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Comment Women crave Feedback (Score 3, Interesting) 579

There are no "likes" for Wikipedia edits, unlike Pinterest or Facebook posts.

Women are social creatures and require a feedback loop to keep contributing. Perhaps if we applied gamification to Wikipedia we might get a more balanced participation as the participants would receive some feedback (positive acknowledgements, achievements, whatever) to keep them motivated to contribute.

Comment Same tech, but as a normal heatsink (Score 2) 171

I would rather have a normal heatsink (in popular form factors) for CPU and GPU out of this material. You would still want airflow through your case, or even on top of the heatsink, but RPMs of those fans would hopefully be much lower, making much less noise.

Silent is a noble goal, but I would be happy to use standard cases and components being very quiet.

Comment Re:I made the switch (Score 2) 143

If you show them a few good ones they will want more, but I wouldn't start to rewrite all the legacy code.

This. Submitter should build a few small projects that give a different end result than the current code base. If you're just swapping R for SAS but delivering the exact same output, no management will care. The sample projects either needs to report the data in different ways, or visualize the data, or even as this parent suggested, simply provide a copy of the output as a spreadsheet.

Innovation will come by thinking about the problem differently and exploring different ways to ask questions to gain insight into your business. If you're just crunching the same numbers, don't bother. For the submitter personally, it's great to learn R and Python, but don't expect an organization shift unless it provides something unique.

Comment A great book for learing D3.js (Score 2) 50

I'm not affiliated with the author in any way, but I did buy the book (though you can get it for free).

This is an amazing resource for someone new to D3.js's declarative javascript and helps you put it all together: https://leanpub.com/D3-Tips-an...

After using D3.js, I've come to the conclusion Mike Bostock is awesome! But it doesn't stop there, people have expanded it like Crossfilter and dc.js.

Tech that allows a javascript n00b like myself to build a simple race results visualization.

Comment Re:Not a surprise (Score 1) 62

I did have to re-add the slashbox... but as I was too lazy to setup an RSS feed or even manually load the page, the slashbox was my portal to freshmeat.

I used to frequent it much more often back in the day, when I had time to explore and experiment with software. Still, there's always something interesting there to someone.

I even have an old Freshmeat.net black tee shirt from back in the day, with a fun "nutrition facts" label. Can't find even a close pic online.

Here's a random snapshot from circa 2000: http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/.vhost/...

Comment Re:Not a surprise (Score 2) 62

Freshmeat / Freecode wasn't about downloads, it was about release announcements and new project announcements.

I still have a slashbox configured, which I've used a few times in the past several months to learn about new projects that I'd otherwise have never learned about.

Submission + - GPS Fitness Data Sold to Oregon Transportation Dept

nullchar writes: The Oregon Department of Transportation has signed up for the Strava Metro GPS service for $20,000 USD. Strava is a mobile fitness app used by cyclists and runners to track their performance with GPS. Strava says the data set of over 300 billion GPS points it has collected worldwide are anonymized and aggregated to protect privacy. Oregon wishes to use the data to enhance it's bike lanes.

The active.com article poses some interesting questions (beware annoying "More:" links between every paragraph):

Strava pulls in position and speed data so accurately that it can often be used to identify what lane a cyclist is using on a particular road. With such accuracy, could the government use Strava data to figure out if a cyclist ran a stop sign or a stoplight? Could it be used in the event of an accident involving a vehicle to map a cyclist's behavior prior to a collision? This is just speculation, as the data is intended to be anonymous.

It would be easy for them to create a database of Strava's user-created "segments" to identify "hot spots" where cyclists may be riding in especially aggressive fashion. In his piece in Bicycling magazine on the Strava-related death of Kim Flint in 2010, David Darlington compared some of the site's "KOM" segments to illegal street racing. He even showed how easy it is to identify cyclists breaking the law by finding several KOM segment leaders who recorded speeds in excess of the posted speed limit.

Submission + - TrueCrypt is dead? What now? 7

Archeron writes: A colleague visited Truecrypt.org today and brought this to my attention. All the links are gone and the front page contains the message:
"The development of TrueCrypt was ended in 5/2014 after Microsoft terminated support of Windows XP." It goes on to list migration instructions. Is this the end for our beloved open source, multi-platform crypto solution? The question is what now? Planned forks? Any recommendations for freely available, open and multi-platform solutions that will allow for moving storage devices from Linux -> Windows -> Mac?

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