She appears on the screen. The hormones take over, and you can't avert your gaze. You stare. Something you see feeds a hunger inside, and you devour this vision, even as you know you are making a fool of yourself. For hours, even days after, you can't shake the feeling. Then, some photographer catches her in real life, without the perfect lighting, without the make up and carefully set tresses, etc. Okay, she's still cute, but hardly the vision of loveliness you thought you first saw. You feel cheated, made a fool of, and you wonder how she managed to capture your attention in the first place.
So, how are you liking FreeBSD? Do you believe it's something you work with, live with day after day? If you find you've gotten used to it, maybe the time has come to get more acquainted with one of the best features of FreeBSD: It's relatively painless to update the entire system by rebuilding it from code. The emphasis is not so much slavishly chasing the cutting edge of BSD technology. Instead, our focus will be on security updates and optimization.
It's nothing personal, you see. Human Resource (HR) directors don't hire people; actually, they hire skill sets. Naturally, that skill set includes the ability to get along, a skill even the most evil sociopath can learn. It's not how good someone is, but whether they exhibit a certain ability to perform. It's strictly dollars for a product, even if that product is a complex of human interaction. If you could get a robot to do the job for less money, the robot would be used.
You've installed FreeBSD, and it works fine, of course. If you are as seriously committed to using it as your desktop as I am, you'll want to get the most out it. Let's go hardcore! The key with FreeBSD is optimization -- tweaking the compile process so the resulting binary code runs as efficiently as possible.
Consumer grade machines with 64-bit processors have been around for the past three years. At first it meant nothing, since the ones you could buy off the shelf came with 32-bit Windows XP. However, that's still the case, as 64-bit Windows drivers have lagged for most consumer hardware. Not so in the Open Source world, where the greatest source of complaints -- poor or missing drivers for some hardware -- is its greatest strength in the 64-bit arena.