Millennium bugs hit stock exchange

You what!?!?!

Since when has SUSE Linux Enterprise Server been equivalent to Microsoft .NET framework? Will El Reg be telling us that a new car based on the Internal Combustion Engine is the equivalent to a new car based on the VW Golf platform next?

You are supposed to be an IT rag after all...

"The low latency system is based on... Linux"

'nuff said.

Very enjoyable article

Very enjoyable article. Am looking forward to reading *many* more like it in the future.

Bonus?

"But that was blamed on "human error", which the exchange claimed was likely sabotage"

Just shows what happens when you don't pay the Greedy *ankers their bonuses.....

Hangonamo!

Why are we suddenly blaming SuSE or Windows for this? Do we know that this is an underlying OS fault? The article doesn't say. Just because I can't get OpenOffice to run on my own main Linux system, I'm not throwing out the OS, any more than I would throw out my Windows 7 system because it doesn't run Pinnacle Studio 10. Neither is the fault of the OS (in one case it's a setting problem, in the other it's the age of the application).

I'd want to see a lot more information about the cause and effect of this fault before I'd pass judgement.

Tick, Tick, Tick ...... Boom goes the Turing Bombe when Nothing Changes Fundamentally

"let's shut it down for a week or two .... see if we can't get on with our lives without worrying about money every second of the day.

maybe people would even find the time to be happy again." ..... Anonymous Coward Posted Thursday 17th February 2011 11:03 GMT

Please let it be wwwidely known, that that is the present abiding problem for the likes of the Markets, which isn't going away and grows ever bigger and more strident every day.

In a nutshell it is thus and this ..... There are those who are Ostensibly Anonymous who have hacked the money system protocols and would share what they have discovered, which removes forever the worry of not having enough money for one's needs. And of course, that then removes the need for those who would control currency supply, and really fcuks up their virtual command and control game, which has them living in luxury for free, off the backs of those who are providing them with their needs and feeds and seeds.

Now who would have that information and intelligence and Most Valuable Intellectual Property, is something which ensures the mystery insures and assures its holders and stock stakeholders, and thus is necessarily invariably always generally unknown as it is known and passed through Networks to SMARTer Keyholders and Trigger Guards for further Sleeper Awakenings for the Additional Protection of Greater Force Numbers.

There is no bug...

That really is Nokia's share price!

Linux is balls

I understand the ball that goes up at the start of trading is controlled by Ubuntu. I guess that's a form of real-time system if it has knack all else to do but at least once it failed due to a full log partition/poor build. Funny how often that happens. Frankly for my money any financial trading system should be on Solaris with ZFS but what do I know, I never worked at any exchange and was too stupid to bother learning mainframe when I had the chance.

- Paris... because she knows where the money is.

*lots* of terminology.

Let's try unscrambling some of it

*Millennium bug". Failure cased by incorrect processing of change from 1999 to 2000. The article shows *no* evidence for this class of bugs being the cause of the problem.

Business critical. System fails company goes down pan. That *would* have described any major *offline* accounts app EG LEO (Lyons electronic Office). More recently would be the code that did calculations for a medical radiation source to decide, given various factors how much to dose them with. Not real time at all (except in the loosest sense) but *absolutely* critical to delivering the machines function. The code had bugs and several patients got 10x the dose they should have had.

Latency tolerant soft real time. Describes lots of stuff on *any* GUI. You clicked on "My Documents" and it showed you the folder. It opened fast *enough* that you're not bothered. If it takes a *bit* more (or less) time to act you're *still* not bothered. The cursor followed you mouse *well* enough to keep you feeling in control.

Latency intolerant soft real time. Here the *consistency* of the response is the important thing but I can't think of a situation where this applies.

After this things get *tough*. Typically the computer system is connected to "stuff" and if the computer can't work out the *right* response in a *guaranteed* amount of time *every* time *very* bad things happen. The "stuff" might be another computer on the network (Skype's latency and *consistency* of that latency are both pretty important for it to work well). If the system is an airliner, jet engine or Uranium enrichment centrifuge things can go badly wrong very quickly.

*nix's were never designed to support *hard* real time constraints but various upgrades to standard functions and the *long* background in building architectures that run such tasks have built up a *lot* of expertise in what to do and how to do it.

Armadillo Aerospace runs such a box to to fly the lunar lander which won the NASA challenge prize.

Some of the usual features for the work include a high resolution clock for the scheduler, software modules locked in main memory (no writing to disk) and either locking module scheduling priorities *permanently* or only allowing them to be changed under *very* carefully controlled criteria.

The developer and admin mindset is important here. While it looks to the apps and the dev tools like a normal *nix box it is not *run* like one.

Of course while the knowledge is out there and developers *with* the knowledge are out there as well it's not clear if *these* developers have it.

BTW Be *very* careful of the phrase "real time." Real time relative to *what*? A human can't control an unstable aircraft without computer assistance (watch the control surfaces of an F16 if you ever see one but *can* respond fast enough to simulate an ABS (c5 brake presses a second IIRC). OTOH a chemical plant with a time constant of 1 hour can be controlled by a human with a chemistry set, some graph paper and a calculator in "real time."

That's my pedantry done.

crippled rubbish

I gave suse version anything a wide berth long ago, just after the time they sold out to those Novel scum. SDE was the most miserable pile of crud I ever had the misfortune to install on my machine, possibly even including Corel linux. Trying to run a business with SUSE you need to have your head slapped and to have your servers go titsup. Well, look what just happened! And this is me, the biggest linux fanboi since 1991. Serve them glad.

How do I make this FAIL icon bigger?

'nix in Real Time

Don't use it. Period. Instead, use something like QNX Neutrino or RTEMS which layers a POSIX API over a hard real-time core to allow normal 'nix functions to run when desired (such as during development) but also provides the hard real-time API's necessary for time-critical tasks.

Use Ada, too, so somebody can maintain the bloody code 10 years after you've departed the project.

Mine's the one with the QNX demo floppy in the pocket.

Y3K?

Y3K?