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In a message that Pierre Orphelin wrote on Saturday, September 11, 1999 8:55
AM relative to the DynaStore converter, he said:
"Risky in my opinion, and this is the reason why I am not in favor of such
solutions versus official solution that are developed and tested by the
same company (Omega Research). Things are complicated enough with the
current versions, and I do not see the advantage ove adding layers of
problem, ...."
In a normal situation I would agree but in this case it might have been
better for Omega Research version 4 users had this been able to be
accomplished a year or so ago. I remember vividly the upper case/lower case
problem with symbols on the BMI feed. This problem was known for many
months yet Omega Research failed to address a patch. The Y2K upgrade in a
manner addresses the problem by ignoring all symbols which contain lower
case characters. Another problem which to my knowledge was never addressed
by Omega Research was the inability of the version 4 Data Server to handle
decimal price scale factors in excess of 100,000. Scale factor values are
well defined in the BMI datafeed specification. This only presented a
problem on a few hundred BB stocks (the only stocks currently using decimal
scale factors) but presented an unknown and potentially huge effect when the
exchanges convert to all decimal. After considerable effort, BMI was kind
enough to modify their datafeed so as not to impact the Omega Research data
server software. I considered that very kind of BMI since indeed it was not
really their problem. Both of these problems could have been patched by
modification of the converter (if there was one) or the Omega Research data
server. In my opinion, it would probably have been nicer to deal with a
third party vendor rather than Omega Research on these issues.
Please do not get me wrong. There are many things that I like about the
Omega Research version 4 software but support does not happen to be one of
them.
The message is - if Omega Research would patch problems in their software
and not leave it in a beta stage they would gain a much respect of their
software users. I think many on this thread feel the same as I do in that I
will not upgrade to any version of new software until it is extremely well
proven. And even then I am hesitant because of the lack of support I have
seen in the past.
Bob Scott
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