Yeah, its always easier to bail then to actually measure the costs and other valid metrics to determine the actual cost of ownership. We are pretty happy with our cost structure and perfomance numbers under linux. Of course some people just like paying extra to outside vendors. I prefer to pocket the savings ....
I use both. I am aware of the value of both Linux and Windows and am not so innately (fill in the blank) as to claim that either product has no value. I'm leaving the thread because I am tired of these wars. And yes, it is easier to bail than to pointlessy argue with those that don't realistically consider the opposite point of view. Ok, this time I am going to cancel the thread subscription so I'm not tempted to post again after I said I wouldn't.
... What i did say is that the TCO of one of them is much lower. Until you actually look and see what is out there in the open-source world you will forever be bound to repeating the mantra fed to you by marketing people at large software companies. Like Balmler said a few years ago when he raised prices and instituted silly and expensive licensing requirements ... " some people dont really need our product line..." Exactly. ... By the say if $soft had never decided to dissmiss their customers we probably never would have evaluated linux and open source to such a large degree and would still be a customer of $soft to this day .....
I am aware that Matrox in the past had a good attitude to open source X11 drivers, but the situation is not the same today. Just scan through the support forums on the Matrox web site to see that there are quite a few issues with drivers for multihead cards. All the specs are not open for MMS cards. To have multihead (and/or DVI) on g200, g450 quads you need to use a closed source module called HAL that works with a slighly modified mga driver. Xorg R6.8.2 is still not supported though I note that it is now promised to be available soon. 64 bit is not supported and anything other than x86 is not supported though that is a minor issue. I have not been able to get multihead DVI working on g200 MMS despite many hours spent on it. I will try again when R6.8.2 support is available and I may revert to a 2.4.x kernel and XFree86 and try that. I may be doing something wrong but I doubt it. So I basically stand by what I said before. The X11 driver situation for Matrox mutihead cards is not nearly as good as it could and should be.
Ahh yes you are right. I remember this now.. haven't used a matrox card in years. The hardware situation is still very depressing. I wonder if anyone has ever actually proven that opening specs can help the competition?
Indeed. I really fail to see why Matrox would lose any competative advantage by releasing full specs for older cards - the G200 MMS for example. The thing is so old it even has a DEC PCI bridge controller chip on it. If HAL were open and specs available I might have a go at seriously tracking down problems, but I'm not inclined to do so when a brick wall might be at the end of that route. It's all a bit of a shame really because the G200 MMS is good for this sort of thing. Fast enough, readily available cheaply, runs cool, reliable and no fans to create noise and run risk of failure.
I plowed through all 12 pages of this thread and couldn't find the answer I was looking for. I have been using Linux for 4 months but have yet to find a trading package that fits my needs: 1) Linux native app (I tried sierra charts under wine with no sucess) 2) IB data feed 3) real time charting I would prefer native app but if anybody knows of anything that works under wine with IB data please let me know, thanks.
If IB supports java, the go for that. If not, go with someone better than IB (hint: there are plenty, look around)..