The Microsoft press release was an eye-opener. I was surprised that Ashton, as well as the other ECN's that were mentioned, chose NT to run their systems. Sun Microsystems would just be such a logical choice. Most of Wall Street is Sun based.
My background is software engineering and I run NT everyday at work. NT does crash, so does UNIX, but just not as often. The fact of the matter is any OS will crash given enough stress. (LINUX is getting some very good reviews for stability for those who even care to know, and it is free!)
One of the deficiencies of NT is scalability, at least, as compared to Solaris. At this stage of the game, scalability might not really matter; a dual PII/300 with plenty of RAM and disk space is probably all that is required, but if VTS becomes huge, you can bet this will be a future issue for Fred W. to deal with.
Auric has a point in all of this OS discussion, however, having Microsoft touting your application is pretty decent and presumably free PR. If the code was written to be portable, migrating to a different OS would not be too difficult. Heck, Sun Microsystems might even lend Ashton a hand. Scott McNealy, are you out there dude? |
