Linux is gaining popularity among Wall Street developers

[Andy Nguyen]

According to this article http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/6265/1/ Linux is increasingly popular with Wall Street banks nowadays. This is very interesting and it underlines the point that Greg mentioned, that we need to expose ourselves to various technology. If you never used Linux before then you can start with cygwin.

Do you notice any migration to Linux at your firm yet?

 

[alain]

We are not going to migrate to Linux anytime soon. My company has a contract with IBM and I know it is not changing.

You see, big companies need a track record for support and to assign the blame is something goes wrong.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

I agree that the migration to Linux is not gonna happen overnight. What interested me in the article is the fact that Linux is gaining ground among Wall street developers...which is most of us when we graduate.
Do I see firm-wide Linux adoption? No way. There is just so much technical and political hurdles involved, especially when millions are on the line everyday.
I think the article gives all of us another incentive to try to go out of our way and learn something unfamiliar to prepare for the future. Just like some of us are using Dev-C++ instead of VC++, it will be nice if you can work in both Linux and Win environment.

Any of you guys uses Linux at home? I know Bob and Ari are Mac fanatics. Where are the Linux guys ? :D

 

[Bridgett]

I have to say that I hated the fact that I had to use Linux machines as a student in the computer science department of my school. I used it because I had to. But you know what...as time went by, I started to become more comfortable with Linux and started to like using it. (Although...I don't use it at home, becuase Windows still has its advantages over Linux). So, my point is, learning Linux can only help you sooner or later, and it's not even that hard.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Bridgett,
I read in that article that Bear Stearns is implementing Linux in its grid network...so have you seen anything going on there?
I think the stereotype is that very CS major is a Linux lover. It's not true by you i think.
I learned linux when I got a telnet account to my CS dept's unix server...there was not much you can do via telnet so I started using it on my home PC. It was back in 99 and then the software was not as easy to use as today.
I'm at a point where there is not much more to learn in Windows. On the other hand, there are so much stuff I don't know about Linux and it's always a learning experience everytime I boot into Linux.
I hope that I can learn a new thing everyday, be it a new finance term, linux trick, math formula. There are just so much things to learn and so little time.

 

[alain]

Andy, which linux distro do you use?

I have Ubuntu at home but I don't have it installed. I used to have Red Hat and I used it for a long time at work because all the software at my job runs over Unix (but I didn't have X at that time). I do a lot of Unix and X-Windows now so I really don't use Linux that much anymore.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Andy, which linux distro do you use?

Alain, if you look at my signature, then you'll see which is my distro.
I started out with Redhat, then Mandrake, Gentoo and Ubuntu. I have used the last several release of Ubuntu from 5.04, 5.10 and the newest 6.06 LTS.
Ubuntu is debian-based and in my opinion it's the most popular, best Linux distro. I have it on my desktop and on my last Thinkpad.
I have a new HD arriving soon so I can put it on my T60 Thinkpad and Ubuntu is a perfect match. I love everything about Ubuntu. I tried the Kubuntu (the KDE version of Ubuntu) and it seems Ubuntu-GNOME is better.
Alain, did you try the latest Ubuntu? I haven't installed it yet but I heard it works great. You should install Ubuntu on your T42 :-
I don't think casual user will see much benefits of Linux over Win. But for financial developers like some of us in the future, we need to learn Linux because we will likely run into it at work in the future and the learning curve for Linux is much steeper than window.
What do you think?

 

[alain]

That is totally true. Developers should know some flavor of Linux or Unix. I can't install Linux on my laptop because it belongs to the company but I use Cygwin and MKS Toolkit to emulate Unix on Windows.

Since I use Unix at work a lot, I know I can pick up Linux in no time.

 

[Bridgett]

wow, I see Linux lovers emerging everywhere now, even here at Baruch?! Maybe it's time to totally surrender to Linux now. Andy, I am not so sure about Bear Stearns' Linux stiuation, since I am not in that type of job function environment yet, but I might be able to ask around and find out.

Linux vs. Windows? Man, the world is just getting more and more complicated. Learn, learn, learn, kids; seize the day, hurry!!!! [-o<

 

[Andy Nguyen]

wow, I see Linux lovers emerging everywhere now, even here at Baruch?!

Bridgett, you would be surprised to see how many unix developers we have among this year incoming class. I have received a few biographies from quite a few old school guys.
I don't know if we should count the Mac guys into Linux camp since Mac is unix-based.
Maybe we should form a little linux group among ourselves to trade tips, etc... :-k

 

[Bridgett]

I did partition on my machine before so that I could have both windows and linux on my laptop. But, really, I wasn't too crazy about taking two systems into one machine. In this case, I'm not sure how I'm gonna use linux again (maybe two laptops -- one uses windows and the other uses linux?? but what about cost-benefit ratio then????)

Anyway, forming a linux group/club is a great idea. anyone else?

Maybe we should form a little linux group among ourselves to trade tips, etc... :-k

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Bridgett,
I think the best solution would be to install XP on one HD and Linux on another. That case, you would have 2 separate OSes on 2 separate HD and you can choose which OS to boot at bootup time.
This has worked wonderfully for me on my Thinkpad. I have XP on the main HD and Ubuntu on the removable HD. When I need to use the DVD drive, i just remove the second HD and plug the DVD drive in.
I don't think using 2 laptops for two OSes is a good idea. Expensive and besides, you don't want to carry two laptops around.

If you adventurous enough, you can dual boot XP and Linux...there are tons of guides to show you how to do that.
As for the Linux group, I think we have more than a few people who are using it professionally and can join us.

 

[Hien]

With Virtualization, you can run multiple OSes at the same time (one OS runs inside another host OSs, no need to dual boot). I haven't play with these myself but here are a couple of freebies (I think they just became free recently) that you can play with:

http://www.vmware.com/
http://www.parallels.com/
Microsoft Virtual PC

 

[Hien]

According to this article http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/6265/1/ Linux is increasingly popular with Wall Street banks nowadays. This is very interesting and it underlines the point that Greg mentioned, that we need to expose ourselves to various technology. If you never used Linux before then you can start with cygwin.

Do you notice any migration to Linux at your firm yet?

At my company we've been using Linux for couple of years now. We have thousands and thousands of these machines in the farm crunching numbers 24x7.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

At my company we've been using Linux for couple of years now. We have thousands and thousands of these machines in the farm crunching numbers 24x7.

Hien,
So Goldman Sachs, and others on the Street, have been using linux mainframes, supercomputers, etc to do all their computational needs. I'm interested in what they use in the development scene there. Is there a firm-wide standard or it's up to individual teams to pick their favourite IDE?
Drop us some tips, tricks of the trade please :D

 

[woody]

Our software uses Windows, but we use Cygwin a lot, especially to gather data from all the servers and to quickly assess problems. At home I use a Mac and am partial to Mac/UNIX environments. My next computer will be a Mac that runs OSX, Windows, and Linux.

 

[Hien]

Our software uses Windows, but we use Cygwin a lot, especially to gather data from all the servers and to quickly assess problems. At home I use a Mac and am partial to Mac/UNIX environments. My next computer will be a Mac that runs OSX, Windows, and Linux.

Are you going for a MacBook? That's what I'm going for by year end and hopefully it the next revision will be out by then. I have a 17" PB now...but it's too big to lug around.

 

[Hien]

At my company we've been using Linux for couple of years now. We have thousands and thousands of these machines in the farm crunching numbers 24x7.

Hien,
So Goldman Sachs, and others on the Street, have been using linux mainframes, supercomputers, etc to do all their computational needs. I'm interested in what they use in the development scene there. Is there a firm-wide standard or it's up to individual teams to pick their favourite IDE?
Drop us some tips, tricks of the trade please :D

Our group uses Eclipse as the main IDE. I don't think there's a firmwide standard...it's up to the each group, but most of them use Eclipse. Others use IntelliJ, NetBeans, etc. Developing in Java using Eclipse is really fun. There are a lot of refactoring features that make you really effective.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

You guys, I don't want to start a flame war here but seriously, you guys are going for the Macs for real? ](*,)
Are you waiting for next generation Macs or the Mac Book Pro they have now? Aren't the overheating, palm rest discoloration problems they have with the current ones giving you no second thoughts? :D
Just kidding. I'm a Thinkpad lover but I have no reason to bash Mac users. Just wonder why you use a Mac unless you are into graphic design.
At least, you guys don't go for a Dell... \:D/

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Our group uses Eclipse as the main IDE. I don't think there's a firmwide standard...it's up to the each group, but most of them use Eclipse. Others use IntelliJ, NetBeans, etc. Developing in Java using Eclipse is really fun. There are a lot of refactoring features that make you really effective.

Hien, I heard so much about Eclipse and how much Java developers love it. I use Anjuta, Dev-C++ and Visual C++ to code the C++.
Can you find out what IDE the quant group at your firm is using to develop C++? And on what environment?
Thanks Hien.