I was bummed out by the moderating of my post in a thread. My email notification showed the 'funny' rating being negated by an IMO undeserved 'offtopic' rating. I posted an appeal, and how satisfying it was to see subsequent moderations correct the situation! Thanks, whoever you were.

It's funny how important the slashdot 'karma' rating gets to be after you post a while. It's like the 'whuffie' in that story I read last year or so.

I am contantly having to clean up and repair the windows installations at work. The biggest problem is spyware, which users are always picking up. I use a combination of Ad-Aware, Spybot Search & Destroy, and Reg Mechanic.

Isn't it frustrating how easy it is for Windows to get messed up? The hard drive needs to be regularly defragmented--something which never has to be done under linux. Viruses & spyware need to be vigilantly removed and guarded against--again, something a linux user never has to deal with. The registry apparently keeps breaking, because it always needs repair.

Would people put up with a car that required this much upkeep?

The more I metamoderate, I am shocked at the posts I read here on Slashdot. During normal reading/posting, I don't see the modded-down posts, but when I metamoderate, I wind up wading through some truly dismal material.

I think java will begin to wane. I have long had the impression that the java community was hobbled to some degree by conflict & red tape. Now Bill Joy departs from Sun, MS completely drops their own bastardized JVM rather than fixes it, and mono/dotgnu put .net tech in the hands of Linux developers. I predict a slow decline in java dev, and growth in C#/mono/dotgnu/.net.