For those who have a server at home, there is now help in dealing with your children's emotional difficulties and the ridicule society faces. Stay At Home Servers has put together a book to deal with the problems kids face growing up with a server in the home. Do we have marketing in our kid's therapy though?

For balance to the story, another find of a linux box with a smile

Since the evidence against CherryOS is mounting up, and it's a lot more credible than SCO's briefcase, I've decided to push this campaign.

This idea is Blatently Stolen (irony intended) from a PearPC page that I've lost the URL for (claim credit for the idea if you like), is to link

<a href="http://pearpc.sourceforge.net">CherryOS</a>

CherryOS

I just realize that I got modded Offtopic for this post. I'm on /., so I've gotten a thicker skin about things, but this just annoys me. It's a joke about Virginia Tech, and considering the positing is heavily related to the Big Mac cluster housed here, it's closer to on topic than most of the posts.

translation for the non-VT perople who might read this (like there's anyone going to read my journal).

CNS=Communications Network Services - the "Network Nazis" No Port for You!

Srinidhi = The "father" of the Big Mac at VT, the faculty who is credited with the idea in the first place

The joke is on the parent's line "but I do work across the hall from one of the big guys in the project if that gives me and credibility?" That screams joking back.

so, my whining comes down to this:
If you don't get the joke, that doesn't mean it wasn't funny.

OK, I have this moderation dilema. Good post here:
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=130098&cid=10869912

with a correction here:
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=130098&cid=10869973

To avoid excessive karma, do mod the first up, and ignore the second, thus modding up 1 bad link, or do I mod up the second, thus not modding the OP with ine good link? Luckily, he's got a good posting history, so he's probably hit the karma cap, but I want to save my points. Sigh... I'm modding the first, but this is one reason why you should read the thread I suppose.

It's been a while since I've had any ideas worth putting up here, but I figure why not. I've got some friends on /., some from work, some from other places, etc. I would like to have a feature that will not only tell you when someone updates their journal, but will let you know when they post something in a discussion as well. Maybe with a mutual concent kind of thing to avoid easy trolling of one person. I don't bother to check my friend's pages and comment histories, and having a system message would be one way to do this.

There should be (and for all I know there may be) a way to send a message to a friend on /. w/o e-mail and w/o replying to something. Just a system message type thing. Not quick enough to be IM, but offline and in the context of /. as well.

Back to Doom 3

So if you have a bunch of friends, and you bitch about some abuse of the moderation in a JE, and one of those friends with mod points to burn happens to only read the discussion *because* you bitched in your JE, and your comment get modded up because of that friend, is that the JE system abusing the Moderation system, that abused the comment posted on the much abused Comment system?

In Soviet Russia, you abuse the moderators. No wait, that's on /.. Or is it ISR, moderators abuse you? No wait that's on /. too. Damn me and my looping logic!

Personally, I steer clear of the under/overrated, unless it's for something that's modded funny that I just don't find funny at all. That's not for when I don't get the joke, I just save it for the lame jokes. If I want lame jokes, I'll listen to my own sense of humor. I don't even know if underrated gives you a +1 or a -1. Replace both Over and Under with a -1 Wrong, Pointless, and Not-Funny and I'd be more content using them. I still prefer to mod things up, but sometimes you have to kick the goatse's down. I did find *one* goatse that was funny as hell, as it was so obvious, but yet so funny. It wasn't even trying to hide it, but like George Carlin and the 7 dirty words, you know he's going to be offensive and funny at the same time.

I also think you should be able to remove meta-mods result messages. I don't care what others think of my moderations. I don't think because of peer pressure, and viewing your meta-mod results is looking at what your "peers" think of your thoughts of other's thoughts. Of course there was that one time I modded someone "overrated" because I thought they were wrong, and got meta-modded unfair because it turns out they were right, but still, it's not like I could go back and fix my stupidity. No good came from telling me someone thought I was off. For all I know, they could have just objected to me using Overrated. Which brings me back to the Wrong moderation. Damn me and my looping logic again. I should go back to looking for that game FAQ again, and stop slashdotting when I'm not taking good enough cough medication.

And another thing...can you turn a long, rambling, nonsensical post into a JE of your own w/o a copy and paste? It just doesn't seem fair to do that, but I suppose I will to see if I'm embarrased by this in the morning, plus it's on my favorite topic: /. Improvements I wish I would make! Plus, I just love a good loop. Whick brings me back toNO CARRIER

I was disapointed when I found this and wanted to post a link to my journal, basically suggesting the same thing. Kind of a AOL me too, but it's a journal, so who cares if it's a lame post? When I was looking for the "reply" button, I saw that the journal had been " This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted."

Come on /., it's a journal, not a front page story. It's highly likely that a journal entry will turn into my favorite /. story which should beat all other stories for the Hall of Fame so just let the replying continue. The journal was less than a month ago!

I was about to hit "save" on the following entry, when I re-tried the link discussed, and it turns out the article is there. I still think there needs to be a -1 Wrong moderation, but I'll eat my crow, and please pass some salsa with that.

side note: I should start pondering the usefullness of having a pref in Slashcode to remove those annoying spaces in URLs that are displayed as straight text. I can read the URL, thanks, so I don't need to have /. fubar it up for me. I don't browse with IE and I have goatse pointed to localhost so I can't even accidentally see that lovely experience by accident. Read on to see why I'm eating this lovely meal:

Today I got meta-moderated "Unfair" for moderating a post "Offtopic" that contained basically a link to a 404 error. When I first modded this post, I was going to mod it up, since I was following the story and it seemed relevant. Turns out that the link didn't work when I went to copy and paste and remove the spaces from it. (When will /. just link the damn things? Annoying goatse trolls.) Since there is no -1 Wrong moderation that I wished for a while back, I knew when I decided to mod this one down (I hate modding down anyway), that I would eat it on Meta-mod by someone too lazy to check the link. *sigh*

This brings up another bit of /. I should learn Perl so I can write: The ability to pre-mod yourself down. Sometimes I post when I know it's off topic and whining when I post some things like the AC post, but there's no place else to post it, since I want to keep it public, so I don't want to move it to e-mail.

A sub-discussion would open the thread up to anyone who wants to view it and the history of where it came from, but can still keep things from being modded off topic. I know Karma whoring is common. I don't usually whore (exception), but I like readers to know who I am and to know where I come from, even though I'm adding to the noise. With the current system, this is why a lot of discussions turn into noise, even though they are interesting to the users involved in them. They know they're now off topic, but where else to you put them. On mailing lists, some make an additional list as a place to discuss certain things, but they rarely work out, and the discussions never leave the "home" list. Moving a discussion to a journal entry would be the same. None of the kids would come and play.

A break out discussion should be an easy concept for SlashCode, and would let people like me ramble, while keeping the signal to noise ration down. Not being able to do this has kept me from contributing a few comments, like this one that aren't quite on topic, but add something minor to it, since I don't want to add to the noise. (Turn it down out there!)

p.s. The joke is from Scrambled Eggs Super.

For that matter, it needs a +1 Ironc. Here's one of my posts, where no one got the irony at all. I'll even admit to being the AC in this tread to reply to my own posts. Good irony isn't just Funny, but it certainly isn't just Insightful, it's both.

I wish I could code Perl. /. modertion needs a "-1 Wrong" with an explaination, preferably just a URL (since you're moderating) where you can point to a reference why they are wrong (also for the meta-moderators to see the proof).