Hear, hear. (Abashedly, I admit that I've yet to teach myself to use the slide rule. Alas, when pencil and paper won't suffice, I still turn to my trusty 1997 model TI-86 engineer's calculator...)

I agree with this insofar as by "the technology," you are referring specifically to our modern "digital" techno-world.

"Technology" more broadly, however, is far from unimportant. Indoor plumbing, municipal sanitation, rural electrification, planes, trains, and automobiles, etc. are concrete technologies that impact societies and individuals immensely.

However, I would agree with you that modern "digital technologies" by their very nature, are ephemeral, unreal things--insomuch as that term usually refers in practice to "tech" that is driven by software compiled to bits. To the extent that they "exist" at all, bits exist only in the aether. You pull the power-source, all running processes cease, and the bits in cache and RAM return to whence they came: nothingness.

Yes, I know about the existence of recording devices that let you save bit-patterns. These (hard drives, flash storage, etc.) are concrete tech, designed to facilitate our interaction with the 0's and 1's. In the absence of appropriate physical machines to do the work of reading and decoding the bits, they would amount to a big pile of gibberish.
Want proof? Tell me what this "says" and what language it is.
Let me guess... Crickets! As much as some people want to believe in such garbage, this ain't really the Matrix, and no one can watch binary digital rain and "see" a blonde.


Absolutely.

I'm afraid that these days, your worst case is the more prevalent scenario in everyday life. I was just relating in another thread a neighbor who's prone to discourage people from looking things up. The message of most every commercial on TV and radio amounts to: "You know you're an idiot who can never hope to understand sh**. But don't worry, we've got an app that'll do the thinkin' for you. Isn't 'tech' great? Now you can get back to worrying about the big stuff, like gluten and cosplay."

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Labor of Love (LOL) -- certainly not masochism. Imagination is preferable to a herd of sadistic businesses... The 90% doesn't care about the blobs because they put them there to figure out what the 10% who do care about the blobs are doing... this 90% lack the imagination for innovation and instead have to try to steal the 10%'s ideas by spying.

That's why our bunch (we, the dreamers, and the makers of music), prefer blob-free operating systems! Freenix is really just Slackware minus a few packages and with a kernel compiled from deblobbed source, which is way too easy to be considered masochistic

Neither crickets nor blonde!

As something commonly recognizable to humans that is the 85-digit base two (binary) representation of a unique integer value. The same integer may be represented as base ten (decimal) or base sixteen (hexadecimal) as...

In words, twenty-seven septillion and change (in the US).

You may string those digits together as bits at some offsets in the memory of some digital device which is designed to assign some significance to that sequence at that offset, either by direct bit manipulation or as the output of a compiler processing some input we may refer to as a "language", but the sequence itself without all that context is nothing but a unique number.

The point I had in mind was that the machines (i.e. "the technology"), wonderful as they are, are still just the implementation of some small subset of Free human thought, drawn in large part from the concept of number. They are both methods of exploration of those ideas and tools for leveraging the ideas for other beneficial uses.

The ideas and concepts, the human thought exsists, and is the thing of actual value, independent of the machine state, or whether the machine exists at all. When the machine facilitates the thought it is a benefit. When it does not it is useless, or worse.

All of which may admittedly be gibberish to some but is all important to the "business" of others!

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In a business setting, or even as a personal server, I'd look to FreeBSD.

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This is exactly my point about the nature of "bits." When you say the binary string I presented amounts to a unique number, you are implicitly providing a context for that string that may or may not be what was intended. Any contextual interpretation of said string of bits can be no more than a mere guess--perhaps those 85 digits have been extracted from the middle of a 300-digit number, perhaps they ...

In any event, your statement about context is spot on. In the absence of context and/or a machine to provide the context for you, collections of "bits" are about as meaningful as collections of sand grains.

And what I was getting at is that while the hardware side of computing may be considered "tech," insofar as hardware is by definition physical, the software side isn't really so.

In fact, I view software as being fundamentally.

Ultimately, I think we are in complete agreement. My previous response was intended just to bring up the caveat of pre-digital technology--the kind of concrete manifestation of human intelligence that I'd hate to see thrown under the bus...

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For my uses, I have for many years found Slackware to be great. Currently, the small flock of Slackware computers I tend are all running version 14.2.

For personal use, I have run Slackware from sometime in the late 1990s until now.

From ~2000 to ~2010 my day-job included being the one-man IT department for a set of servers. These servers generally ran 24/7, and all ran Slackware (command line only). I was on-call for every hour of every day for this period. Not even once during this period was there a problem which was caused by any of the Slackware packages which I installed on the servers; each server had only the packages which I deemed useful for its purpose. One server was the primary source of time and DNS for 'my' network. One server ran Apache. The other servers were the domain-controllers and print-servers and file-repositories for a flock of Windows computers.

I expect Slackware 15.0 will be at least as good as each version of Slackware which will have come before it. :-)

In my opinion, depending on what one needs from a computer, Slackware may work well. Keep in mind, someone will need to tend the computer, and this person will need to know Slackware.

Make that OpenBSD and i'm game (started exploring it again just a day back in vbox)

Genuine question: What does it do better than Slackware?

From my personal experience, Slackware is excellent in both settings, but admittedly my experience is limited to smaller offices. Regardless, I've found it to be near bullet proof, both in VMs and on bare metal. My next project is to learn how to set up SAMBA as an AD DC, so that I can take my offices to the next level.

The short answer, release-engineering.

Formalised release schedules and release lifetimes are important in a business setting. It's hard to forward-plan your upgrade strategies when these things are left to the whims of a BDFL.

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Ok. But what real world difference does it make?

IME, none really. My servers all run -current from different dates. It's no different to running a version which has been ordained with a version number.
In big businesses where they actually have upgrade strategies, you're right. But in small to medium sized businesses it doesn't matter.

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But if there's only one IT guy who knows FreeBSD then you're just replacing the distro BDFL with the IT team BDFL. I had Slackware servers and NetBSD firewalls/VPN gateways running in a couple of small to medium businesses, and while they ran flawlessly for years, when I packed up IT support, there was nobody to take over. If the IT people who replaced me didn't find a Windows server on site, or, at a push, an Ubuntu server, they weren't interested. I have a suspicion FreeBSD would be even further down their list.

It boils down to this : do you go with a technically superior solution, or with something that a trainee can handle when you leave? I would still go with the technically superior solution (Slackware, NetBSD, FreeBSD), but that can create, and for me did create, an almighty headache when someone else has to take over. C'est la vie, c'est technologie.

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Slint is not a business, but it is also hard to forward-plan its upgrade strategies having no clue at all when the next stable version will be released, especially when the most recent one is obsolete. This is true also for Salix, I think. I am not saying that Slackware should care for the fate of its derivatives, just noting that this is an issue not only for small or medium businesses. I also think that this discourages some potential new users, if that matters.

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BTW, Looks like the OP, igadoter, went and got himself banned. No idea what the trigger was, but it looks like he started throwing shade a Jeremy in the feedback forum.

Yep. Considering this inanity from a few days ago, I'm surprised it hadn't already happened. But then he goes and attacks Jeremy for being "racist" ...

And most of all, it's the lack of succession planning; any organisation that tolerates it in IT will tolerate it in R&D, quality assurance, budgetting, strategic planning - ie they're not planning for longevity as an organisation.