The 50 cap on Karma is very sensible, because otherwise we'd all end up with immense karma scores and the beneficial effect of the system would be diluted.

I must confess that prior to reaching a 50 limit, around about my 100th post, I felt more motivated to contribute. Since then, less so, but that isn't a bad thing because there is seldom a lack of good contributions on /.

There's an interesting edge effect pertaining to the 50 cap. If you have 50, then no matter how many people mod your articles up, the points have no effect, but if one person mods an article down, then (at least until next time someone mods you up) your karma score goes down.

There's an interesting discussion, in Stephen Jay Gould's Full House, of how a similar edge effect in nature can give the appearance of a pattern of a directional evolutionary force towards increasing complexity.

• Wirth's P machine
• Species longevity
• Useful slashsite for reading and annotating open books
• Amateur Action BBS criminal prosecution
• Some people thought this was funny

I had a look at the KernelNewbiesWiki. It looks a bit quiet, but I like Wikis for this kind of thing. I'm looking at Linux 0.01, and have written a

• Catalog of 0.01 Kernel components and a
• K ernel 0.01 Walkthrough.

Of course, documenting that ancient kernel doesn't prepare anybody to maintain the very different Linux kernels of later years, but 0.01 is very small and so it's a good place to start, and it has to overcome the same basic obstacles that any UNIX kernel faces during the boot process.

NTL recently introduced broadband to my area, a fact that they failed to tell me about. I found out about it a week or so ago and had them add the 512kbps package to my cable TV account--dropping my current ISP and my second phone line almost pays for the package, so it's a pretty good deal for me. Goodbye, 40kbps connections!

I had some mishaps, such as an ancient firewall that refuses to reboot, but nothing I can't deal with and nothing to do with the NTL service itself, which seems so far to be pretty solid. All you need is a spare ethernet card, a cable, a dhcp client and (for the other machines in the house) IP masquerading. I just transferred the firewall and masquerading duties to another machine that normally does another task.

Since the original firewall is now down and I was considering installing BSD on it anyway, the next step is obvious. I hope that BSD is kind to my old Pentium 90.

One bonus has been that my email configuration was on the old firewall machine, and I have missed a load of work-related email by the simple expedient of not transferring the configuration until I had a basic functional masquerading firewall, which is today. If they really needed me, they have my phone numbers. All in all, the quietest Christmas I can recall in nearly a decade, and I still have nearly a week of holiday left before I have to go back.

It's been a while since I last looked closely at Slashdot (so long that I had forgotten my original username, if I ever had one).

I like the way it looks now, because I can do journals without having to deal with all those messy user interfaces and then feeling obliged to keep it up.

I looked at Wikis as a possibility, but they're not really designed for journals, which are what I prefer, having been a USENET wonk for so long.