X

X

X

X

This comment moderated 20% Insightful, 30% Funny and 50% troll. If the Insightful mod had been a +funny mod it would have been 50/50 and Funny would have been displayed (when it's a tie the positive moderation shows up), but thanks to the Insightful mod I don't lose as much karma.

Nevermind, it was worth it.

EDIT: Just found this;

Bah!

Problem 1: Had to boot into Windows, haven't done that for a few months
Problem 2: Windows wanted to update. Windows wouldn't take "no" for an answer and threatened to restart in 5 minutes. I stopped this by opening CMD and typing "net stop 'windows update'"
Problem 3: iTunes wouldn't let me upgrade unless I downloaded the new version
Problem 4: I clicked "yes" and iTunes froze.
Problem 5: I reopened iTunes, clicked "update" and it froze again
Problem 6: I restarted
Problem 7: Windows configured, installed, uninstalled, reinstalled, pissed around and phoned home to Microsoft before shutting down and restarting
Problem 8: iTunes wanted to update. 80MB later and I had the new version.
Problem 9: iTunes wanted to restart the computer, I said no.
Problem 10: iTunes started downloading the update. An hour-and-a-half later and I had it downloaded
Problem 11: iTunes started installing the update. 30 minutes later and I had it installed.
Problem 12: I need to re-jailbreak my phone.

Was it worth it for copy and paste?

Occasionally the moderations on Slashdot take a nose-dive. I have yet to notice a trend but it seems to be that every now and then a group of morons get mod points and things like this happen ...

A new story comes up; How American Homeless Stay Wired.

The first comment is; "And yet they can't seem to find a job". I liked the joke, I had a bit of chuckle at the joke and it was quickly modded funny, but then it gets modded flamebait - twice. That isn't baiting, it's a good observation with a humerous overtone. The end result was mostly moderated funny, one Insightful mod and (I think) two flamebait. The problem is that for that bit of a humour the poster suffered a net karma-loss because +Funny moderations do not increase your karma. Karma is important, whether you think Slashdot is an online game or not, if you have excellent Karma you get an instant +2 moderation which can be the difference between your opinion being read by millions or nobody (keeping in mind some very excellent posts are left unmoderated at 1 or 0).

Another post commented, "That's some sick battery life right there!" in response to an excerpt from the article that he had been homeless for two years. Once again, humour. End result was 20% insightful, 60% funny and 20% flamebait. The first one could have been flamebaiting, but this one? Commenting about battering life by taking a quote out of context who was that baiting, laptop battery manufacturers? Luckily their karma works out even.

And now, my comment, "Are the computers they use in a brown paper bag?". I was trying for humour; I got 60% funny, 20% flamebait, 20% troll. Flamebait means you're baiting someone in to responding with a flame (oh really!?) What exactly could the flame have been, "Sterotypical homeless use Emacs!"? Trolling is similar to flamebait only trolls mix up facts and "distory reality" to provoke responses. Doesn't fit either. Net karma loss, but I have plenty so I don't care.

And if you look through the rest of story, almost anyone who made a "funny" comment has been modded troll or flamebait at least once. (For example). What happened, did a bunch of indignant homeless using wireless get mod points? Or are people that unable to take a joke? (Some of those comments were so innoculous you couldn't even take offense to them).

Moving to a different story, this comment by me was rebutting a response. If anyone was trolling, it was who I was reponding to who stated that the iPhone "does multitask, right now". Yes it does, but not for GUI apps and not for anything *useful* unless you jailbreak it. My post got 30% informative (I wasn't trying for any moderation, I just wanted to clear some things up with the person I was responing to), 30% overrated which I suppose I can understand as I didn't think the post needed to be moderated and 40% troll!? Did I upset the Apple fanboys or something? Yes I got the fact about autocorrection wrong, you've been able to disable autocorrection on the iPhone since November last year I didn't know this because 1) I didn't read the release notes (I only updated to 2.2 because my phone needed to be recovered and I decided I might as well upgrade it while I was there) and 2) because I've been using Cydia apps to simulate this exact behaviour since I got my iPhone (my post was talking about the times I've used it with it turned on and I was assuming that the only way to do turn it off was to jailbreak the phone, which Apple claims is a DMCA violation but lets not go there). So there you have another net karma loss.

And then in another story, a person commented that if they had 2GB flashdrives they would use them as targets. Another commented that 2GB drives are still useful and that they use a 512MB. I responded that 512MB drives are too small and therefore too hard to hit. Obviously I was being informative and insightful and I got moderated that way, but then some clueless bafoons moderated by funny. Oh hold on, 'twas the other way round. While I appreciate regaining some karma how on earth could that comment be interpreted as insightful or informative? Seriously? I know, I'm bitching because I got moderated badly but also partly because there have been other bad moderations today and it seems to be a trend with Slashdot that the moderations go alright for a while and then there's the occasional day where a bunch of people start getting unfairly moderated troll/flamebait and a bunch of crap gets moderated insightful/informative.

What would help? If moderations were public.

Someone wasted a mod point on a 9 day-old post just because it's linked from my signature. I feel honoured.