"Slashdot published a story about GCC 4.2.1 today. Although this minor update would otherwise be insignificant, it demonstrated the continuing decline of Slashdot. At least one trivial contributor is grumbling over this change and is publicly discussing telling Slashdot editors to take a flying fork at a rolling moebius strip and abandoning Slashdot forever. How will the cynical manipulative Slashdot sellout editors handle the tabloid revolt?"

<RANT>
YO! MODS! The 'offtopic' mod exists for a reason. PLEASE use it.

I read at +3 with no other adjustments and, as an example, I was reading 24-hour Test Drive of PC-BSD and, as always, it's all about Macs and Windows and Linux and what makes up an 'operating system' and about other BSD derivatives and essentially anything but 'Why yes, I tried PC-BSD and here are my experiences' or 'Here is what I think PC-BSD means for computer technology as a whole' or 'The article was very (well|poorly) written and here is why'.

Macs rool! Linux isn't an 'operating system'. Free desktops have failed - netcraft confirms it!

Aaaarrrggghhh!!!

Cookie cutter posts - I read one line and I know where the next two-three large paragraphs are going because they are always the same. (Maybe this should also call for more use of the 'redundant' mod which should have a global context, and not just a thread context.) These would suck if they were on-topic, but it's unbearable when they don't even relate and just follow the usual skew introduced whenever someone mentions Apple/Mac/OSX/Jobs - even, as is often the case, as a cheap joke.

And awaaay we go!

I'm sick of it.
</END RANT>

Incidentally, I have tried PC-BSD. It installed easily, performed well on my hardware, though this is only anecdotal, and was fairly slickly done. It went out of its way to make Windows users comfortable, however, with reboots, install wizards, and whatnot and, since I'm not a Windows user, it made me uncomfortable. I'd recommend it to anyone who was a Windows user looking for an alternative but would figure most any other non-Windows user (BSD, Linux, or other) should probably stick with what they've got or try something else.

TFA was gratuitously split into two pages to pump up the advertising revenue and didn't go into a whole lot of details, but was concise and informative enough and fairly written. The one criticism that occurs is that it credits a supposed PC-BSD concern with stability for the fact that PC-BSD's software is not cutting edge. It actually was pretty close to current when 1.3 was released and I don't think PC-BSD is primarily concerned with stability - it is aimed at end-user desktops, after all - but is simply an indication that the 1.3.x series is kinda old, indicating that there may be manpower or release engineering problems. Just a guess, but seems more plausible than the article's explanation.

I've been reading Slashdot for quite awhile now. It has its ups and downs in terms of story quality. And, naturally, the weekends can be lame. But I don't think I've *ever* read as few stories and been as bored by the summaries I do read, as I have since they rolled out the new CSS'ed Slashdot. And this has been over more than the weekend, so that's not it.

Never posted a journal entry like this before, either, but it'd be off-topic on most any story and I finally just *had* to say something. I want my pre-CSS Slashdot back. The old look had a vibe of inspired crazed amateurism. This looks nice enough, but is uninspired dull 'professionalism'. And it *must* be coincidence... unless the push to CSS and the story suckage both indicate OSTG is leaning hard and gunking up the works now... but the stories are dull - or worse - as well.

Still, fingers crossed: this is probably just another temporary spell and Slashdot will climb back up to its *normal* level of suckage soon. ;)

I blew my mod points recently and don't have any when I really want them. (Cosmic law.)

I'm not sure if this is #1 in my bullet points for a Computing Manifesto, but it's certainly way up there: The centralized computing model was broken, power was now in the hands of the people.

Added another friend. Brilliant discerning shades-of-gray post with astute character evaluations. Don't agree that even open source is salvation, but it's closer and the Gates/Jobs/Google stuff is dead on.

This being the post in question.

I think I figured out this friends thing awhile ago - that you can weight your friends differently with the 'mod bonus' and so on. This seems kind of inappropriate to me. If you weight your 'friends' down that's penalizing them and potentially missing their comments. If you weight them up, then you end up just listening to yourself think, instead of getting new insights. I mean, you could be challenged by what someone posts and make them your friend and weight them higher but then it's a past-tense judgment. You're still making yourself more likely to hear more of what you've already 'approved' of, in *some* way, shape, or form, in the past. And if you don't weight them one way or the other, then I still don't see the point.

So I don't weight anybody at all and don't automatically ignore ACs and so on. But I do go ahead and punch the friendly buttons when I feel friendly. *g*

Anyway - enough of the self-referential slashdot navel-gazing. Maybe I can figure out what *journals* are for next.

Added my first friend today (does this make me a fan? Is that how this works? I RTFA, but my memory sucks) because of this splendid post. I've been lurking at /. for quite some time, then registered and got into modding and occasionally posting, but never really got into this journal and friends/foes stuff. Been tempted to before, but this was too good. Not having any mod points at the moment (and seeing's how it was appropriately +5 already), I felt like shuffling some /. bits in a positive direction somehow.