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White House Website Switches To Open Source
Falc0n writes "WhiteHouse.gov has gone Drupal. After months of planning, says an Obama Administration source, the White House has ditched the proprietary content management system that had been in place since the days of the Bush Administration in favor of the latest version of the open-source Drupal software. Dries Buytaert reflected on this, adding: 'this is a clear sign that governments realize that Open Source does not pose additional risks compared to proprietary software, and furthermore, that by moving away from proprietary software, they are not being locked into a particular technology, and that they can benefit from the innovation that is the result of thousands of developers collaborating on Drupal.'"
I've never understood the need to use some kind of CMS behind websites. It just adds unnecessary weight and complicates things, and always limits what you can do or how you should do it. Why not just code the website completely to begin with?
It's a lot better way to go, even more so for large websites.
I have a center right wing site. It turns on ASP.NET. I am rewriting it for a Linux hosted roll out because it is better. My reasons are thus.
Windows 7 is a better desktop OS, for sure, but, for programmers, Linux is hands down better.
a) You can transplant Linux, but not Windows. I ripped a hard drive out of an Opteron, put it in a Xeon, and booted my Linux right away. All I had to do was google a bit and comment out sbp2 from /etc/modules because my new motherboard did not have firewire support, and any instability was solved. Microsoft can take its TCO numbers and shove it up their ass, as I'm looking at hours of labor to get Windows up and rolling, versus being done for Linux. Meanwhile, the best answer Microsoft has is to do a Windows 7 REINSTALL, meaning that, my data and applications are completely f--- up, and I still have to come up with a goddamned license key for Windows.
b) Linux has built in support for ISOs and DVD burning and every other file system that there is. I do not have google for 80 different spyware tools to get a utility. I can type sudo apt get install and be done with it.
c) Linux comes with every tool imaginable, and has no baked in limits. With Windows, you develop on a desktop and deploy to a server, and the two are different. Linux -is- the server, so its simpler. There are more languages for linux, more evil things you can do to Apache, more off the wall out of the box ways to get things done. Visual Studio is a great product, but its really all there is. It's like a Versaille, a beautiful building for sure, amazing wonder, but no place to take a shit, because the designers thought shitting was bad. Meanwhile, Linux is the land of trailer parks and porta poddies. Might not smell so good, but at least you aren't shitting your pants.
d) bash is still better than powershell. On paper, powershell is better, but only MS could come up with a shell that requires so much fricking typing and looks so ugly.
e) Linux feels faster.
f) And, Linux yes, is cheaper. I paid 0.0000 dollars for an operating system that works to be transplanted and gives me lots of great tools. I have to lay out almost $1000 for Windows + Visual Studio.
It's like, I can be working on my web site on my new computer now, with an OS that's free and asked me to do little to migrate from one machine to another, or I can pay down a bunch more money to get at the data I already had, just because I'm using a new computer with it. I'm not a big socialist. I don't care about the ideology of FOSS, but Windows, you fucking suck!
Seriously, if Linux gets its act together enough to have a vision where your hard drive is transplantable from computer to computer, like it doesn't matter, with tools, data, operating system, preferences, everything, Wndows is dead meat. And Linux now, is getting very close to that.
This is my sig.
The key really is, how do create a social mechanism to prevent excessive concentrations of wealth, without creating a defacto concentration of wealth?
It's almost like you need to have the social rules set up so that its easy come, easy go... once you reach a certain point in wealth, it should be easier to blow it and lose it all.
This is my sig.
A rebuttal to the "socialist agencies" comment I quoted is here by "hiram":
http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/2009/08/a_savage_mob.html
Hiram makes some good points. Still, is not regulation of monopolies something you need a government for? Also, much drug research is fundamentally based on publicly funded (NIH) studies. Also, broadcast media was in general much better for families when there was an equal time law and restrictions against advertising to children. So, some of the problems he points to are the result of deregulation as well as shifting government resources away from "butter" and into "guns". I agree public schooling is a big problem (see John Taylor Gatto and my other post).
We need to separate out various functions of government like regulation and oversight or taxing and redistributing wealth for legitimate public purposes (including avoiding a concentration of wealth that is bad for democracy, like with a progressive tax up to 91% under Roosevelt after WWII) from the issue of who actually provides the services.
But, as I said earlier, take a look at this video of a high speed robot hand from Japan and tell me *anything* about our economy will make sense as-is in ten or twenty years:
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
Or even this: ... ...
From:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2159038/posts http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/02/AR2009010202191.html
"Armed robotic aircraft soar in the skies above Pakistan, hurling death down on America's enemies in the war on terrorism. Soon -- years, not decades, from now -- American armed robots will patrol on the ground as well, fundamentally transforming the face of battle. Conventional war, even genocide, may be abolished by a robotic American Peace.
The detachment with which the United States can inflict death upon our enemies is surely one reason why U.S. military involvement around the world has expanded over the past two decades. The excellence of American military technology makes it possible for U.S. forces to inflict vast damage upon the enemy while suffering comparatively modest harm in return.
The rapid emergence of the armed unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) that roam over Pakistan is a sequel to Moore's Law. Onboard computers became far more powerful, so automatic pilots became far more competent. Signal processors became more sophisticated, facilitating collection and processing of more interesting intelligence. Global Positioning System receivers shrank and could be economically employed on small robotic aircraft. Precision-guided munitions could deliver lethal firepower. And so forth.
The U.S. Navy has arguably moved farthest toward substituting treasure for blood. A generation ago the Reagan administration brought World War II-era battleships out of mothballs to provide gunfire support to onshore operations. With a crew of more than 1,500, these ships were designed to be manned by the low-paid draftees of the 1940s, not the more amply rewarded volunteers of the 1980s. The Navy couldn't afford them, and the ships were soon returned to mothballs. In their place, the Navy came up with the new DDG-1000 Zumwalt destroyer, an automated warship with a crew of only 150."
I came across that while looking what the freepers say about robots:
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/robot/index?tab=articles
Anyway, many conservatives don't get it about technology invalidating muc
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.