London Stock Exchange to abandon MS Windows

http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_to_abandon_failed_windows_platform

by wglb • 17 years ago

62 40 17 years ago

blogs.computerworld.com

TrevorJ• 17 years ago

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.

wyday• 17 years ago

But you don't get thousands of clicks if you title your article "Bad Programmers Create Shitty Programs".

maukdaddy• 17 years ago

Programmed by Accenture. There's your problem.

zen53• 17 years ago

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"

dtf2• 17 years ago

I can't imagine why anyone would ask Accenture to program something as critical and technically demanding as a trading platform. Their public record here in the UK is appalling - the NHS and British Gas are two horrendous cock ups that spring to mind. How on earth do they win these kind of contracts? Brown envelopes?

ams6110• 17 years ago

Absolutely. You know who writes code at Accenture? 22-year-old liberal arts and business majors, in their first job out of college, who've had about 6 weeks of training in programming.

christofd4• 17 years ago

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.

mrtron• 17 years ago

If people in banking tell you that Java/Unix is standard (which it is), why does one exchange moving some components to MSFT products impress you?

christofd4• 17 years ago

I was surprised that a major stock exchange would pick something that is not standard.

gaius4• 17 years ago

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.

christofd4• 17 years ago

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.

jacquesm• 17 years ago

aaarghhh Mumps...

what do you mean you reset the editor string ?

dtf2• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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. :)

Quarrelsome• 17 years ago

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.

martin• 17 years ago

I stopped reading at the point he described the existing solution as "a custom blend of C# and .NET programs." He obviously doesn't have a clue about the platform he's bashing.

mustpax• 17 years ago

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has quite a thing for Linux and OSS in general. Check out his articles here: http://blogs.computerworld.com/sjvn

I mean, I derive no pleasure from using bloated MS software myself (cough Outlook cough), but this guy clearly has an agenda that guides his reporting.

aschobel2• 17 years ago

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

http://www.onwindows.com/Articles/LSE-TradElect-system-goes-...

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.

cdibona2• 17 years ago

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.

wglb3• 17 years ago

This article http://techgeist.net/2009/07/london-stock-exchange-moving-wi... does compare to cars, but not quite the way you are mentioning.

buugs• 17 years ago

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

fauigerzigerk• 17 years ago

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)

olefoo3• 17 years ago

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.

gaius4• 17 years ago

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.

olefoo3• 17 years ago

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... ;-)

London Stock Exchange to abandon MS Windows

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