Posts by jake

Re: My friend has a 14.2 box that's still running.

I hope your friend's old Slackware box isn't connected to a network. There have been a few kernel upgrades that require a reboot since 14.2 was released.

Slack is as general purpose as the wet-ware installer is. It is easy to make it work pretty much anywhere you like (assuming you're not running very, very obscure hardware, or extreme bleeding edge stuff)..

Re: one of?

Slackware is the oldest continuously maintained distro. SLS faded into obscurity by mid 1994.

Re: one of?

If you want to go that far back, the original "boot & root" floppy distro was first. SLS (Slack's parent) and Interim (Debians) were both based on that. Slackware is considered the first usable distro for many reasons. For example, did you actually try using the first couple years of Debian? I did. There is a reason I still run Slack.

Re: 2016's 14.2.

-stable is actually quite up to date, if not exactly modern in places.

You'll have to get nethack 3.6.6 from -current, though.

Re: Better Yet.

My suggestion woud be to ban lobbyists entirely. Totally cut them off. All of them. The shysters. Capital Hill is supposed to be there for "We, the People", not the likes of Big Business and Greenpeace.

Sadly, it'll never happen. Too much money involved.

Re: "A small group of woke mega-corporations"

You've only just noticed that? For the most part, folks who either claim to be woke, or yell/scream that other people are not woke (enough) tend to be hypocrites, and hysterical with it.

The concept is OK, it's the application that leaves a lot to be desired.

The irony ...

... is palpable.

Re: Our Josh

"The idea is to be seen as the badass macho guy who takes no sh!t from nobody and gets things done"

We're not stupid enough to run for office.

Re: RE: "free market"

This is all about the GOP desperately trying to stay afloat in the pool of muck that they unleashed by nominating Trump as their presidential candidate. They are starting to flail, are down to their last gasps, and it's rather fun to watch. Political Science classes world-wide are going to study it for centuries as an example of how not to run a railroad.

_{I'm not all that fond of the democrats, either ... lesser of two evils}

Re: Right move, for the wrong reasons

That wasn't just a fringe, that was all-out galoons and tassles, and enough of each to make a practitioner of passementerie swoon.

Methinks ...

... someone doesn't fully understand what "purple state" means in this context.

Hint: If you were a Red State and are now a Purple State, the general population is leaning towards the Blue side of the spectrum and probably wants nothing to do with your proposed neo-confederacy. Sorry to burst your bubble.

Re: Lord Hawley

"Trumpian jackass"

That's a trifle redundant and pleonastic, don't you think?

Re: Happy Meal tat

How could you wish that on anyone's child, even in jest? How rude!

Re: Hybrids?

Well, yes. :-)

Re: Hybrids?

"Why lug around an IC engine if you don’t have to?"

Because the electrics have no soul. They take too long to recharge between rounds, too.

Re: Why the fuck

"I just install and get to work these days..."

Indeed. The ultimate OS is the one that blissfully gets out of the way and allows me to do my job with no histrionics. For my needs, Slackware does exactly that. Try it, you might like it.

The only time I actually think about which OS I am running is when I'm responding in threads like this one.

Re: MeDearOldMum

To be fair, I should point out that it doesn't matter what OS MeDearOldMum and Great Aunt use, I will still be called for any and all tech support issues in their day-to-day use. Including the dreaded "it did something funny" call, which is all too common with Windows.

So I decided to move them to a customized version of Slackware, partially to make life easier for me. Their "learning curve" was not all that bad, because I put clearly labeled icons for everything they needed on their desktop (Xfce at first, now KDE).

Last year (2020), neither of them needed to call me for support. At all. Not once. As of today, nearly a third of the way into 2021, they still haven't needed to call me for support. That's over fifteen and a half months of trouble-free home computing for a couple of technically illiterate people. (Actually, it's longer than that, I honestly don't remember either of them calling in 2019, either. MDOM had me install a new printer for her in 2018, but I'd have had to do that regardless of OS. She refuses to plug anything into her computer.)

On my end, I run a simple script to tell their computers to update themselves in the wee hours, after testing the upgrade(s) on my own computer and then the Wife's. So no added complication there, nor any "wasted" time. What's not to like?

And all this on Slackware, a supposed "hard to use" distribution. Methinks it's not the end users that are the problem, rather it is their first line of support that has issues.

Re: Why the fuck

One wonders if the idiot taxpayer knows his darling Mac's userland is mostly GNU/BSD ...

Re: Why the fuck

Maintenance headaches in Linux? Hell, it's so easy, MeDearOldMum and Great Aunt use it!

Not really. As a consultant, my job is to get in, do the job well, and get out again ... and hopefully never hear from the client ever again. Failures to communicate (as this undoubtedly is) do nothing but cause ongoing ulcers for all concerned. Intelligent people don't want that.

_{Now ask me why I don't work for governments, doctors, or lawyers anymore ...}

Re: Accountability

We live in a "QUICK! Find someone else to blame!" world, alas.

Re: O je

"Vintage tech from the late 1980s-early 1990s is starting to disintegrate now"

I've had good luck with 1980s Sun kit, should anyone wish to dip their toes in the water of retro computing. Even the tape and floppy drives seem to mostly still work, if you take the time to earn how to properly clean them first.

Re: "It almost looks as though it was made of Lego"

It'll run BSD, therefor I can run my businesses on it.

Not that I would, mind. Not reliable enough, not even back then.

_{Most business doesn't really require glitter, rainbows, moons, stars and my little pony.}

Re: "It almost looks as though it was made of Lego"

"Clearly some "designer" was trying to be "original"."

This was addressed in TFA ...

"arrived in the waning months of John Sculley's tenure as CEO of Apple."

Re: "purely principled, non-personal reasons, it'd probably be Stallman."

And of course you, LDS, do everything for the betterment of others, at all times, right?

Re: The world keeps turning

If one really wanted to make that simile stick, one should also argue that the Fellows at IBM are also leaders of a cult. As is anybody with Emeritus as their title. Etc.

Re: Mouse?

Crossed my mind, too. As it did 30ish years ago .... why have a separate microphone to clutter your desk when you can easily and cheaply add one to a basic keyboard, along with a lockable momentary switch to activate it. So I built my own :-)

The result worked nicely, but I never actually used it for anything.

Re: I see what you did with the title, El Reg

35 years? Really? Remember when so-called "Multimedia PCs" hit the market in the very early 1990s? Each one came with a microphone and speakers (joy!). The resulting cacophony in offices world-wide demonstrated quite nicely why talking (and listening) to one's computer was for niche cases only ...

Re: Dangerous precedent.

"Did they have a captain cook at the email too?"

Of course they did. It's what they do. They will no doubt lie and claim otherwise, but what moron would believe them?