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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 7 declined, 2 accepted (9 total, 22.22% accepted)

Submission + - Reputation Engine - Best Practices for Information-Based Site?

GrantRobertson writes: For my graduate project, I am considering developing a web engine designed around sharing and organizing actual information in a way that people would actually like to and easily be able to use it. Unlike a wiki, the information will be much more granular with lots more metadata and organization. Unlike a web forum, the information will be be organized rather than dispersed throughout thousands of random posts, with little room for dominant personalities to take over. While I like Stack Overflow, I am planning far more structure. While I enjoy the entertaining tangents on Slashdot, I don't want those to take over sites created using my engine. Though I will say, any comments about mooing cows will get automatically upvoted.

Naturally, there must be some way to prevent armies of bots or just legions of jerks from derailing web sites created using this engine. Given that, what would you say are some good rules to include in the reputation engine for such a site. What kinds of algorithms have you found to be most beneficial to the propagation and spread of actual knowledge. What would you like to see and what have you found to be dismal failures?

Submission + - Best language for experimental GUI demo projects 1

GrantRobertson writes: "I am not a professional software developer and never have any aspirations to become one. I've been through a generic university computer science degree-program and I can tolerate C++ begrudgingly. I do OK with Java and prefer it, though I still have to look up every API before I use it. Most of the code I want to write will be not much more than prototypes or proof of concept stuff for the research I will be doing, rather than full-on applications ready for distribution and use. I can learn any language out there, if need be, but these days it is more about the ecosystem than the core language. IDEs, libraries, cross-platform compatibility, user support, open source licensing.

My research/tinkering will be along two main lines:
1) Devising entirely new graphical user interface elements, mostly in 2-D, though often in a true or simulated 3-D space. I am working on ways to visualize, navigate, and manipulate very, VERY large data-sets of academic research information.
2) Computer based education software, though of a type never seen before. This will combine some of the GUI elements invented in (1) as well as displaying standard HTML or HTML5 content via a browser engine.

My requirements are:
A) A decent IDE ecosystem.
B) A decent set of libraries, but ones that don't lock me in to a particular mind-set like Swing does in Java. (Boxes in boxes in boxes, Oh My!)
C) An ability to easily draw what I want, where I want and make any surface of that 3-D object become a source for capturing events.
D) Ease of cross-platform use. (So others can easily look at my examples and run with them.)
E) No impediments to open-source licensing my code or for others to go commercial with it either (as I have seen when I looked into Qt).

So, should I just stick with Java and start looking outside the box for GUI toolkits? Or is there something else out there I should be looking at?"

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