I saw this on Slashdot.
LingNoi writes with this excerpt from ComputerWorld UK:“The London Stock Exchange has said its new Linux-based system is delivering world record networking speed, with 126 microsecond trading times. The news comes ahead a major Linux-based switchover in twelve days, during which the open source system will replace Microsoft .Net technology on the group’s main stock exchange. The LSE had long been criticized on speed and reliability, grappling with trading speeds of several hundred microseconds. The 126 microsecond speed is ‘twice as fast’ as its main international competitors, the London Stock Exchange said. BATS Europe and Chi-X, two dedicated electronic rivals to the LSE, are reported to have an average latency of 250 and 175 microseconds respectively. Neither company immediately provided details. But many of the LSE’s older and more traditional rivals offer speeds of around 300 to 400 microseconds. Nevertheless, Linux is now standard in many exchanges, including the New York Stock Exchange.”
So the London Stock exchange is switching to Linux instead of the poorly performing Windows equivalent and making transactions much faster now. Sounds like a win for Linux and a loss for Microsoft, whose bug ridden software has caused countless problems around the world with lost productivity and even home users who lose data to Windows errors and have to re-install Windows or get their machine serviced at a high cost to recover their data, I come into a computer store sometimes to purchase hardware and I hear the lady at the front desk talking to a customer about their machine and telling them to bring it in and they will have a look at it. Linux can cause problems too if you are not careful, but overall it is more reliable than Windows and more secure as well, especially with NSA Selinux enabled with Fedora Core 13.
That protects your machine from misbehaving applications and stops programs from accessing inappropriate areas of memory, saving your machine from crashes and BSOD’s Although a kernel panic is usually the result on Linux, but with Novell Apparmour or NSA Selinux enabled you will not have this happen. Below is a video about the installation of FreeBSD 8.0, showing the whole installation process and how to get a desktop installed. This distribution of UNIX is not the easiest to install, it is no Ubuntu, but it would be even more secure than Linux, with all of the components coming from one repository. And you can harden the system to act as a secure web-server.