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Admin
Both offer a very high wtf/loc* ratio.
*lines of code
Admin
That's not Bizarro World, that's 1996.
To the first Anonymous:
1) Invest in "Dot Com" stocks, but get out in January of 2001.
2) Stay out of New York city on September 11, 2001, and be TOTALLY out of the stock market as well. Tell everyone you know about this.
3) Go long on Cisco and Microsoft, Netscape is NOT a good investment.
Admin
I'm talking about the people who code in it.
Admin
That's got to be a selection bias. If they found that much MySQL code, it must be mostly open source, while virtually all the "proprietary databases" are commercial. The skill level between the two classes of programmers is not even close - bad open source code rarely makes it into production, while we all know what the worst paid programmers are capable of.
Admin
Maybe I've missed an invisible <sarcasm> tag or something (I'm pretty tired today, it's extremely hot in Vienna), but... there is the Darwin open source project, which is (roughly) OS/X without the UI.
Admin
...at which point you returned to the interview site with several implements suitable for bludgeoning and/or strangulation, right?
Admin
So what? Jesper wasn't hired to work with Solaris.
Admin
If you can afford $150/hr consultants, why can't you afford a real DBMS? Linux and Apache is fine, but PHP and MySQL for a large company? -- I just don't see it happening. I personally love the combo and use it on lots of small projects, but PHP is not suitable at all for large applications.
Admin
Right on. I set up several LAMP boxes for fun years before I ever heard the term itself. And I can tell you where that term is never used: Fortune 50 companies.
Admin
Oh yeah, I forgot about Darwin. I would not count it at present, though, because I only really look at products I could conceivably get customers to use. In practice, these days, that limits the selection to the major Linux distros. Thanks for the reminder - I might put Darwin and on my laptop at some point when I go into BSD withdrawal.
Admin
??
Darwin is an open-source project. If that's the only part you like, then today is your lucky day mister!
I'm not a real hardware nerd, but the new Mac Pro has 4 cores ... I think that's the most cores you can get at the entry price ($2495). What part of the hardware do you think is lacking? AFAIK, Apple really only lags on video cards...but you can BTO a better video card if you want it.
I'm one of those annoying mac people I guess. I don't understand where the stereotype comes from. I use Solaris and Windows all day at work...it's nice to have something fun when I'm on my own time. Then again I'm not your typical computer nerd. I'd rather have a computer that looks nice in my apartment and doesn't take up much space than a plexi-modded ATX case with neon lights and 14 drive bays. I'm guessing you feel the same way to some extent, if you were interested enough to go into an Apple store in the first place.
Edit: doh! beaten to the punch...alas, alack
Admin
Solaris is also free.
Admin
No, Savar, you're the type of Mac person I like. I'm talking about the ones who are proud they don't know anything computers and don't think you ought to either. I guess they think iCrap was made by natural processes, not people. You can spot them in coffeehouses - they are the "bohemians" with $5k laptops, $5k in clothes, and $5k in accessories.
Sorry for the generalizations. To be fair, I'll note that you could identify me in a coffeehouse as the one with a $2k laptop and $3 in clothing and accessories. The one with all the bash shells.
Admin
When I worked with Robert Half (RHT), I found out via a slip from the client that I was making 40% of the billed amount. I didn't realize how awesome that was.
Admin
I don't know about that. Apple also lost the battery war to Dell's superior fire power....
Regarding the OP, in my opinion, this WTF is mostly on the people who sent the consultant in. The company I work for at least gives us time to tool up on the skills required for a job, and they tend to pick people who have very similar skill sets where they can't find identically skill people available.
But then hey, the guy knows Unix, and is probably familiar with Apache and something at least similar to MySQL. This exposes the hidden subtext WTF. WTF is the 'P' in LAMP for. WTF does he need to know to be confidant with LAMP!?!
Admin
The thing that pisses me off about stuff like this is that I work for a firm that doesn't bait and switch like this but we often lose to companies that do. Why? Because we're honest about the people you'll ACTUALLY get. We bid the real freaking team.
Captcha=enterprisey and I've seen plenty of enterprisey crap
Admin
Ah, he didn't quite do it right. I've been a consultant for 30 years, and have been in that position. But the way I handled it:
Client: So you've never worked on RSX-11M+? (REALLY hostile body language, too.)
Me: Nope.
Client: I need a driver written, tested, and in production in two weeks. Why do you think you can
do that?
Me: It's just another Von Neumann architecture, right? How hard can it be?
The client stared a minute, then cracked up. I got the contract, and finished the driver in under a week.
Admin
Here i would disagree, unless you are selling a client the quality of your suit, not knowing
about LAMP no matter how high in the statosphere you work shows one thing, you don't
keep up on technology.
But that seems to be the norm, ...
-pete
Admin
Uhhh, no?
technology != acronyms
I was programming AJAX before the term was even coined.
Admin
" MySQL & Apache is Access & VB of the open-source world. -- an ex-coworker."
That's all too true, though better said as "MySQL and PHP..." . There's nothing wrong with Apache - brilliant software. Also, like VB & Access there are legitimate uses for MySQL and PHP (probably much more than for the first two mentioned) ... it's just that they're frequently and horribly abused.
I can't understand why anybody would use MySQL when there are massively better DBs like PostgreSQL out there for the same cost ($0). PHP at least makes some sense - it's appealing in the same way that ASP is (quick and dirty, but quite effective).
--
Craig
Admin
Yes, you are right. I've always used Debian, now I work at a big mobile telco (the biggest actually, no naming names) which uses Solaris exclusively. It took me about a day, 5 man pages and a find or two to adjust.
The only annoying fact is that all GNU tools are there, but just have another name. default tar is Solaris tar , grep is Solaris grep. There's even the UNIX and BSD ps, so all you need is there.
Admin
More secure - I guess so, especially OpenBSD. But faster? Not any longer. Linux 2.6 has seen several vast performance improvements over 2.4, e.g. an O(1) scheduler, NPTL, smarter VMM, and more. It also introduced kernel preemption - this is less interesting on servers because it affects latency more than throughput, but on desktops it's a real boon compared to Linux 2.4.
While the above comparison is a little outdated, and FreeBSD (the fastest of the three major BSDs) no doubt has had performance enhancements since then, so does Linux. I'd be surprised to learn that FreeBSD's overall performance would beat that of current Linux kernels by any significant margin.
As far as the userland is concerned, FreeBSD's ports system has the advantage of being able to compile/optimize for a specific processor. For example, last time I checked, Debian/x86 was still built to run on 80386 processors. While this is great if you want to install it on really old hardware, it means performance may be more than a little suboptimal on modern hardware, because none of the newer instruction sets like MMX and SSE(2) can be used. In practice, I had some Debian 3.0 tools perform at less than half the speed of SuSE 7.3 on the same Athlon XP box. I guess this is because SuSE uses a larger instruction set, maybe that of the Pentium MMX.
But while this can be an advantage of FreeBSD, many Linux distributions also have tools that directly support building packages from source. The best known is Gentoo, but most of the distributions based on binary packages also allow building from source as an alternative (e.g. Debian, SuSE, RedHat...).
While I don't share your dislike of GUIs, I do think that GUIs are hyped and overestimated, and they have been for decades. There are many things you just can't do in a GUI, or that are very awkward to accomplish. The flexibility of a Unix shell is not easily beaten, no matter what the hordes of clueless point and click users might think.
In that vein, I think it was a very nice move of Apple to include GNU screen in the Mac OS X default install. The one thing that annoyed me though was that the default per user process limit is only 100. A single manpage spawns five processes, so that's just not enough if you like to be able to open dozens of terminals. Fortunately, the limit can be increased both permanently and temporarily (for a new shell at least).
Admin
Darwin is renown for being extremely hard to build. The x86 versions now have even more closed-source bits (all the trusted-computing stuff) - otherwise you could build Darwin for your average PC and stick OSX on top.
I haven't heard of anyone using a recent version of (non-OSX) Darwin.
Admin
RHEL has up2date. Fedora has yum. (You have your choice of GUIs for both, like synaptic... I wouldn't know, I never needed them.)
I thought you were a RHCE! :-p
Admin
This isn't quite true. It says "i386" but that should be pronounced "i686" because it is unlikely the binary will run or be able to use glibc on anything older than that. Check your glibc, it will probably say 686 explictly letting you know it uses SYSENTER instead of INT 128 to do syscalls and such.
And on the code that matters, a "386" binary can do CPU checks at runtime to dispatch among various implementation of code paths (w/MMX, w/SSE, w/SSE3) in the kernel of some application, see mplayer or even the md driver for examples.
Admin
You should have asked him about Solaris, Tomcat, Flash, and UML, then. (STFU for short!)
Admin
150/hour for a bunch of analyst...no wonder you are disgruntled. Show me the money!