money for a doctor with good equipment. I paid $2000 per eye and it was so worth it. You don't need to worry about holding still, they lock your eye still with a suction cup and the all laser machines shut off instantly if somehow your pupil starts to wander.
Ask your doctor about his success ratio. What percentage of people have to come back for corrections and also what he considers success. Cheap places will say that 20/40 vision is a success (you still need glasses) and won't do a touch up if thats as far as you get. A decent doctor will draw the line at around 20/25 and do a follow up if need be. My doctor had over 20,000 surgeries under his belt and had zero injuries and only a handful of people who he couldn't get to 20/25.
Also check out the "Wavefront" technology. They do a high res scan of your eye and custom cut to fix your exact defects which usually results in vision around 20/15 or 20/10 (twice as good as perfect!). It's amazing. I had a friend who had it done (my eyes were too bad to try) and he can things I can't even imagine!
The risk of injury is basically nil if you get a good doctor. The parts that actually suck are as follows: the surgery doesn't hurt but the smell of cooking flesh really gets to you, the fact that you can't rub your eyes or get them wet for a few weeks is really annoying, and lastly the fact that you need to use eye drops for about a year is by far the worst part. But even with all that it's still worth it!
Every so often a new idea or technology destroys an industry and the luddites. The printing press, the cotton gin, steam engine, and open source. It frees up hands and mind to work on the next level of civilization.
TrustCommerce has a great system called BillingID's where you can submit all your credit card info for storage on our secure Linux servers. You are given a handle that you can use bill the customer at any time through our cool GPL'ed client API. Retrieval of the CC info is impossible so even if your server is compromised the hacker can't get your credit card information. This lets you bill customers at your leisure but lets you offload all the extra security responsibility onto us. Security is, after all, what we do. </shameless plug>
Where does society get off saying what people can and can't do with their own bodies, given that they are aware of the risks (or at least aware that the risks are not known). These are not questions for the government or society to ask. These are questions for individuals to ask. "Is this a good choice for me and my body?"
Better than having more layers, just add more bits. Case and point: 2048 bit encryption is not twice as hard to break as 1024 (with twice as many bits). It's closer to 2^1024 times as hard (with 1024 more bits). Crypto can always keep ahead of brute force attacks by adding more bits. The real danger is some kind of algorithm that would make the brute force unnecessary..
This is an anecdote about installing it. There was no mention of how it handles Office200/XP document importing and exporting. There was no mention on how stable it was. There was no mention of how well it integrates with the KDE or Gnome desktops, cut and paste, drag and drop. There was no mention on how it's usability has evolved.
There are MUCH bigger issues with Start Office than does it install quickly or does it hog the screen. How about, can it gracefully replace MS Office for a MS Office user and if not why not?
The big three apps are Outlook, IE, and Office. We have Evolution, Mozilla and ???? A contender for the missing piece of the desktop puzzle deserves a better review than this.
I bet the US patent office would shape up really quick if they were liable for all the court costs companies incur defending themselves from hogwash like this.
Proper billing information security involves two steps: first, the ordinary system security that we all know about - protecting your system from breakins, physical security of the machines, etc. This is a big job in and of itself. On top of that, you then need to worry about encryption of the account information, so that if there is a break-in (either virtual or physical), you are not in a position to be blackmailed by the crackers.
More details can be found on my company's page about security, here. Allow me to boast for a moment and state that we are one of the only payment processors that uses a fully encrypted data storage system: no unencypted card numbers are ever writen to disk. Cool, eh?
As long as I'm evangelizing our service, I will also mention our Billing ID system. This is probably exactly the sort of thing you should be using for this application: not only does it do automated recurring billing, but it actually stores all the info in an encypted database so that you don't have to be responsible for holding that information locally. You can run transactions on the account either by using the six digit Billing ID returned by the original store transaction, or by scheduling one-time or repeated transactions through either the web interface or the TCLink API. It's a pretty nifty system, you might want to check it out for your app.
I got a copy of a few weeks ago and I have to say I loved it. The single player game is simple and fast paced. There's no hunt for the secret door or figuring out complex puzzles. There just a lot of running around killing things with a big sword and occasionally going back to find that door or ledge you walked past. Most single player doom-ish games try and be sooo tricky with all there puzzles to make the game take longer, where as Rune is just a really long, forgiving hack-fest. The first couple of levels are a little dull since they are just getting you used to the controls but it picks up steam and just gets better and better to a very satisfying end.
Mind you I have not played with the death match much but it does indeed look like quake with all bfg's.
TrustCommerce offers a drop in .pm module as well for people writing perl front ends to their web sites. The Raven SSL package allows apache to serve https, not make ssl connections from a perl program. The trouble with SSL in perl is not serving https+mod_perl, its in writing those easy drop in .pm modules for connecting to the eCommerce gateways. Lucky for all you eCommerce site developers, we gateway programmers get to worry about that, not you.
I don't think Adam's comment was meant to detract from the power of something like Mason and mod_perl for developing web site front ends. It was just that of all the API's we have open source libraries for (C, Perl, J2SE, J2EE, Python, PHP and ColdFusion), the Perl module was by far the hardest to develop as the existing tools lack some important features.
I keep a close eye on what bills are being passed and contact my representatives when they must or must not be supported. I write letters to the editors of news papers when they write rather informed or uninformed articles. I donate time and money to organizations that push for change. I spark debate on public web boards. I challenge everyone I know with fact-backed debate and try to change minds one at a time.
I'm sorry I spoke to harshly to you earlier. You caught me in an unusually bad mood. But, yes, that totally apathetic attitude does bother me when I think of the two million people rotting in jail for stupid laws that exist because too many people are apathetic.
I don't want to put my chip on your shoulder, that's a lot to carry. But if you know that these things are wrong what justice does it do you to espouse the opposing rhetoric? All I really want is for you to at least understand the issues you are speaking out on. We are so close to a truly great society and there is just a gap of information to bridge.
While I will refrain from commenting on this individual in this case, it must be said that we in a free society need to always be on our guard as to what the laws are, why they are, and how they are being carried out.
Why can a man in Virginia be throw in jail for going down on his wife in the privacy of their bedroom?
Why does crack cocaine have harder sentences than powder?
Why do blacks make up 15% of the US drug using population but 36% of the drug arrests?
Why can consenting adults be jailed for what they do behind closed doors? [ prostitution, assisted suicide, drug use, sodomy ]
Why, when people break the law, do we enroll them institutions that teach them how to harder criminals and then let them back into society?
Why do we say we are rehabilitating criminals when we only punish them?
The Price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance.
Sheep like you are the reason things are the way they are.
I'd be willing to bet that within a year of the release Microsoft will release the "XBox Center" or some other snazzy marketing name yielding the ability to play Xbox games on your PC.
No, the "XBox Center", or whatever it will be called, will let you do all the non-game things you need a computer for on the XBox. A USB keyboard and mouse, MS Office, IE, MSN, et al. This will be Microsofts dive into the home PC market. It has a hard drive so you can install 3rd party software. It has fixed hardware specs so Microsoft can focus on stable/fast drivers.
It's cheap. It plays games like the best of em. It doesn't need a monitor. It's a full blown PC.
Goodbye Dell, Gateway...
Listen! Loki is only $400,000 in debt. That's not that much. "Will someone with deep pockets save Loki?" No. But we can! They may have gone chapter 11 but the web site is still taking sales.
I don't know what their overhead is but let's assume they make $20 on each sale. That means they only need to sell 20,000 games to be back at ground zero. That's a small percentage of the slashdot population! I know many of us are starving college students and trolls but most of us are well-to-do IT people making real money!
Why stick out necks out to save Loki? I'll tell you why. They have not only made games on linux a reality, but they have made the ability to have games on linux a reality. They made SDL one of the best media layers for any platform. They made OpenAL, the only cross architecture 3D sound library. They pushed the XFree and Mesa developers giving them the need and the user base to make OpenGL on Linux stop being "ok" and start to "kick ass". If it were not for Loki, there would be no Maya for Linux, there would be no glx in XFree86, there would be no SDL. If they go we will lose one of the biggest forces pushing the linux desktop's quality. All of you who remember what 3D, 2D and sound were like on Linux 4 years ago - you KNOW how far we have come, and we owe much of it to Loki.
I know money is tight (it's always tight), but we have an opportunity to save one of the coolest Linux companies around. Like games? Buy some right now, while we still can. Don't like games? Make a 'donation' to Loki to say thanks for all their hard work. Poor? Get one of the older 'on sale' games. Company just IPO'ed? Get two of each and give them to your friends. There are SO many of us!! Sure, Linux companies are dropping like flys but none fill the niche that will be left empty once Loki is gone.
The example you mentioned in parathesis sounds more like a backend thing. Backends, especially in the banking industry, tend to be so old that they predate both open source and Microsoft in the server domain. Those systems tend to be running AIX or SCO.
You're welcome to use my company, TrustCommerce, as an example. We use open source software for pretty much everything, both web stuff and backend. Our processor runs millions of transactions a month and hasn't had a single moment of downtime in over a year. All of our web and frontend stuff is using open source software as well, but there are plenty of good examples of that from companies that will be far better known than us.