Operating System Choice

[MRBRETTONWOODS]

Good luck with your linux journey.

That's exactly what you do, being the idiot that you are, you pretend to 'retire' and leave like you always say, but then you come back to prove how much of a good troll you are, it's an old habit, and it's very easy to discern, you're a worse liar than you are a troll, to be honest.

And you of all people have no right to call anyone an idiot, considering how you were destroyed in this thread after I showed you that the NASDAQ matching system ran on linux through instinet inet, and showed you that the wsj article you repeatedly mentioned only refered to the SIP system again.

Most likely, not only could you not afford a WSJ subscription, but you couldn't access the article either owing to your core incompetency, and thus pretended to pass this off fallaciously.

 

[WinstonTJ]

Anything *nix is going to be more widely used than a Windows kernel... Throw in a few BSD users as well.

For so many reasons that if you have to debate about it here trying to explain would go over most people's heads.

Windows *can* do most of what the *nix/BSD OS'es can - while using 2-5x the system resources and overhead, being less reliable, having more security issues, requiring many more updates and reboots (less system up-time) and quite honestly Powershell is a pain in the rear end to work with.

 

[volpunter]

would you mind explaining why you would need Powershell to manage a single Windows machine? What are the tasks only Powershell can perform?

If I had a server that had to perform fixed operations then I would also run a Linux box aside (I already run Apache on my Windows machine for subversion), I agreed with the facts that the box overall is cheaper to maintain (lower cost), its a little more stable (due to less demand imposed by otherwise hundreds of different applications), security wise I would disagree but I do not want to get into this debate again (though I note that the majority of all hacked servers at large corporations by the named Chinese hacking unit in Shanghai were Unix/Linux servers) but yes, the more you need to open ports and other interfaces to provide additional functionality the more your system becomes prone to attacks, that is not a weakness of Windows or MS it is a fact with all systems that grow.

Fact remains that for day-to-day work, and that includes programming, analytical research on humongous amounts of data, I prefer my Windows 7 machine, no question.

Anything *nix is going to be more widely used than a Windows kernel... Throw in a few BSD users as well.

For so many reasons that if you have to debate about it here trying to explain would go over most people's heads.

Windows *can* do most of what the *nix/BSD OS'es can - while using 2-5x the system resources and overhead, being less reliable, having more security issues, requiring many more updates and reboots (less system up-time) and quite honestly Powershell is a pain in the rear end to work with.

 

[WinstonTJ]

would you mind explaining why you would need Powershell to manage a single Windows machine? What are the tasks only Powershell can perform?

If I had a server that had to perform fixed operations then I would also run a Linux box aside (I already run Apache on my Windows machine for subversion), I agreed with the facts that the box overall is cheaper to maintain (lower cost), its a little more stable (due to less demand imposed by otherwise hundreds of different applications), security wise I would disagree but I do not want to get into this debate again (though I note that the majority of all hacked servers at large corporations by the named Chinese hacking unit in Shanghai were Unix/Linux servers) but yes, the more you need to open ports and other interfaces to provide additional functionality the more your system becomes prone to attacks, that is not a weakness of Windows or MS it is a fact with all systems that grow.

Fact remains that for day-to-day work, and that includes programming, analytical research on humongous amounts of data, I prefer my Windows 7 machine, no question.

I meant in the context of the original poster and perhaps I misread a lot of the debates here. (OP below)

I currently use a window machine, and have at most of my actual job placements.

What are some other options in terms of OS? What do other major banks use? How do I go about starting on another OS besides Windows?

Thanks

At the exchanges and for matching engines and anything command line (non-GUI) it's dominated by *nix OSes. I mentioned Powershell because 2012r2 and Hyper-V are most all PS commands/scripts. Even 8.1 to an extent. 2012r2 server CORE OS (non-GUI) is a PS command line. MSFT has moved away from traditional command line and now uses predominantly Powershell.

To clarify though. For a GUI OS it doesn't matter and you will probably find a lot more windows than anything else. But for non-GUI OS in finance it's going to be *nix. Just the fact that Microsoft requires far more updates (many of which require reboot) is going to be reason enough why MSFT loses out.

Hope that clears it up. Lots of different things going on in this thread.

 

[Jack_Larkin]

At the exchanges and for matching engines and anything command line (non-GUI) it's dominated by *nix OSes.

Oh, you've done it now... volpunter will now be forced to respond with his "FACTS"..

 

[volpunter]

most all I can agree with, all valid points and glad to see there are users here who seem to possess the expertise and experience to make intelligent points.

I meant in the context of the original poster and perhaps I misread a lot of the debates here. (OP below)



At the exchanges and for matching engines and anything command line (non-GUI) it's dominated by *nix OSes. I mentioned Powershell because 2012r2 and Hyper-V are most all PS commands/scripts. Even 8.1 to an extent. 2012r2 server CORE OS (non-GUI) is a PS command line. MSFT has moved away from traditional command line and now uses predominantly Powershell.

To clarify though. For a GUI OS it doesn't matter and you will probably find a lot more windows than anything else. But for non-GUI OS in finance it's going to be *nix. Just the fact that Microsoft requires far more updates (many of which require reboot) is going to be reason enough why MSFT loses out.

Hope that clears it up. Lots of different things going on in this thread.

 

[WinstonTJ]

most all I can agree with, all valid points and glad to see there are users here who seem to possess the expertise and experience to make intelligent points.

I'd follow up my post and say for a normal, day-to-day OS with a GUI a Windows OS makes much more sense 99% of the time.

The biggest issue we run into are things like updates and updates requiring reboots. The Windows Kernel uses things like caching, journaling, static disk writes, etc. Windows OS HAMMERS on disks. SSD's have gotten much better but they just crush USB thumb drives, Micro/SD drives and Compact Flash media. It's great to be able to run a non-GUI OS for 2-3 years without a single reboot on a $60 Compact Flash drive. Can't do that on 2012r2 CORE.

That's what the exchanges and matching engines all use/do - Memory DIMMs, SAS (SATA) ports and BUS ports (PCI/PCI-x/PCIe) are at a premium. Burning up a few for an OS just isn't smart usually.

 

[spacewiz]

I have to admit - Linux is a good OS for technically-savvy people, not ready for mainstream. However, using Windows compared to MacOS is like driving a steam-powered 1890s carriage vs. a modern car... It's just an outdated and user-hostile operating system.

 

[volpunter]

I guess it depends on the average IQ of the user!

I have to admit - Linux is a good OS for technically-savvy people, not ready for mainstream. However, using Windows compared to MacOS is like driving a steam-powered 1890s carriage vs. a modern car... It's just an outdated and user-hostile operating system.

 

[eusdaiki]

Im putting together a trading platform, that will have a windows client, with a python IDE for algotrading...
Until last week and for the last year, I've been working on the Linux end of the system...
last monday, I had the "pleasure" of doing a full python install on windows (with numpy, pandas and scipy), documenting every step to generate a bash script which will end up being an install wizard...

So I fired up a virtual machine with a fresh install of Win7 and get going....

At first I tried to do a straight up install, get each package and set them up... that didn't go too well, I quickly realized that on windows Python is not very slick at taking care of requirements, so although pandas claimed to have installed correctly on the nice looking gui installer... attempting an import quickly lead to an error for missing requirements...

So, I go for approach #2... new VM... with a new fresh install... this time I try to setup PIP and Easy_install, and let them do the heavy lifting... turns out that getting pip to work on command prompt is not exactly an easy task, there's plenty of tutorials on how to do it, none of them is simple... so I go with easy_install, and things are going ok, till I get to numpy and I start getting errors about a missing .bat files... which turn out to be issues related to a missing C++ compiler... so I start looking into visual studio and install VS2008 and VS2012... none of which actually fix the problem...

so I find on one of the tutorials a recomendation to instead use anaconda, pythonxy or a couple other all-included scientific python packages... after reading a few licenses I decide to go for anaconda, which has a wonderful package manager called "conda", I install the minimalistic version (miniconda_ fire up a command prompt and write a single command "conda install --yes numpy pandas etc.... " (in the same manner i would use yum or apt-get to install on the linux side...)

what i learned from the story.... Windows is friendly, as long as you stay within the script... once you start trying to play with non-microsoft-approved tools... things get a bit too painful...



PS...
I also found that there is no OpenMPI for windows!!! so no multiparallel processing unless you write to their own little proprietary controller which happens to be available only on the server version of Windows!