forkb0mb.org

Two Centuries On, a Cryptologist Cracks a Presidential Code

For more than 200 years, buried deep within Thomas Jefferson's correspondence and papers, there lay a mysterious cipher -- a coded message that appears to have remained unsolved. Until now.

/*
An interesting read; a mix of cryptography and history.
*/

London Stock Exchange to Abandon Failed Windows Platform

Anyone who was ever fool enough to believe that Microsoft software was good enough to be used for a mission-critical operation had their face slapped this September when the LSE (London Stock Exchange)'s Windows-based TradElect system brought the market to a standstill for almost an entire day. While the LSE denied that the collapse was TradElect's fault, they also refused to explain what the problem really wa. Sources at the LSE tell me to this day that the problem was with TradElect.

/*
Whoever Microsoft sent to sell this idea to the LSE could, undoubtedly, sell ice cubes to eskimos. Foolish, indeed.
*/

Since then, the CEO that brought TradElect to the LSE, Clara Furse, has left without saying why she was leaving. Sources in the City -- London's equivalent of New York City's Wall Street -- tell me that TradElect's failure was the final straw for her tenure. The new CEO, Xavier Rolet, is reported to have immediately decided to put an end to TradElect.

/*
The article goes on to describe the system's short-comings and compare it to their competitor, a Linux-based solution. Someone commented that the system should have been based on OpenVMS due to it's stability and availability; and I can't argue.

When it's mission-critical, it doesn't have to be Linux, it just can't be Windows. Simple as that.
*/