Can the open source model for development create a good GUI?
I'm well aware that most/. readers use Linux as their primary desktop. I use Linux and Unix as a server OS, but so far, I've been unwilling to switch from Windows as my desktop. I've been through KDE and Gnome, both of which appear to me as second rate Windows copies. I've used straight X-windows, and I've finally settled on WindowMaker since it seems to be a somewhat uncluttered GUI.
The only thing I ever actually use a GUI in Linux for is to have multiple terminal sessions going. Ocassionally I'll use it to see what certain web pages look like under Netscape/Linux.
I have thought about the reasons behind why I don't switch. I've found that the consistent user interface of Windows and the programs running under it enable me to work faster and more comfortably. I also use a MS mouse and keyboard, primarily to avoid carpal tunnel.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that Microsoft has spent big bucks on the subject of user interface, and I can benefit from that research. User interface for me is about getting the job done without getting hurt. If I switched to Linux exclusively, I can say that I would be slower and less productive.
I do a lot of coding and here is another example of good interface design. Visual Studio color codes my code. Call that crap, but when you are working on a page with 1,000 lines of mixed HTML and code that color coding makes it a hell of a lot easier on your eyes. Another example, you go to use a predefined class and all the members of the class appear in a drop-down menu, making it easier to code and harder to make a mistake.
So, given the fact that Microsoft has spent big bucks researching user interface, how can open source keep up with that? Its an important question, and I'd be very interested in the/. opinion.
Thank you, jargonne, if I wasn't posting I would have moderated your comment up. I've been looking for something like this for NT/W2K.
I don't suppose you know of a free NFS implementation for Windows, do you?(I'm aware of Samba, but I want NFS) Add that to the unix commands you mentioned, and ActiveState Perl, and you'd have the same thing as MS's Services for Unix, sans the $150 price tag.
Lets see here...you mention NT specifically and not W2k, so I'll assume you tried to install NT4.
Something bugs me about this post - you claim that all this hardware has "been thoroughly tested by the Microsoft Corporation". Lets see dual P3, 80GB RAID array. No, I don't think you are using hardware that was around in 1996, when the code for that NT4 CD you used was released.
I know the tendency to blame M$ is very strong and often justified. But how can you expect them to have drivers for equipment to be built in the future? Had you RTFM, you would have realized that you needed to customize your install disks, with the correct drivers.
Drivers are a tricky thing. As a system administrator, its your job to make sure you have the right ones. Install procedures for servers are almost always difficult, regardless of the server.(If you don't believe me try installing the code for slashdot on a Linux box next time you have a few free hours) If its not the drivers then its the software configuration. This problem could have happened just as easy on Linux or Unix(trust me, I've done both.)
A good example is the tulip driver that comes with Red Hat. It didn't work! Only after I found out(after several frustrating unsucessful tries) that I had to download the C code and compile the driver did I get my ethernet card to work. Now you tell me, when was the last time you had to compile a driver for NT?
>> I hate to sound like a jerk... but if you don't have a pentium class computer right now you are either too stubborn to give up your 386SX/16 or too dirt poor to own a computer in the first place.
If you hate to sound like a jerk, why spout such drivel? slashdot-terminal is a highly paid sysadmin who is trying to make use of PC's in his network that only need to run in text mode.
or maybe hes trying to donate a usable computer to someone who can't afford it. Not that you care.
I've read at least some of the book, and I agree that the internet needs regulation, for the same reasons as you mention.
But to me, the ones "keeping the Net open and available to all" are those in the open source movement, the ones who so graciously have given us Linux, Apache, Perl, etc. How is regulating the open source movement going to improve the internet? Regulating those companies who would like to see open source go away, yes. But I still have yet to see a convincing argument for regulating open source itself, other than enforcing the GPL, at least making sure it holds up in court.
I was thinking about doing a site based on the dmoz data that would combine a search engine with moderation a la/.
Then I took a closer look at how google worked. It is also moderated, but in the sense that your click-through counts as a vote for the site you searched. My idea would have done that, but with extra "manual" moderation(i.e. if you think that site "Y" belongs higher than position 27 for search "X" you could vote for it) I also would give higher points based on how much a person used and participated.
I'm not so sure I want to do that anymore since google is such a great search engine. If you think this is an idiotic idea, let me know why. If you think its a good idea even considering that we already have google I'd like to know as well.
does CyberPatrol filter slashdot? You can get to just about anywhere on the net from here if you try hard enough.
What does CyberPatrol do if an approved site links to a banned site? I don't see how they could stop this. You can get to some interesting sites without searching or typing in the URL.
Disclaimer: Pinball Wizard is not advocating porn or disobeying your parents. Have a clue and don't bite the hand that feeds you.
hi, I realize that, that's why I predicated the word "war" with "major"
A big country like us fighting Iraq or Vietnam is not what I would call a war between two major powers. If we went to war against Germany, Japan, or Russia, that would be different.
Such a war has not occurred since WWII. I think asking why is a valid question.
I chose your comment to reply to since yours is the prevailing attitude here in this discussion - i.e. "ESR does not speak for us, so he should just shut up and go home".(not that I disagree necessarily, but...)
Surprisingly, not many people see anything wrong with the others in the forum, Larry Lessig & Nathan Newman in particular.
While Eric actually has something to say, Lessigs comment basically boils down to "The Open Source Movement Needs Regulation". Nothing specific, mind you, just that we need some laws there, buckeroo.
All I can say is "why?" Lessig gives no reason laws are needed, in fact he has nothing to say about the open source movement at all. Bout the only worthwhile thing Lessig has to say is an off-tangent reference to the fact that the GPL needs some legal backup. The rest of his wordy statement is all about how ESR is so wrong to say that open source doesn't need government regulation.
IMHO[no explanation for the ignorant], giving the GPL some legal backup is the only law the open source movement needs.
casualty of the moderation wars? Thats some interesting stuff there, care to give a little history lesson?
Since I'm pretty new as a/. poster(I read the stories but didn't post for the longest time) I'm just becoming aware of the whole moderation/karma/troll thing, and to me its one of the most interesting things on/.
Congratulations. You now seem to be posting at 0, meaning you've somehow pulled yourself out of the -2 cellar. I never understood how you got there in the first place, since your posts all seem to be pretty good.
Katz thinks we are living in a golden age of discovery, a critical inflection in history like the Reformation or the Industrial age. Other views stated here point out that our age is simply a natural progression of technology, and our time is no more special than others in history.
I agree more with the latter view, with one exception. In every other period in history, technological advantage has been used to establish military supremacy. Yet there hasn't been a major war(war between two or more major powers) since WWII, some 60 years ago. So if this is a turning point in history, I would say its because of this, the fact that we seem to have been able to evolve technologically without starting a major over it.
Are we through with war as a species? Or is this just a lull while we build up our star wars technology in order to dominate the world?(we can nuke you, but you can't nuke us) Its hard to say if its because weve evolved or if its because of a really strong deterrent that we have not been invoved in a major war for so long.
OK, I saw mention of Rick Wakeman, Fresh Aire, and others, but no Keith Emerson?!?
Keith IMO was one of the all time greats, but seems to be largely forgotten these days. Back in their time Emerson, Lake, and Palmer were big enough to take the London Symphony Orchestra on tour & spend 2 million bucks making an album. These days, all you ever hear on the radio from ELP is 'Lucky Man' which doesn't give the slightest clue as to how fscking brilliant a keyboardist Emerson was.
If you really want to hear the Moog tortured and played to its limit, check out any of their first 5 albums - ELP, Tarkus, Pictures at an Exhibition, Trilogy, or Brain Salad Surgery.
Perl makes hard tasks easy and impossible tasks manageable.
>> IMHO Perl has no real domain in which it is better than everything else
Even if you don't use it for web programming, it is a much better system admin tool than anything else. You can do everything you can do with sed, awk, or shell scripting with Perl. And its cross platform, so you could conceivably make one comprehensive system admin tool with Perl that did all the jobs you needed to do across multiple OS's.
If you ever want a good laugh, dig up an old health textbook from pre-1930. The prevailing wisdom was that masturbation caused innumerable evils in adolescents, including poor health, antisocial behavior, and insanity.
Parents were made to believe that it was imperative to prevent their children from ever masturbating. Even once would ruin the child forever.
Its was what the experts all said, so it must have been true.
The first two application programs I ever used were pkunzip and doom. I had just bought my first computer and someone in school gave me both on floppy.
Since I used pkunzip to extract doom, that makes it the first program I ever used. It was a regular partner back in the days of DOS games.
Because this is not going to tell you, say, who your great^50 grandmother was in the year 1348, or whatever. We've all met a few people who are from these European families and can trace their heritage through some famous castle in Austria back to the year 800 AD. But those people are few and far between and this study is not going to let most of us have the same knowledge of our families as your rare aristocrat.
Don't forget, as late as 1900 more than 3/4 of the American population were rural farmers or otherwise agrarian.(IIRC) Most of us can probably trace our roots to farmers and we probably don't have to go back very many generations before this is true. The farthest I can trace my last name unbroken is to Iowa, 1837. If I don't take the strict last name route I can go back to the early 1700s when the Scotch-Irish emigrated en masse from Northern Ireland to the states. Thus, I know that my ancestors were all farmers, they were likely farmers in Ireland and Scotland before that. I know they were at least literate when they came to America, but I have no knowledge of my family before that. Seeing as how for many, many generations most of the human population was agrarian, passed knowledge orally, and did not keep records, I don't see how this study is going to help people "trace" their ancestry.
I realize that that was not the only purpose of the study BTW, and that they likely made many worthwhile discoveries.
Hey, cool site. Its late Friday, but I'll have to come back and check you guys out. I'm in the retail business also, just on the other end. I did all the coding/DB programming for an online bookstore (which I'd rather not spam the/. public about right now)
I like the b-tree idea, but what do you do when you are working with multiple tables? For instance, I've got something like 35 tables going for this particular database. How do you handle joins and such?
You've intrigued me enough to check out PHP, as its something I haven't tried yet. So far I code in C++, Perl, VB(ASP mostly), and Java. Seems to me the best way to go for what you are talking about would start with standard data structures that are in STL. STL leaves some things to be desired however, there are no hash tables or b-trees, so you still have to build your own from lower level components or from scratch.
Maybe an "improved" STL would be the ideal open source project you are looking for? I'd be interested in that as well.
Email me if you'd like to continue this discussion. jeverist@nospam.page1book.com Also you can probably find my website now.
You are right, we are not disagreeing, and that was an insightful comment. Thank you for making me aware of some things I wasn't aware of previously - specifically the fact that the platforms we discussed are now compiled to bytecode.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned here though is that plain-vanilla SQL is a standard(ANSI SQL 92) and therefore portable between vendor implementations. I personally try to avoid vendor-specific SQL whenever possible for this reason. Going from a cross-platform SQL statement to a vendor-specific stored procedure is something that takes 2 or 3 lines of code in the SP itself. So I wouldn't discount coding in SQL because its vendor-specific.
As far as using data structures rather than a full-fledged RDBMS, I've had success using the C++ standard template library(STL) to create data structures like maps and lists where using a DB would be overkill. But in a solution that required multiple tables, I just don't see how you could realistically improve on SQL.
Stick with the Wrox books, they generally are very good. 15seconds is a good website to check out.
Anything you do at the session level is going to negatively affect performance and scalability. Session variables are stored in the servers memory throughout the lifetime of the users visit. If you ever need to scale to a web farm, session variables will trip you up, because they are stored at the particular server. There are some good tutorials on the web that cover how to avoid using sessions in ASP.
I like ADO(ActiveX Data Objects) because they give you flexibility in how you open your database connection. My advice here is to study all the different methods and use your brain as to which one is appropriate. You can open recordsets dynamically(meaning you can modify the data) or statically(better for things like searches where you all you need is to read it once.) Study all the different cursors, and choose the appropriate one for your specific need. Each is a tradeoff between functionality and performance.
That said, I try to use ADO only when necessary, because native SQL is going to perform better. But you can't do a lot of the ADO tricks with straight SQL.
I notice that ASP has a bad rep on slashdot, being Microsoft. Its actually good when used correctly, unfortunately it makes web development a little too easy so you see a lot of crap being done with ASP as well.
PHP, ASP, and JSP are compiled? Thats news to me, my understanding is that they are interpreted every time the page is loaded. The intrinsic advantage of these over simple CGI is that their process runs inside the web server's process instead of forking every time there is a new request. But they are still interpreted each time.
Which is the reason for components. You can move most of your logic to C++ components(best results) VB, Java, or something else. My experience is with COM in this arena, so I can't speak for other component architectures. The components are then called from the web pages via ASP or whatever platform you are using.
Stored procedures compile the SQL itself. Its not the same thing as having a C library. You have precompiled SQL that you can pass parameters to.
I thought Oracle did have a C library, so I'll have to check your statement. It would be kind of dumb if they didn't since Microsoft has come up with a C library and fast access to Oracle through OLEDB(sort of an improved ODBC)
If you are looking for access to data structures directly, you probably should roll your own. You're not likely to come up with something that works better than good old SQL for data access any time soon.
Hmm...I'd say that Perl qualifies for the "enterprise system" category, and so I respectfully disagree that its only appropriate for smaller, script-driven sites.
Besides slashdot, which we all (should) know runs on apache/mod_perl, there is the Internet Movie Database. So here we have two major sites that run on perl, and those are just a couple that I can think of immediately. I'm sure there are more.
Well Bob, it doesnt look like I'll be coding for your company any time soon, as I only have 90 something credit hours.
However, last time I checked there were 3 IT jobs unfilled for every filled position. In some areas the ratio is 6:1.
A smart company IMHO would try to recognize actual talent than be swayed by that degree, or certification for that matter. By your logic, a 19 year old kid who might have spent the last 7 years working on Apache would be unqualified to be a web developer!
Luckily, there are many companies who don't use this retarded logic when hiring.
no, just a less than competent admin
on
Pay Lars
·
· Score: 1
that didn't set the permissions properly. A standard NT box might have 5 or 10 user licences. However an NT website, properly set up, should assign 'IUSR_SERVERNAME' to all web visitors, to avoid this problem.
Its not likely whoever did this could set Apache up properly either. I've done both, and either way, you have to know what you are doing.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm well aware that most /. readers use Linux as their primary desktop. I use Linux and Unix as a server OS, but so far, I've been unwilling to switch from Windows as my desktop. I've been through KDE and Gnome, both of which appear to me as second rate Windows copies. I've used straight X-windows, and I've finally settled on WindowMaker since it seems to be a somewhat uncluttered GUI.
The only thing I ever actually use a GUI in Linux for is to have multiple terminal sessions going. Ocassionally I'll use it to see what certain web pages look like under Netscape/Linux.
I have thought about the reasons behind why I don't switch. I've found that the consistent user interface of Windows and the programs running under it enable me to work faster and more comfortably. I also use a MS mouse and keyboard, primarily to avoid carpal tunnel.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that Microsoft has spent big bucks on the subject of user interface, and I can benefit from that research. User interface for me is about getting the job done without getting hurt. If I switched to Linux exclusively, I can say that I would be slower and less productive.
I do a lot of coding and here is another example of good interface design. Visual Studio color codes my code. Call that crap, but when you are working on a page with 1,000 lines of mixed HTML and code that color coding makes it a hell of a lot easier on your eyes. Another example, you go to use a predefined class and all the members of the class appear in a drop-down menu, making it easier to code and harder to make a mistake.
So, given the fact that Microsoft has spent big bucks researching user interface, how can open source keep up with that? Its an important question, and I'd be very interested in the /. opinion.
I don't suppose you know of a free NFS implementation for Windows, do you?(I'm aware of Samba, but I want NFS) Add that to the unix commands you mentioned, and ActiveState Perl, and you'd have the same thing as MS's Services for Unix, sans the $150 price tag.
Something bugs me about this post - you claim that all this hardware has "been thoroughly tested by the Microsoft Corporation". Lets see dual P3, 80GB RAID array. No, I don't think you are using hardware that was around in 1996, when the code for that NT4 CD you used was released.
I know the tendency to blame M$ is very strong and often justified. But how can you expect them to have drivers for equipment to be built in the future? Had you RTFM, you would have realized that you needed to customize your install disks, with the correct drivers.
Drivers are a tricky thing. As a system administrator, its your job to make sure you have the right ones. Install procedures for servers are almost always difficult, regardless of the server.(If you don't believe me try installing the code for slashdot on a Linux box next time you have a few free hours) If its not the drivers then its the software configuration. This problem could have happened just as easy on Linux or Unix(trust me, I've done both.)
A good example is the tulip driver that comes with Red Hat. It didn't work! Only after I found out(after several frustrating unsucessful tries) that I had to download the C code and compile the driver did I get my ethernet card to work. Now you tell me, when was the last time you had to compile a driver for NT?
If you hate to sound like a jerk, why spout such drivel? slashdot-terminal is a highly paid sysadmin who is trying to make use of PC's in his network that only need to run in text mode.
or maybe hes trying to donate a usable computer to someone who can't afford it. Not that you care.
But to me, the ones "keeping the Net open and available to all" are those in the open source movement, the ones who so graciously have given us Linux, Apache, Perl, etc. How is regulating the open source movement going to improve the internet? Regulating those companies who would like to see open source go away, yes. But I still have yet to see a convincing argument for regulating open source itself, other than enforcing the GPL, at least making sure it holds up in court.
Then I took a closer look at how google worked. It is also moderated, but in the sense that your click-through counts as a vote for the site you searched. My idea would have done that, but with extra "manual" moderation(i.e. if you think that site "Y" belongs higher than position 27 for search "X" you could vote for it) I also would give higher points based on how much a person used and participated.
I'm not so sure I want to do that anymore since google is such a great search engine. If you think this is an idiotic idea, let me know why. If you think its a good idea even considering that we already have google I'd like to know as well.
What does CyberPatrol do if an approved site links to a banned site? I don't see how they could stop this. You can get to some interesting sites without searching or typing in the URL.
Disclaimer: Pinball Wizard is not advocating porn or disobeying your parents. Have a clue and don't bite the hand that feeds you.
A big country like us fighting Iraq or Vietnam is not what I would call a war between two major powers. If we went to war against Germany, Japan, or Russia, that would be different.
Such a war has not occurred since WWII. I think asking why is a valid question.
Surprisingly, not many people see anything wrong with the others in the forum, Larry Lessig & Nathan Newman in particular.
While Eric actually has something to say, Lessigs comment basically boils down to "The Open Source Movement Needs Regulation". Nothing specific, mind you, just that we need some laws there, buckeroo.
All I can say is "why?" Lessig gives no reason laws are needed, in fact he has nothing to say about the open source movement at all. Bout the only worthwhile thing Lessig has to say is an off-tangent reference to the fact that the GPL needs some legal backup. The rest of his wordy statement is all about how ESR is so wrong to say that open source doesn't need government regulation.
IMHO[no explanation for the ignorant], giving the GPL some legal backup is the only law the open source movement needs.
Check out everything. A great online dictionary for things like IIRC, 31337, and all those other fun words you run across online.
Since I'm pretty new as a /. poster(I read the stories but didn't post for the longest time) I'm just becoming aware of the whole moderation/karma/troll thing, and to me its one of the most interesting things on /.
I wonder how much this website would be worth?
I agree more with the latter view, with one exception. In every other period in history, technological advantage has been used to establish military supremacy. Yet there hasn't been a major war(war between two or more major powers) since WWII, some 60 years ago. So if this is a turning point in history, I would say its because of this, the fact that we seem to have been able to evolve technologically without starting a major over it.
Are we through with war as a species? Or is this just a lull while we build up our star wars technology in order to dominate the world?(we can nuke you, but you can't nuke us) Its hard to say if its because weve evolved or if its because of a really strong deterrent that we have not been invoved in a major war for so long.
Keith IMO was one of the all time greats, but seems to be largely forgotten these days. Back in their time Emerson, Lake, and Palmer were big enough to take the London Symphony Orchestra on tour & spend 2 million bucks making an album. These days, all you ever hear on the radio from ELP is 'Lucky Man' which doesn't give the slightest clue as to how fscking brilliant a keyboardist Emerson was.
If you really want to hear the Moog tortured and played to its limit, check out any of their first 5 albums - ELP, Tarkus, Pictures at an Exhibition, Trilogy, or Brain Salad Surgery.
>> IMHO Perl has no real domain in which it is better than everything else
Even if you don't use it for web programming, it is a much better system admin tool than anything else. You can do everything you can do with sed, awk, or shell scripting with Perl. And its cross platform, so you could conceivably make one comprehensive system admin tool with Perl that did all the jobs you needed to do across multiple OS's.
Parents were made to believe that it was imperative to prevent their children from ever masturbating. Even once would ruin the child forever.
Its was what the experts all said, so it must have been true.
Since I used pkunzip to extract doom, that makes it the first program I ever used. It was a regular partner back in the days of DOS games.
Thanks, Phillip.
Don't forget, as late as 1900 more than 3/4 of the American population were rural farmers or otherwise agrarian.(IIRC) Most of us can probably trace our roots to farmers and we probably don't have to go back very many generations before this is true. The farthest I can trace my last name unbroken is to Iowa, 1837. If I don't take the strict last name route I can go back to the early 1700s when the Scotch-Irish emigrated en masse from Northern Ireland to the states. Thus, I know that my ancestors were all farmers, they were likely farmers in Ireland and Scotland before that. I know they were at least literate when they came to America, but I have no knowledge of my family before that. Seeing as how for many, many generations most of the human population was agrarian, passed knowledge orally, and did not keep records, I don't see how this study is going to help people "trace" their ancestry.
I realize that that was not the only purpose of the study BTW, and that they likely made many worthwhile discoveries.
I like the b-tree idea, but what do you do when you are working with multiple tables? For instance, I've got something like 35 tables going for this particular database. How do you handle joins and such?
You've intrigued me enough to check out PHP, as its something I haven't tried yet. So far I code in C++, Perl, VB(ASP mostly), and Java. Seems to me the best way to go for what you are talking about would start with standard data structures that are in STL. STL leaves some things to be desired however, there are no hash tables or b-trees, so you still have to build your own from lower level components or from scratch.
Maybe an "improved" STL would be the ideal open source project you are looking for? I'd be interested in that as well.
Email me if you'd like to continue this discussion. jeverist@nospam.page1book.com Also you can probably find my website now.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned here though is that plain-vanilla SQL is a standard(ANSI SQL 92) and therefore portable between vendor implementations. I personally try to avoid vendor-specific SQL whenever possible for this reason. Going from a cross-platform SQL statement to a vendor-specific stored procedure is something that takes 2 or 3 lines of code in the SP itself. So I wouldn't discount coding in SQL because its vendor-specific.
As far as using data structures rather than a full-fledged RDBMS, I've had success using the C++ standard template library(STL) to create data structures like maps and lists where using a DB would be overkill. But in a solution that required multiple tables, I just don't see how you could realistically improve on SQL.
Anything you do at the session level is going to negatively affect performance and scalability. Session variables are stored in the servers memory throughout the lifetime of the users visit. If you ever need to scale to a web farm, session variables will trip you up, because they are stored at the particular server. There are some good tutorials on the web that cover how to avoid using sessions in ASP.
I like ADO(ActiveX Data Objects) because they give you flexibility in how you open your database connection. My advice here is to study all the different methods and use your brain as to which one is appropriate. You can open recordsets dynamically(meaning you can modify the data) or statically(better for things like searches where you all you need is to read it once.) Study all the different cursors, and choose the appropriate one for your specific need. Each is a tradeoff between functionality and performance.
That said, I try to use ADO only when necessary, because native SQL is going to perform better. But you can't do a lot of the ADO tricks with straight SQL.
I notice that ASP has a bad rep on slashdot, being Microsoft. Its actually good when used correctly, unfortunately it makes web development a little too easy so you see a lot of crap being done with ASP as well.
Which is the reason for components. You can move most of your logic to C++ components(best results) VB, Java, or something else. My experience is with COM in this arena, so I can't speak for other component architectures. The components are then called from the web pages via ASP or whatever platform you are using.
Stored procedures compile the SQL itself. Its not the same thing as having a C library. You have precompiled SQL that you can pass parameters to.
I thought Oracle did have a C library, so I'll have to check your statement. It would be kind of dumb if they didn't since Microsoft has come up with a C library and fast access to Oracle through OLEDB(sort of an improved ODBC)
If you are looking for access to data structures directly, you probably should roll your own. You're not likely to come up with something that works better than good old SQL for data access any time soon.
Besides slashdot, which we all (should) know runs on apache/mod_perl, there is the Internet Movie Database. So here we have two major sites that run on perl, and those are just a couple that I can think of immediately. I'm sure there are more.
However, last time I checked there were 3 IT jobs unfilled for every filled position. In some areas the ratio is 6:1.
A smart company IMHO would try to recognize actual talent than be swayed by that degree, or certification for that matter. By your logic, a 19 year old kid who might have spent the last 7 years working on Apache would be unqualified to be a web developer!
Luckily, there are many companies who don't use this retarded logic when hiring.
Its not likely whoever did this could set Apache up properly either. I've done both, and either way, you have to know what you are doing.