
London Stock Exchange to abandon MS Windows - wglb
http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_to_abandon_failed_windows_platform
======
Quarrelsome
What the hell? So when a driver of a Toyota car crashes into a tree it's
Toyota at fault as opposed to the driver?

I have no idea why the author has decided to crowbar their own bias on
platform preference into this article. There doesn't appear to be any
information that states its the platform at fault.

~~~
aschobel
LSE's trading platform, TradeElect, was written by Microsoft and Accenture.

[http://www.onwindows.com/Articles/LSE-TradElect-system-
goes-...](http://www.onwindows.com/Articles/LSE-TradElect-system-goes-
live/843/Default.aspx)

Microsoft used TradeElect as a centerpiece in their "Get the Facts" Linux
bashing campaign.

<http://www.microsoft.com/uk/getthefacts/lse.mspx>

Microsoft should get a share of the blame, but it sounds like a borked
implementation since NASDAQ runs on Windows.

~~~
cdibona
Did Nasdaq get rid of the hp/tandem nonstop backends then? I don't think they
did. As of 2008 they were still running them. They might have windows
frontends and middle ware, though.

~~~
aschobel
You're right, I misspoke when I said "NASDAQ runs on Windows".

The information dissemination system runs on Windows, the trading system run
on Tandem.

[http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1290967&cid=285...](http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1290967&cid=28572825)

~~~
cdibona
My first job in the Silicon Valley was on the Himalayas doing QA. They were
awesome machines. QA meant pulling drives and cpus in the middle of
processing, browning out/cutting power, etc.. it was wonderfully destructive
:-)

------
dtf
TradElect was launched at the same time that BetFair, a big internet betting
exchange, announced its own FlyWheel platform. FlyWheel took 2 years to
develop internally (apparently with two different dev teams initially
competing against each other) at a cost of around £1m. It runs on
Oracle/JBoss/Linux/x86 on £25k worth of kit, and does up to 1m TPS (compare
with TradElect's £40m to achieve a target of 68k TPS, which apparently it
never achieved).

~~~
imajes
I heard about this. It's a real shame that BetFair's system isn't being
implemented for the LSE- i hear it far out strips any 'real world' use cases
and can handle it all really well. Sounds pretty awesome to boot. :)

------
TrevorJ
The article doesn't seem to indicate that LSE will be dumping windows -just
dumping a third-party product that happened to run on windows. It is unclear
what platform the new vendor will be using. It is also unclear that the
trouble outlined here was the fault of the OS or just a poorly-coded program
running on top of it.

~~~
maukdaddy
Programmed by Accenture. There's your problem.

~~~
zen53
There is a great comment in the article from a person who worked at
Accenture...

"I finally quit after walking out of a berating meeting from a boss who
reckoned I'd done a project too fast and produced an executable that was too
small. "We quoted them three point two million for this. We can't give them a
500 Kb executable after a week and say it's done"

~~~
jodrellblank
I'd be annoyed if that's all I got.

For 3.2 million, I'd hope for some good documentation, guides, and some
fanfare, preferably some evidence of the QA procedure it's been through, too.
You can't put ten thousand dollars+ of polish on a project in a week, can you?

------
buugs
Lots of diggs for someone who doesn't proofread his articles. I'm guessing he
relates well to their user base.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
He tells bigots what they want to hear. That's a true success formula.

(disclaimer: I use Windows, Linux and OS X and I'm not enthusiastic about any
of them)

------
christofd
hmm... I was surprised several years back by the announcement when LSE (London
Stock Exchange) moved to MSFT server products, since people in banking mostly
tell me that Java/Unix is standard.

~~~
gaius
There is no "standard". In any investment bank you'll find everything from
MUMPS to MATLAB, VAX Pascal, APL, Haskell. The result of a) many acquisitions
and mergers and b) a culture of if you need something, build it yourself, out
of whatever you have to hand. I've seen NeXTStep and OS/2 and even an Amiga on
trading floors.

~~~
christofd
Wait a sec, that's not infrastructure there running in individual trading
departments. Major transactional backbones in banking almost all run on
Java/Unix as I understand.

~~~
gaius
For the really mission-critical systems there's more COBOL, C++ and even VAX
Basic (I'm not kidding) than there is Java, and there's a lot of mainframe and
VMS too, and weird Unixes like Dynix. A lot of it is stuff that people outside
the industry will never even see anymore.

One project I worked on in fixed income was C++ based, it could handle a few
hundred trades per second on modest kit. When I left I think the J2EE rewrite
was up to 6 trades _per minute_...

~~~
christofd
Thanks for the insights! Yes, my friend's dad in Munich used to program the
main software handling Hypo-Vereinsbank's transactions and it was all in COBOL
(a previous programmer had introduced a small rounding error, which resulted
in havoc... good story).

Very interesting to see this diversity of systems.

------
olefoo
My painful discovery of the day was the sad revelation that in 2009 Microsoft
still has not yet moved on from case-insensitive filesystems. I'm sorry, but
if your operating system cannot distinguish between ['ass','Ass','ASS'] then
it is a toy and not a tool.

Modding me down does not erase this painful truth.

~~~
gaius
A case insensitive filesystem needs to convert everything into a single case
before doing any string comparisons. The _only_ reason Unix doesn't do this is
because they couldn't spare the CPU to do it in the original implementation.
So not only are you offtopic, but you have your chronology backwards.

~~~
olefoo
Sorry, but a filesystem that doesn't preserve exactly what I put into it is
broken.

And the only chronology I mentioned was my _surprise_ that Windows is still
broken, even in it's latest iteration (Vista).

I am glad that I only have to deal with Microsoft product on an extremely
occasional basis. I feel sorry for people who are so emotionally invested in
their operating system that they can't see that OpenBSD is the answer... ;-)

~~~
jodrellblank
Windows does preserve exactly what you put into it, it will never change the
case of your files. It will not let you call two files the same name (with
different case) and it will not care if you reference a file with the wrong
case.

This is utterly brilliant behaviour. Case is a pain to remember and a pain to
communicate with other people, it doesn't fit well with our language. You only
need to try and read a password to someone to see that. There's also no
pleasant way to remember that two files are the same name but different cases.

One of the first things I do when installing linux is set bash to case
insensitive tab completion, and vim to case insensitive searching.

You may as well ask for an OS that preserves the speed you typed a filename
and wont let you access it unless you match the speed again.

~~~
wglb
Actually, this is not entirely true. If you use a program called PAX, which is
like unix tar, you can get two files with the same case-independent name with
different capitalization. This is necessary for posix.

And yes, this is very odd, and apparently not well known. Just as is the fact
that from the C-level api, you can use forward slash instead of backslash to
separate file name and directory name.

