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Jeez, I really sounded like an a**hole :-P
Not the intended effect 
James
Sonork: Hasaki
"I left there in the morning
with their God tucked underneath my arm
their half-assed smiles and the book of rules.
So I asked this God a question
and by way of firm reply,
He said - I'm not the kind you have to wind up on Sundays."
"Wind Up" from Aqualung, Jethro Tull 1971
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James T. Johnson wrote:
Jeez, I really sounded like an a**hole
Oh good gosh no - I didn't see it like that at all.
But, no time to chat - I seem to have got the Pick Basic dudes all stirred up now...
Where will it end! 
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Hey Tim,
You're absolutely right - but at the moment it's sunny, it's Sunday, and I'm listening to some very smooth trance while making blueberry muffins.
Ping me on Monday 
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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Chris Maunder wrote:
making blueberry muffins
[homer]mmmmmmmm, blueberry muffins  [/homer]
I surprised my family this morning, I actually cooked breakfast! 
James
Sonork: Hasaki
"I left there in the morning
with their God tucked underneath my arm
their half-assed smiles and the book of rules.
So I asked this God a question
and by way of firm reply,
He said - I'm not the kind you have to wind up on Sundays."
"Wind Up" from Aqualung, Jethro Tull 1971
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Blueberries? In Canberra? I thought they just had canberries!
HA! Get it? Canberra - canberries?
Ok... well, whatEVER!
Like, tanks, eh. And resevoir.
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win32 has been added. Yell if you want more categories that are vaguely to do with Visual Studio development
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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Chris Maunder wrote:
win32 has been added.
You _are_ the best.
Chris Maunder wrote:
Yell if you want more categories that are vaguely to do with Visual Studio development
Hmmm... are you saying that 'Small shiny objects' might not be right up there on the must have list? Fair enough, seeing as how you refrained from adding 'Smooth trance'.
Mush tanks again.
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As long as you're working on CP.Net...
What if the article ratings showed the standard or average deviation along with the average? These values are pretty easy to calculate and can give you a good idea as to the accuracy of the beloved 'average' value.
If you're worried about scaring people away with terms like "standard deviation", you could calculate the StdDev then scale to a 1-10 range and call it something like "confidence" and represent it with a little graph or something.
Here's a little example:
Article A: 3,4,4,5,4,4,3,3,3,3,3,2,2,5,4,3,3
Article B: 5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,4,4,4,1,1,1,1,1,1
Take these two sets of hypothetical ratings, for example. They have the same average (3.41), but B should probably be considered a more highly-thought-of article. Those 1's in B look out of line with the the rest of the values - it should be rated much higher. The ratings for article A, though, make sense - it's mostly 3's and 4's.
A avg: 3.41
B avg: 3.41
Through the magic of Excel, we get the Average and Standard Deviations:
A AvgDev: 0.719
B AvgDev: 1.418
A StdDev: 0.870
B StdDev: 1.660
Each of these values is much higher for Article B. This confirms that the ratings for A are more consistent than those for B. You could interpret this to mean that A's average more accurately reflects the majority of its ratings than B's average does for B's ratings.
This is all basic statistics, nothing crazy.
And here's the "confidence" thing i was talking about. I'll just scale the StdDev to a 0.0 to 1.0 range.
A Confidence: 0.692
B Confidence: 0.412
Or, A's confidence is at 70% while B's is at 41%.
Conf = (2.83-StdDev)/2.83. 2.83 is the maximum StdDev for data in the range 1 to 5 (i think ).
(this "confidence" is just something i made up, it's not related to any real statistical calculation)
it's friday, i'm bored
-c
"What the hell are you getting so upset about? I thought you didn't believe in God".
"I don't," she sobbed, bursting violently into tears, "but the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be".
-- Joseph Heller
Smaller Animals Software, Inc.
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You could also confuse the hell out of everyone with the equation for calculating the standard deviation:
SD = √Σ(x - avg.(x))²/n
Chris Losinger wrote:
this "confidence" is just something i made up, it's not related to any real statistical calculation
There are such things as confidence intervals that allow you to represent your data. We can say that a random variable will fall within these two ranges of my dataset(SomeNumber, SomeOtherNumber) with XX% confidence.
These are calculations that have existed for a long time.
Nick Parker
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yeah, i knew "confidence" was a reserved work, so to speak, in statistics. i just didn't remember what it was for .
-c
"What the hell are you getting so upset about? I thought you didn't believe in God".
"I don't," she sobbed, bursting violently into tears, "but the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be".
-- Joseph Heller
Smaller Animals Software, Inc.
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No Problem, I forgot to mention in the last post that it was a really good idea. Thanks Chris 
Nick Parker
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This won't help if we get some idiot voting 10 1's. It's also going to add a lot of storage/processing time.
But - definitely something to think about.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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Chris
Instead of showing the average just show the total. Thus even a 1 is useful. If someone gives me a 1 my total still goes up. Don't show the number of votes or the average. The advantage with this is that now nobody can artificially bring an article down.
A nice total-count system is a lot better than an abused-average system.
And perhaps one more rule. Only members with at least 150 posts and 2 months of membership are allowed to vote. This helps to avoid the [sign up, vote, sign up again...] situations.
Regards
Nish
If I am awake and my eyes are closed, it does not necessarily mean that I am thinking of naked women.
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Nish [BusterBoy] wrote:
Instead of showing the average just show the total. Thus even a 1 is useful.
Good idea! At first i thought that sounded awful, since poor articles with lots of people voting would still get higher ratings than some good niche articles... But for a given category, the rating would still give a good impression of which ones were more favored - while at the same time reducing the rational for malicious down-rating of articles, since cross-category comparison would be useless anyway.
Nish [BusterBoy] wrote:
Only members with at least 150 posts and 2 months of membership are allowed to vote.
 150 posts sounds like a huge number. Ok, maybe not for you  . But still, isn't that maybe overkill?
Sometimes i only remember, The days when i was young
Nowadays no one remembers when they were young and stupid... ADEMA, The Way You Like It
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Shog9 wrote:
since poor articles with lots of people voting would still get higher ratings than some good niche articles
The point to be noted here is that poor articles wont get votes. Each vote counts. A 5 counts more than a 1, but a 1 still counts. Thus instead of 5 being excellent and 1 being poor we have 1 being good, 2 better, 3 still better 4 very good and 5 excellent. And a 0 [no-vote] means bad. If the total for an article is 0, it means that nobody found it useful.
Nish
If I am awake and my eyes are closed, it does not necessarily mean that I am thinking of naked women.
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Chris,
How can we control spam on here, just started to notice it, there have been several posting with the title "Excellent Free Technical eBooks", of course from an Anonymous user? 
Nick Parker
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Email me with the link and I'll nuke it. If it gets bad I'll ban their IP.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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Where can I start for Image processing?Is there any way in DirectX?
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did you try looking in the Bitmap and Palettes section???
-c
"Do you mind if I smoke?"
"Madam, I don't care if you burn."
-Oscar Wilde
Smaller Animals Software, Inc.
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Guna wrote:
Where can I start for Image processing?Is there any way in DirectX?
ROTFLMAO
Poor Chris.
Every post in this forum is mailed to him too
Nish
If I am awake and my eyes are closed, it does not necessarily mean that I am thinking of naked women.
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Welcome to my nightmare
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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DirectX is completely unnecessary - check out my articles in the GDI+ section, this GDI+ code is easily ported to C++.
Christian
The tragedy of cyberspace - that so much can travel so far, and yet mean so little.
"I'm somewhat suspicious of STL though. My (test,experimental) program worked first time. Whats that all about??!?!
- Jon Hulatt, 22/3/2002
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Chris,
Since we know that you are laboring so hard to get CP converted over to ASP.NET, I do have a question. Do you think that with the new version you will be able to automate the method to update articles? I am referring to the articles that have been moved outside the useritems section/folder.
Nick Parker
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Are you saying I'm slow? 
The issue with article updates is that some authors are more throrough in their formatting, spelling and grammer than others. All edited articles share the same look and feel and a minimum standard of readability. Allowing anyone to update the article text would mean standards would quickly fall.
However - updating the downloads is definitely something I can automate.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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Fair enough...
Chris Maunder wrote:
Are you saying I'm slow?
Never, just trying to think of some ways to make things easier for all.
Nick Parker
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