Sounds like the old "we had to burn the village in order to save it" defense.

My home machines have had Slackware Linux as their primary OS since around 1995, and I still maintain that Slack is the most Unix-like of all the Linuxes. This classic, verging on historic, distro has always been rock solid, dependable, and reliable, and has always accepted that I'm the one in charge of my hardware, not Patrick.

But thanks to a new job, I've been forcibly immersed in a bunch of "modern" Linux distros lately, and have finally been seduced by the dark side. Yes, after Slacking for something like 17 years, I've decided to reinstall my home box with a modern desktop-type distro. (Not with the cell phone / tablet style interface, I haven't gone completely crazy).

Using Slackware has been tremendously educational and consistently rewarding over the years. It has been a dream OS for this old-time, Unix-y hacker type, and I wouldn't have missed it for the world. Thanks for everything, Patrick! And for you young whippersnappers out there, if you're interested in learning Linux / Unix, there are worse things you could do than installing a "traditional" distro like Slackware and figuring out what makes it tick.

This is brilliant, really. The old "(whatever)... on a computer!" junk patent space was getting a little played out, but now we can patent "(whatever)... on a mobile phone!" so life is good again! At least for patent trolls.

Please, just stop it already. Every user interface change in the past couple years has made it *less* usable. Give it up.

*Shrug*. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. If Bush was still in office, he'd have voted the same way. If Clinton were re-elected, he'd do the same. This is just like the kids I went to grade school with, arguing with religious conviction whether Ford or Chevy was better. It just doesn't make any difference.

... imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!

Sorry, always wanted to do that...

They can have my organs when they pry them from my cold, dead... oh wait.

+1

Of course it's not lying, just "expectations management." In totally unrelated news, why do version numbers (Linux's, Microsoft's, anyones) never go *down* instead of up? After all they're just numbers with no semantics or meaning.

And as I've pointed out in the past, this was a reaction to Pat getting tired of people thinking Slackware was out of date compared to some other (ahem) popular Linux distros, who were shipping basically the same software but with a much bigger number slapped on it.

> I think it's clear that some other distributions inflated their version numbers for marketing purposes, and I've had to field (way too many times) the question "why isn't yours 6.x" or worse "when will you upgrade to Linux 6.0" which really drives home the effectiveness of this simple trick. [...]
> Sorry if I haven't been enough of a purist about this. I promise I won't inflate the version number again (unless everyone else does again ;)
http://www.slackware.com/faq/do_faq.php?faq=general

> I'm guessing you don't live in the UK where this kind of reactionary "OMG someone got hurt let's ban something" vote-chasing by our politicians is a daily fact of life.
I don't, but in recent years it's sure starting to feel that way.

Dunno about the encryption, but sounds like you need to get your company / site certified as an "appropriately recognized facility".

> Personally I hope they never get made.
Couldn't agree more. Some things just should not be reduced to film.

Very sad to hear this. I read and re-read the Dragonriders books growing up, starting with The White Dragon. Great books and a great author.

Right. How could a guy right out of school be so dumb as to not investigate which specific type of hellhole he's interviewing at? Fresh-outs don't have the bitter, hard-won experience of old farts - that's why they're not old farts.