"I became acquainted with Blue State Digital's work for the Obama campaign on June 3 of this year, when I got an email pointing me to a MyBO ad with the filename "techinterest?foo". The ad recruited "exceptionally talented web developers" with "A deep understanding of LAMP development processes and best practices", "Experience scaling (a) large LAMP application", "Experience building complex applications using PHP and MySQL" with "deep knowledge of MySQL performance and query optimization" and "Advanced or expert CSS, Javascript, and AJAX skills". The email also noted that McCain's campaign site runs on Windows".
I just checked netcraft.com for all the major candidates for president. It should come as no surprise to those of us who use Linux on a regular basis that Barack Obama runs his web site on Linux. But the real surprise comes when looking at the other candidates. Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Mike Huckabee are all running their sites on Windows Server 2003. This information is all correct as of today according to netcraft. I did see a couple of weeks ago that netcraft said that barackobama.com was running FreeBSD, but it says Linux now, and FreeBSD is still much better for running web sites as sophisticated as this one than Windows Server 2003.
Obama for America! Obama for Linux! YES WE CAN!!
I like linux O.S. this is the free kernel, operating system and mostly open but not nearly complete free applications which come with gnome and kde, which are the graphical frameworks so you can point and click your way about.
Linux is not without its challenges. Even the latest versions of Linux have some notable development problems that are either minor and easy to fix or behave Machiavellian and can cause serious problems.
What is the difference between this system or form of digital nature and using Microwindows? Plenty.
The factor of resource use in Linux is as-needed, just in time or barely enough, and, occasionally -- too many bells, levers and whistles! That's OK. Us engineers just love this.
Whereas, microwindows will underutilize resources and run at 150% or twice the CPU clock speed needed. However, windOws' core architecture and upkeep plus the '' live '' patches or software revisions are not open and transparent ( I won't call them updates ). Therefore, applying meaningful or transparent measurements in windows land is a waste of time.
We, that is I and the next guy down the street, plus all the campus folks, and the people I've yet to meet here, and people everywhere else want to fix offshoots or hybrids of LINUX which in their inherent state are, in fact, STATE MACHINES so that the core libraries, common libraries in use, system programs and service oriented and auxillary applications professionally store, deliver, cache and retrieve information. In other words it is your data it is on time it is processing field of elements linked to a processor with prioritization of utility to spare, has true efficiency and has a major cool factor so derivatives do indeed fit. It's like having a new car in terms of vroom and a used car in terms of price all at the same time!
Linux, the Apache web server and database spread sheets are useful in work, school, politics, the legal system and of course research and private enterprises. Media forgets or deliberately overlooks the cutting edge tools available in open source.
I think open source software will be an important factor in software development in '08 - 2009 and beyond. It's been a struggle on this side of the continent ( and others will attest: where has it not? ) but well worth it. Money should be spent on getting us where we have to be and others on board. We like building machines, multi-line routines and software avatars or agents. It is our obligation, our love, our hobby, our endeavor or entrepreneurial movement that to some degree all keeps us grounded in reality today. Hacking computer code is the real intelligent design.
