I am aware that portversion (part of the portupgrade suite) is much faster. I was using it until portupgrade broke. I did just check and it appears as if portupgrade is suddenly working again. Definitely not predictable enough for me to want to keep using.

I am/was using portmaster because portupgrade is broken on my system (it chokes on the pciids package). Portmaster is fast(er), but is unbelievably verbose, and its default settings are frustrating. Portupgrade defaults to saving old libraries, saving the need to recompile EVERYTHING. Portmaster does not. Portupgrade will keep distfiles around. Portmaster will sporadically prompt you to delete all of the associated distfiles. Portupgrade will show you the progress of the files it's downloading. Portmaster will show you that it's blocked, waiting for something to download (it will keep spamming your console with this rather useless message until the file has finished downloading... given how unreliable some of the default mirrors are this can add quite a bit of time to installs/upgrades unless you're paying attention to bandwidth usage elsewhere).

Yes, I'm sure portng is going to be a step up. I'm sure that I could learn how to use portmaster. But in the end, the Debian tools are far, far more intuitive and expedient for me. Maybe it's time to test out Debian/FreeBSD.

The ports system is an absolute nightmare. Sure you've got things like portmaster and portupgrade (the latter is currently broken with no fix in sight). I spend far more time mangling ports than I do dealing with package management on any Debian based system. It took over forty seconds(!!) on an otherwise idle system (Ivy Bridge i5 w/ SSD) to list all the installed ports and their versions (pkg_version). Using the ports system is akin to pulling teeth as far as I can tell.

The problems with X, for me, have mainly been lack of driver support (Ivy Bridge support is pants). But that's a whole 'nother ball of wax.

Yeah, well, having to go out of your way to disable stuff is great motivation to move to another distro that actually respects its users.

Agreed. I've been using FreeBSD off and on since 2.2.2. Despite some really eye watering bugs with Ubuntu (especially their ec2 instances), FreeBSD is just more tedious and more frustrating to use. But... FreeBSD has the one killer feature for me: ZFS. It's portable in a pinch and ensure a decent amount of data integrity. Hammer, BTRFS, etc don't offer that kind of flexibility.

For the upgrade from 7.x to 8.x I used "freebsd-update". I forgot to disable the cron task, so after falling asleep the machine proceeded to lunch itself. Fine. User error. Again I tried "freebsd-update" to apply security patches. Guess what? "freebsd-update" doesn't handle new files gracefully, and again it lunched itself. Sure, there was an easy fix (download the single missing file that threw a wrench into the works), but the maintainer of "freebsd-update" knew of the problem and, as far as I can tell, just ignored it. Too much manual intervention is required to keep a FreeBSD system running compared to Linux.

I decided to tempt fate again with the upgrade from 8.x to 9.x (to see if the much promised support for Intel graphics chips was usable -- lesson learned, despite being in the release notes it's pre-alpha at best). Well, this time "freebsd-update" didn't mess anything up, the new kernel did. Turns out what FreeBSD 9.x and FreeBSD < 9.x consider BSD disk labels are two very separate things. My ZFS pools vanished. All sorts of fun ensued (there's that pesky data integrity thing). While FreeBSD 8.x would recognize the pool, 9.1 both missed and corrupted the ZFS magic bits. UGH.

Then there's the ports system. A clusterfuck if I've ever seen one. I've been using 'portupgrade' to ease some of the pain. And it works. Until it doesn't. It's definitely not particularly compatible with ruby 1.9. It's utterly confused by the versioning on the ruby 1.9 port. Upgrading (as of this week) to the latest version of the "pciids" port breaks "portupgrade" with no clean way to back these things out. When mucking about with all the updated XOrg stuff (see above about trying to get Intel graphics to work) I discovered that if you're not using "portupgrade" it's super easy to install duplicate, conflicting versions of a package with no clean way of backing this out. Compare this to Debian based distros where dpkg -i will neatly handle upgrades without lunching your system. While compiling is something of a pain, there are out of date binary packages that are sorta available. The real pain is just that the ports toolchain sucks rocks.

Oh, and watching trivial bugs languish for years got frustrating too. Ah well.

You're kidding, right?

HP Touchpad:

"Designed in USA. Made in China."

So why aren't you singling out HP?

Meanwhile, the Mozilla folks have been dodging HTML4 and CSS3 for over twelve years. You tell me, what sounds like a better use of time: bloating the browser with some bullshit Facebook-specific plugin or allowing for decimal aligned numbers in tables?

Sadly, Firefox becomes less and less relevant as they try the most hamfisted ways to maintain relevance.

That's not a bug, that's a feature. CentOS is saving you from that god awful interface redesign featured prominently in GIMP 2.8.

That happened to me recently. Actually it was two dimes in one pocket that set off the machine. The process went a little like this: I got asked a few times what I had in my right pocket, waited for a male TSA employee to come over, waited for the TSA agents to stop bickering, got a quick patdown (including a few squeezes of my pockets), turned my pocket inside out, discovered two dimes, went on my way. All the while I was staring at an outline of my body with a couple of red squares highlighting the areas of interest.

My problem with the pornoscanners is twofold: they're extremely invasive and they're (potentially) dangerous. These newer machine address the first issue pretty well IMO, and as long as they're safer I'm pretty much satisfied. Now if only they could get rid of the bullshit liquid, gel, spreadable rules...

So? Bain Capital invests in companies that employ people overseas. Lots of companies do that. Do you invest in Apple? How about Intel or AMD? Do you own an HTC phone, or a smart phone at all? Even the US Government has invests in companies that close down US plants to open them up overseas. Obama "invested" in GM. GM has closed down plants in the US to open new ones in Mexico and other places overseas. Do you think that Obama "prefers to ship jobs off overseas than to invest in America."? It's the same thing, isn't it? Well, except that Obama is using American tax dollars to do it against our will. Bain used freely invested money from investors

The difference is that Apple's primary focus is not shipping companies overseas. The company that Bain invested in specializes in offshoring.

But the point is that you said "their own candidate for president prefers to ship jobs off overseas than to invest in America", which is something you can't back up because it's not true. You WANT to believe it so bad that you are actively silencing the the logic portion of your brain that is screaming, "why would Romney WANT to give American jobs to overseas workers? That doesn't make sense". It's sad when you have to lie to yourself to keep justify your beliefs.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/aug/10/illinois-workers-bain-outsourcing

From the article:

"This company is competitive globally. They make a profit here. But Bain Capital decided to squeeze it a little further. That is not what capitalism is meant to be about," said Freeport mayor George Gaulrapp, 52, pictured.

So, yes, it seems to me that Romey prefers overseas jobs.

So this deserves to stay up while footage of the Mars rover should be taken down? Right-o.

Google deserves no praise for this. The making of 'Innocence of Muslim' was likely illegal because the guy who made it was legally obligated to not use the internet for the duration of his probation. As other comments have pointed out, if someone was offended by this movie and wanted it to disappear a simple DMCA takedown notice would have sufficed. Instead, people invested in seeing conflict in the Middle East want this video up so that they can stoke the flames of anti-American sentiment. Google, with all of their idiotic policies, is playing right into this. Shame on all of you.

Godless heathens? Tell that to Pussy Riot...

Yes. See also: Leica and rangefinder.

Mmm. Wrong. Modern ratchets (at least the higher end stuff) often have many more teeth than older ratchets. This allows them to be useful in more confined spaces. Both tools and expectations have indeed evolved. Someone who's used to the flexibility a new SnapOn Dual 80 ratchet afford probably wouldn't be super happy with an old 30 tooth model.

My ratchets will work on 1950s model cars, and I'm sure they'll still be useful on a 2050 model car.

Your ratchets, sure. Your sockets, not so much. Plenty of new types of fasteners have been introduced since the 1950s (TORX/E-TORX/TORX Plus, Pozidrive, metric hex stuff, etc).

What, you mean metric spanners and sockets (and before that SAE)? Seriously Volvo put perhaps more thought in how things come apart than most other manufacturers. With 80s Volvos if you've got a bolt and a nut, they're typically different sizes (ex 17mm + 18mm instead of 2x 17mm). The bonus here is you can use one set of tools.

Whitworth... now that's weird (unless you're Australian).