DragonFly users List (threaded) for 2008-10
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DragonFly users List (threaded) for 2008-10
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Re: Back from nycbsdcon!


From: Tom Davis <tom@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2008 21:41:22 -0400



Matthew Dillon wrote:
I hope everyone survived the financial meltdown! There were a few
no-shows at the Con due to the mess, it being NYC there were
numerous local BSD users working in the financial industries who got
messed up pretty badly.

On 2008 Oct 14, at 20:41, walt wrote:
Maybe I shouldn't be surprised to hear that, but I am. Are you saying that those BSD users are employed to use and/or maintain BSD systems in
the financial sector? I'd have figured the Wall Street herd for M$- only
shops.

In my experience, Wall Street (and financial companies in general) are much more likely to be IBM shops than Microsoft shops. And that usually means AIX or sometimes Linux (and at one time even meant OS/2 2.x for desktops and OS/2 1.3 for ATMs, for heaven's sake). One of the NYC BSD Users Group meetings I attended was presented by an IT guy from Morgan Stanley who described needs that companies such as his had which would have to be addressed before they would consider moving to BSD systems (faster support for new hardware, longer support for older OS versions, and especially support for new hardware in older OS versions being the main ones I remember. Plus support for variables in soft links such as /usr/local/$APP_VERSION/lib which is apparently supported in some other Unixen, and binary compatibility between various kernels so that software doesn't need to be recompiled which was really only supported in AIX using SOM [this talk was a couple of years ago and I'm pulling this from memory]).


Many of the people I know who work for financial companies are Perl programmers (I know, my associations are not exactly what most people would regard as respectable).

Of course people who use, administer, or program for AIX during the day are fairly likely to use BSD systems personally, AIX being somewhat more costly.

In many cases, the people who have already been affected by the crisis are contractors whose clients were primarily financial companies.



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