Well, part of one.

I wrote this post that comments on abuse of the word "troll". I guess it was inevitable that it should be modded down as "troll"!

If you block banner ads, you'll have missed the recent series of ads on Slashdot from Lane Bryant, a clothing chain that caters to "plus size" women. There have been a lot of ads, mostly for, uhm, intimate garments. I wonder what that's about? Or maybe I don't want to know!

I recently made this post, asserting there was no such thing as an "analog disk". Several people responded to point out the flaws in my logic, all of them describing real-world technology that contradicted my theory.

Not a big deal. Except my post continued to accumulate "informative" mods after I admitted I was wrong! Now that's sad.

Here's my recent post about Google and their permanent betas. The mods follow a common pattern: quickly modded up, then eventually modded back down with the usual cowardly "overrated".

I don't give a shit about the mods. (And as usual, I ask people not to waste their mod points "fixing" the situation.) But something else does bother me. A dozen or so people responded, and not a single one of them seems able to grasp the idea that I admire Google, but am still critical of their screwups. Apparently you're only allowed to love or hate.

Moderations for a recent post. Not a good day for the mod system, since most of the mods seemed to be based on whether or not the moderator agreed with me.

Maybe it's time we injected some honesty into the system, and changed "troll" to "stupid"!

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Rather appropriate, posted to RMS to Move Into Bill Gates Building Today, has been moderated Insightful (+1).

It is currently scored Insightful (2).

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Rather appropriate, posted to RMS to Move Into Bill Gates Building Today, has been moderated Insightful (+1).

It is currently scored Insightful (3).

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Rather appropriate, posted to RMS to Move Into Bill Gates Building Today, has been moderated Interesting (+1).

It is currently scored Insightful (4).

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Rather appropriate, posted to RMS to Move Into Bill Gates Building Today, has been moderated Overrated (-1).

It is currently scored Insightful (3).

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Rather appropriate, posted to RMS to Move Into Bill Gates Building Today, has been moderated Funny (+1).

It is currently scored Insightful (4).

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Rather appropriate, posted to RMS to Move Into Bill Gates Building Today, has been moderated Insightful (+1).

It is currently scored Insightful (5).

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Rather appropriate, posted to RMS to Move Into Bill Gates Building Today, has been moderated Troll (-1).

It is currently scored Insightful (4).

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Rather appropriate, posted to RMS to Move Into Bill Gates Building Today, has been moderated Insightful (+1).

It is currently scored Insightful (5).

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Rather appropriate, posted to RMS to Move Into Bill Gates Building Today, has been moderated Overrated (-1).

It is currently scored Insightful (4).

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Rather appropriate, posted to RMS to Move Into Bill Gates Building Today, has been moderated Troll (-1).

It is currently scored Insightful (3).

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Rather appropriate, posted to RMS to Move Into Bill Gates Building Today, has been moderated Insightful (+1).

It is currently scored Insightful (4).

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Rather appropriate, posted to RMS to Move Into Bill Gates Building Today, has been moderated Insightful (+1).

It is currently scored Insightful (5).

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Rather appropriate, posted to RMS to Move Into Bill Gates Building Today, has been moderated Overrated (-1).

It is currently scored Insightful (4).

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Rather appropriate, posted to RMS to Move Into Bill Gates Building Today, has been moderated Troll (-1).

It is currently scored Insightful (3).

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Rather appropriate, posted to RMS to Move Into Bill Gates Building Today, has been moderated Insightful (+1).

It is currently scored Insightful (4).

This post got 4 "funnies" and a "troll". It's nice to have my humor appreciated, but it's the "troll" I truely find flattering!

After 15 months of unemployment, I finally got a writing contract. At Adobe no less. Not a lot of money (in fact, my entire pay will certainly be consumed by some endodontal work I need), but darn, I was sick of not working. And it's plain old nitpicky API writing, which I dearly love to do.

I got this job partially because of my experience with API work at Borland, but mainly (I think) because I had some heavy experience with JavaDoc, which experience translates nicely to working with Doxygen. Doxygen is supposed to be a language agnostic answer to JavaDoc, but in practice it's mainly used for C++. To support other languages, you need to writer a parser. (JavaDoc uses the Introspection API to pull signatures out of Java class files, so it doesn't need to do any real parsing.)

I actually have some technical issues with Doxygen. It generates some very weird HTML. And the way it generates XML (assembling all the markup strings by hand, instead of using a standard API, such as SAX) makes me very nervous. But Doxygen's markup language is 10 times more powerful than JavaDoc. And JavaDoc doesn't even do XML. Wouldn't be very hard to do. Except certain people with the Java Division happen to be painfully XMLphobic. Which is why ... (bites tongue until it bleeds).

This post just got an upmod. Hey, I appreciate the compliment, but I wrote that 4 days ago -- it's much too late to affect the visibility of the story. Besides, the story only has 24 posts, so visibility isn't that big an issue in any case. A wasted mod point, in other words.

Moderators need to concentrate more on raising the visibility of good posts (and helping bury bad ones), not on rewarding people they agree with.

My latest batch of moderations contains 15 upmods and no downmods. How embarrassing!