Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures • Hacker News Board

Re: Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

#31

Post by tacostakohashi » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 4:12 PM UTC

7sigma wrote: post #14

bbgtoreuters wrote: post #2

Decades of crusty code - C++ wrapped around C wrapped around Fortran, home brewed versions of the STL, nih syndrome across the tooling. Actually surprised outages not more common. Still, given their interview process is basically parlour trick questions about pointers and char arrays, it is quite telling!

yep, lets not forget 700mb + executables...

Only 700mb? Maybe back in the perkin elmer days, these days they're up to 4gb, constrained only by the various linkers, file size and address spaces available...

Re: Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

#32

Post by hubbins » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 4:15 PM UTC

anonu wrote: post #3

Is this the first crack in the Hoover Dam that is Bloomberg Terminals? Probably not - but the widespread reliance on the $10k+ per year terminal in the financial services industry means that this thing is ripe for disruption. The key isn't to build a terminal replacement though. fintech startups need to chip away at little bits and pieces - and need to inter-operate as much as possible. Only then will the bbg dominan…

You can write the software, but where are you going to get the data? There are only a few companies that own it and they're not going to give it away. The data is very costly to collect. That's a lot of the cost of any financial software is data licensing fees.

Re: Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

#33

Post by tacostakohashi » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 4:17 PM UTC

apaprocki wrote: post #26

bachback wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bloomberg started out as a network system independent of the Internet. Michael Bloomberg was a network engineer. I'm not sure they ever really switched to proper TCP/IP. This company sure looks like a dinosaur these days. However its hard to imagine a company being able to replace even a chunk of their infrastructure. They are tightly integrated into all institutions and there is no other service which offers a compl…

Yes, we use proper TCP/IP :)

...among other things.

Re: Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

#34

Post by kokey » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 4:31 PM UTC

apaprocki wrote: post #26

bachback wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bloomberg started out as a network system independent of the Internet. Michael Bloomberg was a network engineer. I'm not sure they ever really switched to proper TCP/IP. This company sure looks like a dinosaur these days. However its hard to imagine a company being able to replace even a chunk of their infrastructure. They are tightly integrated into all institutions and there is no other service which offers a compl…

Yes, we use proper TCP/IP :)

The issue was probably something like a broadcast storm because of defective fault detection on some redundant network kit. That won't stop people blaming it on the fact that the stack isn't built on the latest hipster frameworks.

Re: Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

#35

Post by zhte415 » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 4:31 PM UTC

akramhussein wrote: post #5

Random anecdote: Was told by a trader a few years back that one trading desk had both Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters systems next to one another and once they were able to capitalise on Bloomberg being a few seconds faster to make a net gain.

Having a Reuters and Bloomberg terminal on the desk next to each other is commonplace, I did have, plus a Datastream.

As for a few seconds delay, that's probably how they're interacting with them, not how they could use them. Both have both very different UIs and very different Excel plugins (assuming someone has both on their desk, from experience, they probably use the Excel plugins a lot/mission critical functionality).

Re: Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

#36

Post by marbletiles » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 4:38 PM UTC

tacostakohashi wrote: post #31

7sigma wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yep, lets not forget 700mb + executables...

Only 700mb? Maybe back in the perkin elmer days, these days they're up to 4gb, constrained only by the various linkers, file size and address spaces available...

Server-side is very big - in fact, a long time ago the part called simply "the Big" got too big and now there are multiple Bigs.

Re: Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

#37

Post by noir_lord » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 4:40 PM UTC

kokey wrote: post #34

apaprocki wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we use proper TCP/IP :)

The issue was probably something like a broadcast storm because of defective fault detection on some redundant network kit. That won't stop people blaming it on the fact that the stack isn't built on the latest hipster frameworks.

While I see your point do we have to throw the word "hipster" at everything new?.

I'm not a huge fan of Javascript and it's proliferation of frameworks but some of that stuff is objectively both good and useful.

Re: Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

#38

Post by gaius » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 4:50 PM UTC

brador wrote: post #7

chollida1 wrote: post #4

The outage isn't that bad. I've talked to 5 other firms in Canada this morning and haven't heard of a single one that is down. Bloomberg's tickering plant is still working and their emsx(trading system) is up and running, albeit a bit slow right now. I think it was on a stackoverflow podcast that Joel or Jeff said that it makes you wonder about people who complain about down time if they've ever built something of th…

How do they protect the ticker tape thing from attacks, like say, a DDOS?

The same way that ALL important systems should be protected: by not connecting them to the Internet in the first place.

Re: Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

#39

Post by zhte415 » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 4:56 PM UTC

anonu wrote: post #3

Is this the first crack in the Hoover Dam that is Bloomberg Terminals? Probably not - but the widespread reliance on the $10k+ per year terminal in the financial services industry means that this thing is ripe for disruption. The key isn't to build a terminal replacement though. fintech startups need to chip away at little bits and pieces - and need to inter-operate as much as possible. Only then will the bbg dominan…

$10k/terminal/year? Absurd. It is a lot more than that.

As another commentator mentioned, chip away. That is how Bloomberg made it as a company. By being better and more sane at fixed income in a very new market.

Find a niche and chip away at that. Data is expensive. Personally, I think making a niche in something coming to becoming mainstream (like R) which is already there in some boutique areas is where it could be.

But don't quote me. I'm still doing COBOL>

Re: Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

#40

Post by RockyMcNuts » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 5:14 PM UTC

Probably just a large sugary beverage having its revenge on Mike Bloomberg.

http://www.businessinsider.com/reason-for-the-global-bloombe...

But if you want to cripple the financial system, Bloomberg's a good single point of failure to attack. That and Seamless, which also had a hiccup today.