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User: juggler314

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  1. Re:I can juggle three ... on Juggling By the Numbers · · Score: 1

    Oh and at the time I could manage 6 - sort of, but I could do 3 in my right hand fairly well. So after someone complained about it being hard I'd do it one handed (in the same cascade pattern, not just up and down like a shower). Shut people up real good.

  2. Re:I can juggle three ... on Juggling By the Numbers · · Score: 1
    I used to teach people to juggle in college - and had similar stories - most people could manage at least a decent showing of the standard 3 ball cascade within a half hour at most - but every once in a while I'd come across someone that just couldn't learn - not sure why. .

    Interesting to note that I would start with just tossing one ball from hand to hand - as soon as you can do that consistently, try two (as in left, right, catch, catch, right left, catch catch, etc). again do that until they look the same in both directions and the heights stay the same and you don't drop them. Then go for all 3, usually starting is the hardest part, and you'll try it a few times before you get the first throw decent.

    Sometimes you have to have people stand right in front of a wall to teach them not to throw forward...

    I taught myself while home sick from school - took about a week. This was pre internet and I had no references at all other than 3 balls.

  3. Re:Have You Accounted for User Preference? on Options For Good (Not Expensive) Office Backbone For a Small Startup · · Score: 1

    I use LibreOffice on my computer while everyone else has MS Office - it's usually not a problem. The one thing Libre sucks at though is PPTs - now this is probably at least 1/2 the fault of the people that make incredible bad PPT's (bad here meaning bad underneath...lets not comment on artistic prowess for now). Opening anything beyond a very basic PPT usually results in terrible terrible things in LibreOffice.

  4. Re:Danger Google on Wikipedia Mobile Apps Switch To OpenStreetMap · · Score: 1

    I use Zimbra as the mail server for my company - it's quite the clone of google and open source (http://wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/Building_Zimbra_using_Perforce). I was amazed at how many of all those same nifty ajax-y features work on their web client as well. *And* it's now owned by vmware so it's got a strong corporate backer. The free version is not feature complete though - it has all the standard features, it's the enterprise level stuff they leave out (high availability, clustering, more advanced/faster search for super-large inboxes and a few other things - reasonable in my opinion).

  5. Re:Sometime the old ways on Ask Slashdot: How To Allow Test Takers Internet Access, But Minimize Cheating? · · Score: 1

    I took a high level graph theory class...and the professor told us that we could choose how we wanted the final to be: a)no references at all, b) open book (the book for the course) or c) open anything (bring any references you feel like).

    He then proceeded to explain that if we chose a) the test would be only require knowledge we had learned in class, b) the test would cover material that would not be answerable from the book or c) where he would choose open NP-hard questions and see how well we did reasoning through possible solutions.

    Not surprisingly we chose option a)

  6. Of course on What Happens When the Average Lifespan is 150 Years? · · Score: 1

    I always find it strange when discussing this and people (like my gf even) don't see why one would want to live a longer, or even unending life. I think you will always find things to do. And of course no one wants to live to 150 with the last 80 years being all dementia - this is only a thing to talk about if the life extension adds "good" or at least "passable" years. I'd take more aches and pains in exchange for an extra 70 years of expected lifespan in a heartbeat.

    The thing that will really piss me off is if I get to 80 or so, then they figure out the anti-aging tech, but I'm too old to use it. I want either to benefit from it or for it to still be "in the distant future" when/if I get old and die.

  7. Re:You have to have it on Ask Slashdot: Is Reverse DNS a Worthy Standard For Fighting Spam? · · Score: 1

    Oh and one more thing, I don't require incoming ptr checks on my mail server, as many have pointed out some people simply don't do it even if they should. The score will be weighted higher towards spam without it though.

  8. You have to have it on Ask Slashdot: Is Reverse DNS a Worthy Standard For Fighting Spam? · · Score: 2

    I didn't read every comment, but the general theme seems to be that it's not absolutely required to have a reverse DNS entry. While this is true per the RFC - it's incredibly bad in practice. Google MX check, run the checker and if you don't have reverse DNS it'll point it out. Also people that say not one mail has bounced because of this must simply be wrong. Many blacklists will auto-add you if they notice you don't have reverse dns, then many companies will pick that up. Last time i had to move my companies mail server, the reverse was inadvertently not setup properly - not only did this cause problems fairly quickly it was slow to fix because while you'll be added to blacklists instantly, getting back off them is a manual process - you have to find every one you are on and then the companies that have picked up this info then have to get the new info - and some don't do this in a timely manner.

    Running a real mail server for a real company without a correct functioning PTR record would be something that should get you fired.

    The reasoning is simple, anyone running a real mail server will easily be able to set it up, if you don't have the PTR it likely means you are a spammer or you are running a server at home. Not that there's anything wrong with running your own SMTP server, but that's basically how botnets send spam...so there's a heavy correlation to that and spam.

  9. Re:But How Many $$? on A Fifth of Telecommuters Work Less Than An Hour Per Day · · Score: 1
    I've only ever really worked jobs where results count. If what needs to be done takes 4 hours that week...it takes 4 hours, if it takes 60, it takes 60. If the president of company XYZ wants certain things done...and his employees get them done in less than 40 hour work weeks he has 3 choices:
    • 1) Fire people until everyone is working 40ish hours/week (and are unhappy)
    • 2) Keep coming up with more work to do until they are all working 40ish hours/week
    • 3) do nothing, keep raking in whatever money you are and have everyone else be happy with the work load.

    3 seems the smart choice to me.

  10. Re:But How Many $$? on A Fifth of Telecommuters Work Less Than An Hour Per Day · · Score: 5, Insightful

    More likely it's just that they get their "real" work done in 1 hour/day, respond to crap e-mails sporadically the rest of the day. I know plenty of people that waste 6+ hours/day with bureaucracy/meetings/chit chat/whatever at the office. It's just that when you work at home...you do the same work, and then watch tv, or tend to the lawn, or whatever the rest of the time rather than dealing with office bullsh*t.

  11. pfsense on Ask Slashdot: Best Connect Scheme For a 2-ISP Household? · · Score: 1

    If you can spare/build/whatever a machcine (and really it could probably be anything from the last decade), download pfsense, the installer pretty much works, the how-to's are very detailed. It's a mature stable product. It'll let you load balance your outbound connections as well as do everything a modern firewall does (you might, for instance, find being able to setup VPN on the box highly useful).

    If you don't know anything about networking it might be a bit daunting, but probably still within the realm of possibility given it's all gui based and the docs are detailed.

  12. on call on Is Finding Part Time Work In IT Unrealistic? · · Score: 1

    I would love to find some part time work, the problem is that the IT work that I do...really doesn't lend itself to just being somewhere a few hours. It's all stuff that requires you to at least be available on-call 24x7. Not that I usually have to work that much, but still if you are the network guy and the network breaks, you have to fix it, whenever that is. And if you have multiple clients, and they all have problems at the same time...well it could get ugly...

  13. Re:The ISPs are hitting internet radio too on Copyright Board Lawyer Responds On Pandora's End · · Score: 1

    also..internet radio isn't usually streamed at 128K - that's rather high...

  14. Re:Scrap Barry White on Party Ideas For Math Nerds? · · Score: 1

    This was our game of choice at school (engineering) http://www.webtender.com/handbook/games/whalestales.game we often threw in "mod" tails where you were allowed to say call 6 mod 4 instead of just saying 2. We'd also let in negative numbers. If you weren't lightning fast in deciphering the number you got called out. Pairing weird math for the numbers with "jet" tails (most of the annoying words gone, just calling out numbers) was always good for fun.

    This game, can be used to just destroy someone pretty damn fast. The newbie never knew what hit him...

    Sadly girls almost never played this game...not even the ones that liked math...

  15. Re:Radius? on AOL's Embarassing Password Woes · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Man I noticed this years ago, wish I had thought it was important enough to write up about then maybe I could have had my own slashdot posting!

    (and yes that...sickeningly...means I actually used AOL for some time...)

    I had a problem logging in to the AOL webmail because it *does not* truncate to the first 8 characters and I *thought* my password was longer than 8. Thus logging into the AOL app worked fine, but I had to manually truncate to 8 characters to get webmail working.

    I thought it was a problem on my end so I IM'd support. After a few painful minutes of trying to work with that moron I figured out what it was...and suggested they add it to their help notes for the next time someone calls in on it.

  16. Re:Where's the problem here? on University Bans Wireless Access Points · · Score: 1

    Actually they can't necessarily restrict your use of unlicensed spectrum. Just recently courts ruled that airports can't restrict businesses within the airport from setting up free access points. Even though the airport is leasing the space they can't restrict this access.

    Another common misconception about residential leases is that anything in the lease that is restricted is legal. Not true, landlords often put lots of things in leases that are blatently illegal to require/restrict. That's why the last clause of a lease is always "If any clause in this lease is invalid it will not invalidate the whole lease". Landlords are generally scum.

  17. CAN-SPAM works some if you are careful on Is the CAN-SPAM Act Working? · · Score: 4, Informative
    I was getting about 230 spam messages/day. A few weeks after the new year I decided to take the plunge and see if I could decrease it a bit.

    I basically tried to sort out which spams were legitimately adhering to the law (which wasn't too hard), and if anything was iffy I would fill out the unsubscribe link with a throwaway e-mail to see if I got spam from it.

    long story short 4 weeks later I'm getting about 170 spams/days. A decrease of 60 messages/day or about 25% less. Not a huge decrease, but noticeable.

    The big benefit though is that the spam that is left is more "spammy" than before - hence my bayesian filter has achieved a slighly higher success rate which is good.

  18. solar power on Laptop vs. Small Desktop: Best Bang Per Watt? · · Score: 2, Informative
    Many ppl on here have recomended using a laptop - that's fine, but ditch the power converter. Your solar cells are going to be putting out DC, you will lose much power converting that to AC, just to plug in an AC->DC converter for the laptop.

    Also if there's already some sort of battery or capacitor in the solar power setup don't even run teh laptop with the battery in - why waste any power charging batteries - just put them in every week or so to top off.

    Same goes for anything else, anything that runs on DC power you should hardwire to avoid the redundant conversions.

  19. Re:Maps for walking routes? on Best Online Mapping Site? · · Score: 1

    I'm convinced there must be some super-secret reason they don't. You could easily output walking directions by just by ignoring a few bits of data that are in the map db's. Ignore street directions and assume all streets are the same "speed" and *poof* you've got walking directions. If anything, the algorithm will just get faster. So there's got to be some underlying political or economic reason why they don't do it.

  20. Prior Art on Prince of Pop-ups · · Score: 1
    I personally wrote code for my company's website that did this exact "traffic management thing". I wrote that code at least as far back as late 1997 - checking with my boss to see how far back we can pin it.

    I hate this patent crap, it would be like a dream come true to be able to personally kill one...

  21. Bayesian Filter + Challenge Response on Earthlink Deploying Challenge-Response Anti-Spam System · · Score: 2, Interesting

    A number of folks have pointed out how this really doesn't work so well in a real world situation. This is pretty much true, there are myriad problems. What can work fantastically is a two tiered approach though: 1) Use a Bayesian filter to sort your mail however you want (for simplicity lets just say spam/not spam). 2) Forward all filtered mail marked as spam to your CR prog of choice - this chunk of mail should already be confirmed in the high 90%'s to be spam - the few false positives should get caught. The reason this works so well is that the Bayesian filter approach is pretty solid, but there's always a worry of a few important false positives sifting through. This gets rid of those. If you really want to go balls-out you could make use of a service such as spamgourmet.com for ordering processes. Whenever you order something where you are expecting some automoted return mail that might hit the Bayesian filter AND also not respond to the CR use one of the self destruct e-mails. You should never get more than 5 or so e-mails from an order anyway. You can then just filter everything from your bogus self destruct e-mails into a generic "orders" folder.

  22. Re:Right idea, wrong price on Review of iTunes Music Store · · Score: 1

    Everyone seems to think that the cost of a Datacenter, servers and bandwidth doesn't make a difference. It can easily cost several 100's of thousands of dollers/month to run a high volume website - and that doesn't even count the humans - or any R&D capital input in the first place.

  23. Re:Not an unprecedented idea... on Gamecube Finally Plays GBA Games · · Score: 1

    Yeah I thought there was a Genesis one too - but the carts were so much bigger and I'm pretty sure the TurboGrafx one was more advanced. I *almost* got one for christmas that year - but my dad just couldn't even find one in the store - even at $400 in 1994(?) it sold out everywhere. NEC did a bad job of marketing the system...classic.

  24. Re:Not an unprecedented idea... on Gamecube Finally Plays GBA Games · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Forgot to mention the one really great *reverse* system. The Turbographics (turbographix?) portable. That played every system game to full compatibility in full color and full resolution. So far ahead of it's time...poor turbographics. I loved that system, it had far better graphics than anything available at the time.

  25. Re:First sale doesn't apply? on Microsoft: You Need Permission to Sell Our Software · · Score: 1

    I believe there are in fact certain rights that you can't sign away. Constitutional rights are definitely in that group. I don't know if any other rights get that same treatment.