Well, yeah, that's the whole point behind the eBay feedback system.

Precisely! Though I've heard that ebay's system isn't as good as users would like it to be.

As you said in the article, any ratings system can be manipulated. Search engine optimization also comes to mind.

The significant difference between what you propose here and what happens on eBay is that both parties get to critique each other on eBay, so a buyer, for example, won't want to provide negative feedback to a seller unless he or she doesn't mind receiving negative feedback in return.

I don't know if you could construct some sort of method for trending user responses to determine if there were certain "bad apples" you needed to cull or not....

Good point. The reputation-management system would help to keep writers in check. But it would be better yet if it could also keep readers in check -- to ensure they don't mod down stories that are truthful, and vice versa. That strikes me that it might well be possible, if you had a karma-like system (viz. Plastic or Slashdot).

This all makes me think of the sites mentioned (Plastic, Slashdot, et al) as pioneers of the reputation management frontier - what can be learned from communities like them will eventually lead to systems which work better, which are fairer and more efficient. Evolution which will lead eventually to reliable decentralised media.

Very good, I give this thread and the accompanying article a credibility of 9 (of 10).

Funny how these abstract, almost antiquated and chivalrous ideas like reputation, credibility (and taste, eventually) will be quantified as we digitize our society. I can see rep and cred being like platinum itself and a source of "wealth".

I am all for it as I see it now, we may end up making saints of ourselves through utility: A concept for which I have been arguing inversely (that honesty/credibility/reputation lead one to be more functionally whole).

Did you mean to refer to "decentralized media" as a sub-culture, or as a description of the future of all media?

There seems to be a future in which there is a decentralized, ad hoc media network composed of hundreds of localized reporting hubs (or blogs, sites, whatever your term). This decentralized media uses the least expensive available bandwidth and resources, and by its nature is somewhat random.

This is in direct opposite the existing massively centralized media network that uses the most expensive bandwidth and resources and is of limited diversity.

But je digress. Theoretically ...

O.K. Clive -- it's now clear that you are the author of all those Frank Magazine articles with the phrase je digress in them. That would make it 80% of those articles, nicht wahr?

Ahahahha!

I love Frank.

Good points all above -- about the role of credibility in a new landscape of media. Yes, I've wondered whether Plastic/Slashdot/ebay et al have created something that other people will copy. The barrier to this stuff being used in traditional media is that too many traditional journalists don't want input or feedback from readers. The higher you go up the journalistic totem pole, the less likely the people are to give out their email addresses. They'll contact you if they want to hear from you, thank you very much.

The "well-off Manhattenite" bias is why I also read things like Street Roots, a newspaper whose writers and vendors are (mostly) homeless people.

That's an incredibly cool site!

Where can I find more information about this ?

Nice site. thx.

That gives us a pretty good starting point to understand a lot more about variables, and that's what we'll be examining next lesson. Those new variable types I promised last lesson will finally make an appearance, and we'll examine a few concepts that we'll use to organize our data into more meaningful structures, a sort of precursor to the objects that Cocoa works with. And we'll delve a little bit more into the fun things we can do by looking at those ever-present bits in a few new ways.

Inside each stack frame is a slew of useful information. It tells the computer what code is currently executing, where to go next, where to go in the case a return statement is found, and a whole lot of other things that are incredible useful to the computer, but not very useful to you most of the time. One of the things that is useful to you is the part of the frame that keeps track of all the variables you're using. So the first place for a variable to live is on the Stack. This is a very nice place to live, in that all the creation and destruction of space is handled for you as Stack Frames are created and destroyed. You seldom have to worry about making space for the variables on the stack. The only problem is that the variables here only live as long as the stack frame does, which is to say the length of the function those variables are declared in. This is often a fine situation, but when you need to store information for longer than a single function, you are instantly out of luck.

These secret identities serve a variety of purposes, and they help us to understand how variables work. In this lesson, we'll be writing a little less code than we've done in previous articles, but we'll be taking a detailed look at how variables live and work.

We can see an example of this in our code we've written so far. In each function's block, we declare variables that hold our data. When each function ends, the variables within are disposed of, and the space they were using is given back to the computer to use. The variables live in the blocks of conditionals and loops we write, but they don't cascade into functions we call, because those aren't sub-blocks, but different sections of code entirely. Every variable we've written has a well-defined lifetime of one function.

Seth Roby graduated in May of 2003 with a double major in English and Computer Science, the Macintosh part of a three-person Macintosh, Linux, and Windows graduating triumvirate.

To address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.

These secret identities serve a variety of purposes, and they help us to understand how variables work. In this lesson, we'll be writing a little less code than we've done in previous articles, but we'll be taking a detailed look at how variables live and work.

A variable leads a simple life, full of activity but quite short (measured in nanoseconds, usually). It all begins when the program finds a variable declaration, and a variable is born into the world of the executing program. There are two possible places where the variable might live, but we will venture into that a little later.

The rest of our conversion follows a similar vein. Instead of going through line by line, let's just compare end results: when the transition is complete, the code that used to read:

The most basic duality that exists with variables is how the programmer sees them in a totally different way than the computer does. When you're typing away in Project Builder, your variables are normal words smashed together, like software titles from the 80s. You deal with them on this level, moving them around and passing them back and forth.

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