Re:I hope it's better than 5.3
on
FreeBSD 5.4 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
If you want support for the latest hardware, you either need to run Linux, or FreeBSD 5.x, and FreeBSD 5.x is somewhat flaky.
Not true. Device drivers are usually backported unless they depend on some system difference between 4.x and 5.x. I've never noticed any hardware incompatibilities between versions and i've used both extensively.
The next one is a doosy...
The FreeBSD ports system is not all it's cracked up to be. Stuff is constantly breaking.
I honestly have not encounted a break in any major apps in ports in the past 3 years. It's evolved a lot since you last used it, i guess.
The desktop apps just aren't maintained carefully enough (not surprising, since FreeBSD is not a major desktop OS). After a cvsup, you get left wit a system in a state where you can't upgrade one piece of software without breaking a lot of other software. Portupgrade is a disaster -- I've never seen a better way to bork a system than to unleash portupgrade on it.
No, no no. Not true. I had a production system with apache, php, postgresql, gnome, KDE, etc installed (it was a workstation/light-use webserver for a lab i was working in). I installed it at 4.5, last time i touched it it was at 4.11, all ports upgraded (using cvsup and portupgrade), only one install point. After being a FreeBSD user for about a year. If I can do it, in a production environment, without any break in's or security issues, anyone can. My webserver here at home has been running 5 since 5.2.1, same deal - all things installed from ports, only one point of install, all upgraded by cvsup and portupgrade. No problems. Then there's my workstation, it runs Gentoo, Windows, Solaris and FreeBSD 5.3. FBSD has been installed since 5.3 first made -RELEASE, runs gnome 2.10 (which hit ports before it hit portage, ~1 week after official release). Only one install point, constantly updated using cvsup and portupgrade. Gentoo? Great little distro, but i've installed it at least 3 or 4 separate times due to major breakages or just aggrivation with portage. I don't hold it against portage, it's just still maturing.
Your report couldn't be further from my experience. Ever since i started running freebsd back four years ago i've been able to keep an up-to-date, stable system without much difficulty.
As a gnome user, I'll tell you why I don't use KDE:
It's too cluttered. Plain and simple. It gives me a headache. The configuration interface drives me up the wall - far too many things squeezed into one single window. Konqueror repeatedly pisses me off. It just tries to do too much. KDE is indeed powerful, but it's not very elegant. And power without elegance is called a sledgehammer. Gnome, on the other hand, its aiming at elegant power - the ability to do what needs to be done without extraneous work. I have the knowledge and the skill to do everything I need to from the command line, and I used to do that. I was a black/fluxbox user for many years. Then, I grew up a little. Of all the DE's out there that I've tried (KDE, XCFE, Enlightenment, Gnome, CDE, etc), I've always come back to gnome. It does what I want it to and stays out of my way. To be completely honest I don't want a DE to do certain things for me (user management, service administration, etc). A shell and vi are just far more powerful than any GUI for certain tasks. But, that's just my opinion. That's why I use gnome - it gives me the environment i need to get serious work done, without trying to do everything for me.
All of those things you mention are intentional. BSD's don't actively try to go out and get users...they just create it and the users come. A certain kind of person in attracted to BSD.
As far as "modern society rewarding less than 1% of all artists"...if the other 99% were any good then they wouldn't be starving now would they?
"Good" is subjective. Things considered "universally good" in art are only universally good because a handful of influential people point them out as good. Then the drooling masses follow.
No, it's because artists don't care. Compound with this the fact that modern society rewards less than 1% of all artists and you have a population of starving artists that just don't want to work for free in the name of the greater good.
Wealth(in) is any input of wealth to a system. Wealth(out) is any output of wealth from that system. Growth is ignored as it's really only a mutiplicative factor that is relevant to both sides of the equation equally. Think of it this way:
You have a job. At the end of the week you get paid 100 bucks. You go out and spend that 100 bucks on bills, food, clothing, games, whatever. At the end of the next week, you have the goods you need and no extra money. You had no net effect on the system (steady state -> input = output). Now lets say you got paid 150 bucks, and this time you put 50 bucks in your savings account just to amass wealth, with no intent of spending it at any point in the future. You spend the remaining $100 randomly. Now the inputs do not equal the outputs. In fact, the inputs ($150) equal the outputs ($100) plus your surplus ($50). You have removed $50 from the system, and thus have had a net negative impact on it.
Static here means that over the short term (20 - 70 years), wealth stays stagnant - that is it doesn't go to back more economic endevours that help spread wealth among other sectors of society. Dynamic means that over the short term wealth moves around. Think ideal savings vs ideal investment.
Riches pile up statically in things like bank accounts (on and off shore), trust funds, property, etc. They pile up dynamically in things like the stock market, investing in a business start up, etc. Dynamic wealth stock piles are constantly feeding back to the system - stocks enable companies to grow and develop new products and technologies. Static wealth stock piles are narrow in their area of positive returns, and more generally have the effect of removing resources from the system. Inheritances are ways of insuring those resources remain, for the most part, removed from the system. Negative net impact
The main principal behind capitalism is that those that have, spend. It's an incentive to voluntarily share wealth. However, passing money from one family generation to the next is a narrow way to share wealth, with a narrow impact (ie, marginalized impact). Capitalism is designed to be a positive feedback system - people are supposed to get rich, then put their money back into the system. The estate tax tries to ensure some kind of resdistribution of wealth: Rich uncle Herb could pass his joint in the Caymans, as well as his multimillion dollar bankroll, to his favorite niece Suzy, keeping the majority of his wealth centralized. Or, he could spend his money on hookers and coke, distributing his wealth in places it would otherwise not touch. If he chooses to centralize his wealth rather than decentralize it, a chunk of it will go off and build roads and hospitals somewhere, pay government workers, etc. If he chooses to piss away his money before he dies, decentralizing it, then the wealth is voluntarily shared and capitalism moves on in its ideal state, keeping the economy healthy. Inheritances are designed to keep money centralized. This is bad for the economy, and bad for capitalism.
The clean/"simple" (note the quotes, this solution makes sense, but would be extremely difficult to implement) solution to this is to standardize the interface to the html, multimedia, windowing toolkit, etc across all *nix options, and allow different implementation to exist under them. That way a program can call up an html rendering object in a standard way, and the real work will be done with whatever implementation the distribution author/user/sysadmin set up to be used as the back end (khtml, gecko, ghtml, whatever). Developers for third party apps would then have a sane, predictable API to develop for, and the community would still have the choice it values so dearly. I could see this as an extension to fd.o's agenda, if it really is a good idea.
Note: I'm no software architech, this just seems to make sense to me. Does it to anyone else?
Let me try and explain this scientifically using a very simple wealth-mass balance equation:
Wealth(in) = Wealth(out) at steady state conditions
If this exists, then money is changing hands, moving around and stimulating the economy. This is the condition nature constantly moves toward, and ideally is what a markey economy should strive for - even distribution of wealth based on production and consumption of goods and exchange of services for capital. If you don't have steady state conditions, then you've got something else going on:
Wealth(in) = Wealth(out) + Surplus
Here, what you get in is greater than what you're putting back out to the system. Because of this the system's resources begin to become drained and scarce, while a few resource sinks hold in unproductive bondage what would otherwise be a usable resource in the system. So, no, riches piling up are not indicative of assets being used for productive purposes when you look at the whole system. The productivity is localized and marginalized when compared to imparment put upon the entire system. This is not how the invisible hand of the market is supposed to work.
The flipside to this is that people are generally shitty with money. Sooner or later you're going to get an heir/heiress that decides hookers and coke is a better way to stimulate the economy than infinite savings. And therein lies the chaos inherent in any natural system. Huh...maybe that's how trickle down economics is supposed to work?
Well, it's not that naive, but it is naive. IF a corporation builds it, it DOES, without argument, belong to the corporation (unless they donate it). If built by government, it is at least in theory the property of the people. Modern practice has shown this to not always be true, but it's an arguable point. I know the park down the street, national forests, army bases, police stations, etc are ideally there for my good. They were built with the idea that I, as a tax paying citizen of a "democratic" state-based society, will benefit from their existance. Now a days they tend to exist for the extention and proliferation of the system, but it's hard to stop that. I agree that his comment about the base existing for humanity is very naive. If the US government built it - or any government for that matter - it would only exist for strategic allies or neutral nations that we feel cooperation with will benefit us. Just wanted to point out, though, that if a corporation built it, it would exist for one thing: economic profit for the corporation heads.
Now that you mention it, bold and italics would look better. Seems kind of like once linux+bash started color coding everything, it became defacto. Any idea how one would go about bolding directories and italicizing executables in tcsh?
that kind of tab completion exists in tcsh too - just toss set autolist in your.cshrc file. I had it enabled on my last freebsd install - basically makes tcsh work exactly like bash while still feeling more solid. Silly linux kids, when will they learn?!
A Geek is an engineer, or, barring that, one who obsessed with obtaining skill in something that really has no real world relevance, but sucks up time from interesting problems as a means of illusionary social superiority. These skills are mainly trivial, done by countless others, and are done in a way that collaboration is almost completely shunned. Examples are D&D, pseudo-religious flame wars (kind of like this), system administration, obtaining an MCSE, gaming, running debian, etc. This goes back to the Geeks of olde, circus geeks, who did horrifying and sometimes amazing acts that really had no utility outside of grossing people out and taking their money. As society has progressed the Geek personality has had to adapt, and now simply is the loner in his mom's basement who chats on IRC about how many bots he has running on his sid server while playing countless command-line MUDs, groaning about trolls and dice logistics. Help me out here dictionary:
geek geek (g=ek), n.
1. A performer in a carnival, often presented as a wild man,
who performs grotesquely disgusting acts, such as biting
the head off a live chicken or snake.
PJCM
2. Hence: Any eccentric or strange person; an oddball; an
eccentric.
The Dork is a more of a fun individual. He or She enjoys making people laugh and being the butt of many-a-jokes. They're fun to be around and generally amiable. When they're on, they're funny, when they're off, they're reserved.
The Nerd, on the other hand, is your average scientist. They are reserved, hard-minded, generally nice, think-a-holics. They're open minded and realize all of the basic fundamental human truths instinctively. They find average pursuits boring and tedious, feel that they are generally socially inferior, but know it doesn't matter.
Everyone has some combination of nerd/dork/geek in them. The main theme here, though, is social identity. Geeks think their "skills" make them socially superior to others. Dorks feel they are on the same level as everyone else. Nerds feel they are inferior, but realize it's all a crock of shit anyway. Your classic geek would be a Sports hero or a D&D player. Your classic Dork would be a comedian. Your classic Nerd would be a scientist. None of them are inherhently evil.
During the 90's you computer people decided to take back the term Geek and adopt it in a way that it had never been used before. Now "hackers" are considered Geeks. Well, they're not, though their followers certainly are. Hackers are nerds. They love thinking about interesting problems, solving them, and sharing them. The entire hacker and open source culture is built on top of Nerdom. However, most of slashdot is awash in geeks. Followers who feel the need to tout their skills, chime in with some so-called insightful statement that is really just a rehash of things said over and over again in the community:
"Competition is a Good Thing (tm)"
"Free as in Freedom not free as in Beer"
"Monopolies are Bad."
Etc, etc etc...
Infact, slashdot is built on the Geek model. That is, it's based on social advancement through subjective ratings, rather than pure openness and exchange of thoughts - be they flames or otherwise. It's trolls tend to be more insightful and commentative than it's serious posters, especially those post 600000 UID's. In other words - slashdot is designed, be it intentional or not, to bring out the worst element of the open source world - the Geek. The engineer that works in back rooms on a widget that his boss will then claim for his own. Owned by a company, building and toiling, giving shit back to society other than another magical product to pump to the masses, sold for more than it's really worth. But they're an engineer. That title makes them better than the rest of us! Or, they're a sys-admin or a dungeon master. All labels, titles that are created to make the individual feel superior in some meaningless way.
I use both Gentoo and FreeBSD on the same workstation. As of now i'm running a FreeBSD 5.3 install that's existed for about 6 months, cvsuping and portupgrade -arR'ing about once a week. No breakage.
My Gentoo install is about 3 months old with the same update schedule, no breakage. I hit that glibc/autoconf bug but i fixed it without an install...don't remember how.
Anyway, sounds like your breakage = pebkac. If you're well versed in the ins and outs of the freebsd ports system, as well as the conf files, you won't hose a system with cvsup. Same goes for portage and etc-updage. Infact, i had a production 4.x stable machine running for 3 years with a weekly cvsup cycle every friday night. No breakage, ever.
the FreeBSD base system, that which includes everything that is not a third party app is unchanged when they slip in the stable tag. All that gets backported is security updates
Your response proves your ignorance of the FreeBSD release system. Ports exists so that you can install UP TO DATE, MODERN packages and programs. You install the program you want, and then you can choose if you want to upgrade it with ONLY SECURITY FIXES, to keep it stagnant and unchanging after install. The FreeBSD stable means you have a stable foundation on top of which to install programs, either by way of ports or on your own. However, stable does mean unchanging, solid, well-tested, and essentially bug free.
Hmm..so lets see. Stable foundation - FreeBSD and Debian both have this. Up to date collection of programs and utilities (outside the base system) available for install using the package manager? FreeBSD, check; Debian stable, nope. So what's the choice for the GGGP?
Everything asian is just over rated. And since they're genetically inferior (Hello, the world mongoloid?! mongolia?! mongoloid?! MONGOLIA?!?!?! clearly inferior), they simply can not translate their simplistic, inferior language to the complex, elegant, chaotic beauty that is english. It's fairly simple.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want support for the latest hardware, you either need to run Linux, or FreeBSD 5.x, and FreeBSD 5.x is somewhat flaky.
Not true. Device drivers are usually backported unless they depend on some system difference between 4.x and 5.x. I've never noticed any hardware incompatibilities between versions and i've used both extensively.
The next one is a doosy...
The FreeBSD ports system is not all it's cracked up to be. Stuff is constantly breaking.
I honestly have not encounted a break in any major apps in ports in the past 3 years. It's evolved a lot since you last used it, i guess.
The desktop apps just aren't maintained carefully enough (not surprising, since FreeBSD is not a major desktop OS). After a cvsup, you get left wit a system in a state where you can't upgrade one piece of software without breaking a lot of other software. Portupgrade is a disaster -- I've never seen a better way to bork a system than to unleash portupgrade on it.
No, no no. Not true. I had a production system with apache, php, postgresql, gnome, KDE, etc installed (it was a workstation/light-use webserver for a lab i was working in). I installed it at 4.5, last time i touched it it was at 4.11, all ports upgraded (using cvsup and portupgrade), only one install point. After being a FreeBSD user for about a year. If I can do it, in a production environment, without any break in's or security issues, anyone can. My webserver here at home has been running 5 since 5.2.1, same deal - all things installed from ports, only one point of install, all upgraded by cvsup and portupgrade. No problems. Then there's my workstation, it runs Gentoo, Windows, Solaris and FreeBSD 5.3. FBSD has been installed since 5.3 first made -RELEASE, runs gnome 2.10 (which hit ports before it hit portage, ~1 week after official release). Only one install point, constantly updated using cvsup and portupgrade. Gentoo? Great little distro, but i've installed it at least 3 or 4 separate times due to major breakages or just aggrivation with portage. I don't hold it against portage, it's just still maturing.
Your report couldn't be further from my experience. Ever since i started running freebsd back four years ago i've been able to keep an up-to-date, stable system without much difficulty.
As a gnome user, I'll tell you why I don't use KDE:
It's too cluttered. Plain and simple. It gives me a headache. The configuration interface drives me up the wall - far too many things squeezed into one single window. Konqueror repeatedly pisses me off. It just tries to do too much. KDE is indeed powerful, but it's not very elegant. And power without elegance is called a sledgehammer. Gnome, on the other hand, its aiming at elegant power - the ability to do what needs to be done without extraneous work. I have the knowledge and the skill to do everything I need to from the command line, and I used to do that. I was a black/fluxbox user for many years. Then, I grew up a little. Of all the DE's out there that I've tried (KDE, XCFE, Enlightenment, Gnome, CDE, etc), I've always come back to gnome. It does what I want it to and stays out of my way. To be completely honest I don't want a DE to do certain things for me (user management, service administration, etc). A shell and vi are just far more powerful than any GUI for certain tasks. But, that's just my opinion. That's why I use gnome - it gives me the environment i need to get serious work done, without trying to do everything for me.
I actually dind't mean to post anonymously the first time!
Fuck, that should be "yet" not "yes"
All of those things you mention are intentional. BSD's don't actively try to go out and get users...they just create it and the users come. A certain kind of person in attracted to BSD.
BAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHHAHHAAHHAHAHAHAH*gasp *HAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHHAAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Oh dear god, man. Beautiful.
As far as "modern society rewarding less than 1% of all artists"...if the other 99% were any good then they wouldn't be starving now would they?
"Good" is subjective. Things considered "universally good" in art are only universally good because a handful of influential people point them out as good. Then the drooling masses follow.
Glad to see someone on slashdot celebrates 4/20.
No, it's because artists don't care. Compound with this the fact that modern society rewards less than 1% of all artists and you have a population of starving artists that just don't want to work for free in the name of the greater good.
Plus, you know, ozone is good for us...right? Right?!
Wrong. It does smell good, though.
Wealth(in) is any input of wealth to a system. Wealth(out) is any output of wealth from that system. Growth is ignored as it's really only a mutiplicative factor that is relevant to both sides of the equation equally. Think of it this way:
You have a job. At the end of the week you get paid 100 bucks. You go out and spend that 100 bucks on bills, food, clothing, games, whatever. At the end of the next week, you have the goods you need and no extra money. You had no net effect on the system (steady state -> input = output). Now lets say you got paid 150 bucks, and this time you put 50 bucks in your savings account just to amass wealth, with no intent of spending it at any point in the future. You spend the remaining $100 randomly. Now the inputs do not equal the outputs. In fact, the inputs ($150) equal the outputs ($100) plus your surplus ($50). You have removed $50 from the system, and thus have had a net negative impact on it.
Static here means that over the short term (20 - 70 years), wealth stays stagnant - that is it doesn't go to back more economic endevours that help spread wealth among other sectors of society. Dynamic means that over the short term wealth moves around. Think ideal savings vs ideal investment.
Riches pile up statically in things like bank accounts (on and off shore), trust funds, property, etc. They pile up dynamically in things like the stock market, investing in a business start up, etc. Dynamic wealth stock piles are constantly feeding back to the system - stocks enable companies to grow and develop new products and technologies. Static wealth stock piles are narrow in their area of positive returns, and more generally have the effect of removing resources from the system. Inheritances are ways of insuring those resources remain, for the most part, removed from the system. Negative net impact
The main principal behind capitalism is that those that have, spend. It's an incentive to voluntarily share wealth. However, passing money from one family generation to the next is a narrow way to share wealth, with a narrow impact (ie, marginalized impact). Capitalism is designed to be a positive feedback system - people are supposed to get rich, then put their money back into the system. The estate tax tries to ensure some kind of resdistribution of wealth: Rich uncle Herb could pass his joint in the Caymans, as well as his multimillion dollar bankroll, to his favorite niece Suzy, keeping the majority of his wealth centralized. Or, he could spend his money on hookers and coke, distributing his wealth in places it would otherwise not touch. If he chooses to centralize his wealth rather than decentralize it, a chunk of it will go off and build roads and hospitals somewhere, pay government workers, etc. If he chooses to piss away his money before he dies, decentralizing it, then the wealth is voluntarily shared and capitalism moves on in its ideal state, keeping the economy healthy. Inheritances are designed to keep money centralized. This is bad for the economy, and bad for capitalism.
The clean/"simple" (note the quotes, this solution makes sense, but would be extremely difficult to implement) solution to this is to standardize the interface to the html, multimedia, windowing toolkit, etc across all *nix options, and allow different implementation to exist under them. That way a program can call up an html rendering object in a standard way, and the real work will be done with whatever implementation the distribution author/user/sysadmin set up to be used as the back end (khtml, gecko, ghtml, whatever). Developers for third party apps would then have a sane, predictable API to develop for, and the community would still have the choice it values so dearly. I could see this as an extension to fd.o's agenda, if it really is a good idea.
Note: I'm no software architech, this just seems to make sense to me. Does it to anyone else?
Oh shit, in that case i'm fucking down for a tasty corporate-goat-moon-barbecue.
Let me try and explain this scientifically using a very simple wealth-mass balance equation:
Wealth(in) = Wealth(out) at steady state conditions
If this exists, then money is changing hands, moving around and stimulating the economy. This is the condition nature constantly moves toward, and ideally is what a markey economy should strive for - even distribution of wealth based on production and consumption of goods and exchange of services for capital. If you don't have steady state conditions, then you've got something else going on:
Wealth(in) = Wealth(out) + Surplus
Here, what you get in is greater than what you're putting back out to the system. Because of this the system's resources begin to become drained and scarce, while a few resource sinks hold in unproductive bondage what would otherwise be a usable resource in the system. So, no, riches piling up are not indicative of assets being used for productive purposes when you look at the whole system. The productivity is localized and marginalized when compared to imparment put upon the entire system. This is not how the invisible hand of the market is supposed to work.
The flipside to this is that people are generally shitty with money. Sooner or later you're going to get an heir/heiress that decides hookers and coke is a better way to stimulate the economy than infinite savings. And therein lies the chaos inherent in any natural system. Huh...maybe that's how trickle down economics is supposed to work?
Well, it's not that naive, but it is naive. IF a corporation builds it, it DOES, without argument, belong to the corporation (unless they donate it). If built by government, it is at least in theory the property of the people. Modern practice has shown this to not always be true, but it's an arguable point. I know the park down the street, national forests, army bases, police stations, etc are ideally there for my good. They were built with the idea that I, as a tax paying citizen of a "democratic" state-based society, will benefit from their existance. Now a days they tend to exist for the extention and proliferation of the system, but it's hard to stop that. I agree that his comment about the base existing for humanity is very naive. If the US government built it - or any government for that matter - it would only exist for strategic allies or neutral nations that we feel cooperation with will benefit us. Just wanted to point out, though, that if a corporation built it, it would exist for one thing: economic profit for the corporation heads.
Thank you, kind sir. We have both helped each other out today. Italics on links does make more sense.
Now that you mention it, bold and italics would look better. Seems kind of like once linux+bash started color coding everything, it became defacto. Any idea how one would go about bolding directories and italicizing executables in tcsh?
that kind of tab completion exists in tcsh too - just toss set autolist in your .cshrc file. I had it enabled on my last freebsd install - basically makes tcsh work exactly like bash while still feeling more solid. Silly linux kids, when will they learn?!
Not true. You've got the triad all wrong:
A Geek is an engineer, or, barring that, one who obsessed with obtaining skill in something that really has no real world relevance, but sucks up time from interesting problems as a means of illusionary social superiority. These skills are mainly trivial, done by countless others, and are done in a way that collaboration is almost completely shunned. Examples are D&D, pseudo-religious flame wars (kind of like this), system administration, obtaining an MCSE, gaming, running debian, etc. This goes back to the Geeks of olde, circus geeks, who did horrifying and sometimes amazing acts that really had no utility outside of grossing people out and taking their money. As society has progressed the Geek personality has had to adapt, and now simply is the loner in his mom's basement who chats on IRC about how many bots he has running on his sid server while playing countless command-line MUDs, groaning about trolls and dice logistics. Help me out here dictionary:
geek geek (g=ek), n.
1. A performer in a carnival, often presented as a wild man, who performs grotesquely disgusting acts, such as biting the head off a live chicken or snake. PJCM
2. Hence: Any eccentric or strange person; an oddball; an eccentric.
The Dork is a more of a fun individual. He or She enjoys making people laugh and being the butt of many-a-jokes. They're fun to be around and generally amiable. When they're on, they're funny, when they're off, they're reserved.
The Nerd, on the other hand, is your average scientist. They are reserved, hard-minded, generally nice, think-a-holics. They're open minded and realize all of the basic fundamental human truths instinctively. They find average pursuits boring and tedious, feel that they are generally socially inferior, but know it doesn't matter.
Everyone has some combination of nerd/dork/geek in them. The main theme here, though, is social identity. Geeks think their "skills" make them socially superior to others. Dorks feel they are on the same level as everyone else. Nerds feel they are inferior, but realize it's all a crock of shit anyway. Your classic geek would be a Sports hero or a D&D player. Your classic Dork would be a comedian. Your classic Nerd would be a scientist. None of them are inherhently evil.
During the 90's you computer people decided to take back the term Geek and adopt it in a way that it had never been used before. Now "hackers" are considered Geeks. Well, they're not, though their followers certainly are. Hackers are nerds. They love thinking about interesting problems, solving them, and sharing them. The entire hacker and open source culture is built on top of Nerdom. However, most of slashdot is awash in geeks. Followers who feel the need to tout their skills, chime in with some so-called insightful statement that is really just a rehash of things said over and over again in the community:
"Competition is a Good Thing (tm)"
"Free as in Freedom not free as in Beer"
"Monopolies are Bad."
Etc, etc etc...
Infact, slashdot is built on the Geek model. That is, it's based on social advancement through subjective ratings, rather than pure openness and exchange of thoughts - be they flames or otherwise. It's trolls tend to be more insightful and commentative than it's serious posters, especially those post 600000 UID's. In other words - slashdot is designed, be it intentional or not, to bring out the worst element of the open source world - the Geek. The engineer that works in back rooms on a widget that his boss will then claim for his own. Owned by a company, building and toiling, giving shit back to society other than another magical product to pump to the masses, sold for more than it's really worth. But they're an engineer. That title makes them better than the rest of us! Or, they're a sys-admin or a dungeon master. All labels, titles that are created to make the individual feel superior in some meaningless way.
I use both Gentoo and FreeBSD on the same workstation. As of now i'm running a FreeBSD 5.3 install that's existed for about 6 months, cvsuping and portupgrade -arR'ing about once a week. No breakage.
My Gentoo install is about 3 months old with the same update schedule, no breakage. I hit that glibc/autoconf bug but i fixed it without an install...don't remember how.
Anyway, sounds like your breakage = pebkac. If you're well versed in the ins and outs of the freebsd ports system, as well as the conf files, you won't hose a system with cvsup. Same goes for portage and etc-updage. Infact, i had a production 4.x stable machine running for 3 years with a weekly cvsup cycle every friday night. No breakage, ever.
the FreeBSD base system, that which includes everything that is not a third party app is unchanged when they slip in the stable tag. All that gets backported is security updates
Your response proves your ignorance of the FreeBSD release system. Ports exists so that you can install UP TO DATE, MODERN packages and programs. You install the program you want, and then you can choose if you want to upgrade it with ONLY SECURITY FIXES, to keep it stagnant and unchanging after install. The FreeBSD stable means you have a stable foundation on top of which to install programs, either by way of ports or on your own. However, stable does mean unchanging, solid, well-tested, and essentially bug free.
Hmm..so lets see. Stable foundation - FreeBSD and Debian both have this. Up to date collection of programs and utilities (outside the base system) available for install using the package manager? FreeBSD, check; Debian stable, nope. So what's the choice for the GGGP?
Everything asian is just over rated. And since they're genetically inferior (Hello, the world mongoloid?! mongolia?! mongoloid?! MONGOLIA?!?!?! clearly inferior), they simply can not translate their simplistic, inferior language to the complex, elegant, chaotic beauty that is english. It's fairly simple.
FreeBSD. It's just as stable as Debian with the up-to-date-ness of Gentoo's portage. The only thing you won't have is nvidia drivers on amd64.
Ah the young. So blind, so naive.