The Shrine

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>Let's say you're setting up a server for a bank to have online banking...what OS / server app would you use?</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>A proprietary one</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>What makes you say that?</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '><b>Link:</b> <a href="http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/">h ... /graph/</a>

Why guess? See what some banks use. The bank I use - Bank of America - is using Apache on Linux.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Win 2000 / IIS 5.0 / MS SQL. Scale suprising well at the enterprise level compare to *nix/apache solutions.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>No one O/S is gonna suit any one company's complete needs, even bank ones. And it's a bank, they'll have the coin (as need) to pay for it</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>I don't see how that leads to the conclusion that a proprietary OS is the choice for a bank.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light"; text-align: left; '>Not really. IIS is hacked all the time, Windows 2000 has a security patch every three weeks, and MS SQL is the biggest hog on the planet. I recommend FreeBSD / Apache / MySQL (or PostgreSQL).</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>If you have the means, get your own system. It's perfectly customizable and most efficient at doing exactly what you want. If you get someone else's program, you have to deal with stuff you don't necessarily want. Otherwise, you'll have to massively reprogram anyways....</div>

<div style='font: 11pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light"; text-align: left; '>Or you can do what the millitary did and use the Linux kernel source to build off of.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>You are making the assumption that a proprietary OS and server are always better than a free/Open Source one. This is not the case; sometimes it is, sometimes it is not. Depends on your needs.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>In rare circumstances, an open-source one can do the job as well as any proprietary one, I agree. But with the case of a bank, I think it's even more imp't to get the little details perfect.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Face it, both Apache and IIS get hacked with the same frequency and when it comes to OS stability, Win 2000 is starting to get there, the amount of security patches released is starting to slow down by a great deal.

When it comes to cost/scability at enterprise level, the MS combo is quite hard to beat in terms of both cost and performance. Apache/others don't do SMP as well as the current MS combo. Apache is good for HTTP load balancing though, but that just means the requirement for more hardware to achieve the same result as a MS bases SMP cluster when it comes to HTTP related applications.

When it comes to other non internet related applications like terminal logins, again MS is better due to it's SMP scaling performance.

This is why when the DOS attack came, Seoul was practically shut down because a lot of their banks etc runned on MS stuff, and MS did a terrible job advertising the patch to the DOS attack worm.

Apache/*nix/*SQL solutions are good for low to medium-end enterprise applications requirements, and high internet based enterprise applications but it's not as cost efficient when it involves non-internet based applications.

For a more detail look, http://www.tpc.org/ has more bench mark results at the enteprice level if you are curius.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>No, you do not agree with me - I did not say "rare." How does a proprietary OS enable the "get the little details perfect" over an open one?</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>If you have the money, you pay for the development from the ground up of an O/S that was designed specifically to meet your needs in every way. Open-coded ones, as great as they are, can never PERFECTLY acheive that</div>

<div style='font: 12pt Arial; text-align: left; '>Yeah but how many institutions anymore are going to build an entire OS from scratch? It just wouldn't be cost effecient... besides, if really they needed customizability they could just write custom software for the server, this is still pricey but at least it's reasonable.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>I agree to a degree. But I also imagine banks would be quite particular about security and nit-picky about the options</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>And even then, I don't think they'd do that for a server.

I can't think of a single company that made their own OS (except a company who makes an OS as a product.) Especially not for a server. Some of the big-boys have probably forked some of the Open Source OSes for their own use, but one, that's not the same as going from the ground up, and two, that runs contrary to your assertion.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '><a href=http://dictionary.reference.com/search? ... rietary</a> software is any software that is owned exclusively by a single person or company. Such examples are Windows and Solaris.

Open Source I think you understand.

But what you think "proprietary" software is, I refer to as in-house. It is software that a company makes for its own ue. In-house software may be proprietary, but it can also be Open Source. When you say a bank should use proprietary software, what that implies is that they should buy some OS off the shelf, like Windows or Solaris. Even though there is the possiblity that they could develop their own proprietary software, this did not occur to me since in practice, this does not happen. What you meant to say was that the bank should make their own OS.

But banks aren't going to do that. They are in the banking business, not the software business. It is beyond their scope to develop a production quality modern OS.</div>