<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> </head> <body text="#000000" bgcolor="#ffffff"> ....... So why is the biggest of big business switching to Linux from Windows and Unix? It’s the three “Ss”: speed, security, and stability. Day trading is so 20th century. Today’s sharp traders make their cash by running programs that trade milliseconds ahead of the other guy in <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aBBFQ6thBuiY">High Frequency Trading</a>. To do that you need really fast stock exchanges, which is where Linux comes in. As a Deutsche Borse representative told me these days, “Speed, or ‘low-latency,’ is everything for exchanges. A fraction of a second can mean mega gains or losses to investors. Transactions that once took minutes and seconds to complete are now processed in thousandths and millionths of a second, with the fastest trading engines reaping the biggest benefits.” They also have to be secure. When you’re looking at a million plus transactions per second, which is what both the LSE and Deutsche Borse claims their platforms can do, you don’t want anyone messing with the till for even a micro-second. In addition, these systems have to be stable. The LSE failure cost millions of pounds. <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/2795836/London-Stock-Exchange-failure-floors-share-price-rally.html">Traders, who’d expected a good day, were infuriated</a>. Any system can, and will, fail, but Linux is simply far more stable on servers than its competitors. <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/the-london-stock-exchange-moves-to-novell-linux/8285">http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/the-london-stock-exchange-moves-to-novell-linux/8285</a> <pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">-- Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. </pre> </body> </html>