"If a person never exercises at all their metabolism will slow to a crawl and they'll stop losing weight after they reach a certain weight."
Do you know which weight? That when your caloric acquisition equals your burning rate. Exactly what I said.
"Usually that certain weight is either slightly overweight, or within the healthy range."
Tell that to any famine suffering country.
"The problem with this is they'll look like a smaller fat person rather than a fit person."
Not. Not in reality (I haven't seen any third world starving person looking "fat") nor within context (people with a high percentage of fat on his diet may look fatty; but if they don't eat fat but say, mainly vegetables, white fish, a bit of carbohydrates -pasta and rice, and a bit of red meat, they won't look fatty no matter what).
"The only way to lose fat is to combine weight lifting and exercise with a low calorie diet."
Bullshit. Within or below caloric equilibrium you won't make up fat if you don't eat fat, plain simple. Or have you ever seen a fatty years-long comma patient?
Re:There are many big questions...
on
The Big Questions
·
· Score: 1
"But what is the question?"
What is the answer?
Re:I think the big questions are "big"
on
The Big Questions
·
· Score: 1
"By what means do you arrive at such a conclusion that from now until forever a way will not be found in reason and logic so that they will have something to say on the existence of a god?"
No, no, no... that's not the case: It's terribly easy for reason and logic to say something on the existance of God: it's only needed for God to come down on His Holly Glory and go to Letterman's for an interview. It is about the *non*existance of God where problems begin.
And then, "Just because we believe that logic and reason as we presently know them do not have anything to say about the existence/non-existence of a god does not mean that in the future they will not" fails an easy pre-condition: while science and technology evolutions, reason and logic do not. God as a logic problem is as tractable now as it was in the Ancient Greece days and the problem with it is... that there's no logic on It. The most basic logic assert: 'if A then B' fails about God because being it omnipotent, 'if A then B... or C or D or even something out of the alphabet'.
"But sure - exercise alone and diet alone isn't going to lose you weight. You need to do both."
No, you don't.
But it's healthier that way. What you need in order to lose weight is ingressing less calories than you are burning. You can do that by eating less, burning more or a mix of the two. It's just that simple.
"And what do most package managers do? Utterly lazy dependency management. "Well, you need this package... so you should have the latest version of it.""
"but Comcast doesn't like that so I get throttled. Why should I be targeted for restriction? This is a case of everybody being at fault, not just one person."
As if Comcast had the least intention to focus on one person. Take off all weaselry and the end result is plain simple: we (Comcast) will charge for the full bandwith offered but we don't intend to give you but 50% of what you buyed.
"Ubuntu not hardly representative of all linux distros? Maybe not, but it IS by all accounts I can find, far and away the most popular (even more so if you included Ubuntu-derived distros)"
Well, Windows is even more popular than Ubuntu, by an order of magnitude; it's even the most popular OS over there. Should we conclude that Windows represents all OS producers' love for quality assurance?
"If Ubuntu is not representative, then gentoo, slackware, etc are even more unrepresentative of linux distros as a whole, no?"
Regarding what it's been talked here, they are as much representative as Ubuntu: nothing, that is. The parent was trying to associate some group culture aspects (like their interest in proper QA) to a source code base (Linux). It has as much sense saying that since Ubuntu (may) lack QA then all other distributions (probably) lack of it too as saying that since I met a stupid black guy then all black men are (probably) stupid.
"Flagging this as "Troll" for being critical of how Linux distros don't get the same levels of QA testing isn't exactly demonstrating great professionalism..."
Thinking that completly different projects that just happen to share some code base are the same with regards their internal procedures (Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Fedora, Slackware, SUSE...) is what demonstrates lack of professionalism -or a trollish behaviour. Since there's no "-1 unprofessional" mod...
"In fact, this was an internal web based app for our office, which dealt with hotel reservations. When setting up a new hotel on the system, the users (our staff), had to find and supply the telephone number as part of the standard contact details we needed for every hotel. Do you know of any hotel that DOESN'T have a telephone, and if so, how would we call them to make a reservation ? There are sometimes instances where some fields MUST be filled in, otherwise the whole record becomes worthless"
So again we are in square one: Why are your users entering such telephone numbers as 1111111? Are you *SURE* they do it on mistake? Because if they do for their own valid (to them) reasons managing the incident as if it were a mistake you try to avoid by code, then the idiot one is still on *your* end of the keyboard.
"because virtualization only works for large companies with many, many servers"
How is it, then, that our little company has *greatly* benefited from virtualization? We are an IT company and we use it mainly for development/stage environments and it is working for us fantastabously. And no, we don't virtualize anything already on its own iron unless we have a strong reason (big refactoring/reinstalling, etc.): we are not short of rack space or too worried about our electric consumption, so if it works why touch it?
By your explanations it seems not a problem with virtualization itself which can indeed serve very well even for short companies (you talk about a death motherboard: what about an HA virtualization environment with just two servers if you don't need more?) but, as almost always, unknowledgeable decision makers that give more credit to snake-oil sellers and their brightly coloured brochures than to their own in-house professionals.
So, rewriting the credits, "IT Snake Oil, Six Tech Cure-Alls That Went Bunk reduced to one: Management".
"We had a simple field on a form to "Supply a Telephone Number". The users didn't, so we used JS to validate they had filled it in."
So instead of validation server-side you rely on validation client-side?
"The more you Idiot-Proof a system, the smarter the Idiots become. Not smarter at actually entering the correct data, just smarter at bypassing the protections you put in place."
Hummm... Why are your users entering such telephone numbers as 1111111? Are you *sure* they do it on mistake? Or might it be that they don't *want* to give their telephone number to you for their own valid reasons and you still didn't add the option "I don't have or don't want to share my telephone number with you"?
I'm not sure which keyboard end is the idiot one in this case.
"Yes, but you don't have the flexibility and the elasticity of resources"
Does it Amazon? Don't think so (I don't mean Amazon's users but Amazon itself).
"billing for your exact usage"
That's true: in our little company we never found useful billing for that kind of services to our internal users though we could with not too much effort.
"and the ability to rapid provision"
Did you read what I wrote? Three or four years ago "rapid" meant "as soon as your new iron comes and then less than a day more". About two years ago it meant "less than a day". About a year ago it meant "about two hours". Now it's a matter of autoprovision and it takes the time for the template to copy, and surely less than it would take to get it running on Amazon. As I already said, nothing new but a continous improvement of our services.
"Though you do have a cost for technicians to maintain and know every aspect of your data center, which is something that's built into the cloud model."
Do you think Amazon doesn't pay its technicians?
"Clouds are great for companies that don't want to hire and pay for that expertise"
Not. *Outsourced* cloud services are great for companies that don't want to hire and pay for that expertise.
Re-read your post. The only real novelty is about billing: if you outsource this, billing gets more complex though with finer granularity. That I concede, but even if that meant a total revolution in the way people do bussiness it certainly doesn't makes for "a new technology" as stated in the grandparent post. And then, wrapping a new billing ability in fuzzy PHB-oriented terms in order to better market it looks like the very definition of "buzzword" just as I said.
"how did "big company uses X" lead to the conclusion "X is reliable?" It could simply mean they've taken steps to account for the fact it loses data, but that doesn't make it reliable."
They are companies that already showed the monetary ability and the acumen not to fail in obvious ways. Since "taking steps" always costs money, such a big company using "X" instead of "Y" indeed leads to the conclusion that "X" is a better value for its bussiness case than "Y".
"If one provider offers me "cloud computing" and the other offers "software as a service", what does that tell me about the likely functional differences in their offerings?"
The one providing "cloud computing" is offering you the barebones for your services; the one ofering SaaS is offering you the service.
So generally speaking, the one offering you SaaS will be the client of the one offering him Cloud.
"I do enjoy how everyone is trying to beat down Cloud Computing. It's basically a new technology"
They are beating down because, repeat after me, it-is-not-a-new-technology; it is a buzzword.
"Sure there's no good overall definition"
As it's usually the case for buzzwords: they are not technical jargon but marketroid speech for PHB characters, no wonder it's fuzzy.
Of course faster provision, better templating and higher manageability is good news for everybody but it is just an evolutionary trend lasting years now, its last step being bringing virtualization on the x86 platform and it certainly is no news for anyone in the field but just "more and better" of the same.
Do you want cloud?
* Virtualization: checked
* System templating: checked
* Remote monitoring: checked
* Centralized administration: checked
* Fast user-managed provision: checked
* Fast deployment and redeployment: checked What am I talking about? Amazon? Not: just my three racks server room and that has been the case for years, each year faster, more flexible and capable. Maybe it's because I'm the unknowingly inventor of the cloud... except this has been "best practices" for any sysadmin worth his salt for years.
"So what if the user has a "centralized repository" that, for all I care, has outdated versions (and my options are doing the work for the package maintainer who's out in Mexico in the dope trip of his life) or doesn't have what I want *at all*?"
So what? Are you indeed trying to make a point? So what if your vendor provider doesn't feel like following procedures that will make its userbase happier and more fidel to their product? It certainly doesn't make its choice better than the alternatives.
"but free is free, right?"
I see. So all you want is trolling, right? So be it, Mr. synthespian and let's forget I already stated that providing it's own repo is an option even for your beloved closed source programs proudly produced by American labour.
"You propose no solution for distribution of non-free software."
No, I don't. Not at least here and now. I don't make bussiness on the distribution of non-free software so why I should? The day I need or care about distributing non-free software is the day I'll look for solutions to that problem. Meanwhile I have higher priorities to care about (like posting on Slashdot).
"You propose no solution for funding development of free video game software."
I neither develop nor use video game software, be it free or closed source. Therefore, why should I?
"Therefore, you appear to propose the elimination of the video game industry."
Unstated conclussion. On my previous message I didn't offer solutions to end famine in Africa either; am I proposing all those people should be anihilated? No. The fact I don't propose solutions about how should closed source bussiness be managed only states that: that I didn't offer such solutions. It specifically doesn't state I propose to eliminate them. One thing is that they don't get my simpathy nor my free effort looking for solutions for their problems, a different one that I try to eliminate them.
"A lot of Slashdot users who like to play video games disagree with your proposal."
Therefore is up to *them* to seek/offer your asked for solutions, not me. On the other hand I did *not* propose anything (see your own opening paragraph) so what's exactly those lot of Slashdot users disagree with?
Your opinion. I've extensively managed software installations on Linux and Windows and even if package managers are a necessary evil, they are much better than the alternatives. By far.
"If I want software [...] I don't have to hope that the company I bought the operating system has put it in their database."
You forget that one thing is a package manager and a very different one a package source. Any company that cares can provide its own tigthly integrated package source for a distribution without permission or cooperation from the operating source vendor (yes: even closed source vendors can do that). And by using the package manager the end user gets for free centralized software inventory and upgrades without the need to go after each and every vendor's procedures as they reinvent the wheel.
"Package managers are only necessary because of the fragmented nature of the Linux universe."
Oh! that certainly explains why on the Windows side they have reinvented them (control panel's install/unistall app, install shield, windows update, msi files...) only worse.
"I think the absence of "one person willing to take the effort to package it" is the problem."
Of course it is. But then we are not talking about "easiness for the end user" anymore. We are talking about producer's percieved convenience.
"Especially if that effort involves seeking support from a mentor's list."
True. But then you still have the "second best" from the end user stand-point: produce you own repo and let the user get the software from it. It is not such a terribly difficult task and the only added nuisance for the user is adding a line to her sources list (and even then, it can be streamlined by providing a file to be dropped at/etc/apt/sources.d/).
" Add to that the fact that it's an effort to be repeated for several distros."
No, I don't want to add it since it's irrelevant; such a support is not affected by you using "thin" or "fat" binaries: you either support a given platform or you don't and that's the kind of choice the developer won't only have to take for Linux' distributions but for Windows and its multiple release, OS/X, etc. And still I'll point out that it's much easier to support "Debian and Red Hat" than it is to support "Windows and OS/X".
"Did you guys forget how the web worked before CMSs came around?"
Yes: it did work slower, more expensive and less functional. I even remember why first intranet efforts used to fail: because content stagnated due to the fact that only programers that didn't produce the information in first place were the only ones allowed and/or with the knowledge to modify contents.
"Most CMS products are insecure pieces of shit. I would not use a CMS for a high profile target like that. They should be publishing static files with a custom system. Only pages that must be dynamic should be. It's just dumb?"
You do know you can have your CMS administrative backend opened only to your internal networks so from the Internet all you have access to is an static, pre-cached, read-only version, do you?
Slashdot Mirror
"If a person never exercises at all their metabolism will slow to a crawl and they'll stop losing weight after they reach a certain weight."
Do you know which weight? That when your caloric acquisition equals your burning rate. Exactly what I said.
"Usually that certain weight is either slightly overweight, or within the healthy range."
Tell that to any famine suffering country.
"The problem with this is they'll look like a smaller fat person rather than a fit person."
Not. Not in reality (I haven't seen any third world starving person looking "fat") nor within context (people with a high percentage of fat on his diet may look fatty; but if they don't eat fat but say, mainly vegetables, white fish, a bit of carbohydrates -pasta and rice, and a bit of red meat, they won't look fatty no matter what).
"The only way to lose fat is to combine weight lifting and exercise with a low calorie diet."
Bullshit. Within or below caloric equilibrium you won't make up fat if you don't eat fat, plain simple. Or have you ever seen a fatty years-long comma patient?
"But what is the question?"
What is the answer?
"By what means do you arrive at such a conclusion that from now until forever a way will not be found in reason and logic so that they will have something to say on the existence of a god?"
No, no, no... that's not the case: It's terribly easy for reason and logic to say something on the existance of God: it's only needed for God to come down on His Holly Glory and go to Letterman's for an interview. It is about the *non*existance of God where problems begin.
And then, "Just because we believe that logic and reason as we presently know them do not have anything to say about the existence/non-existence of a god does not mean that in the future they will not" fails an easy pre-condition: while science and technology evolutions, reason and logic do not. God as a logic problem is as tractable now as it was in the Ancient Greece days and the problem with it is... that there's no logic on It. The most basic logic assert: 'if A then B' fails about God because being it omnipotent, 'if A then B... or C or D or even something out of the alphabet'.
"But sure - exercise alone and diet alone isn't going to lose you weight. You need to do both."
No, you don't.
But it's healthier that way. What you need in order to lose weight is ingressing less calories than you are burning. You can do that by eating less, burning more or a mix of the two. It's just that simple.
"You still need at least some Internet-facing interface for the power grid, so that the entire network can be controlled"
No, you don't.
"And what do most package managers do? Utterly lazy dependency management. "Well, you need this package... so you should have the latest version of it.""
No_Single_Package_Manager_Does_That.
Clear?
All the rest is utter crap too.
"but Comcast doesn't like that so I get throttled. Why should I be targeted for restriction? This is a case of everybody being at fault, not just one person."
As if Comcast had the least intention to focus on one person. Take off all weaselry and the end result is plain simple: we (Comcast) will charge for the full bandwith offered but we don't intend to give you but 50% of what you buyed.
"Ubuntu not hardly representative of all linux distros? Maybe not, but it IS by all accounts I can find, far and away the most popular (even more so if you included Ubuntu-derived distros)"
Well, Windows is even more popular than Ubuntu, by an order of magnitude; it's even the most popular OS over there. Should we conclude that Windows represents all OS producers' love for quality assurance?
"If Ubuntu is not representative, then gentoo, slackware, etc are even more unrepresentative of linux distros as a whole, no?"
Regarding what it's been talked here, they are as much representative as Ubuntu: nothing, that is. The parent was trying to associate some group culture aspects (like their interest in proper QA) to a source code base (Linux). It has as much sense saying that since Ubuntu (may) lack QA then all other distributions (probably) lack of it too as saying that since I met a stupid black guy then all black men are (probably) stupid.
"Beta version of Firefox
Which almost everyone considered it polished"
Except, of course, its very developers but, oh! what would they know.
"Flagging this as "Troll" for being critical of how Linux distros don't get the same levels of QA testing isn't exactly demonstrating great professionalism..."
Thinking that completly different projects that just happen to share some code base are the same with regards their internal procedures (Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Fedora, Slackware, SUSE...) is what demonstrates lack of professionalism -or a trollish behaviour. Since there's no "-1 unprofessional" mod...
"In fact, this was an internal web based app for our office, which dealt with hotel reservations.
When setting up a new hotel on the system, the users (our staff), had to find and supply the telephone number as part of the standard contact details we needed for every hotel.
Do you know of any hotel that DOESN'T have a telephone, and if so, how would we call them to make a reservation ?
There are sometimes instances where some fields MUST be filled in, otherwise the whole record becomes worthless"
So again we are in square one: Why are your users entering such telephone numbers as 1111111? Are you *SURE* they do it on mistake? Because if they do for their own valid (to them) reasons managing the incident as if it were a mistake you try to avoid by code, then the idiot one is still on *your* end of the keyboard.
"because virtualization only works for large companies with many, many servers"
How is it, then, that our little company has *greatly* benefited from virtualization? We are an IT company and we use it mainly for development/stage environments and it is working for us fantastabously. And no, we don't virtualize anything already on its own iron unless we have a strong reason (big refactoring/reinstalling, etc.): we are not short of rack space or too worried about our electric consumption, so if it works why touch it?
By your explanations it seems not a problem with virtualization itself which can indeed serve very well even for short companies (you talk about a death motherboard: what about an HA virtualization environment with just two servers if you don't need more?) but, as almost always, unknowledgeable decision makers that give more credit to snake-oil sellers and their brightly coloured brochures than to their own in-house professionals.
So, rewriting the credits, "IT Snake Oil, Six Tech Cure-Alls That Went Bunk reduced to one: Management".
"We had a simple field on a form to "Supply a Telephone Number". The users didn't, so we used JS to validate they had filled it in."
So instead of validation server-side you rely on validation client-side?
"The more you Idiot-Proof a system, the smarter the Idiots become. Not smarter at actually entering the correct data, just smarter at bypassing the protections you put in place."
Hummm... Why are your users entering such telephone numbers as 1111111? Are you *sure* they do it on mistake? Or might it be that they don't *want* to give their telephone number to you for their own valid reasons and you still didn't add the option "I don't have or don't want to share my telephone number with you"?
I'm not sure which keyboard end is the idiot one in this case.
"When the Oracle at Delphi pronounced Socrates the wisest man in all of Greece"
Oracle at Delphi? Where? When? It's more Borland at Micro Focus, these days.
In the other hand, knowing Oracle, it probably wouldn't say nothing about Socrates at Greece but would pronounce Ellison wisest man over Sun.
"Yes, but you don't have the flexibility and the elasticity of resources"
Does it Amazon? Don't think so (I don't mean Amazon's users but Amazon itself).
"billing for your exact usage"
That's true: in our little company we never found useful billing for that kind of services to our internal users though we could with not too much effort.
"and the ability to rapid provision"
Did you read what I wrote? Three or four years ago "rapid" meant "as soon as your new iron comes and then less than a day more". About two years ago it meant "less than a day". About a year ago it meant "about two hours". Now it's a matter of autoprovision and it takes the time for the template to copy, and surely less than it would take to get it running on Amazon. As I already said, nothing new but a continous improvement of our services.
"Though you do have a cost for technicians to maintain and know every aspect of your data center, which is something that's built into the cloud model."
Do you think Amazon doesn't pay its technicians?
"Clouds are great for companies that don't want to hire and pay for that expertise"
Not. *Outsourced* cloud services are great for companies that don't want to hire and pay for that expertise.
Re-read your post. The only real novelty is about billing: if you outsource this, billing gets more complex though with finer granularity. That I concede, but even if that meant a total revolution in the way people do bussiness it certainly doesn't makes for "a new technology" as stated in the grandparent post. And then, wrapping a new billing ability in fuzzy PHB-oriented terms in order to better market it looks like the very definition of "buzzword" just as I said.
"how did "big company uses X" lead to the conclusion "X is reliable?" It could simply mean they've taken steps to account for the fact it loses data, but that doesn't make it reliable."
They are companies that already showed the monetary ability and the acumen not to fail in obvious ways. Since "taking steps" always costs money, such a big company using "X" instead of "Y" indeed leads to the conclusion that "X" is a better value for its bussiness case than "Y".
"If one provider offers me "cloud computing" and the other offers "software as a service", what does that tell me about the likely functional differences in their offerings?"
The one providing "cloud computing" is offering you the barebones for your services; the one ofering SaaS is offering you the service.
So generally speaking, the one offering you SaaS will be the client of the one offering him Cloud.
"I do enjoy how everyone is trying to beat down Cloud Computing. It's basically a new technology"
They are beating down because, repeat after me, it-is-not-a-new-technology; it is a buzzword.
"Sure there's no good overall definition"
As it's usually the case for buzzwords: they are not technical jargon but marketroid speech for PHB characters, no wonder it's fuzzy.
Of course faster provision, better templating and higher manageability is good news for everybody but it is just an evolutionary trend lasting years now, its last step being bringing virtualization on the x86 platform and it certainly is no news for anyone in the field but just "more and better" of the same.
Do you want cloud?
* Virtualization: checked
* System templating: checked
* Remote monitoring: checked
* Centralized administration: checked
* Fast user-managed provision: checked
* Fast deployment and redeployment: checked
What am I talking about? Amazon? Not: just my three racks server room and that has been the case for years, each year faster, more flexible and capable. Maybe it's because I'm the unknowingly inventor of the cloud... except this has been "best practices" for any sysadmin worth his salt for years.
"Personally I think things like S3 are mostly useful as a contingency plan for adding a lot of capacity in a hurry while you work out"
Yes. Or a case for a startup bussiness you still don't know how well it will make out: reducing you up front costs reduces your risks.
"So what if the user has a "centralized repository" that, for all I care, has outdated versions (and my options are doing the work for the package maintainer who's out in Mexico in the dope trip of his life) or doesn't have what I want *at all*?"
So what? Are you indeed trying to make a point? So what if your vendor provider doesn't feel like following procedures that will make its userbase happier and more fidel to their product? It certainly doesn't make its choice better than the alternatives.
"but free is free, right?"
I see. So all you want is trolling, right? So be it, Mr. synthespian and let's forget I already stated that providing it's own repo is an option even for your beloved closed source programs proudly produced by American labour.
"You propose no solution for distribution of non-free software."
No, I don't. Not at least here and now. I don't make bussiness on the distribution of non-free software so why I should? The day I need or care about distributing non-free software is the day I'll look for solutions to that problem. Meanwhile I have higher priorities to care about (like posting on Slashdot).
"You propose no solution for funding development of free video game software."
I neither develop nor use video game software, be it free or closed source. Therefore, why should I?
"Therefore, you appear to propose the elimination of the video game industry."
Unstated conclussion. On my previous message I didn't offer solutions to end famine in Africa either; am I proposing all those people should be anihilated? No. The fact I don't propose solutions about how should closed source bussiness be managed only states that: that I didn't offer such solutions. It specifically doesn't state I propose to eliminate them. One thing is that they don't get my simpathy nor my free effort looking for solutions for their problems, a different one that I try to eliminate them.
"A lot of Slashdot users who like to play video games disagree with your proposal."
Therefore is up to *them* to seek/offer your asked for solutions, not me. On the other hand I did *not* propose anything (see your own opening paragraph) so what's exactly those lot of Slashdot users disagree with?
"So you have sympathy only for those developers of redistributable software."
Yes, that's true.
"How do you propose to recoup the cost of developing, say, a single-player or local multiplayer video game if it is redistributable?"
I do not propose anything. Why should I?
"Package managers are a necessary evil."
Your opinion. I've extensively managed software installations on Linux and Windows and even if package managers are a necessary evil, they are much better than the alternatives. By far.
"If I want software [...] I don't have to hope that the company I bought the operating system has put it in their database."
You forget that one thing is a package manager and a very different one a package source. Any company that cares can provide its own tigthly integrated package source for a distribution without permission or cooperation from the operating source vendor (yes: even closed source vendors can do that). And by using the package manager the end user gets for free centralized software inventory and upgrades without the need to go after each and every vendor's procedures as they reinvent the wheel.
"Package managers are only necessary because of the fragmented nature of the Linux universe."
Oh! that certainly explains why on the Windows side they have reinvented them (control panel's install/unistall app, install shield, windows update, msi files...) only worse.
"I think the absence of "one person willing to take the effort to package it" is the problem."
Of course it is. But then we are not talking about "easiness for the end user" anymore. We are talking about producer's percieved convenience.
"Especially if that effort involves seeking support from a mentor's list."
True. But then you still have the "second best" from the end user stand-point: produce you own repo and let the user get the software from it. It is not such a terribly difficult task and the only added nuisance for the user is adding a line to her sources list (and even then, it can be streamlined by providing a file to be dropped at /etc/apt/sources.d/).
" Add to that the fact that it's an effort to be repeated for several distros."
No, I don't want to add it since it's irrelevant; such a support is not affected by you using "thin" or "fat" binaries: you either support a given platform or you don't and that's the kind of choice the developer won't only have to take for Linux' distributions but for Windows and its multiple release, OS/X, etc. And still I'll point out that it's much easier to support "Debian and Red Hat" than it is to support "Windows and OS/X".
"Did you guys forget how the web worked before CMSs came around?"
Yes: it did work slower, more expensive and less functional. I even remember why first intranet efforts used to fail: because content stagnated due to the fact that only programers that didn't produce the information in first place were the only ones allowed and/or with the knowledge to modify contents.
"Most CMS products are insecure pieces of shit. I would not use a CMS for a high profile target like that. They should be publishing static files with a custom system. Only pages that must be dynamic should be. It's just dumb?"
You do know you can have your CMS administrative backend opened only to your internal networks so from the Internet all you have access to is an static, pre-cached, read-only version, do you?