Is it would have allowed a service to easily migrate it's existing userbase to OpenID.
1) Legacy user logs in. 2) System has their email on file and checks to see if that email address now supports OpenID. 3) If the email address now supports OpenID, the website can offer to migrate the user to OpenID.
The big "flaw" in my idea is if the user already exists in the system, why the hell would you want to migrate them to OpenID anyway? Why not just let them use the email address for a login and authenticate locally? Once you migrate them, the user would have to do more steps to log in then before.
That is half the problem. It isn't an intuitive way of logging into a website. Since the days of timeshare computers, people understand "username / password". Nobody understands "URL => ????".
If you were to ask me to write the OpenID obituary, the biggest reason the protocol failed was the decision to use a URL instead of an email address. Every other failure was secondary to that one.
Unless the attacker deletes the recovery emails before you get to them, you'd notice somebody requesting a bunch of password resets. Ditto for signup requests.
With open-id, if you have RMS's Magic URL, you can pretty much go hog-wild as him without ever being noticed. Anything that takes an Open ID URL is something you can sign up for and probably do your bidding un-noticed.
Nope you can still self-employed and just deal with your medical bills yourself.
You assume medial costs are cheap. Unfortuantly reality called and would like to inform you that they are not at all cheap.
You don't understand what freedom is, likely because you've never seen a country that has much of it.
Just maybe it is because your vision of "freedom" simply could not function in a system containing more then a few dozen people.
And if your reply contains "the problem is, nobody does X and if everybody just did Y", then you fail. Anytime an argument requires "If only everybody did Z", it means something is wrong with your argument, not society.
and say "oh yeah, but what about the externalities like the cost of health care when kids in the neighborhood get lead posioning from the landfill?". Then some snarky jackass cites some Penn & Teller episode that says that CRT's dont have lead in them but instead are a great source of Omega3 (liberal myth) fatty (liberal myth) acids (academic myth) and are actually healthy for children and pets (liberal myth). Then some damn hippie (nixon) jumps in and starts saying we are evil for wasting perfectly good CRT's and the Corporate Man (myth) wants us to spend money on useless LCD's (myth). Then some nerd chimes in that LCD's consume 1.3465GW less power (myth), which of course is a myth debunked on Fox & Friends (lie). Then everybody says "Fuck you" (swear) and nothing gets done. Welcome to modern US (imperialist) political debate(myth).
Our politics have gotten too divided, too tit for tat and and too bitter.
Look. Here is the deal with CRT's. We should recycle them. But right now, it is a pain in the ass for most people so instead of getting properly recycled they get dumped or left on a curb. I mean, I did the right thing once, and those assholes wanted to charge me $20 bucks to take my old TV. Screw that! Not to mention I don't own a car now and the garbage guy doesn't collect them. Lets not even get into the fact that some of these recycling companies offshore the whole process and a bunch of kids with gas masks get to burn them in open pits.
How do we solve the problem? We need to do *something* with this dinosaurs called CRT's. Dumping them into a landfill is unhealthy thanks to led and god knows what else in them. How do we do it and who pays for it?
Government didn't get out of the way enough for details that didn't matter, yes. But at the same token, government didn't get involved enough in areas that *did* matter. Say corporate bond ratings. Say helping to spur a some clearinghouse for default credit swaps so they can be traded in public view.
Government *can* help. They can help by regulating the system to make it more transparent. The lack of transparency leads to a lack of trust in the market. Lack of trust leads to... well you are living it in now.
Just once, I've love to hear a die-hard libertarian explain how privatized roads would work. Just once. I'm not talking highways either, I'm talking arterials, residential roads, etc. And don't cop out and point to tiny road networks found in gated communities. Tell me how you'd have a privatized road system on the scale of say, New York or LA.
And if your answer is "it would be impossible now", explain how you could, from scratch, create a privatized road network that would then give birth to a city of that size.
For extra credit, explain if it is nessicary to create a standard for signs, lighting, turn signals, mirrors, cross-walks and such. If it is, explain how this would be legislated and if it is not legislated who would regulate such things.
Every single expansion of Governmental power erodes our freedom and liberty.
and
Group coverage plans (i.e: the kind you get from your employer) aren't allowed to exclude pre-existing conditions if you already had coverage.
Conflict. You lost freedom by not having a government provide healthcare. You have a medical condition? Want to be self-employed? Forget health insurance. You don't have that freedom anymore and you are stuck workin' for the man.
Sometimes you have to give up a freedom to gain another. This isn't all black and white.
1) Companies located in our country have to offer health care plans. Companies located elseware dont directly have to offer this benefit--their government does it for them. GM is fux0red for many reasons--one of them is the fact they have to pay gobs of money in health care benefits when their competition doesn't. Thus, one can deduce it is harder for US companies to compete because their employee costs are higher then elseware.
2) You pay into an insurance pool of some form for pretty much your entire life. How fucked up is it that if you go uninsured for even a few months, you can get sick and go broke? Good luck getting insurance after you got sick too. While I can see things from the insurance companies perspective, and I dont think they are "evil" like some, I dont think they can sustain a business model that really keeps us all healthy.
3) Lets not forget that as you get older, your premiums go up. A young guy like me can get private insurance for around $210/mo while a 60 year old would be paying around $700/mo for the same plan. Group plans like the ones offered by companies can average the cost of their old and young employees. This is why when you go on COBRA and you are young, your premiums are way higher then what you'd pay if you got (and could qualify for) a private insurance plan. Lord help you, by the way, if you have a pre-existing condition and want to get a private insurance plan. Unless you have a "domestic partner" or a spouse who has group insurance plan, you can kiss the idea of being an independent contractor goodbye.
4) I'm glad I dont have to make decisions like this.
Do you really believe that our economy is in the dumps because we don't have enough roads or bridges?
It will be if we continue to underfund the upkeep of the ones we have already built. Most of the new-new-deal money will go to repair (or in many cases replace) what we've got, not build new things.
I've been getting into XNA development. Not to shabby. It definitely will open doors and let people who don't traditionally create games (or anything 3d, really) give it a shot. The documentation is pretty good and not as intimidating as the straight DirectX stuff. For starters, they dont assume you know everything about shaders, vertex buffers, etc. You should still grab the DirectX SDK's though, because the current XNA docs don't go as deep into things like HLSL or lighting.
You still have to know your math. Remember your linear algebra class in college? You better. Graphics programming seems all about the matrix.
In theory, the whole thing was designed to be portable. Your code should, in theory, compile down to the Zune, Windows and XBox360.
As for what you can publish in their community thingy? Dunno as I haven't tried. Something tells me you can probably route around it though. The reason for the community, it would seem, is simply providing a simple way to market and sell your game. Kinda like the store for iPhone apps.
Good times though. If you've never tried programming for DirectX or any kind of 3d stuff, I'd definitely give it a whirl. Coming from a web-developer background, this kind of programming is very different beast. Much lower level, you gotta worry about byte ordering and how to marshal data into video memory. Plus a lot more attention to performance... Make sure you have your old linear algebra book on hand though:-)
And I find it interesting how companies can "exploit" GPL the way you describe. Especially when you get contributors to assign their copyright over to the maintainers. There is no way to "exploit" a BSD license that way.
I'd actually be curious to know what the official stance is on your use of the GPL. While I personally dont give two shits, I wonder if the FSF guys have a opinion.
It is good to hear some of the Linux distros are heading in that kind of direction. It has been a while since I've looked at the state of Linux distros (besides Ubuntu).
Quite frankly, once I made the plunge into FreeBSD, I've never really looked back. I'm a happy camper with FreeBSD on the servers and Windows on my desktop. I'll spare you which version of Windows I'm using:-)
Dont forget the botnet could be used as a social engineering tool and send out phishing email to everybody @yourmilitary.mil.fu . Get all these people to click on a phising webpage hosted somewhere on your botnet. Hit the right personnel and you could land yourself some valuable information.
And besides, screw military. What about hospital networks, school networks, utility networks? You think those are all somehow on the public internet? Even if the command channels aren't, a large DDOS could bring down their email at minimum.
If you think "cyberwar" is just "log into a unix shell and type 'rm -rf'", you aren't being creative enough. Put yourself into a more evil mindset for a minute and apply all the scams people now use on the intertubes and then add a twist of global-intertubular-war.
Many who use GPL do so because they dislike proprietary software. Yet when it comes to integrating with other open source software, GPL'd code amounts to what is essentially proprietary software. Might as well ship a binary blob, it is just as useful.
Oh boy... rc stuff. Yeah. The best part is the rc stuff seems to vary based on your linux distro. What works on DistroA won't work on DistroB. Dunno if that is the same between the BSD's as my experience is pretty much in FreeBSD.
Another big difference for those at home is FreeBSD is way more hard-core about what goes in "/usr/local/" vs "/". Basically, if you are adding something that isn't in the core of FreeBSD, it will go into "/usr/local", including "/usr/local/etc". All your port applications, everything, should put it's goo into "/usr/local". "/" is for system stuff only.
But you have to admit it is kinda a tease. Here you go and modify my code and then dangle your changes in front of me and yet I can't use them. At least when you put it in your Fortune 500 breath-mint testing software I can't see your changes--out of sight, out of mind. With the GPL stuff, I can see but I can't touch:-)
Bottom line is no, I dont give a crap if you never give me a line of code in return. But I still am human and am thus subject to fuzzy, non logical things like culture and being nice to your fellow man.
But not a whine. You are free to be pedantic and interpret it as one though... others seem to relish in the opportunity.
1) How do you deal with an HTML document that links to something outside the filesystem? As in, what if I'm offline?
2) You can do a hell of a lot in HTML that you cannot render on a console. What if the document you wrote uses an image or some javascript?
3) You need to make it compatible with "man". While 'info' sucked big time, one of the suckiest parts was that it fragmented the linux documentation. Whatever you propose must exist when I type "man joeblow". Failure to do so will repeat the mistake made by the 'info' dudes.
Problems 1 & 2 need to be addressed because one of the use cases for documentation is when shit hits the fan and your net doesn't work and your only access is on the console via 9600 baud RS232.
Problem 2 may not seem that important for some things (developer docs, I'd say), but for other things like shell utilities the documentation must be presentable in the same medium as the utility. I have no problem with web-based programmer docs, but I do have a problem if some jerk wants to use an image in his documentation for 'tar'.
There is another hidden issue. HTML isn't a standard anyway. Which HTML version? How strict is "strict"?
My point was that things are different. Personally I actually like the more sloppy approach used by the GNU utilities, even if the programmer in me disagrees.
Another thing that takes a little getting used to is the device names are different. Rather then "hdd0" and "eth1", they are named after their kernel module - maybe "ad0" and "ee0". I'm sure there is a good argument for either approach, but it is something that takes adjustment to.
But this would be against the principles of the BSD license, would it not?
It would indeed. Again, there is a difference then calling out some ass who never gives back and trying to make a new religion.
Sounds more like a flaw in the BSD license
Not really. The BSD license did exactly what it was intended to do. If people don't want to contribute changes back to the mainline, that reflects badly on them not the license.
Frankly, it is in your best interest to give back anyway. Merging the mainline code into your private branch is usually a pain in the ass.
Everything in the ports tree is essentially random crap. The only thing FreeBSD does is wrap the source code with a (really nice) build system. Ports aren't "stable" the same way the core is. That said, a lot of the big-name stuff like apache has separate ports. For example apache-1.3, apache-2 and apache-2.2 have separate ports (I think there is a port that follows the trunk too).
The difference between the BSD's and Linux's are in scope. In FreeBSD there is a whole lot more junk that is maintained by a single group then in most linuxes.
But still, you are correct in the "real applications" are all ports.
Speaking of command-line stuff
on
FreeBSD 7.1 Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
(and boy I'm posting in this thread;-)
For those who've never used a BSD system but have used Linux, be prepared for the command line to work a little different. BSD utilities are often way more picky about the ordering of arguments.
With the GNU tools, "chmod 775 * -R" will recurse down a tree and set everything to 775. "chmod -R 775 *" will do the same thing.
In FreeBSD, only "chmod -R 775 *" will work right.
In BSD userland, the patten is almost always command [arguments] [strings of goo]. In GNU land, you can usually interchange [arguments] and [string of goo] and get the same result. Some will argue that only the BSD way is proper and the GNU way is sloppy. Whatever your feelings are, if you've gotten used to being sloppy about ordering, it will take some adjustment to get used to BSD tools.
The good news is the "proper" way will work on either set of tools.
There is a difference between "You guys aren't playing fair..." and "our operating system is your religion, either embrace it or go away".
If somebody like $VENDOR_X takes and takes but never contributes even minor shit like bug-fixes to kernel code, they should be called out. But unlike other, more political organizations, you will never see an Anti-$VENDOR_X clause added to a BSD license. That is the important bit.
BTW, one big peeve in BSD land is when the GPL guys will take BSD code like drivers. The GPL license will "infect" any modifications and prevent those changes from being send back to the original BSD code. Kind of a tease, don't you think?
As in going into a port and "make -> make install"?
If you are go grab "portupgrade" (/usr/ports/port-utils/portupgrade, I think). Portupgrade will do the "make" crap for you and has the side-effect of doing a "make clean" when it is done. It has some other nice parts like letting you set all the config variables in one file as well has helping you do crazy gentoo-like dependency swaps.
PPS: "make portsnap" while you are at it and then put it on a cronjob. cvsup is for people who are gonna fuck with the ports tree.
There are more important things in the world then how well an operating system does in some assholes random benchmark. If you are standardizing your servers around an operating system based solely on "speed", I question your abilities as a server dude.
I'll just name one thing, out of many, that are vastly more important than "speed". Stability. No, not "never blue-screens". I'm "does the maintainers of the system make major changes in every single release and then stop supporting older releases". Under this definition of stable, FreeBSD wins over linux hands down. Especially after the "we can't be bothered to maintain a stable branch of the linux kernel, so we will add new shit in with the old all the time". You might get a dozen exciting new bugs and security fixes when you "upgrade" between 2.6.1114492 and 2.6.1114493. In fact, this was one of the major reasons for me dumping linux in the first place. The 2.4.x kernels are the last stable linux kernels out there.
That is just one example of something more important than "passes 4*10^30 fps in WoW" benchmark.
As for security? Which is easier to audit and verify? A random pool of code and libraries distributed across hundreds of websites and maintainers, or a cohesive operating system whos entire codebase is in exactly one place?
Slashdot Mirror
Is it would have allowed a service to easily migrate it's existing userbase to OpenID.
1) Legacy user logs in.
2) System has their email on file and checks to see if that email address now supports OpenID.
3) If the email address now supports OpenID, the website can offer to migrate the user to OpenID.
The big "flaw" in my idea is if the user already exists in the system, why the hell would you want to migrate them to OpenID anyway? Why not just let them use the email address for a login and authenticate locally? Once you migrate them, the user would have to do more steps to log in then before.
That is half the problem. It isn't an intuitive way of logging into a website. Since the days of timeshare computers, people understand "username / password". Nobody understands "URL => ????".
If you were to ask me to write the OpenID obituary, the biggest reason the protocol failed was the decision to use a URL instead of an email address. Every other failure was secondary to that one.
Unless the attacker deletes the recovery emails before you get to them, you'd notice somebody requesting a bunch of password resets. Ditto for signup requests.
With open-id, if you have RMS's Magic URL, you can pretty much go hog-wild as him without ever being noticed. Anything that takes an Open ID URL is something you can sign up for and probably do your bidding un-noticed.
You assume medial costs are cheap. Unfortuantly reality called and would like to inform you that they are not at all cheap.
Just maybe it is because your vision of "freedom" simply could not function in a system containing more then a few dozen people.
And if your reply contains "the problem is, nobody does X and if everybody just did Y", then you fail. Anytime an argument requires "If only everybody did Z", it means something is wrong with your argument, not society.
and say "oh yeah, but what about the externalities like the cost of health care when kids in the neighborhood get lead posioning from the landfill?". Then some snarky jackass cites some Penn & Teller episode that says that CRT's dont have lead in them but instead are a great source of Omega3 (liberal myth) fatty (liberal myth) acids (academic myth) and are actually healthy for children and pets (liberal myth). Then some damn hippie (nixon) jumps in and starts saying we are evil for wasting perfectly good CRT's and the Corporate Man (myth) wants us to spend money on useless LCD's (myth). Then some nerd chimes in that LCD's consume 1.3465GW less power (myth), which of course is a myth debunked on Fox & Friends (lie). Then everybody says "Fuck you" (swear) and nothing gets done. Welcome to modern US (imperialist) political debate(myth).
Our politics have gotten too divided, too tit for tat and and too bitter.
Look. Here is the deal with CRT's. We should recycle them. But right now, it is a pain in the ass for most people so instead of getting properly recycled they get dumped or left on a curb. I mean, I did the right thing once, and those assholes wanted to charge me $20 bucks to take my old TV. Screw that! Not to mention I don't own a car now and the garbage guy doesn't collect them. Lets not even get into the fact that some of these recycling companies offshore the whole process and a bunch of kids with gas masks get to burn them in open pits.
How do we solve the problem? We need to do *something* with this dinosaurs called CRT's. Dumping them into a landfill is unhealthy thanks to led and god knows what else in them. How do we do it and who pays for it?
Government didn't get out of the way enough for details that didn't matter, yes. But at the same token, government didn't get involved enough in areas that *did* matter. Say corporate bond ratings. Say helping to spur a some clearinghouse for default credit swaps so they can be traded in public view.
Government *can* help. They can help by regulating the system to make it more transparent. The lack of transparency leads to a lack of trust in the market. Lack of trust leads to... well you are living it in now.
Just once, I've love to hear a die-hard libertarian explain how privatized roads would work. Just once. I'm not talking highways either, I'm talking arterials, residential roads, etc. And don't cop out and point to tiny road networks found in gated communities. Tell me how you'd have a privatized road system on the scale of say, New York or LA.
And if your answer is "it would be impossible now", explain how you could, from scratch, create a privatized road network that would then give birth to a city of that size.
For extra credit, explain if it is nessicary to create a standard for signs, lighting, turn signals, mirrors, cross-walks and such. If it is, explain how this would be legislated and if it is not legislated who would regulate such things.
and
Conflict. You lost freedom by not having a government provide healthcare. You have a medical condition? Want to be self-employed? Forget health insurance. You don't have that freedom anymore and you are stuck workin' for the man.
Sometimes you have to give up a freedom to gain another. This isn't all black and white.
Until I realized two things:
1) Companies located in our country have to offer health care plans. Companies located elseware dont directly have to offer this benefit--their government does it for them. GM is fux0red for many reasons--one of them is the fact they have to pay gobs of money in health care benefits when their competition doesn't. Thus, one can deduce it is harder for US companies to compete because their employee costs are higher then elseware.
2) You pay into an insurance pool of some form for pretty much your entire life. How fucked up is it that if you go uninsured for even a few months, you can get sick and go broke? Good luck getting insurance after you got sick too. While I can see things from the insurance companies perspective, and I dont think they are "evil" like some, I dont think they can sustain a business model that really keeps us all healthy.
3) Lets not forget that as you get older, your premiums go up. A young guy like me can get private insurance for around $210/mo while a 60 year old would be paying around $700/mo for the same plan. Group plans like the ones offered by companies can average the cost of their old and young employees. This is why when you go on COBRA and you are young, your premiums are way higher then what you'd pay if you got (and could qualify for) a private insurance plan. Lord help you, by the way, if you have a pre-existing condition and want to get a private insurance plan. Unless you have a "domestic partner" or a spouse who has group insurance plan, you can kiss the idea of being an independent contractor goodbye.
4) I'm glad I dont have to make decisions like this.
5) ???
6) Win Ponies.
It will be if we continue to underfund the upkeep of the ones we have already built. Most of the new-new-deal money will go to repair (or in many cases replace) what we've got, not build new things.
I've been getting into XNA development. Not to shabby. It definitely will open doors and let people who don't traditionally create games (or anything 3d, really) give it a shot. The documentation is pretty good and not as intimidating as the straight DirectX stuff. For starters, they dont assume you know everything about shaders, vertex buffers, etc. You should still grab the DirectX SDK's though, because the current XNA docs don't go as deep into things like HLSL or lighting.
You still have to know your math. Remember your linear algebra class in college? You better. Graphics programming seems all about the matrix.
In theory, the whole thing was designed to be portable. Your code should, in theory, compile down to the Zune, Windows and XBox360.
As for what you can publish in their community thingy? Dunno as I haven't tried. Something tells me you can probably route around it though. The reason for the community, it would seem, is simply providing a simple way to market and sell your game. Kinda like the store for iPhone apps.
Good times though. If you've never tried programming for DirectX or any kind of 3d stuff, I'd definitely give it a whirl. Coming from a web-developer background, this kind of programming is very different beast. Much lower level, you gotta worry about byte ordering and how to marshal data into video memory. Plus a lot more attention to performance... Make sure you have your old linear algebra book on hand though :-)
And I find it interesting how companies can "exploit" GPL the way you describe. Especially when you get contributors to assign their copyright over to the maintainers. There is no way to "exploit" a BSD license that way.
I'd actually be curious to know what the official stance is on your use of the GPL. While I personally dont give two shits, I wonder if the FSF guys have a opinion.
It is good to hear some of the Linux distros are heading in that kind of direction. It has been a while since I've looked at the state of Linux distros (besides Ubuntu).
Quite frankly, once I made the plunge into FreeBSD, I've never really looked back. I'm a happy camper with FreeBSD on the servers and Windows on my desktop. I'll spare you which version of Windows I'm using :-)
Dont forget the botnet could be used as a social engineering tool and send out phishing email to everybody @yourmilitary.mil.fu . Get all these people to click on a phising webpage hosted somewhere on your botnet. Hit the right personnel and you could land yourself some valuable information.
And besides, screw military. What about hospital networks, school networks, utility networks? You think those are all somehow on the public internet? Even if the command channels aren't, a large DDOS could bring down their email at minimum.
If you think "cyberwar" is just "log into a unix shell and type 'rm -rf'", you aren't being creative enough. Put yourself into a more evil mindset for a minute and apply all the scams people now use on the intertubes and then add a twist of global-intertubular-war.
Many who use GPL do so because they dislike proprietary software. Yet when it comes to integrating with other open source software, GPL'd code amounts to what is essentially proprietary software. Might as well ship a binary blob, it is just as useful.
Oh boy... rc stuff. Yeah. The best part is the rc stuff seems to vary based on your linux distro. What works on DistroA won't work on DistroB. Dunno if that is the same between the BSD's as my experience is pretty much in FreeBSD.
Another big difference for those at home is FreeBSD is way more hard-core about what goes in "/usr/local/" vs "/". Basically, if you are adding something that isn't in the core of FreeBSD, it will go into "/usr/local", including "/usr/local/etc". All your port applications, everything, should put it's goo into "/usr/local". "/" is for system stuff only.
But you have to admit it is kinda a tease. Here you go and modify my code and then dangle your changes in front of me and yet I can't use them. At least when you put it in your Fortune 500 breath-mint testing software I can't see your changes--out of sight, out of mind. With the GPL stuff, I can see but I can't touch :-)
Bottom line is no, I dont give a crap if you never give me a line of code in return. But I still am human and am thus subject to fuzzy, non logical things like culture and being nice to your fellow man.
But not a whine. You are free to be pedantic and interpret it as one though... others seem to relish in the opportunity.
I've got a couple problems:
1) How do you deal with an HTML document that links to something outside the filesystem? As in, what if I'm offline?
2) You can do a hell of a lot in HTML that you cannot render on a console. What if the document you wrote uses an image or some javascript?
3) You need to make it compatible with "man". While 'info' sucked big time, one of the suckiest parts was that it fragmented the linux documentation. Whatever you propose must exist when I type "man joeblow". Failure to do so will repeat the mistake made by the 'info' dudes.
Problems 1 & 2 need to be addressed because one of the use cases for documentation is when shit hits the fan and your net doesn't work and your only access is on the console via 9600 baud RS232.
Problem 2 may not seem that important for some things (developer docs, I'd say), but for other things like shell utilities the documentation must be presentable in the same medium as the utility. I have no problem with web-based programmer docs, but I do have a problem if some jerk wants to use an image in his documentation for 'tar'.
There is another hidden issue. HTML isn't a standard anyway. Which HTML version? How strict is "strict"?
My point was that things are different. Personally I actually like the more sloppy approach used by the GNU utilities, even if the programmer in me disagrees.
Another thing that takes a little getting used to is the device names are different. Rather then "hdd0" and "eth1", they are named after their kernel module - maybe "ad0" and "ee0". I'm sure there is a good argument for either approach, but it is something that takes adjustment to.
It would indeed. Again, there is a difference then calling out some ass who never gives back and trying to make a new religion.
Not really. The BSD license did exactly what it was intended to do. If people don't want to contribute changes back to the mainline, that reflects badly on them not the license.
Frankly, it is in your best interest to give back anyway. Merging the mainline code into your private branch is usually a pain in the ass.
Everything in the ports tree is essentially random crap. The only thing FreeBSD does is wrap the source code with a (really nice) build system. Ports aren't "stable" the same way the core is. That said, a lot of the big-name stuff like apache has separate ports. For example apache-1.3, apache-2 and apache-2.2 have separate ports (I think there is a port that follows the trunk too).
The difference between the BSD's and Linux's are in scope. In FreeBSD there is a whole lot more junk that is maintained by a single group then in most linuxes.
But still, you are correct in the "real applications" are all ports.
(and boy I'm posting in this thread ;-)
For those who've never used a BSD system but have used Linux, be prepared for the command line to work a little different. BSD utilities are often way more picky about the ordering of arguments.
With the GNU tools, "chmod 775 * -R" will recurse down a tree and set everything to 775. "chmod -R 775 *" will do the same thing.
In FreeBSD, only "chmod -R 775 *" will work right.
In BSD userland, the patten is almost always command [arguments] [strings of goo]. In GNU land, you can usually interchange [arguments] and [string of goo] and get the same result. Some will argue that only the BSD way is proper and the GNU way is sloppy. Whatever your feelings are, if you've gotten used to being sloppy about ordering, it will take some adjustment to get used to BSD tools.
The good news is the "proper" way will work on either set of tools.
There is a difference between "You guys aren't playing fair..." and "our operating system is your religion, either embrace it or go away".
If somebody like $VENDOR_X takes and takes but never contributes even minor shit like bug-fixes to kernel code, they should be called out. But unlike other, more political organizations, you will never see an Anti-$VENDOR_X clause added to a BSD license. That is the important bit.
BTW, one big peeve in BSD land is when the GPL guys will take BSD code like drivers. The GPL license will "infect" any modifications and prevent those changes from being send back to the original BSD code. Kind of a tease, don't you think?
As in going into a port and "make -> make install"?
If you are go grab "portupgrade" (/usr/ports/port-utils/portupgrade, I think). Portupgrade will do the "make" crap for you and has the side-effect of doing a "make clean" when it is done. It has some other nice parts like letting you set all the config variables in one file as well has helping you do crazy gentoo-like dependency swaps.
PPS: "make portsnap" while you are at it and then put it on a cronjob. cvsup is for people who are gonna fuck with the ports tree.
There are more important things in the world then how well an operating system does in some assholes random benchmark. If you are standardizing your servers around an operating system based solely on "speed", I question your abilities as a server dude.
I'll just name one thing, out of many, that are vastly more important than "speed". Stability. No, not "never blue-screens". I'm "does the maintainers of the system make major changes in every single release and then stop supporting older releases". Under this definition of stable, FreeBSD wins over linux hands down. Especially after the "we can't be bothered to maintain a stable branch of the linux kernel, so we will add new shit in with the old all the time". You might get a dozen exciting new bugs and security fixes when you "upgrade" between 2.6.1114492 and 2.6.1114493. In fact, this was one of the major reasons for me dumping linux in the first place. The 2.4.x kernels are the last stable linux kernels out there.
That is just one example of something more important than "passes 4*10^30 fps in WoW" benchmark.
As for security? Which is easier to audit and verify? A random pool of code and libraries distributed across hundreds of websites and maintainers, or a cohesive operating system whos entire codebase is in exactly one place?