I don't mean to start this thread for M$ vs linux. This is a trader forum. I only concern which kind of platform is better for my trading. I only daytrade futures indexes and my trading PC has the following config: Hardware: 1.75G AMD + 1GB RAM+ 2 HDD + 1 LCD + another external HDD for backup Software: 1 charting + excel +java(IB), other paid softwares are only an anti-vrius package and a screen capturing. All the rest are freewares I believe I already have the minimum setup in both hardware and software for trading. But even so I can't get rid of license to pay for M$ at this moment and I believe it will be the same till next windows be available. The only question is will I upgrade or not. That is the original idea I start this thread. Most likely I won't LOL
Hi mfhboy, Thank you for starting this thread. As you see, many opinions, possibly help, has been posted in answer to your question. May this help many with their trading software choices. At least some may have discovered something that they did not yet know. Your current hardware seems to be more than adequate for trading purposes. As to your not being able to avoid the M$ license INCLUDED in a computer purchase, you must live in the EU. In the US, this would be illegal. If I am not mistaken, several class action suits are currently running in the US against M$ for all kind of abuse things like these. In EU, sticking with their habitual slave and exploitation government traditions, monopoly is only "attacked" verbally but brilliantly practiced in everything. No way to get your money back from a monopolist having fleeced you repeatedly by shoving his products down your throat.
I remember dad mentioning that MicroShit's goal is to go to a lease type form of using their stuff. I perceive the first steps of this have already been taken with the implementation of Windows Product Activation (http://aumha.org/win5/a/wpa.htm) and it gives me pause to think about a dependency on any new OS. I have put our Win2000 and Office 97 CD's in the safe and have made a few copies of them to be stored elsewhere. (no online activation) Also collected the required SP for them. Now with a hardware firewall and a third party software firewall (and not using email / browse on those installations) I hopefully can reduce some of the dependency for the immediate future. If I could move to a charting package on Linux that is not tied to the the PCID then I would do this. But have not found a charting package that can take over from the old TS2000i. One way avoiding paying tax to M$ is to build your own, but I am not up to that, besides I want a laptop and not a desktop. But good mention NN of the included license to steal, need to have a look if I can purchase with a different OS in another country. Maria edit: Apparently Dell offers preloaded Linux in France on a laptop (http://lwn.net/Articles/152096/) and I found HP is offering a laptop with Linux preloaded (http://news.techwhack.com/386/mamma-mia-a-linux-notebook-from-hewlett-packard/)
We started to move off of $soft about the time of the XP launch: To us it was quite clear that a future of relying on $soft represented an unacceptable risk to the business. A few years later we see our assement completely validated and our cost structure improved by several orders of magnitude. I just dont see how we ever could consider $soft again unless they undergo some type of radical re-engineering of their business model.
I agree the Linux OS itself can replace M$. But how about the development tools? Can they match .net?
My dear Cool. It doesn't sound like you ever touched a development tool in your life. What the heck is .net good for? It's a repeat for those true believing dummies that haven't learned anything from DAO, ADO, MFC, COM, DCOM, DCOM+, Activex, C# (doing a rewrite of it already), Visual1, Visual2, Visual3, Visual4, Visual5, Visual6, MSDN, ... . (had to shorten the list a bit). Many people came to linux/unix (or came back to it) out of disgust with that mess. Want to read about some of today's software development prowness? Google to Google. Learn about Google's usage of software development tools, how they grew rich because of it and how they got M$ scared as hell. Come back after you read up on this. You may need quite some work.
This is a little harsh .... You can do a lot with $soft tools quickly, without having to know a great deal. Of course the trade off is being welded to $soft and to being at their mercy with respect to fixing code and raising prices/ costs. There are a number of reasons that companies stick with $soft - a lot of the decision points are driven by issues other than performance risk or cost in those organization where there is not supercritical review of decisions.
Hi prt, You are right about being harsh. I really didn't want to spend too much time in describing those 10 years of misery I lived through being forced to cope with the non-ending sequel of immature, buggy development tools. Often a gee-wiz tool/method disappeared again a few years later to be replaced by a new half-cooked gee-wiz kludge. Adequate documentation was never available. You got to dig this up in piles of books by authors who obviously were suffering similar problems like yourself. Having come from unix environments, I never had encountered such a sloppy mess before. You can indeed do a lot with such a bunch of crap, but it simply requires too much of useless sweat. .NET? Don't have to bother anymore with it. I can't shake off the uneducated impression that M$ itself still doesn't know exactly what .NET is all about. C# was touted 5 years ago as the greatest discovery since Christopher Columbus. It seems they have to rewrite it extensively now to incorporate lots of stuff picked up from elsewhere. Did anybody ever manage write an OS with this precious gift up till now? Maybe M$ is trying it all out discreetly on its Vista laggard ? Don't forget that the historical development of UNIX was almost 100% based on development of "development tools". In fact today's compiler technology was to a great extent developed hand in hand with the porting of early UNIX systems to different hardware architectures. You can read about this in a special issue of the "Bell System Technical Journal" (BSTJ) with the remarkable and prophetic title: "The UNIX Programming System" (1985?) Not much has changed in this basic outlook driving the current unix/linux developers & users. Do we have to take Cool's reference to .NET and my added C# jokes as technological novelties comparable to the significance of for example C and shell development tools in UNIX?
Running an IT organization is all about perception and budgeting. Once you are entrenced nobody will give you money to switch out ..except small systems, one at a time and for many IT directors /CIO's they have the $soft salespeople in the CEO's or directors or managing directors ear and thus it becomes too much effort for most people to change. I ran unicos on crays and other unix like supercomputer operating systems as well as BSD long before there was $soft, and I have worked on some of the biggest $soft systems designs. In my own company I had the authority to demand $soft go away. In a much larger organization I probably would not - especially if $soft is entrenched.