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The New York Stock Exchange unexpectedly shut down trading in all of its listed stocks Wednesday morning.
The exchange said on Twitter: "The issue we are experiencing is an internal technical issue and is not the result of a cyber breach."
A trader on the floor of the exchange in lower Manhattan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that after the suspension began, traders were told that the problem was related to updated software that was rolled out before markets opened Wednesday.
Trading was resumed around 3:00 PM after having been down since 11:30 AM.
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New York Stock Exchange Shut Down Temporarily Due to "Internal Technical Issue"
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For recreational use only.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday July 09 2015, @01:12PM
Top tier industry standards are still really only good enough for 99% reliability.
If you fail at understanding a requirement, it can blow up in your face only when you actually need it in the real world.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday July 09 2015, @01:35PM
FTFY.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Thursday July 09 2015, @02:09PM
Nope, forget it. Clients do get it wrong sometimes(okay, often), but good developers are supposed to handle that. Trying to apportion blame for these almost inevitable failings is a mental trap.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by kurenai.tsubasa on Thursday July 09 2015, @02:39PM
Especially when dealing with the Masters of the Universe. They'll shove you around. They won't answer your questions. They'll never fill out paperwork unless it's scribbled like a 3 year old and done completely wrong, just to mock you. They'll play the telephone game, passing the change request to somebody else to somebody else to pass to the wrong person where you work to somebody else to somebody else and then to your desk because they know the game of telephone always distorts information. They refuse to put anything in writing so they can always claim you, personally, screwed up, for reasons!
My favorite scenario is when one of them throws last minute shit at you and then it turns out to be wrong.
But alas, it's never the fault of the infallible Masters of the Universe. Especially when it was a miscommunication about a half-specified feature at a meeting you weren't even made aware of by cocaine snorting assholes who make orders of magnitude more money than you ever will.
They will beat you down, beat you down again, and they won't stop until you think you've gone mad and have a mental break down because you simply cannot understand why the hell it wasn't in writing from the get-go and why the hell nobody understands why having things in writing and following established procedure is important! Even something as simple as realizing that a programmer testing her own code is not QA, not anywhere fucking close! They derive a sexual, orgasmic pleasure out of fucking with your mind and mentally raping you.
What amazes me more is that these things have a vibe to them. The resonant rumblings of the Masters of the Universe start at the 0.01%, then the 0.1%, then the 1%. I can feel it. The cascading resonance (resonance cascade?) is about to hit my desk. There has been a great disturbance in the force, as though millions of virtual dollars that represent no wealth whatsoever cried out in terror and then were suddenly silenced. “Don't you understand I'm losing more than you make in a decade every second because of your incompetence and illiteracy!”
This is going to be one of those days where I get a strong drink, put on Failsafe, Miracle Mile, or something Terminator just for the sheer nuclear pornography of fantasizing that the Masters of the Universe will finally screw up so bad it starts World War 3, and smile a little while I imagine all the higher-ups finally getting their comeuppance when they're blinded by a bright flash, brighter than the sun—brighter than anything you've ever seen!—and then incinerated in nuclear fire.
Whew! That turned out more Freudian than I'd intended. Submit!
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday July 09 2015, @03:36PM
When you're sitting there fantasizing about the Masters of the Universe finally getting their comeuppance, realize you're one of those guys who can make that happen. Bradley Manning was a soldier who had clearance for diplomatic cables. He was no revolutionary. But he was sick and tired of the bullshit. So he leaked the cables to Wikileaks. That sparked the Arab Spring and has in turn changed life for tens of millions of people across the Middle East who had been suffering under repressive dictators for decades. He truly changed the world and struck a blow for freedom.
Likewise Snowden was a sysadmin. He was no revolutionary. But he found he couldn't sit on his hands and let the crimes continue. We all here know the rest. And Snowden has changed the world, continues to change the world, and has done more for actual freedom than the last 4 wars the US has fought combined.
Now the morbid, the timorous, and the CointelPro guys are going to jump in here and snidely comment that Manning is in prison and Snowden is trapped in Russia, that Assange is trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Well, guys, freedom isn't free. Everybody glibly says that when it comes to soldiers taking bullets for their country, but it's true for every person every day. Each one of us. We can choose to keep "eating bitter" as they say of Chinese peasants, or act.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday July 10 2015, @01:35AM
Bradley Manning
s/Bradley/Chelsea/
Hmm, how to use a regex to fix that pronoun? This invokes the old saying: “You have a problem. You decide to use a regex to fix it. Now you have two problems.” Maybe a (?…) precondition to matching Snowden. Eh, it's not important.
These are good points. I've been considering going blackhat, because it seems that the blackhats are fighting the good fight. It's a question of bread more than circuses, and I suppose a question of my own hacker training. Can I support myself and those I love as a blackhat? I keep going on about my time with the Chinese Amazons, but it seems Amazon philosophy would dictate that the right thing to do would be to go blackhat.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday July 10 2015, @02:14PM
Yes Bradley is now Chelsea. At the time he acted, he was still a 'he' so I chose that pronoun.
I believe that techs are the best positioned to fight the top criminals, the bankers, who commit their crimes using the systems we build and manage for them. A Navy SEAL team can kill a room full of bankers, but they can't defeat the system and global criminal syndicate they represent. Only we can. The same goes for the NSA and the CIA. We are the soldiers for this war.
No one can tell you what you should do. But if you do feel the way you have said, then conscience and self-respect argue you cannot do nothing. Find a path of action you can countenance, and take it. Mind that though the Masters of the Universe and their puppets in government now brazenly act with utter contempt for the Rule of Law themselves, they will not hesitate to use "the law" to suppress you even if what you do is clearly within your legal right to do if what you do inconveniences them or challenges their power in any way. Case in point: Herve Falciani [theregister.co.uk], a tech at HSBC that blew the whistle on its massive tax evasion schemes for its wealthy clients. He took that information to the tax departments of the government of France and Spain who were being deprived of billions of euros of lost revenue; it did not stop the government from trying to come down on him. But if we had masses of guys like Herve doing the same thing the global banking criminal enterprise would crumble in a fortnight.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday July 09 2015, @05:26PM
But alas, it's never the fault of the infallible Masters of the Universe.
Remind me again, who is paying whom?
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday July 10 2015, @01:28AM
That's a good question.
Who's making the robots and who's profiting from the robots?
I'm no Luddite and wouldn't call for a Butlerian jihad (well, obvious exception for Skynet and the AIs of Simmons' Hyperion [and even those were quite divided on the issue of what to do with humanity]), but it's getting close to time for those of us who maintain and write for these computer systems under sometimes simply bizarre kinds of pressure and utter misconceptions (i.e. the internet being sufficiently advanced technology by way of its indistinguishably to magic) to go Galt as it were… ironically, this is how unions and professional associations are formed, by going Galt when shit becomes unbearable.
Here's what the MotU are doing: they have a strong propaganda arm selling the narrative that we're¹ a bunch of misogynist racists getting in the way of “women²” and minorities entering the field and filling some kind of shortage of tech workers while laying off tens of thousands of tech workers and failing to scale our pay in proportion to the increased business capabilities we provide. There is a time when men and Amazons need to put their collective foot down and say, “Party's over. Pay me what I'm worth or who's going to make your next job-eliminating toy? How will we support our loved ones who can no longer work because of what we've given you when you're paying me as though I support only myself?”
Now to digress.
¹ Always remember that this support the SJWs pretend to have for trans women is a pure smoke screen. It's even more laughable when they accuse a cisgendered woman of having a penis. The 2nd and 3rd wave feminist movements have never supported trans women, even when there were still Amazon operatives in their numbers (1st and 2nd wave feminism) before they left because the mission had been accomplished. (There are no operatives I'm aware of, not that I I'm certain I could disclose it if I did know, in the 3rd wave—judging by the 3rd wave's embrace of the idea of women as weak victims—the exact same lies men used to tell that led to the formation of the Amazon Nation in antiquity—, going to absurd lengths such as “microaggressions” [the very idea infuriates me], one can be assured there are no more Amazons involved in those circles.)
² Full disclosure: It is true I do look down on non-Amazon women, but out of pity. However, I also believe that being formally initiated into an Amazon tribe is not a requirement of being a true Amazon, and I've met several true Amazon sisters though they be few and far between.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday July 09 2015, @03:34PM
I took a college class around the turn of the century, and the instructor was in charge of the Illinois Secretary of State system and gave the class a tour through the mainframe. It ran Unix, of course, had four separate CPUs for redundancy; if one went down, the other three automatically took over its functions seamlessly. They have two natural gas backup generators for if the power goes out.
He claimed that they had achieved 100% uptime since they had installed it, and said that 100% uptime was critical, since the Illinois State Police relied on it for their squad cars; if it went down, none of the squad cars could do anything with the car's computers and it would be dangerous for the cops and maybe even the public.
I would think the stock exchange should learn from my old instructor. 99% won't do.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MrGuy on Thursday July 09 2015, @03:54PM
There is no such thing as 100% uptime.
Even "five nines" uptime is incredibly hard and expensive. And, sorry, having more than one machine and a generator hardly qualifies as 5 9's-level reliability.
What happens if the building that all these CPU's live in suffers a connectivity failure? What if this happens again [wikipedia.org]? What happens if ComEd's natural gas system goes out at the same time the power does, so there's no gas to burn? Or, if you have a store of gas, what happens when the gas runs out? What if the storage the CPU's are attached to fails? Or gets corrupted because all the machines are up but one is writing garbage to the shared repository? Or if the shared repository locks up? Or, if each node has its own local storage, what happens when they get out of sync? Where's your defense against those things?
How does the system get upgraded without downtime? Sure, there are ways to do it, but just having more than one node isn't sufficient to guarantee that.
Also, designing a system that results in near-total failure if one key system (ANY one key system) goes down is begging for trouble. Your system is brittle, and while this does focus a lot of attention and effort on protecting your single point of failure, it means you have one.
Sure, the state of the art has advanced a lot in the last 15 years, but none of these problems was unknown at the time.
If your instructor claimed he had a 100% uptime system, then I think your old instructor didn't know what he was talking about. And if he thought his system was 100% bulletproof, he shouldn't have been in charge of a system. Reliability is a journey, not a destination. You're never done, and you're never perfect.
(Score: 1) by xav on Thursday July 09 2015, @05:31PM
> There is no such thing as 100% uptime.
> If your instructor claimed he had a 100% uptime system (...)
I think you are mixing up HA with uptime. Saying that you have _achieved_ "100% uptime" (as quoted by the poster) doesn't mean you have a 100% HA system. My first understanding is that you just have been lucky enough until now.
Beside, after replacing uptime with HA, everything you said is correct.
(Score: 2) by mechanicjay on Thursday July 09 2015, @06:29PM
I'd argue about state of the art with regards to clustering and availability. VMS, once a prominent player in financial exchanges and whatnot, had a lot of this stuff figured out decades ago. To the point where there are documented cases of VMS clusters having cluster updates of DECADES.
We also had some pretty darn reliable Netware clusters back where I used to work. These things were expensive and proprietary and fell out of favor in the marketplace for a variety of reasons. When messing around with some of the linux heartbeat and HA stuff, I'm astounded that it's so shitty when the problem was basically solved elsewhere a long time ago.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Thursday July 09 2015, @04:02PM
Sounds like some of the gear we have in my company's building. There is the corporate IT manages stuff (I work for a huge faceless fortune 50 company so we have corporate IT and then the people I work with) that seems to manage 95% reliability and then there are the systems I work with. Some of them have been running continuously for ~13 years since they moved into this building save for patches and the necessary reboots, but even then only one machine goes down at a time and the rest of the system takes over. Multiple redundancy is key, then again the work I do is actually overseen by all sorts of regulators who actually care depending on who the customer.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday July 09 2015, @06:18PM
I was waiting for the part of the story when, during the tour, somebody frobbed a Molly switch in a particularly redundancy-defeating way.
And then the 100% was no more
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"