It's a "carrier-neutral" chip, so you can activate the device on whatever carrier you like - GSM or CDMA.

Unlocking a phone makes it carrier neutral. What you're talking about is being communication standard neutral simply by supporting multiple standards, but that is increasingly a non-standard (CDMA was largely a North America only thing, but is increasingly a US-only thing -- basically Verizon -- after Bell and Telus in Canada left CDMA for GSM).

All of this having little to do with financing your phone.

Unlocked phones sold as devices by themselves would be *wonderful*. I'm hoping that this actually gets carried out.

But I doubt it. Firstly a lot of people are making hay about the fact that this phone is "designed by Google", but so was the G1 essentially (also branded as Google, given to Google employees, called a Google phone, etc). So it seems like a refresh of the position the G1 held and people are extrapolating a little too much.

Seriously, supposedly the reason apple has assiduously avoided background processes not to mention creating a centralized push notifier was to avoid battery life drain and process management headaches.

Do you believe their excuse? Somehow the iPhone has a battery life equal to or worse than a Droid, which is of course a phone with no such constraints.

Apple wants to control the experience and the ecosystem. It's as simple as that. Everything else is just noise.

It reminds me when Linux had to be custom compiled for every host, the necessities for the platform (e.g. network, video, etc) needing to be compiled into the kernel. At the time this was held up as some sort of great feature. Of course really it was just a technical deficiency and when they moved beyond it suddenly its imagined advantages were forgotten. The same for when the Apple PC world used PowerPC chips, those superstar processors that put the x86 world to shame. Then Apple went x86 and it was forgotten.

Only they attempt to be the only solution for everything. By your own logic why didn't the LSE go with an in-house .NET solution?

The fact that Microsoft held up the LSE as an example doesn't somehow excuse gross intellectual dishonesty in swinging entirely the other way. This submission specifically says that the LSE "rejects .NET for open source", when really they switched from a consulting co to running it in house through an acquisition. Oh but it doesn't stop there in parading ridiculous hyperbole, but goes on to say "pretty savage indictment of the costs of a complex .Net system" when it is nothing of the sort.

This is the sort of garbage that Slashdot suffered from years ago, so to see it still held up is honestly depressing. Didn't these people grow up and detach themselves a bit?

All of which contributes to overall system performance. Many ingredients a meal does have.

Yes, Linux is infinitely configurable. That's why I have it on my phone. That's why I have it on my NAS. That's why I have it on my PVR. However not only do I doubt that the company in question has customized it to much degree, a principal, extremely central part of their system is Oracle, which of course is the antithesis of open source.

This submission and many of the responses again herald back to years ago. Guess what, kids: Linux has already arrived. Linux runs lots of critical systems. This isn't some big revelation.

You only challenged the claims with information!

What information did they present?

None. Shill account back-ups or not, simply pretending that some valuable info was conveyed doesn't make it so.

Huh? Trading platforms are trivial applications.

For which they spent $30 million on the last solution, and an up-front $10 million on this one, to who knows what ends, with expectations of a 3-unknown length deployment, running in parallel.

I agree that it superficially should be incredibly trivial. But it isn't.

Do people still seriously use "M$" on Slashdot? I thought that died out when people grew up.

And to call me a Microsoft apologist is humorous.

BUT THE LSE HAS!!

Really? Where do you read that? Because, you know, no where does it say that. And maybe you're new to the industry, but metrics aren't always backed by the scientific method...

The article states quite clearly that the accenture/.net system could only achieve 2.7ms/transaction. It also states the system they bought achieves .4ms/transaction. So sure the LSE CTO could just be lying to make himself look good for spending $30 million to buy the company that built this platform...

The LSE has a bizarre technical leadership that tends to be very flamboyant about everything they do (remember the numbers they rolled around when switching to the .NET solution). Yes, I absolutely believe that it would go something like "estimate what the performance difference would be?" "Oh...I dunno...we'll have to set up a load testing enviro..." "No, just estimate...but make it good".. ....

You call yourself a realist... yet realistic perspective is dependent upon knowledge of the subject. It's well known that most trading platforms are faster than the piece of crap they had on the LSE... often more than 25ms faster, which means that it was faster to trade on Euronext.

Right. Yet even the LSE, in pimping this purchase, pegs their current trading times at less than 3ms. But...you know....Red Flayer says that the others are 25ms faster...so...uh...They pretrade. Must be designed by GS.

MilleniumIT has an established product in deployment in several exchanges. Their transaction times have been demonstrably faster than the POS that MS/Accenture developed on .NET framework

You keep making these claims based upon apparently nothing, vaguely waving your hands at the all-knowing Google. How about you provide some solid links?

"The sky is purple. Geeze....just google it! See, I've proven myself."

Failing that, are you telling us that you personally benchmarked this system running on the LSE's stack, with their trading load, and you've demonstrated this? Because, of course, you haven't.

Although, to be fair, it's also quite possible that what we have here are leftover MS astroturfers from the earlier anti-MS article. That would explain a lot, but maybe I'm just being paranoid again.

Paranoid, or just unable to see reality if it punched you in the face given how so utterly focused on your fanaticism you are.

Horseshit. This is switching from "Accenture writing a slow unstable trading platform with .NET via cheap labor in India" to "buying the company that produces a fast, stable platform on Linux via cheap labor in Sri Lanka".

And you're the one telling me to use Google?

When the LSE switched to the .NET solution, they heralded the fact that it dropped them from 130ms+ to 10ms trading times. Now that they're switching from .NET to this new solution, they're saying it brings them from 2.7ms to 0.4ms.

As far as reliability, purportedly the LSE had a single day of problems caused by never qualified reasons. That was enough for many to go "AHA! .NET!", but of course that's because they're ignorant morons who immediately demonstrate how little their opinion is worth. Failures at banks, airports, national systems, and so on, have happened on the gamut of platforms and systems, so it's marvelously telling when people demonstrate their ignorance.

Wait, Microsoft + Accenture built a piss-poor platform. As you may recall, Accenture is a giant in the consulting business. Their combined efforts failed miserably.

Accenture and the other big consulting companies have a horrendous track record for building failed projects at a very high cost. The moment someone says "let's hire Accenture to build this" is the moment the costs go up dramatically.

MilleniumIT has a proven product in deployment in several exchanges. Their product is not pie-in-the-sky. It works. They've had several big wins in the past decade. They've been collaborating with Intel on optimizing their platform. Their transaction processing times are an order of magnitude better than LSE's current system.

LSE isn't going to run setup.exe (sorry ./setup.so), they're going to have to do some large-scale integration work and customization to make it work with their system, and the "pie in the sky" element is that one of the reasons they decided to acquire this company is because now they have stars in their eyes about the great things they are going to do.

And as far as the trading time, again: Wait until its integrated. Lets revisit this in 6 months.

So, I'm not sure what your angle is... are you trolling? Astroturfing? Or just spouting knee-jerk reactionism without any kind of basis in reality?

Gosh, you got it all covered there. I guess you provided a savage indictment of my post. Or maybe I'm actually a realist, and see a lot of people doing a hilarious happy dance far too prematurely. That's what she said!

As one other note, while OSS fanatics (I'm quite keen about OSS, but not quite a fanatic) go apeshit about this - This was more "switched from Accenture to running it `in house' in the form of a large team of low-paid talent in Sri Lanka" way more than it was "abandoned .NET for Linux! Rah rah rah!". The fact that people are hilariously so focused on the latter while missing the former speaks to how incredibly myopic people can be.

did Microsoft take down their triumphant "case report" on the original design-in?

While I'm not sure if .NET / Windows is the appropriate platform for a stock exchange, I find it humorous how quickly so many want to bask in the glow of this, using it as proof of something, when I'm fairly certain that it was discarded as proof of nothing when the LSE first went the .NET route. Now we have some completely and utterly unproven vapourware, supported by some fictitious numbers, and people are using it conclusively, when really it should be more along the lines of "yeah...we'll see...".

The LSE sounds like it has very incompetent technical leadership, and this sounds very pie-in-the-sky-ish. So now in return for selecting this Sri Lankan company, they get 100% ownership (???) of some speculative wish. Great. .NET is a fantastic development environment, and it is fantastic for virtually any size websites. Probably not so great for real-time trading, though throw enough specialization at it and you can get whatever you want out of it.

So your world is divided into "people who agree with me" and "mindless zombies".

After re-reading what Miquel has said multiple times, both here and on his blog, under no rational interpretation can I derive what you claim he said.

So you take on that strawman and win -- congrats! -- but it has nothing to do with what is being discussed.

Or hey, you could use it on your own server. If you're willing to pay TWO AND A HALF THOUSAND DOLLARS A MONTH...

Joel talked about this strategy once before. The idea was something like "we aren't ready to support that model, however let's post a ridiculous price just in case someone is really motivated". Not only does it add credibility to the "StackOverflow is super valuable" idea, but maybe one day someone will send in a yearly check for $30,000 and they can pay an intern to make the install packages and documentation, etc.