[conspire] Buggy ATI Driver (and others) Leaves Vista Open to Attack

[Adrien Lamothe]

Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
I've not been seeing Mono / C# used anywhere that matters to _me_, yet, but 
that's probably a matter of time.  I note:
http://www.mono-project.com/Companies_Using_Mono#Who_uses_Mono.3F

That page features some of the usual Web 2.0 suspects:  Medsphere 
(startup in which VA $WHATEVER's Larry Augustin has been involved, and
that has the extremely ugly lawsuit against its founders for an
allegedly unauthorised public release of source code under GPLv2 -- see:
http://lwn.net/Articles/193731/), MindTouch, Mainsoft, Splendid CRM, and
SourceGear.  I'd not heard of the rest, previously (except Novell
itself, of course).

The Mono site mentions that running ASP.NET developed Web code is a
frequent attraction for companies.  Poor bastards.
I've done a lot of LAMP development the past year and a half. I'm seeing that at least a third (and more during some periods) of prospective clients want someone who knows .NET. Kind of defeats the purpose of building something with LAMP. It appears that many companies just can't find it within themselves to break away, kind of like a disfunctional relationship where someone won't leave an abusive partner (hmmm, some people ARE masochistic.) At least the book publishers will come out ahead.

A few days ago, went to an interview, where I was told a software architect should be able to explain, point by point, why Apache is a better web server than IIS. Seems they want someone to "engage with their clients", part of which involves acting as a salesman for LAMP. I explained that I ceased thinking about IIS years ago and would rather think about more productive things. The interviewer also asked me to explain the five forms of relational database normalization, something which in my opinion is not important except as an academic exercise. I knew what the forms were years ago, but since in practice you really don't need to apply those categories there is no need to memorize the five forms. I explained to the interviewer (who is the company's Chief Architect) that in many cases, especially databases with huge numbers of rows, you may actually want to duplicate data in separate tables for reporting purposes (joining a 200,000 row table can be very time consuming) and
 even to enhance security (allowing UPDATE and DELETE privileges only on particular tables and carefully evaluating the data in those tables before transferring it to more permanent tables.) Further, the company is set on only using PHP as their language of choice for LAMP development. When I explained the advantages of using Python TurboGears and Python SQL Alchemy for their particular project, the interviewer/Chief Architect had never heard of SQL Alchemy. He also wouldn't tell me why they only want to use PHP. At the interview's conclusion, the interviewer told me that "everyone here is from Ivy League schools." I'm not sure why he mentioned that, but given it was the last thing he said I assume it must have some importance. The feedback I got from the recruiter was that the interviewer told her I don't know much about the LAMP stack. Hmmm, not being able to do a sales comparison of IIS vs. Apache and not remembering the five forms of database normalization equates to
 lack of knowledge of the LAMP stack. Of course, the Chief Architect can get away with not even being aware of Python SQL Alchemy (a very important LAMP component.) Oh well, I guess he has much more important things to think about, like whether the email guest list database for his web site is in Boyce-Codd normal form or not and getting ready for his next IIS vs. Apache client presentation. It actually is quite vicious to give that type of feedback to a recruiter who I may want to work with in the future, especially since his assessment is false. Funny thing, as I was leaving the interview I walked past a couple of the company's business types, who had just left a large meeting (apparently the same meeting my interviewer had to run to,) and heard one say to the other "he really isn't qualified to manage a large budget project." Don't know who they were referring to, don't really care, but it shows the Dot Com culture of backstabbing amongst "blue blood" clueless people is
 coming back South of Market. It feels really good to not end up in that snake pit. One great thing about the Dot Com bust was not having to listen anymore to those type of people back stab each other over lunch (the conversation would always start out "I really like John/Jane, he/she is a hard worker, but ....").





 
       
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