He is very much recognized, maybe not in the press or on 'important' web sites, but by many many people who run their PC's on slackware and save loads of time because of it's simplicity and clearness.
I have been upgrading (without reinstallation) since 3 years. The simple and clear packaging system makes it possible to avoid being entangled in a web of dependancies (which demand a reinstall from scratch sooner or later in many distributions).
There are companies that prefer to buy commercially developed software with support, guarantees etc. At the moment products such as Samba do work but cannot give any guarantee since MSFT might break their reverse-engineered implementation at any time. Office-compatability is sketchy as well and you never know if any document can be opened with other software.
If a formal spec to the protocol/fileformat/API is available and it is 100% legal to implement products based on these specs, others can easier implement products that use the protocol and they can guarantee that it works.
What disturbed me about Dell (Switzerland) is that in this country there is no right whatsoever to send back if you don't like the product.
Since there is no shop/showroom where you can look at the product in advance, this is an inacceptible policy for me. Yes I would be prepared to pay the shipping costs in such a case, but even under that condition you have no such right in Switzerland.
In the rest of Europe you have a legal right to do so, and in the US the consumers are demanding enough to enforce a return policy. Only the stupid Swiss consumers are so 'easy' that they let them selves be ripped off and order without any guarantee, grrr.
In many countries they do. For example in holland the liberal party is the most (mainstream) conservative country. Liberalism is about individual freedom and responsability, which is contrary to the socialist idea of a strong state that takes care for you.
OTOH the "as long as it doesn't adversely affect others" is the key point, the practical consequences of liberalism depend greatly on how to implement this. But it remains that the core value of liberalism is personal freedom and (thus) responsability, which is more politically right than left (b.t.w. the word liberal is used completely false in the US, and often is used synomymous with permissive or even leftist).
What needed to be improved for easy of use is the swapping of disks. This has already been solved: HDD based players (which currently mainly use MP3 compression but that is a side matter). This is already happening, HDD MP3 jukeboxes for livingroom or car use are starting to be mainstream devices, and for video there are already HDD based recorders (some digitize real time into MPEG, some records the MPEG stream being broadcast by satellites DVB-S).
Next step would be a DVD-jukebox where you insert a DVD, which is ripped and stored on the internal disk. I expect this within 1 or 2 years when MPEG-4 is being established.
Re:CD's aren't harsh - mastering might be differen
on
The Future of the CD
·
· Score: 1
very important, engineers working on both are told to deliberately make the CD sound subtly worse, which is often only a tweak of the EQ or master volume away - yes, quieter things almost always sound "worse"
The industry desperately wants us to buy into a new format to replace the already perfect CD, for two reasons:
music industry can implant its DRM schemes
consumers have to buy all their collections over again, the present market is saturated
equipment manufacturers would love to sell new players to everyone, the CD player market is saturated as well
In order to make consumers believe their lies, I would not be surprised if current CD's would be mastered suboptimally on purpose. So they can prove that SACD or DVD-A is better.
Please, don't believe it. For 15 years they sold us CD as 100% perfect for human ears, which is true. New formats are unnecessary and even harmful. If anything, the CD is already overkill even for audiophiles (I consider myself to be one, mainly listening to classical music).
But who still has CD players everywhere? I have MP3 players everywhere (3 portable , one HDD based in my car and one HDD based for my living room) and I see the same around me. The stores here (in Switzerland) sell loads of MP3 devices of all kinds (portable or not, for car or not) mainly shifting to HDD or solid state (CD players playing MP3 is going away).
SACD and DVD-A is not necessary. 99.9% of all people do not have the equipment that can fully match the quality of a normal CD. CD already is 'perfrect': it includes all audible frequencies (at least for humans) with enough dynamic range (16 bit). For years everyone claimed (including the manufacturers) that CD is perfect. Now we have to believe suddenly that CD can be improved, and even that the average person with an above average stereo equipment could hear the difference between SACD and CD?!?
I loaded the page with Mozilla (which renders it correctly) then saved the page. Opened with Opera 7 which renders incorrectly (the stylesheet is contained in the saved page).
Also, I opened the page with Opera 7 via a squid proxy, which completely faked the user agent string. Still I received the same page (no modification/sabotage) which was not rendered correctly by Opera.
I do think this article is incorrect, and the fault is Opera's. There is a slight possibility that MSN found out the Opera problem and purposely constructed their page such that it would trigger the Opera bug.
Just tried www.msn.com with Opera 7. No matter what I set the agent identification to, msn keeps sending the wrong (faulty) stylesheet.
It looks like MSN uses more advanced techniques to find out what the client is than just the agent identification, in order to sabotage Opera in this case.
In Europe and also Asia Rambus claims won't be accepted. This might become an interesting precedent, where the US thinks it can rule the (economic) world by setting "standards" w.r.t. protecting IP, and the rest may get fed up with this selfcentered protectionist interpretation and implementation of IP laws.
In fact they did recount the votes because it was so close. In the UN referendum b.t.w. it was not the majority of cantons that mattered, but the overall majority of votes.
For some referendums both a canton and an overall voter majority is required, for some only a voter majority will do.
The Swiss have indeed not voted on every single line of lawtext, but if anyone disagrees with some part of a law, he can start a referendum to have it changed.
Because of the growing importance of foreign treaties in these days, the law is being changed (a referendum follows in 2 weeks) to extend referedum power: in future foreign treaties must always be ratified by the people in a referendum. This because more and more of the states sovereignty is influenced by foreign treaties.
Or with the saturation factor, i.e. after years of replacing vinyl and tapes everyone now has their favourite music on CD's and only need to buy new releases.
What I keep worrying about is the TCPA *2.0* specification. The original spec allows an alternative to a "trusted" platform, but future specs may require a PC boot a Palladium-enabled OS -- or none at all.
Since there is a large and fully legitimate market for other operating systems (PC-UNIX variants, novell, Linux) which is already being used on a large scale by large business as well, it is impossible that there won't be any PC's that run non "trusted" platforms.
You'll just see a divide in the PC architecture: one for "trusted", i.e. windows-only PC's, one for the rest (just as there are Apples and PC's today).
We can only hope that the content providers are stupid enough to believe in this (or any other) fake DRM. Then they release their contents, and if the "hackers" can restrain themselves long enough, it can all be copied anyway.
More and more car brands can/could be maintained and repaired only with proprietary equipment and electronics. Only selected dealers can rent this equipment, shutting out competition.
Thus the car makers could make extra profits on car maintenance (inderectly through their dealer network) and make cars a bit cheaper to lock in/tempt the buyer.
The EU also has forbidden this practice, and forces car makers to open the specifications of electronic and computer interfaces to the diagnostics subsystems. Also a new law enables each dealer to represent and repair any brand of car, i.e. it has become illegal for car makers to restrict the number of dealers (such as only those that do not do business with others) or to set up their own dealer network.
I think it is the same tactics, one that has been prevented now, shall be prevented too for the print cartidge market and hopefully too for video consoles and the like.
In general, the business model to almost give away some piece of equipment and then afterwards cash in on the required consumables or assecoires should be prevented, since it is misleading for the public and unethical.
The idea is not bad, but to use TCP out of spec is horrible and inexcusable.
One should have defined a HTTP over UDP instead.
Practical problem with that is that UDP packets may arrive out of order, and may be dropped more easily. HTTP should have provided a (thin) layer above UDP to make it reliable enough for its purposes; which, admittedly, is less than TCP. TCP is a bit of an overkill for HTTP.
HTTP 1.1 has improved this in another way, by reusing connections to the same server. This greatly diminishes the amount of TCP open/close and thus also the advantage/disadvantage of IE's behaviour.
I bought a Canopus ADVC-100, just in case these nightmares do become true: It is an analog DV video converter (2 way), with built in macrovision protection that can be disabled by a simple trick.
I haven't used it much yet, but it is good to have this escape route just in case.
You see articles warning about the "strings attached" to digital media popping up everywhere now, also in mainstream media. This is relatively new. I think the public at large (including politicians who are in the end dependant on votes) is waking up.
I do not expect a quick total end to DRM, but the ultimate goal to control all computers (apart from the fact that professional users and producers would be vehemently against it, such as IBM, and they too have some political influence) is a few bridges too far.
It's not really due to GSM, but more due to the state intervention taking place in Europe (which is a good thing in this case): a telecom operator only can get a GSM licence if they promise to give good coverage to all of the population (such as at least 95%). If they don't keep their promise, they get a large fine.
This prevents operators to "only pick out the raisins", that is to only cover the most lucrative areas and forget about the rest.
I don't even think the operators are unhappy with this obligation, since it provides a level playing field. Without obligation, noone would cover more rural areas since their competitors wouldn't either. With the obligation, they all have to loose some money to invest in not yet profitable regions, but at least everyone looses the same. After some time, the critical mass is reached even in those rural areas so everyone wins in the end.
For me the telecom market shows that state intervention is not always bad, but sometimes it is necessary for the state to help/force companies to remove barriers that a totally unregulated market cannot overcome.
Re:Cable is Better in YOUR area
on
DSL Rising
·
· Score: 2
In switzerland it is about the same: more than 90% coverage by cable, but DSL rapidly surpassing the initial advantage that cable had.
The service and quality of broadband via cable (offered here by Cablecom, a subsidiary of NTL) is so bad that also in areas where you can have cable many people have switched to DSL (which is offered by the monopoly former PTT, swisscom); DSL now has coverage of 95% of the population (I think there are no many countries that reach this level).
Price for DSL and cable is about the same. Most people use DSL via ISDN by the way, which makes filters everywhere unnecessary (just 1 splitter which splits the ADSL from the ISDN U-bus).
Cable service is so bad that many communities are considering to renationalize Cablecom.
Since many businesses shall be tempted to try to obtain a discount by playing like they're seriously considering Linux. In playing this, some of them might actually consider it the first time and even get charmed by the idea (discounts from MSFT or not).
Also, the message that MSFT sends with this (now publicly known) policy is that they consider Linux to be an extremely dangerous competitor. This must put some companies to think.
MSFT has succeeded in the PC market for two reasons:
1. Luck They were lucky with their initial MS-DOS contract
2. The networking effect All that came after 1 (luck) has to do with the networking effect known to affect computers: There is a cycle of platform software being dependant on availability of popular applications, and applications being dependant on the popularity of the platform. Later, proprietary file formats (office) also played their part.
The networking effect is what kept MSFT in the lead after their initial luck (just like IBM earlier in the mainframe market).
Now this cannot be transferred to a totally different market of mobile devices:
1. The file formats cannot/need not be the same, thus MSFT looses their lock-in advantage.
2. New operating systems (whether called Windows does not matter, since it is not windows no matter what) because of a radically different HW platform means the cycle of operating system and applications is broken.
MSFT would have to start all over, without having the advantages they have been able to rely on in the past 20 years. Thus we start with a level playing field for the first time since long.
We (as consumers) are very lucky that this time (like the mini market (UNIX)) but unlike the mainframe and PC markets before, the platform is quite open (Symbian) and the specs of the underlying hardware and protocols (GSM and 3G) are all open and can never be controlled by a single vendor. This is also a big difference, which shall make it impossible for MSFT to repeat their past success and tactics.
So what is so much better to an XML parser, as compared to dozens and dozens of other parsers & lexical analyzers (such as yacc+lex, javaCC etc)?!?
Generic parsers often use EBNF to specify your grammar. Whether specifying your grammar in XML-Schema as opposed to EBNF does not make it much simpler (if not more complex due to limitations in XML-Schema). The lexical analyzer is hardwired in XML, with yacc you can roll your own, which allows you to read input in any format you like (not just body format).
So XML severely limits your lexical format, and also the grammar. What you gain is... hmm don't know.
It is completely beyond me what is so good about XML. There are plenty other "compiler compilers" available that allow you to make your own little language easily, providing much more freedom (if you want).
I have tried Gentoo, but I'm back to Slackware. I used to use FreeBSD (for 5 years) but had to switch to Linux because of vmware (current versions alas do not run under FreeBSD).
For me as an old FreeBSD user, Slackware feels much much more "at home". Yes, Gentoo has ports (I prefer FreeBSD's though) but a big drawback is that, in contrast to FreeBSD, the whole base system is also made up of ports.
In FreeBSD the 'core' system is the same everywhere, not maintained by ports but having all source code in/usr/src, to be installed/updated by syncing the source and then execute 'make world' in/usr/src.
Gentoo, with its web of port dependencies and infinite number of configurations, is unstable because of this. Also a small change often requires recompilation and reinstallation of 'everything'. Just read the Gentoo boards/mailing lists to see how often some configuration (combination of ports) breaks.
FreeBSD ports also break occasionally, but at least the don't affect the base system.
Apart from that, Slackware is like FreeBSD w.r.t. simplicity for file layouts, rc startup files etc. Gentoo feels more like other Linuces. This is a matter of taste and of what you're used to. I am convinced that most FreeBSD users prefer Slackware if they have to use a Linux distribution.
Slashdot Mirror
He is very much recognized, maybe not in the press or on 'important' web sites, but by many many people who run their PC's on slackware and save loads of time because of it's simplicity and clearness.
I have been upgrading (without reinstallation) since 3 years. The simple and clear packaging system makes it possible to avoid being entangled in a web of dependancies (which demand a reinstall from scratch sooner or later in many distributions).
Only FreeBSD comes close.
Yes, I think it does matter.
There are companies that prefer to buy commercially developed software with support, guarantees etc. At the moment products such as Samba do work but cannot give any guarantee since MSFT might break their reverse-engineered implementation at any time. Office-compatability is sketchy as well and you never know if any document can be opened with other software.
If a formal spec to the protocol/fileformat/API is available and it is 100% legal to implement products based on these specs, others can easier implement products that use the protocol and they can guarantee that it works.
What disturbed me about Dell (Switzerland) is that in this country there is no right whatsoever to send back if you don't like the product.
Since there is no shop/showroom where you can look at the product in advance, this is an inacceptible policy for me. Yes I would be prepared to pay the shipping costs in such a case, but even under that condition you have no such right in Switzerland.
In the rest of Europe you have a legal right to do so, and in the US the consumers are demanding enough to enforce a return policy. Only the stupid Swiss consumers are so 'easy' that they let them selves be ripped off and order without any guarantee, grrr.
In many countries they do. For example in holland the liberal party is the most (mainstream) conservative country. Liberalism is about individual freedom and responsability, which is contrary to the socialist idea of a strong state that takes care for you.
OTOH the "as long as it doesn't adversely affect others" is the key point, the practical consequences of liberalism depend greatly on how to implement this. But it remains that the core value of liberalism is personal freedom and (thus) responsability, which is more politically right than left (b.t.w. the word liberal is used completely false in the US, and often is used synomymous with permissive or even leftist).
What needed to be improved for easy of use is the swapping of disks. This has already been solved: HDD based players (which currently mainly use MP3 compression but that is a side matter). This is already happening, HDD MP3 jukeboxes for livingroom or car use are starting to be mainstream devices, and for video there are already HDD based recorders (some digitize real time into MPEG, some records the MPEG stream being broadcast by satellites DVB-S).
Next step would be a DVD-jukebox where you insert a DVD, which is ripped and stored on the internal disk. I expect this within 1 or 2 years when MPEG-4 is being established.
The industry desperately wants us to buy into a new format to replace the already perfect CD, for two reasons:
- music industry can implant its DRM schemes
- consumers have to buy all their collections over again, the present market is saturated
- equipment manufacturers would love to sell new players to everyone, the CD player market is saturated as well
In order to make consumers believe their lies, I would not be surprised if current CD's would be mastered suboptimally on purpose. So they can prove that SACD or DVD-A is better.Please, don't believe it. For 15 years they sold us CD as 100% perfect for human ears, which is true. New formats are unnecessary and even harmful. If anything, the CD is already overkill even for audiophiles (I consider myself to be one, mainly listening to classical music).
But who still has CD players everywhere? I have MP3 players everywhere (3 portable , one HDD based in my car and one HDD based for my living room) and I see the same around me. The stores here (in Switzerland) sell loads of MP3 devices of all kinds (portable or not, for car or not) mainly shifting to HDD or solid state (CD players playing MP3 is going away).
SACD and DVD-A is not necessary. 99.9% of all people do not have the equipment that can fully match the quality of a normal CD. CD already is 'perfrect': it includes all audible frequencies (at least for humans) with enough dynamic range (16 bit). For years everyone claimed (including the manufacturers) that CD is perfect. Now we have to believe suddenly that CD can be improved, and even that the average person with an above average
stereo equipment could hear the difference between SACD and CD?!?
I loaded the page with Mozilla (which renders it correctly) then saved the page. Opened with Opera 7 which renders incorrectly (the stylesheet is contained in the saved page).
Also, I opened the page with Opera 7 via a squid proxy, which completely faked the user agent string. Still I received the same page (no modification/sabotage) which was not rendered correctly by Opera.
I do think this article is incorrect, and the fault is Opera's. There is a slight possibility that MSN found out the Opera problem and purposely constructed their page such that it would trigger the Opera bug.
Just tried www.msn.com with Opera 7. No matter what I set the agent identification to, msn keeps sending the wrong (faulty) stylesheet.
It looks like MSN uses more advanced techniques to find out what the client is than just the agent identification, in order to sabotage Opera in this case.
In Europe and also Asia Rambus claims won't be accepted. This might become an interesting precedent, where the US thinks it can rule the (economic) world by setting "standards" w.r.t. protecting IP, and the rest may get fed up with this selfcentered protectionist interpretation and implementation of IP laws.
In fact they did recount the votes because it was so close. In the UN referendum b.t.w. it was not the majority of cantons that mattered, but the overall majority of votes.
For some referendums both a canton and an overall voter majority is required, for some only a voter majority will do.
The Swiss have indeed not voted on every single line of lawtext, but if anyone disagrees with some part of a law, he can start a referendum to have it changed.
Because of the growing importance of foreign treaties in these days, the law is being changed (a referendum follows in 2 weeks) to extend referedum power: in future foreign treaties must always be ratified by the people in a referendum. This because more and more of the states sovereignty is influenced by foreign treaties.
Or with the saturation factor, i.e. after years of replacing vinyl and tapes everyone now has their favourite music on CD's and only need to buy new releases.
Since there is a large and fully legitimate market for other operating systems (PC-UNIX variants, novell, Linux) which is already being used on a large scale by large business as well, it is impossible that there won't be any PC's that run non "trusted" platforms.
You'll just see a divide in the PC architecture: one for "trusted", i.e. windows-only PC's, one for the rest (just as there are Apples and PC's today).
We can only hope that the content providers are stupid enough to believe in this (or any other) fake DRM. Then they release their contents, and if the "hackers" can restrain themselves long enough, it can all be copied anyway.
More and more car brands can/could be maintained and repaired only with proprietary equipment and electronics. Only selected dealers can rent this equipment, shutting out competition.
Thus the car makers could make extra profits on car maintenance (inderectly through their dealer network) and make cars a bit cheaper to lock in/tempt the buyer.
The EU also has forbidden this practice, and forces car makers to open the specifications of electronic and computer interfaces to the diagnostics subsystems. Also a new law enables each dealer to represent and repair any brand of car, i.e. it has become illegal for car makers to restrict the number of dealers (such as only those that do not do business with others) or to set up their own dealer network.
I think it is the same tactics, one that has been prevented now, shall be prevented too for the print cartidge market and hopefully too for video consoles and the like.
In general, the business model to almost give away some piece of equipment and then afterwards cash in on the required consumables or assecoires should be prevented, since it is misleading for the public and unethical.
The idea is not bad, but to use TCP out of spec is horrible and inexcusable.
One should have defined a HTTP over UDP instead.
Practical problem with that is that UDP packets may arrive out of order, and may be dropped more easily. HTTP should have provided a (thin) layer above UDP to make it reliable enough for its purposes; which, admittedly, is less than TCP. TCP is a bit of an overkill for HTTP.
HTTP 1.1 has improved this in another way, by reusing connections to the same server. This greatly diminishes the amount of TCP open/close and thus also the advantage/disadvantage of IE's behaviour.
I bought a Canopus ADVC-100, just in case these nightmares do become true: It is an analog DV video converter (2 way), with built in macrovision protection that can be disabled by a simple trick.
I haven't used it much yet, but it is good to have this escape route just in case.
You see articles warning about the "strings attached" to digital media popping up everywhere now, also in mainstream media. This is relatively new. I think the public at large (including politicians who are in the end dependant on votes) is waking up.
I do not expect a quick total end to DRM, but the ultimate goal to control all computers (apart from the fact that professional users and producers would be vehemently against it, such as IBM, and they too have some political influence) is a few bridges too far.
So they will fail in the end.
It's not really due to GSM, but more due to the state intervention taking place in Europe (which is a good thing in this case): a telecom operator only can get a GSM licence if they promise to give good coverage to all of the population (such as at least 95%). If they don't keep their promise, they get a large fine.
This prevents operators to "only pick out the raisins", that is to only cover the most lucrative areas and forget about the rest.
I don't even think the operators are unhappy with this obligation, since it provides a level playing field. Without obligation, noone would cover more rural areas since their competitors wouldn't either. With the obligation, they all have to loose some money to invest in not yet profitable regions, but at least everyone looses the same. After some time, the critical mass is reached even in those rural areas so everyone wins in the end.
For me the telecom market shows that state intervention is not always bad, but sometimes it is necessary for the state to help/force companies to remove barriers that a totally unregulated market cannot overcome.
In switzerland it is about the same: more than 90% coverage by cable, but DSL rapidly surpassing the initial advantage that cable had.
The service and quality of broadband via cable (offered here by Cablecom, a subsidiary of NTL) is so bad that also in areas where you can have cable many people have switched to DSL (which is offered by the monopoly former PTT, swisscom); DSL now has coverage of 95% of the population (I think there are no many countries that reach this level).
Price for DSL and cable is about the same. Most people use DSL via ISDN by the way, which makes filters everywhere unnecessary (just 1 splitter which splits the ADSL from the ISDN U-bus).
Cable service is so bad that many communities are considering to renationalize Cablecom.
Since many businesses shall be tempted to try to obtain a discount by playing like they're seriously considering Linux. In playing this, some of them might actually consider it the first time and even get charmed by the idea (discounts from MSFT or not).
Also, the message that MSFT sends with this (now publicly known) policy is that they consider Linux to be an extremely dangerous competitor. This must put some companies to think.
MSFT has succeeded in the PC market for two reasons:
1. Luck
They were lucky with their initial MS-DOS contract
2. The networking effect
All that came after 1 (luck) has to do with the networking effect known to affect computers: There is a cycle of platform software being dependant on availability of popular applications, and applications being dependant on the popularity of the platform. Later, proprietary file formats (office) also played their part.
The networking effect is what kept MSFT in the lead after their initial luck (just like IBM earlier in the mainframe market).
Now this cannot be transferred to a totally different market of mobile devices:
1. The file formats cannot/need not be the same, thus MSFT looses their lock-in advantage.
2. New operating systems (whether called Windows does not matter, since it is not windows no matter what) because of a radically different HW platform means the cycle of operating system and applications is broken.
MSFT would have to start all over, without having the advantages they have been able to rely on in the past 20 years. Thus we start with a level playing field for the first time since long.
We (as consumers) are very lucky that this time (like the mini market (UNIX)) but unlike the mainframe and PC markets before, the platform is quite open (Symbian) and the specs of the underlying hardware and protocols (GSM and 3G) are all open and can never be controlled by a single vendor. This is also a big difference, which shall make it impossible for MSFT to repeat their past success and tactics.
So what is so much better to an XML parser, as compared to dozens and dozens of other parsers & lexical analyzers (such as yacc+lex, javaCC etc)?!?
Generic parsers often use EBNF to specify your grammar. Whether specifying your grammar in XML-Schema as opposed to EBNF does not make it much simpler (if not more complex due to limitations in XML-Schema). The lexical analyzer is hardwired in XML, with yacc you can roll your own, which allows you to read input in any format you like (not just body format).
So XML severely limits your lexical format, and also the grammar. What you gain is... hmm don't know.
It is completely beyond me what is so good about XML. There are plenty other "compiler compilers" available that allow you to make your own little language easily, providing much more freedom (if you want).
I have tried Gentoo, but I'm back to Slackware. I used to use FreeBSD (for 5 years) but had to switch to Linux because of vmware (current versions alas do not run under FreeBSD).
/usr/src, to be installed/updated by syncing the source and then execute 'make world' in /usr/src.
For me as an old FreeBSD user, Slackware feels much much more "at home". Yes, Gentoo has ports (I prefer FreeBSD's though) but a big drawback is that, in contrast to FreeBSD, the whole base system is also made up of ports.
In FreeBSD the 'core' system is the same everywhere, not maintained by ports but having all source code in
Gentoo, with its web of port dependencies and infinite number of configurations, is unstable because of this. Also a small change often requires recompilation and reinstallation of 'everything'. Just read the Gentoo boards/mailing lists to see how often some configuration (combination of ports) breaks.
FreeBSD ports also break occasionally, but at least the don't affect the base system.
Apart from that, Slackware is like FreeBSD w.r.t. simplicity for file layouts, rc startup files etc. Gentoo feels more like other Linuces. This is a matter of taste and of what you're used to. I am convinced that most FreeBSD users prefer Slackware if they have to use a Linux distribution.