Our gutless PM, John Howard, has weighed in on US senator Barak Obama's stated plans to pull US troops out of Iraq if he is elected president.

"If I was running al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and pray, as many times as possible, for a victory not only for Obama, but also for the Democrats" [*]

Isn't this basically the same fear-mongering bullshit the Bush camp was using against John Kerry back in 2004?

Hey Johnny, you're three years behind in your pro-neocon rhetoric.

It looks like my most recent article has made it to the front page of OSNews. As usual, the comments got off to a rocky start with the requisite grouch making half-baked arguments. Other than the political sub-thread he started, the comments have otherwise been very positive.

All in all, I think the coverage is kind of cool. Wouldn't you agree? :)

Edit: Almost forgot! One poster was kind enough to provide a link to this little hack. (And I do mean *little*!) Smitty, I think that one is for you? ;)

In an accidental followup to David Brin's article Why Johnny Can't Code, I share my own experiences with introducing my son to a Commodore 64. The experience convinced me that older machines are just plain better at teaching than modern software and computers. Which would be sad, except that the Commodore 64 is perfectly positioned to make a comeback as an educational toy!

I couldn't get enough votes for my ugly fridge, even though it was advertised on Canada's top Conservative blog smalldeadanimals.com .

I did create a new eBay auction though for the Male Sterilization Kit that my girlfriend invented, and fortunately has no intention of ever using.

I'm using YouTube to market my campaign to get my Ugly Fridge "Cold Yeller" the most votes in a contest.
Help me out please and watch the YouTube video, send it to your friends, and vote for my fridge soon.

The last two days I've opened what I thought were duped articles, but they were Backslash articles by Timothy rehashing what was talked about yesterday on Slashdot. Slashdot is so short of stories that they talk about yesterday's stories knowingly now. I'm so short of journal news, that I'll write about Slashdot, who's writing about Slashdot.

I seem to have an enemy of sorts. From near the end of May I have been getting a lot of "Flamebait" mods on my comments. Now, some of those are probably fair. I don't post very many comments here, I find it just too "busy". I usually only comment when I see something I can really comment on, not just idle chatter. So perhaps a lot of my comments are somewhat heated. But there's clearly irregularities:

• This recent helpful comment was modded Informative. Thank you. Then some nutter responds with an unprovoked attack. Does he get modded down? Flamebait? Troll? Overrated? No. I respond and that gets modded Flamebait.
• In a discussion about IPv6 and 6bone someone suggested using 6to4 tunneling. I respond saying that when I traceroute the "anycast" address 192.88.99.1 it goes off to the US, and that I'd rather use AARNET's local tunnel broker service. This somehow got modded Flamebait.
• In a discussion about MS claiming the OpenDocument format was slow, I agreed with another comment and elaborated. Informative apparently, then flamebait.
• And finally, in a discussion about problems with mapping drive letters in Windows XP to Novel shares, I explained how DOS (and Windows 3) assigned drive letters to partitions. Oh, and an exclaimation that MS is still using drive letters in their OS's. Someone thought it was informative, but later it was modded Flamebait.

In a few of these cases I remember seeing "positive" mods pretty soon after I posted, with the flamebait mod coming much later. Which seems to suggest to me that someone is regularly checking my posting history to hand out Flamebait mods, rather than reading my comments in the normal discussion and reacting to them. And quite a few of them are pretty deep in the discussion, not top-level comments. So it's not likely that they'd normally read them.

To me, this just another step in the decay of Slashdot. This used to be a pretty nice place. My userid is 755, I am among the first users of Slashdot. I created this account some time back in '96 or '97 when Rob first added user accounts to Slashdot. Back then it was fun. Ask Slashdot was actually helpful. The discussion was much more paced and friendly. Now almost every story gets several hundred comments in a few hours and you have to be very quick to get in a comment that anyone will respond to. If you come "late" then your comment will lie undiscovered at the end where nobody reads, or modded "Redundant".

Which brings me to the moderation system. It was a good idea to start with: make good comments more prominent and bad ones less prominent. But like all things it is open to abuse. So meta-moderation was added in an attempt to reduce the abuse. But that doesn't seem to have worked well. And then there's the problem of Groupthink - the moderation system is like some sort of perverted democracy where people vote on what other people write. Democracy is good (usually) for choosing people, but not for judging individual comments in a public forum. People are basically encouraged to make comments that tow the "party line". But as always, popularity != correctness. As Slashdot attracted more "mainstream" users, I've noticed a number of alarming memes growing in popularity here. For instance, I thought the whole "Microsoft gets attacked more because more people use their software" nonsense had been dead and buried long ago, but now I not only see these comments being made here with little critical response, but modded up as well. It saddens me to see those sorts of comments being made. Now, I admit I've not the most level-headed guy when it comes to Microsoft, but I think it's clear that a good number of Slashdot users now are MS-apologists. And they are biasing the moderation system.

Well that's all I have to say for now. I didn't plan for it to turn into an anti-slashdot rant, but I guess that's just how I feel about Slashdot at the moment.

Well, it looks like Slashdot has a new comment system. If you're a subscriber, you can turn it on by smacking the checkbox at the top of a comments page.

Unfortunately, I give you about 5 minutes before you'll be smacking that checkbox back off. I don't know about anyone else, but I normally browse at +0 Nested. This gives me a clear view of the discussion, and allows me to quickly browse from comment to comment. Anything else (e.g. Threaded mode) tends to require too much clicking.

The problem is that this new scheme is nothing more than uber-threading mode. It allows you to see the highest rated comments, and/or fold up the comment listings of lower-rated comments. Which breaks up the discussion horribly. It might be nicer for people who *like* threaded mode, but for the rest of us it's not particularly useful. Even worse, it doesn't seem to save your changes. So everytime I go to a new story, I have to lower the threshhold to 0! Fixing this problem alone would increase the usablility by 100%.

Basically, it's a nice concept, but I can't seem to take a liking to it. Perhaps if the threading was a little less clunky, I might like it. One thing I hope they *don't* do is make the comments download via AJAX. When I use a laptop, I'll occasionally load a large page of comments and read them on the go. This can be nice for interesting topics that have generated a lot of comments while I wasn't looking.

If anything, I'd like to see the page overflow feature fixed first. The way the overflow works, comments can disappear into the ether if there are a large number of responses to a top level post. To actually see the comments, you need to muck around with the threading/flat/nested settings trying to find a way of displaying the info so that it doesn't overflow.

Final analysis: I love the attempt and I encourage Taco and Pudge to keep trying. Unfortunately, the current version isn't it. What do the rest of you think?

When it comes to Open Source games, it often seems like the selection is limited. Sure, everyone has played Tux Racer and Frozen Bubble, but what comes after that? The answer seems to be "not very much." Still, there are a few diamonds in the rough that have gone unnoticed by the majority of gamers. These are the games that you wish you existed, but are nearly impossible to find. In my latest article, I've collected a list of the top ten games that you've probably never played, but really wish you had.

After months of work, and several sleepless nights, I have finally moved. All the articles and your comments have been flawlessly imported to the new site. The Blogger.com site will soon redirect to the new site.

Don't think for a minute that my work is done on the new site, though. I have a lot of plans for expanding it. I'll update all ya' all as my plans for world conquest grow nearer.

Peace out.

One of us. One of us. A new Slashdottie.

Today's systems have hundreds of file formats they must support. Wouldn't it be great if we could reduce all the file formats in existence down to a single file format that could be supported across all systems?

My latest three-part article addresses this concept: The Intelligent File Format

If such a concept could be made into a standard, pressure could be put onto Microsoft and other large companies to support the format or lose massive government business. (See the recent pushes for the Open Document Format for a very real example of how this can work.)

I'd love to hear your thoughts and opinions.

I was seconds away from a first post, but even though I started out at +2, and expected to get up to maybe +3 interesting, I ended up down at -1 Troll. I've never had 29 comments posted on one single post of mine before, it's astonishing it's while I've spent some time at a low reading threshold value too then.
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=177585&cid=14729494

I think recently there are a few moderators hanging around that don't care for my "speak up" attitude, which is backed up by the higher number of AC trolls telling me to "shut up" in various ways, including slipping in Overrated moderations after the story is a day old. I think I may have struck a nerve too the other day with my remark that some Slashdotters place too little emphasis on building families and are short sighted to think that money is the cure to all ills later in life.

I got tired of not having a working PVR when I have an ATI AIW card, so I reinstalled Windows XP on my computer in free space. Now I am reinstalling my favourite software slowly, trying not to break the TV or hibernation features.

My cousin Brex has been adding some pretty funny stuff to his blog at www.lifeofbrex.blogspot.com too.