Mark Kent wrote:
> High Plains Thumper espoused:
>> The Ghost In The Machine wrote:
>>
>>> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6182657.stm
>>
>>> [3] Various transformations might be considered legal or
>>> illegal as well. Bootleg recordings of a performance are
>>> common enough, or one can simply connect an audio cable
>>> from a player currently playing a legally-purchased CD
>>> to a recorder or digitizer that has sufficient space to
>>> digitize and burn an initially blank CD-R or such. While
>>> the fidelity may not be 100% as in a pure digital copy,
>>> it might be good enough for the user's purposes,
>>> especially if he then hands out the resulting duplicates.
>>> One can also contemplate various mostly harmless
>>> transformations to the audio or video data (e.g.,
>>> inverting the waveform or injecting a small bit of random
>>> noise to forestall checkers).
>>
>> Back in the late '60s I used to do direct copy of vinyl
>> records to a decent sounding 1/4" reel-to-reel portable
>> using small (3-1/2"?) reels through a patch cable,
>> speakers to mic input. I purchased it mail order through
>> wages earned after school working on a poultry farm.
>>
>> Back then I did not feel I was violating any law. I took
>> it on trips, I had my tunes. (For a teenager, it was my
>> "iPod".)
>
> In spite of the article above, I do not believe it correct
> to state that copying CDs is illegal in the UK, as, as far
> as I know, you're allowed to back things up anyway. That
> aside, people have been doing this for years, with no hint
> of "enforcement", so it would be interesting to understand
> why the change!
>
> I used to have an Akai 1710 reel-to-reel which did up to
> 15ips, which gave damn good quality. It was a good
> machine, I used to use it with a shure Mike for recording
> concerts and so on. You could onward copy to cassette from
> there.
Those reel-to-reels certainly reproduced better quality than
cassettes. A carry over was the 8 track tapes, which used
1/4" tapes.
My "iPod" was a brick the size of a standard laptop and 5
times as thick, weighed may be 5 kg. Back then I was
impressed with its compactness. My daughter has a little
whine of how her Creative Zen Nomad Xtra 30 GB is bulky. The
newer players like latest iPod are more trim.
>> I could not help but noticed an ad on the right side of
>> the article. Microsoft ad movie shows an operator
>> stopping the presses, makes a change, press restarts.
>> Headlines state, "London Stock Exchange Chooses Windows
>> over Linux for Reliability". Ad block below movie screen
>> has text, "Download industry white papers to see how
>> Windows compares to Linux."
>>
>> Microsoft's FUD campaign is still rolling.
>
> LSE chooses Windows - wow - I wonder how long before the
> world's stock markets grind to a halt; presumbly, it won't
> be long before there's some awful disaster.
This I cannot say. It would not surprise me if they have
Linux firewalls protecting the entire infrastructure to the
internet and other communication links. Also, given as
complex a system as the LSE, it is a conglomeration of
systems, with multiple vendor products.
Technical documentation on the LSE so far gives no hints on
their IT infrastructure. This is understandable, with global
IT terrorism. Also, it is understandable as they must
maintain a neutral stance to not affect stock trading.
I downloaded the white paper from
http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/a/0/3a0b6465-a87c-45c
0-92c8-4cfd8b4415b6/LSE_WinServ03_Final.doc
or http://tinyurl.com/yjs3b6
Following is the only quote from the paper regarding
infrastructures Microsoft replaced:
| Fifteen Times Faster for Traders than Previous System
|
| Infolect is performing better than the LMIL system in
| several key areas, which is helping to ensure London Stock
| Exchange customers can execute trades reliably and
| quickly?particularly when engaged in algorithmic trading.
One must be careful when reading. I detected the following:
| In the past six years, there have been no production
| outages at the London Stock Exchange, and the new systems
| running on Microsoft technologies are critical to
| maintaining this 100 per cent reliability record.
|
| The London Stock Exchange has a mission critical programme
| in place with Microsoft, which covers ongoing support.
| Lester says: ?Our testing regime makes us very sure
| Infolect will meet its targets. The level of technical
| failure testing was very high, and the scenarios from which
| we have proven resilience are extensive.?
Reworded, the above means that the previous LMIL (London
Market Information Link) system infrastructure offered 100%
reliability with no productivity losses. The new system must
prove itself by providing the same reliability as the
outgoing system.
| One Hundred Per Cent Reliability for Traders on High-Volume
| Trading Days
|
| Infolect has three times more capacity than LMIL and has
| proven its resilience on some of the highest-volume trading
| days in London Stock Exchange history.
|
| Infolect currently has the capacity for message
| dissemination of 3,500 messages a second, with an ability
| to scale to more than 100,000 messages per second.
As stated above, only regards reliability with regard to
Infolect scalability, but does not state the role or capacity
of the current Microsoft infrastructure. IMHO, the whole
document sounds nice as a whole, but sounds vague.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/?p=739
has some interesting observations:
| November 21st, 2006
| Reviewing a Microsoft anti-Linux case study
| Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:10 am
| Here's their headline summary:
|
| London Stock Exchange Cuts Information Dissemination Time
| from 30 to 2 Milliseconds
|
| That's fast - in fact, 2ms barely exceeds communications
| latency for a typical PC NIC.
|
| But look carefully at the wording, especially as repeated
| in the excerpt below, and you'll see how this miracle is
| achieved:
|
| Reliability is fundamental to the London Stock Exchange
| value proposition for the market and continues to give
| its senior managers peace of mind about system uptime.
| There are approximately 300 customers who connect
| directly to the live Infolect system to receive
| real-time market data directly from the London Stock
| Exchange. The data disseminated from Infolect is then
| displayed on more than 107,000 terminals in more than
| 100 countries.
|
| Notice that they imply that their data goes to 107,000
| screens worldwide, but actually say only that it goes to
| 300 or so customer owned devices on their local area
| network - and 520 messages per second means they take an
| average of just about 2ms to deliver.
|
| In other words the performance claim amounts to saying they
| have a relatively slow LAN and those "107,000 screens in
| 100 more than countries" have absolutely nothing to do with
| it because those networks are run by LSE's 300 or so big
| customers - and it's very doubtful that any of them would
| have noticed any performance change at all.
|
| At the end of which, of course, I was still wondering what
| Linux had to do with any of this - Microsoft's headline,
| after all, said that the LSE picked Windows over Linux for
| reliability.
|
| The answer is that neither Linux nor Solaris nor any other
| Unix variant is mentioned in this report; Microsoft simply
| hung an anti-Linux label on a very carefully worded story
| about a pair of committed Microsoft partners, HP and
| Accenture, getting together with Microsoft to sell rather
| simple technology to a willing customer - whose employers,
| I think, should be seriously embarrassed.
Here is something interesting:
http://download.microsoft.com/documents/uk/business/reality/In
folectLondonStockExchangePressRelease.doc
or http://tinyurl.com/y49dct
I could not find such a press release announcement on the
London Stock Exchange site's press releases. A search on -
'"London Stock Exchange" "Press Release" Microsoft Infolect'
netted US sites and a German site. Clicking on Germany site
netted article not found error. Clicking on Google's
"similar pages" netted the same.
That plus writing style lends me to disbelieve in the
genuineness of the article as originating from LSE, although
some of the statements may be.
--
HPT
|
|
