My old man drives a 797 at a coal mine in Central Queensland - top speed unloaded is 60km/hr. I don't define that as "incredibly slow", as it's a damn sight faster than you can run.
Got a photo around here somewhere of him and his truck- he's 6ft tall, and standing next to the truck, his hard-hat is level with halfway up the hub of the front tyre.
Top speed loaded is 40km/hr, but that is because the tyres cannot take the higher speeds - they overheat and blow. When a tyre is $35,000 and it blows, that's not good. When it's pumped to it's normal pressure of 130PSI and the truck is parked anywhere near people when it goes off, that's definitely very,very bad.
Considering the inertia involved, they are pretty much unstoppable by cars, buildings,etc if at speed - they will mow right over the top of your average 4x4 and not even notice. A guy where he works ran over an (empty) Toyota Landcruiser troop carrier one night - swung around in a loop to dump, backed up towards the face, felt a bump "like coming up against a little ridge of dirt" (his words) , put the foot down a little, reverse to face, dump load, drive forward a little, get out of the cab for a smoke, look down in front of the truck.... what's that down near the front wheel? Oh, crap.
But anyway, I've worked on more autonomous stuff than this.
Sandvik (and Cat) have systems for underground mines that are pretty much fully autonomous. Sandvik and their Toro loaders can do a full circuit in auto, driving using laser rangefinders to map the walls, update their location on an internal map and basically do all the work except actually dig the bucket of ore. They do traffic control (one loader waits for another at intersections), collision avoidance, the whole shebang.
So one guy can operate three or four loaders at once, as all he does is take control of a loader at the ore pile, dig a bucket, then set it loose to go and dump that load automatically elsewhere. Meanwhile another loader turns up and sits idle at the ore pile waiting for him to take control. It's Management's wet dream - no need for trained underground operators on $55/hr, get some 17 year old in a control room on the surface at $20/hr running 4 loaders.
If ore wasn't so tricky to dig out (irregular sizing is the problem), they'd be full auto by now.
I get something similar on the main page that completely glues up firefox for 20 seconds or so. Can't switch tabs, window doesn't redraw if I switch away and then back to firefox, it's completely stuck.
Been happening now for a month, and only on/. - it's getting a bit tedious.
Anyone else seen this? Firefox 2.0.0.14, moderately stock eeePC distro, no plugins except for adblock.
IE-only suggests incompatibility with text browsers, which - coupled with text-to-speech - blind people use a lot.
I'm sure there will be some "enabling" law on your books that says that people providing a service must cater for people with disabilities, much like shopping centres need to provide things like disabled parking and wheelchair access.
So, pass their web site on to any one of a number of organisations that cater for people with disabilities - they should be able to help make it more accessible.
(I was going to mention to run it through Bobby yourself, but I see that it was commercialised some years ago. Bummer.)
The Therac-25 machines are a totally different issue from CRT x-rays.
Firstly, it should be noted that x-rays are given off when high energy electrons from the electron guns strike the metal shadow mask near the front of the picture tube. X-rays are produced as the metal atoms in the shadow mask are excited by the electrons and then drop back to their ground state, releasing an x-ray. 99% of the x-rays produced are back-scatter - that is, they go in the direction of the back of the tube, as that side of the shadow mask is the bit that's getting hammered.
Secondly, to make a decent amount of x-rays, the applied voltage needs to be a fair bit higher than what is normally used in a colour picture tube to generate the image. The O.P. said it was faulty, perhaps it could have generated it. But there are normally multiple protection circuits on the EHT that prevent this (as in, they go "phut" before the voltage gets that high and the monitor shuts off/never works again).
Thirdly, the back of a picture tube is heavily shielded, with a lead/metal coating. X-rays can still get through, but at the power levels needed for escaping x-rays to actually physically hurt, it would result in the instant destruction of the monitor.
Finally, if the O.P. was feeling a thousand needle points of pain from the monitor for 15 seconds or so, you're probably looking at a rather heavy dose of radiation. One hopes that they've seen a doctor about it.
Tried getting panning working? I whipped up an app for my 701 eee (based on i810pan) to do this. Gives you 1024x768 panning, which is rather handy. i810pan needs software cursors enabled which buggers up hardware acceleration, hence my version.
It's still a little clunky round the edges, but it works and fills a need for me.
I turn it on when I need to use big-screen apps - mainly VirtualBox and XP for development for a particular embedded device, but Google maps is definitely another reason for it.
I'm still busy just getting Xorg to pan again, after the Xorg devs decided that it wasn't the X server's business to pan a viewport around a virtual screen and the window manager should do it. Never mind the fact that a virtual desktop has been present in X for a Very Long Time Now, or that current window managers don't do panning as they expect X to do it.
Thanks guys, I really enjoy my 800x480 eeePC so much more for your decision.
So basically, you could never apply these speed increases to a generic distro.
Oh come now! Never say never! You could:
- Boot with modular kernel. - Probe devices and get a list of loaded modules. - Recompile kernel with said modules built-in. - Boot with that kernel from now on.
It's relatively scriptable - in fact, I think there's a "probe loaded modules and generate new.config" script already about the place. If the user is unwilling to wait for a kernel recompile during install, just stick with the modular kernel and incrementally compile during idle time.
It's trivial. I'd code it up myself, but I'm a little busy at the moment, you understand.
Sorry, your attempt at being authoritative has completely failed for me. You can't just throw out statements like this without at least trying to back them up with facts (or at least plausible assertions).
you want a LITTLE BIT of swap in all cases.
Why? A little bit of swap does SFA if some big memory-hogging app gets loaded.
for netbooks (asus eee pc) I recommend 128mb of swap (max).
Why? With a SSD that has speedy reads and sluggish writes, you might as well not have it and just get more physical ram if you find your apps keep getting suddenly terminated.
for most laptops up to 256mb swap is more than enough.
Why? With 2GB of ram becoming more common on laptops, an extra 10% does SFA.
I've seen a good many starter motors broken because of a good swift thwacking too.
Newer reduction drive starter motors have permanent magnets for the field, which are fragile. Thwacking the body of the starter motor generally cracks them and ruins the starter. If you can hold the starter for your V8 in the palm of your hand, it's a reduction drive unit.
If you're going to thwack a starter, thwack carefully. Aim for the end cap where the brushes are, or the solenoid body and just give it a few firm taps. Don't just go to town with a four-pound hammer.
Incidentally, your sig gives me a feeling of deja-vu....
I have to wonder if the "99 other" incidents was where something just fell over after the "evil" IT guy left and Management just assumes it was malice.
I agree the school policy is not well thought-out. It's hard to determine the circumstances of how it came about - perhaps they were sick of drunken vomiting students and hoped that this would slow them down a bit.
A guy I used to know - he had a son who was 19. Drank a 40-ounce bottle of rum for a $50 bet from a friend at a party. Threw it up in fifteen minutes, with much laughter from his friends, wound up dead about 45 minutes later. His dad went around to the friend's place the next morning and asked for the $50. Said it was one of the hardest things he ever did, but he said it had to be done, just to reinforce the stupidity of his death to his son's friends. A lot of them stopped the binge-drinking after that, but a few years later the younger crowd were at it again.
Everyone thinks when they're young that they're indestructible and will live forever. I guess it takes a couple of shocks for that to wear off:-(
Here's the thing - drinking is not like flicking a big switch from "sober" to "alcoholic poisoning". There's plenty of middle ground for a happy drunk who won't need a visit to the hospital later.
If you're needing a visit to the pharmacy in the morning for asprin because the Big Brass Band in your head is keeping time to your heartbeat, that's a sign that you shouldn't quite go so far next time.
But (sigh) kids see it as a rite of passage to get wasted and completely lose control of their bodily functions. It was fun for me,I guess - but only once. Speaking now with the added experience of age, it's a waste of money to go that far if all you'll be doing is hurling everything back up again in short order.
It's the vibe I got off said rep I was trying to enumerate. It smacks of a nasty mix of Political Correctness, Censorship and slowly turning up the heat until your boiling the unsuspecting frog.
"Today, We don't like knives. Get rid of all the knife vids - don't want anyone to know about the dangerous knife."
What's next?
"Today, We don't like fatty food. Get rid of all the deep-fryers, so that people can't die of heart failure."
Wait, I think a few US states have done that one already....
If you attend U.F. and go to the hospital for alcohol poisoning you will be expelled from school, so instead of getting medical care students risk possible death to avoid being kicked out of school.
Here's a crazy idea that just might work:
Put the beer bong down and don't get alcohol poisoning in the first place.
'I would like to see other internet service providers follow suit to reinforce our message that violence will not be tolerated either on the internet or in the real world,' she said.
First it's guns, then it's knives, then it's drunken louts with their angry fists, then it's "unsavoury behaviour" in the street, then it's public demonstrations/rallies, then it's any dissent at all.
Only things with zero rest mass can reach the speed of light. Protons have a rest mass (1.67261 x 10-24 grams ) which increases as velocity increases by the equation
m / sqrt(1 -(v^2/c^2))
From the equation you can see that as velocity increases towards c , the mass increases asymptotically. If you use the same constant force to accelerate with, the rate of acceleration approaches zero as you approach c.
So if you're using particles with mass, you can never quite get to the speed of light. No doubt the LHC can accelerate them to pretty close to c though.
All modern computers will shut off the fuel injectors if:
- The throttle position sensor reads 0% / idle
and
- Engine RPM is significantly above idle RPM (1500RPM or so, usually).
Regarding your Volvo, it should, unless it's got one of the very first systems in it. Seeing it's an '89 model, it should have a relatively smart engine computer in there. (compared to the near-analog early Bosch Jetronic systems, where a simple weighting of ECM inputs gave injector output.)
If you're careful, you can often pick up the small 'kick' that happens when fuel injection begins again. Coast down towards idle RPM uphill and your should be able to sense it.
It's common in certain parts of the world to use the word 'period' (or the phrase 'full-stop') to emphasise a statement like that. It indicates and strengthens the fact that there's nothing else to consider.
The statement :
"How in the world do you have this much phone sex, period?"
Is relatively acceptable. The "period" indicates that to have this much phone sex, you must have to do it to the exclusion of everything else - sleeping/eating/bathing/etc.
But it's a terrible abuse of sentence structure to tack the remainder on like that.
Possibly you could get away with:
"Especially to do it all at work, and not have anyone notice?"
Those two sentences would really highlight the fact that phone-sex must have taken up the bulk of his day.
Either that or he was multitasking with six girls on hold.
It doesn't appear to be that hard to be reasonable, does it? I really must try it sometime.
But seriously, I would negotiate a price and probably ask nicely if I can keep an email address on that domain for a while. It's no real hassle for the other side's servers, unless you're getting multi-gigabytes of spam a day. Then at least you've got a good period of time to phase out that address.
Or keep the MX records for your domain and sub-let the www section out to them for $200/year. That way everything essentially just stays the same for you, and they get a.com webpage.
Plenty of options if everyone's talking nicely at the table.
You're using Google to look for Java jobs? Let me fill you in on a little history here.
All those jobs that pop up in Google were created by a single example Java JobWorm(tm), created by Sun's experimental labs back in 1996. Due to Java's insidious "write-once,run-anywhere" nature and it's accidental inclusion as example code in Sun's first printing of "Introductory Java", it's still on the loose today - cruelly crushing the dreams of those who spend years of their lives becoming Java Gods, only to find the contact numbers on Java job ads all resolve to a X-rated video store near Sun headquarters that one of the original Java developers was fond of frequenting.
The objective-C guys haven't managed to get their worm code to cross-compile nicely across all platforms yet, but it's getting there. Once they do and it's in the wild proper, watch out, it'll be slick. If you're surfing the net and suddenly feel the urge to really get cracking on Objective-C, it's a sure sign you've just made contact with the worm. With slow, measured movements, reduce your monitor's contrast to minimum and back carefully away from the computer. Delete your browsing history with averted eyes (or by using a mirror) once the urge passes.
A small dose of BASIC (ten or fifteen lines of code a month) is generally enough in most situations to give you some protection against these two worms. If you are working in a dot-com startup, or are frequently exposed to Management, this may need to be increased to 500 lines of BASIC code a week, possibly including some optimised hardware-specific assembly subroutines.
The point is that if the ISP isn't making money, it's a failure of their business technique. If they're oversubscribing their lines and the available bandwidth can't handle it, it means they predicted usage patterns incorrectly. Why is that my problem?
It becomes your problem when every ISP has to cover their arse and charge $600/mo to provide a guaranteed 24/7 uncongested, maximum-capacity link to your house, just so you can download your linux ISO's at will.
Let's instead work to force ISPs to be honest. If you say I have 6mbps (or whatever) of bandwidth and a 24/7 connection to the Internet, then I should be able to use that 6mbps * 24 * 7. The fact that this may cause Comcast's network some add'l work or problems is not the customer's concern.
And it won't be your ISP's problem when your $30 internet goes to $300 a month because your ISP had to buy a huge chunk of upstream capacity, will it?
I'll spell it out for you:
ISP's oversubscribe their upstream links.
That's how they can make a living.
You can buy a T1 for yourself if you like and cut out the eeeevil money-grabbing ISP. Oh look, they seem to start at about $600/mo. There's your bandwidth right there, all you can eat. Help yourself, but don't forget to pay the bill.
Slashdot Mirror
My old man drives a 797 at a coal mine in Central Queensland - top speed unloaded is 60km/hr.
I don't define that as "incredibly slow", as it's a damn sight faster than you can run.
Got a photo around here somewhere of him and his truck- he's 6ft tall, and standing next to the truck, his hard-hat is level with halfway up the hub of the front tyre.
Top speed loaded is 40km/hr, but that is because the tyres cannot take the higher speeds - they overheat and blow. When a tyre is $35,000 and it blows, that's not good. When it's pumped to it's normal pressure of 130PSI and the truck is parked anywhere near people when it goes off, that's definitely very,very bad.
Considering the inertia involved, they are pretty much unstoppable by cars, buildings,etc if at speed - they will mow right over the top of your average 4x4 and not even notice. A guy where he works ran over an (empty) Toyota Landcruiser troop carrier one night - swung around in a loop to dump, backed up towards the face, felt a bump "like coming up against a little ridge of dirt" (his words) , put the foot down a little, reverse to face, dump load, drive forward a little, get out of the cab for a smoke, look down in front of the truck.... what's that down near the front wheel? Oh, crap.
But anyway, I've worked on more autonomous stuff than this.
Sandvik (and Cat) have systems for underground mines that are pretty much fully autonomous. Sandvik and their Toro loaders can do a full circuit in auto, driving using laser rangefinders to map the walls, update their location on an internal map and basically do all the work except actually dig the bucket of ore. They do traffic control (one loader waits for another at intersections), collision avoidance, the whole shebang.
So one guy can operate three or four loaders at once, as all he does is take control of a loader at the ore pile, dig a bucket, then set it loose to go and dump that load automatically elsewhere. Meanwhile another loader turns up and sits idle at the ore pile waiting for him to take control. It's Management's wet dream - no need for trained underground operators on $55/hr, get some 17 year old in a control room on the surface at $20/hr running 4 loaders.
If ore wasn't so tricky to dig out (irregular sizing is the problem), they'd be full auto by now.
I get something similar on the main page that completely glues up firefox for 20 seconds or so. Can't switch tabs, window doesn't redraw if I switch away and then back to firefox, it's completely stuck.
Been happening now for a month, and only on /. - it's getting a bit tedious.
Anyone else seen this? Firefox 2.0.0.14, moderately stock eeePC distro, no plugins except for adblock.
IE-only suggests incompatibility with text browsers, which - coupled with text-to-speech - blind people use a lot.
I'm sure there will be some "enabling" law on your books that says that people providing a service must cater for people with disabilities, much like shopping centres need to provide things like disabled parking and wheelchair access.
So, pass their web site on to any one of a number of organisations that cater for people with disabilities - they should be able to help make it more accessible.
(I was going to mention to run it through Bobby yourself, but I see that it was commercialised some years ago. Bummer.)
The Therac-25 machines are a totally different issue from CRT x-rays.
Firstly, it should be noted that x-rays are given off when high energy electrons from the electron guns strike the metal shadow mask near the front of the picture tube. X-rays are produced as the metal atoms in the shadow mask are excited by the electrons and then drop back to their ground state, releasing an x-ray. 99% of the x-rays produced are back-scatter - that is, they go in the direction of the back of the tube, as that side of the shadow mask is the bit that's getting hammered.
Secondly, to make a decent amount of x-rays, the applied voltage needs to be a fair bit higher than what is normally used in a colour picture tube to generate the image. The O.P. said it was faulty, perhaps it could have generated it. But there are normally multiple protection circuits on the EHT that prevent this (as in, they go "phut" before the voltage gets that high and the monitor shuts off/never works again).
Thirdly, the back of a picture tube is heavily shielded, with a lead/metal coating. X-rays can still get through, but at the power levels needed for escaping x-rays to actually physically hurt, it would result in the instant destruction of the monitor.
Finally, if the O.P. was feeling a thousand needle points of pain from the monitor for 15 seconds or so, you're probably looking at a rather heavy dose of radiation. One hopes that they've seen a doctor about it.
Carrying them in anything other than glass though, would be highly ill advised. And who carries glass bottles anymore?
Get some hydrofluoric acid. Plastic bottles only for that stuff. 90% should do the trick.
Tried getting panning working? I whipped up an app for my 701 eee (based on i810pan) to do this. Gives you 1024x768 panning, which is rather handy. i810pan needs software cursors enabled which buggers up hardware acceleration, hence my version.
it's here.
It's still a little clunky round the edges, but it works and fills a need for me.
I turn it on when I need to use big-screen apps - mainly VirtualBox and XP for development for a particular embedded device, but Google maps is definitely another reason for it.
I'm still busy just getting Xorg to pan again, after the Xorg devs decided that it wasn't the X server's business to pan a viewport around a virtual screen and the window manager should do it. Never mind the fact that a virtual desktop has been present in X for a Very Long Time Now, or that current window managers don't do panning as they expect X to do it.
Thanks guys, I really enjoy my 800x480 eeePC so much more for your decision.
(end bitter rant)
So basically, you could never apply these speed increases to a generic distro.
Oh come now! Never say never!
You could:
- Boot with modular kernel.
- Probe devices and get a list of loaded modules.
- Recompile kernel with said modules built-in.
- Boot with that kernel from now on.
It's relatively scriptable - in fact, I think there's a "probe loaded modules and generate new .config" script already about the place. If the user is unwilling to wait for a kernel recompile during install, just stick with the modular kernel and incrementally compile during idle time.
It's trivial. I'd code it up myself, but I'm a little busy at the moment, you understand.
Sorry, your attempt at being authoritative has completely failed for me. You can't just throw out statements like this without at least trying to back them up with facts (or at least plausible assertions).
you want a LITTLE BIT of swap in all cases.
Why? A little bit of swap does SFA if some big memory-hogging app gets loaded.
for netbooks (asus eee pc) I recommend 128mb of swap (max).
Why? With a SSD that has speedy reads and sluggish writes, you might as well not have it and just get more physical ram if you find your apps keep getting suddenly terminated.
for most laptops up to 256mb swap is more than enough.
Why? With 2GB of ram becoming more common on laptops, an extra 10% does SFA.
I've seen a good many starter motors broken because of a good swift thwacking too.
Newer reduction drive starter motors have permanent magnets for the field, which are fragile. Thwacking the body of the starter motor generally cracks them and ruins the starter. If you can hold the starter for your V8 in the palm of your hand, it's a reduction drive unit.
If you're going to thwack a starter, thwack carefully. Aim for the end cap where the brushes are, or the solenoid body and just give it a few firm taps. Don't just go to town with a four-pound hammer.
Incidentally, your sig gives me a feeling of deja-vu....
I have to wonder if the "99 other" incidents was where something just fell over after the "evil" IT guy left and Management just assumes it was malice.
I agree the school policy is not well thought-out. It's hard to determine the circumstances of how it came about - perhaps they were sick of drunken vomiting students and hoped that this would slow them down a bit.
A guy I used to know - he had a son who was 19. Drank a 40-ounce bottle of rum for a $50 bet from a friend at a party. Threw it up in fifteen minutes, with much laughter from his friends, wound up dead about 45 minutes later. His dad went around to the friend's place the next morning and asked for the $50. Said it was one of the hardest things he ever did, but he said it had to be done, just to reinforce the stupidity of his death to his son's friends. A lot of them stopped the binge-drinking after that, but a few years later the younger crowd were at it again.
Everyone thinks when they're young that they're indestructible and will live forever. I guess it takes a couple of shocks for that to wear off :-(
Here's the thing - drinking is not like flicking a big switch from "sober" to "alcoholic poisoning". There's plenty of middle ground for a happy drunk who won't need a visit to the hospital later.
If you're needing a visit to the pharmacy in the morning for asprin because the Big Brass Band in your head is keeping time to your heartbeat, that's a sign that you shouldn't quite go so far next time.
But (sigh) kids see it as a rite of passage to get wasted and completely lose control of their bodily functions. It was fun for me,I guess - but only once. Speaking now with the added experience of age, it's a waste of money to go that far if all you'll be doing is hurling everything back up again in short order.
It's the vibe I got off said rep I was trying to enumerate.
It smacks of a nasty mix of Political Correctness, Censorship and slowly turning up the heat until your boiling the unsuspecting frog.
"Today, We don't like knives. Get rid of all the knife vids - don't want anyone to know about the dangerous knife."
What's next?
"Today, We don't like fatty food. Get rid of all the deep-fryers, so that people can't die of heart failure."
Wait, I think a few US states have done that one already....
If you attend U.F. and go to the hospital for alcohol poisoning you will be expelled from school, so instead of getting medical care students risk possible death to avoid being kicked out of school.
Here's a crazy idea that just might work:
Put the beer bong down and don't get alcohol poisoning in the first place.
'I would like to see other internet service providers follow suit to reinforce our message that violence will not be tolerated either on the internet or in the real world,' she said.
First it's guns,
then it's knives,
then it's drunken louts with their angry fists,
then it's "unsavoury behaviour" in the street,
then it's public demonstrations/rallies,
then it's any dissent at all.
All for the good of the people, of course.
Aha, but it's not in ALL CAPS, is it?
Only things with zero rest mass can reach the speed of light.
Protons have a rest mass (1.67261 x 10-24 grams ) which increases as velocity increases by the equation
m / sqrt(1 -(v^2/c^2))
From the equation you can see that as velocity increases towards c , the mass increases asymptotically.
If you use the same constant force to accelerate with, the rate of acceleration approaches zero as you approach c.
So if you're using particles with mass, you can never quite get to the speed of light. No doubt the LHC can accelerate them to pretty close to c though.
I patented this back in 1997.
All modern computers will shut off the fuel injectors if:
- The throttle position sensor reads 0% / idle
and
- Engine RPM is significantly above idle RPM (1500RPM or so, usually).
Regarding your Volvo, it should, unless it's got one of the very first systems in it. Seeing it's an '89 model, it should have a relatively smart engine computer in there. (compared to the near-analog early Bosch Jetronic systems, where a simple weighting of ECM inputs gave injector output.)
If you're careful, you can often pick up the small 'kick' that happens when fuel injection begins again. Coast down towards idle RPM uphill and your should be able to sense it.
It's common in certain parts of the world to use the word 'period' (or the phrase 'full-stop') to emphasise a statement like that. It indicates and strengthens the fact that there's nothing else to consider.
The statement :
"How in the world do you have this much phone sex, period?"
Is relatively acceptable. The "period" indicates that to have this much phone sex, you must have to do it to the exclusion of everything else - sleeping/eating/bathing/etc.
But it's a terrible abuse of sentence structure to tack the remainder on like that.
Possibly you could get away with:
"Especially to do it all at work, and not have anyone notice?"
Those two sentences would really highlight the fact that phone-sex must have taken up the bulk of his day.
Either that or he was multitasking with six girls on hold.
And the voice of reason speaks up.
It doesn't appear to be that hard to be reasonable, does it? I really must try it sometime.
But seriously, I would negotiate a price and probably ask nicely if I can keep an email address on that domain for a while. It's no real hassle for the other side's servers, unless you're getting multi-gigabytes of spam a day. Then at least you've got a good period of time to phase out that address.
Or keep the MX records for your domain and sub-let the www section out to them for $200/year. That way everything essentially just stays the same for you, and they get a .com webpage.
Plenty of options if everyone's talking nicely at the table.
You're using Google to look for Java jobs? Let me fill you in on a little history here.
All those jobs that pop up in Google were created by a single example Java JobWorm(tm), created by Sun's experimental labs back in 1996. Due to Java's insidious "write-once,run-anywhere" nature and it's accidental inclusion as example code in Sun's first printing of "Introductory Java", it's still on the loose today - cruelly crushing the dreams of those who spend years of their lives becoming Java Gods, only to find the contact numbers on Java job ads all resolve to a X-rated video store near Sun headquarters that one of the original Java developers was fond of frequenting.
The objective-C guys haven't managed to get their worm code to cross-compile nicely across all platforms yet, but it's getting there. Once they do and it's in the wild proper, watch out, it'll be slick. If you're surfing the net and suddenly feel the urge to really get cracking on Objective-C, it's a sure sign you've just made contact with the worm. With slow, measured movements, reduce your monitor's contrast to minimum and back carefully away from the computer. Delete your browsing history with averted eyes (or by using a mirror) once the urge passes.
A small dose of BASIC (ten or fifteen lines of code a month) is generally enough in most situations to give you some protection against these two worms. If you are working in a dot-com startup, or are frequently exposed to Management, this may need to be increased to 500 lines of BASIC code a week, possibly including some optimised hardware-specific assembly subroutines.
Take care, and stay alert.
The point is that if the ISP isn't making money, it's a failure of their business technique. If they're oversubscribing their lines and the available bandwidth can't handle it, it means they predicted usage patterns incorrectly. Why is that my problem?
It becomes your problem when every ISP has to cover their arse and charge $600/mo to provide a guaranteed 24/7 uncongested, maximum-capacity link to your house, just so you can download your linux ISO's at will.
Let's instead work to force ISPs to be honest. If you say I have 6mbps (or whatever) of bandwidth and a 24/7 connection to the Internet, then I should be able to use that 6mbps * 24 * 7. The fact that this may cause Comcast's network some add'l work or problems is not the customer's concern.
And it won't be your ISP's problem when your $30 internet goes to $300 a month because your ISP had to buy a huge chunk of upstream capacity, will it?
I'll spell it out for you:
ISP's oversubscribe their upstream links.
That's how they can make a living.
You can buy a T1 for yourself if you like and cut out the eeeevil money-grabbing ISP. Oh look, they seem to start at about $600/mo. There's your bandwidth right there, all you can eat. Help yourself, but don't forget to pay the bill.