Trading on the London Stock Exchange has been halted after a computer system failed on one of the most frantic days of trading so far this year.

FTSE 100: trading on the London Stock Exchange halted after computer systems failed

In an embarrassment for the LSE, the exchange said that no orders can be entered or executions of those trades occur. The LSE plans to bring back trading in a “controlled way’’, but couldn't say how long that will take.

Working with Microsoft and Accenture, the London Stock Exchange replaced its London Market Information Link (LMIL€®) system with Infolect€®. It used the Microsoft€® .NET Framework, the Microsoft Visual C#€® .NET development tool, and the Microsoft SQL Serverâ„¢ 2000 database

The outage hit shortly before close of trading and forced the exchange to extend its closing auction by a hour and a half, from 4.30pm until 6pm. Even so it was reported that that some traders left for the day with trades unexecuted

Infolect was launched two years ago in place of the exchange’s London Market Information Link platform. It uses Microsoft .net technology and a SQL Server database

In China, it would take about one and one-half years wages (for the average Chinese) to buy a legitimate copy of Windows Vista. If you could find it here.

Microsoft is the biggest cause of zombie remailers in the world, because they make noises, but do not do anything to address the real digital inequities in the world.

Earlier this month, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had suspended trading in 35 companies that were found to be commonly referenced in pump-and-dump stock email campaigns.

The SEC action to freeze the assets is the third filed in as many months involving market manipulation schemes conducted through online account intrusions. In the past the SEC has also taken action against individuals who allegedly broke into financial news Web sites or news release services.

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"When spam clogs our mailboxes, it's annoying. When it rips off investors, it's illegal and destructive," SEC Chairman Christopher Cox said in a statement.

Problems found in an audit of Diebold tabulation records from an Ohio November 2006 election raise questions about whether the database got corrupted during the tabulation of election results...

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The database is built from Microsoft's Jet database engine. The engine, according to Microsoft, is vulnerable to corruption when a lot of concurrent activity is happening with the database, such as what occurs on an election night...

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The report mentions that election staff had trouble with the server crashing and freezing on election night.

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The report notes that with punch card machines election officials used to be able to determine definitively if all ballots had been counted in the results.

Nineteen machines had 21 screen freezes or system crashes, producing a blue screen and messages about an "illegal operation" or a "fatal exception error." A Diebold technician had to restart the machine for voting to resume. Ten machines had a total of 11 printer jams. Almost one-third of all machines in the mock election had a problem.

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"Especially with this blue-screen problem, you don't know whether it's the printer drivers, you don't know whether it's Diebold's own code or whether it's Windows, or where the problem is," he said. "It brings into question the entire system."

If anyone out there persists in believing that Linux isn't ready for serious prime time, NYSE Euronext's dependence on Red Hat should finally lay that silly notion to rest. As announced, the New York Stock Exchange Euronext dumped its proprietary UNIX heritage (AIX, HP UX, Solaris) for the freedom, flexibility, and performance of Linux.

The New Zealand Stock Exchange is moving to a Linux platform for its settlement and clearing system, replacing its existing HP NonStop platform and applications in order to reduce cost and increase flexibility.

"We favor Linux for what we do. We don't want to be beholden to any one [hardware or software] supplier, even if it is very good. We want the freedom to be vendor-independent, so Linux was a good choice," said Rubinow.

Everyone is already using Linux somewhere, Elliott said, but there are still people who are afraid to put their mission-critical applications on it for fear that it is not robust enough.

Customers may be comfortable using Linux for infrastructure-type systems but less so for business software, said Monica Kumar, senior director of product manager for Linux and open-source software at Oracle.

"The Financial Services firms are leading the enterprise adoption of open source technology, including Linux," says Zachary. "By watching the consumption patterns of these firms, open source vendors can gain a good understanding of the types of products and services that are commercially viable.

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"We see a growing role for open source software beyond Linux in financial services companies and that's why many companies are expanding the governance policies and procedures around using open source software."

In 2005, Michael Dortch, executive editor and director of IT infrastructure management strategies at the Robert Frances Group, penned a report comparing Linux application server total cost of ownership (TCO) with Microsoft's Windows and Sun Microsystems' Solaris. In that report, Linux won handily, prompting Dortch to recommend that all IT managers at least give the Linux application server a serious look for mission-critical data center tasks.

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What a lot of our clients are finding today, however, is that, with Linux and open source application servers, the wisdom of the crowd has solved those standards-based problems. And because the management tools are freely available and malleable, they find that the big sell was "cheap and free" but is now "What will complete my processes faster?" Open source used to be inexpensive and free, but now IT is finding value [in it] because it's more responsive and responsive.

...Linux developers are steadily chipping away at the most significant functional gaps that limited its suitability for these workloads in the past, allowing it to progress far beyond the "edge of network" domain where it has traditionally thrived. The impressive wins by Novell and Red Hat prove that user perceptions about Linux's limitations are gradually crumbling as well.

By now it should be obvious to even the most casual industry observers that Linux operating systems - and open source-based software in general - have reached critical marketplace mass. Recent Linux deals and announcements by Oracle and Microsoft have only reinforced the "open source is enterprise-grade" message that IBM, Unisys and other "Master Brand" hardware, software and services vendors have been preaching for years. In short, open source, especially Linux, is becoming "legitimized" by the major vendors for enterprise environments, and user executives are more than happy to believe them.

The company predicts a steep rise: only 18 percent of businesses will be using Linux in business-critical roles by the end of 2007.

"Linux operating systems - and open source-based software in general - have reached critical marketplace mass," said the study's authors, Bruce Guptill and Bill McNee of Saugatuck Research.

Forrester just issued an insightful report on the increasing adoption of open source in the enterprise. The verdict? Open source is everywhere, and taking an ever-increasing piece of the enterprise pie