You misunderstand: In a transaction you have a buyer and a sellers, and a facilitating party such as an exchange like NYSE. High Frequency firms participate on both the buy or sell, but never act as a middleman to the overall transaction.

>Most programmers know next to nothing about concurrent software >design, testing, and development.

Huh? You mean bad programmers know nothing about the above.

>AMDs chip pretends to be a single-processor machine while dividing >tasks with multiple cores.

Umm no, AMD doesnt pretend it IS a symmetric processor with multiple cores. The way the operating system handles these cores does not differ on the hardware. You have have the same behaviors of threads and processes on a dual core opteron as you do a dual Pentium-Pro.

>Coding to true multi-processor systems is not only difficult but it is >also not supported well in any language.

And you obviously havent done either as a basic understanding of how an operating system handles processes might make you change your mind on all you wrote here.