Are you a 'glass is half full' or 'glass is half empty'?
This kind of situation is a perfect example of an expression whose origin I can't remeber.
No matter how bad things are, things can always get worse.
I applaud microsoft for putting that kind of effort into fixing their OS. I really do. They've taken a bad design, implemented it poorly, then kludged it to work. Now they have this mess which thankfully they are finally cleaning up.
When bill and his cronies stol^H^H^H^Hcame up with MS-DOS out of that garage, the bureaucracy of any large corporation did not exist and when problems were discovered, they got fixed.
As any company gets larger, psychosis sets in and the peons do what the bosses wants and the bosses think all is well. The end result is shortcuts get taken, work is rushed and product is shoved onto the market before it's ready. Many years later, you have the mess that is present today. XP flaws that go back to the early days of NT, buffer overflows, etc.
Even if microsoft halted development and put their entire software development resources to fix the flaws in XP, it would still be years before that work was completed. And even then, it would not be guaranteed to be fully flawless, not to mention it would likely break everything.
So perhaps the glass only contains half of what it could contain, but the fact that they are recognizing and making a concerted effort to fix the many gaping security flaws in their product, only suggests that things could actually be far worse than they currently are.
Um....err...well.....ah...Nice to see your language skills are finely tuned.
As for shining a laser beam into a cloud, or bouncing it off of something else still poses the same problem. Have you ever played with a laser transmitter? When it hits something, it still only shows up as a tiny little dot. Bouncing it off a cloud is even worse because clouds are not very solid and the beam will penetrate the cloud much further than a noncoherent light and would get scattered much further away from the pilot as to be visible. Ever try seeing anything in heavy fog, day or night? If you do see anything at all, all you see is white. A clould would be a very poor projection screen and the laser beam would have to be so powerful to be seen bounced off a cloud, it would be better to use flood lights.
so... you're suggesting... planes should.. um... be equipped.. with... hm... ah... radio receivers? wow.
I'm not sure if that was sarcasm or humour or what, but I'll take offense to that, so yes I am suggesting they should have radio receivers... Oh wait. They already have those. Even better, I knew that already. Erm, hmm... Perhaps I should explain in more detail in case you failed to understand my point.
You see, the radios that are in planes share a common frequency. In some locations, there are so many planes, that those channels are almost constantly being used. To simply jump right in and use the radio to say "hey buddy, you're in a no fly zone" would break some serious regulations and by the time ground control finally gets a hold of that specific airplane, it could be too late.
My solution would have been to have the onboard radio receivers look for coded signals that they normally listen on, and have a directional radio source from the ground send a signal directly to that airplane. Since its directional, only that airplane would get the signal and the onboard instruments would flash to the pilot to leave the area. Ground control and all the other airplanes would be unaffected.
Flashing a laser at an airplane as a warning is next to useless.
Since a laserbeam remains a relatively focused beam as it travels through space, the laser beam has to be shone directly into the eyes of the pilot to be seen.
What would be more effective is a directional radio frequency transmitter that sends a special signal to a receiver on the airplane in question. It could sound an alarm in the cockpit which means 'get the fudge out of here'.
Maybe they could turn it into an elaborate security game where they shoot a rocket equivalent of a paintball at the airplane, and if it hits, they have to play dead.
You're all too kind. I'd rather beat these people with something a lot harder than a rubber hose. A hickory bat reinforced with a titanium rod core for example.... and if such a bat doesn't exist, one should be specially made just for that kind of activity.
Then again, forget that. I think if one has been proven beyond a doubt to have committed a crime, they and their entire list of their crimes should be announced to all the other jailed criminals. Child molesters and pedophiles would have a very short life expectancy. If we can raise a generation up on that knowledge, I'd bet that generation would be far more willing to 'stay clean' knowing the fate if they got caught.
(Yes, I know the spyware will take over both proc's. Let me dream)
Just go into the task manager and set the affinity for all the spyware tasks to one processor. It won't stop them from running on the other, but hopefully it will help balance the load a bit.
What we REALLY need is a virus that recognizes and lowers the priority of all that spyware to the lowest level.
It seems to me they'll need the power management to keep it from melting itself
Don't forget the 50 Gigawatt power supply!
The processor alone consumes (last I heard) about 100 watts and if it's essentially two processors in one, will require a really really good power supply. That means to use this proc, you'll instantly need 100 extra watts out of your power supply.
If they have to have power management to keep it from meltdown, just how much more computing CAN you get out of it anyway? To me the second core would be running at about 20% duty cycle to keep it from catching on fire.
On the plus side, they could always mod the case to throw off that heat like a space heater. Coffee warmer in the summer, foot warmer in the winter.
Re:I think you can stop now.....
on
EU to Ban Macs
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Slashdot was ever normal? When did this happen and how many seconds did it last?
Normal is a subjective term and I meant normal for slashdot. As in returning to how it was a week ago, how it was a month ago, etc.
Running a story about how optimizing the idle loop for example can hardly be considered a joke, and even then, it's a pretty bad one.
Processors have have had for a very long time a HALT instruction that essentially disengages the cpu clock from the internals to conserve power, and since the computer is sitting idle waiting for something to happen, why chase its tail when it can go to sleep until a hardware interrupt wakes it up?
This is barely news. This is not even close to "being news for nerds, stuff that matters"........and I have 5 moderator points I can use. At first I wasn't sure if slashdot was playing a prank on me or not. I'll just pretend I don't have points to use up until tomorrow, just to be safe.
Shouldn't be too long now before slashdot returns to normal.
Doctors need steady hands and for most things can use their own hands, but this could be a really good application for neurosurgeons who can't afford the slightest twitch.
Once the skull is opened, they could then switch to robotic 'arms' and do the delicate work by focusing on where the instruments have to be by simply thinking it.
Re:Wow! think of all them IP addresses.
on
The Next Net
·
· Score: 2, Informative
50 addresses for every square foot
I stand corrected. It's been years since I even given IPv6 even a first though, I forgot all about it. The 50 addresses statement would be true if IPv6 had a 6 byte address (48 bits), not the actual 128 bits (ipv4 is coincidentally 4 bytes, ipv6 is version 6, not 6 bytes long, and as I've discovered, the version and bytes in IP addresses are not related).
So doing the math (this time entire earth surface area, not just land mass, as per equator diameter with something more manageable like square millimeters):
IPv6 addresses = 2^128 = 3.4 * 10^38
earth diameter = 12,760 km
radius = 6380km = 6380000000 mm
surface area = 4 * pi * r^2 = 5.1 * 10^20 sqr mm
address density = addresses / sqr mm = 6.7 * 10^ 17
Re:Wow! think of all them IP addresses.
on
The Next Net
·
· Score: 1
They have this other thing called "NAT"
Well, that goes without saying. I'm pretty paranoid about my computer security and I hide behind 2 firewalls. The only way in is through an SSH connection tunnelled through my own homegrown encryption tunnel.
I run linux and have a standard user account, and I'm also pretty wary about what I run on said computer. If I ever did want my appliances on the net (which I don't), then I'd VPN into my home computer running 24/7 and control them from there.
I wanted to point out that not everyone is as paranoid as I am and security is an illusion. As to a NAT, hiding behind it is fine, but what's the point if you can't control it from outside? Some industries might feel compelled to convince us it's ok to do so and this is a don't let your guard down message. In even 10 years, it is entirely conceiveable to have 802.11 and/or ethernet jacks on the latest appliances. I say fine and all, just be careful.
Wow! think of all them IP addresses.
on
The Next Net
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I believe IPv6 has something like 50 addresses for every square foot of land on the earth.
That's amazing. Soon we'll be able to wire up our entire house and everything from the fridge to the alarmclock would be accessible from the internet.
I only hope if it gets to that, nobody can hack into my microwave when I'm cooking my dinner, or someone hacking into my alarm clock and messes with the settings.
If microsoft does good on their desire to control it all, they'd better finally have some reasonable measure of security. I wouldn't want to wake up to find out some low life got to my hot water heater and turned it off because of a buffer overflow vulnerability.
More and more ISPs who provide email services are starting to provide free email virus scans.
I receive frequent emails stating that the virus scanner was unable to clean the attachments of viruses, so the attachments have been deleted.
Microsoft might also have something to do with it by finally cluing in that auto-running attachments when you open an email is not necessarily a good thing, and they've taken the "can't save, can't run period" road as being the new default to outlook express, the chance of such a virus spreading this way is severely contained.
With enough publicity of email based virus writers being prosecuted, new would be virus writers might also be detered.
It also doesn't take too many stings for someone to become wary of blindly running attachments. You'd have to live in a vacuum not to see a connection between news reports about the next melissa, or the next netsky or the next beagle virus running rampent and the flood of emails in your inbox enticing you to run the attachment. So even if new viruses were created to propagate via email, the population is on guard.
These factors combined are probably what have caused the decline in self mail propagated malware. It will remain to be seen if the user community and the software provider community drop their guard to allow this stuff to flare up again.
With the drop in this type of malware, is it any wonder why now we are faced with browser exploited malware? I think the virus writers have simply moved on to greener pastures and when that shuts down will probably find yet another unforseen avenue of spreading their malware.
The email spread viruses have probably peaked, but factoring in all the new and creative ways for getting malware, it's just another drop in the bucket.
will track its progress and are able to communicate with the vehicle via satellite during the mission to change course
If they can change its course and affect its navigation, will they? I know it's not, but it almost seems to be bobbing around and riding the gulf stream to get to where it has to go.
It would be much more interesting to create a self propelled autonomous robot to swim upstream from the mouth of the ocean to a specific river or stream the same way fish return to spawn where they hatched, all without guidance. All it would know is where it has to go, but how it gets there it would have to be able to figure out on its own (avoid obstacles on its own, etc).
However, just to play devils advocate, not everyone can afford the most bad-ass computer, and XP although doesn't really choke on a 1GHz duron system, they do exist and, it is to some extent sluggish on those.
There are some mobos that have integrated video and are next to useless for anything but the basic 2d stuff. Asking those specific computers to have a CPU intensive experience by default beyond what might be normal for XP, would make them horribly slow.
What burns me is that microsoft changes their interface on every new version of their OS and makes that the default. It might rock on the latest hardware, but for a good many people who have slightly older systems, it starts to chug and choke. They have a 'classic' mode and you can switch off the CPU killing animations and whatnot, but why can't they have an applet in the display manager that lets you choose the performance sucking mode over a standard default fast, clean and simple looking UI which in my opinion should be the default.
I agree. There are only so many ways you can make a border, only so many ways you can make the X button that closes the window, etc.
To be constantly changing themes and having pointless window resize animations, etc, is to make it bloated beyond necessity and because of the extra code to make it that much more bloated, they're inviting more and more bugs, and more and more instability and more and more performance degradation.
Technially savvy people can likely work around these differences, but what about grandma jane whose breathing quickens because she's afraid to even turn the damn thing on. If people like this get put in front of longhorn, even though you could change the look to the 'classic' look that might by then be the luna interface of XP, will they even know how to do that? And if they can't, will the shiny eye candy not intimidate them further?
I really do believe sometimes microsoft changes things just because they can, not because they should.
In terms of what kind of GUI I like, in linux I prefer the original FVWM XWindow manager. It's about as appealing as the original windows 3.1 window decoration scheme, but it's classic and it's clean, and it's damn fast.
How many GHz of cpu cycles will it take just to maintain the UI in longhorn? So, while it's glitzy and sparkly, when the novelty wears off, it's just another interface and the performance hit will not justify it, so no, if I'm impressed now, after months of using it I would not be impressed anymore.
So based on what the promoter of this prize is saying is:
We'll give 25K to anyone who can write a virus that can infect any computer just like the ones we've set up. Without going after a specific computer, it's just another virus thrown out in the wild and stands very little chance of finding its way onto the target computer in question.
I think very few people here would say it's not irresponsible, but I don't see how this contest could work without specifically going after those boxes.
And if anyone did manage to break into those specific computers, then I could see making provisions for launching a "HELLO WORLD" program that at least in theory could be just as pernicious as a trojan or worm.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you a 'glass is half full' or 'glass is half empty'?
This kind of situation is a perfect example of an expression whose origin I can't remeber.
No matter how bad things are, things can always get worse.
I applaud microsoft for putting that kind of effort into fixing their OS. I really do. They've taken a bad design, implemented it poorly, then kludged it to work. Now they have this mess which thankfully they are finally cleaning up.
When bill and his cronies stol^H^H^H^Hcame up with MS-DOS out of that garage, the bureaucracy of any large corporation did not exist and when problems were discovered, they got fixed.
As any company gets larger, psychosis sets in and the peons do what the bosses wants and the bosses think all is well. The end result is shortcuts get taken, work is rushed and product is shoved onto the market before it's ready. Many years later, you have the mess that is present today. XP flaws that go back to the early days of NT, buffer overflows, etc.
Even if microsoft halted development and put their entire software development resources to fix the flaws in XP, it would still be years before that work was completed. And even then, it would not be guaranteed to be fully flawless, not to mention it would likely break everything.
So perhaps the glass only contains half of what it could contain, but the fact that they are recognizing and making a concerted effort to fix the many gaping security flaws in their product, only suggests that things could actually be far worse than they currently are.
or... into... um... a... ah.. a cloud?
Um....err...well.....ah...Nice to see your language skills are finely tuned.
As for shining a laser beam into a cloud, or bouncing it off of something else still poses the same problem. Have you ever played with a laser transmitter? When it hits something, it still only shows up as a tiny little dot. Bouncing it off a cloud is even worse because clouds are not very solid and the beam will penetrate the cloud much further than a noncoherent light and would get scattered much further away from the pilot as to be visible. Ever try seeing anything in heavy fog, day or night? If you do see anything at all, all you see is white. A clould would be a very poor projection screen and the laser beam would have to be so powerful to be seen bounced off a cloud, it would be better to use flood lights.
so... you're suggesting... planes should.. um... be equipped.. with... hm... ah... radio receivers? wow.
I'm not sure if that was sarcasm or humour or what, but I'll take offense to that, so yes I am suggesting they should have radio receivers... Oh wait. They already have those. Even better, I knew that already. Erm, hmm... Perhaps I should explain in more detail in case you failed to understand my point.
You see, the radios that are in planes share a common frequency. In some locations, there are so many planes, that those channels are almost constantly being used. To simply jump right in and use the radio to say "hey buddy, you're in a no fly zone" would break some serious regulations and by the time ground control finally gets a hold of that specific airplane, it could be too late.
My solution would have been to have the onboard radio receivers look for coded signals that they normally listen on, and have a directional radio source from the ground send a signal directly to that airplane. Since its directional, only that airplane would get the signal and the onboard instruments would flash to the pilot to leave the area. Ground control and all the other airplanes would be unaffected.
now THERE's an idea.
no comment.
Flashing a laser at an airplane as a warning is next to useless.
Since a laserbeam remains a relatively focused beam as it travels through space, the laser beam has to be shone directly into the eyes of the pilot to be seen.
What would be more effective is a directional radio frequency transmitter that sends a special signal to a receiver on the airplane in question. It could sound an alarm in the cockpit which means 'get the fudge out of here'.
Maybe they could turn it into an elaborate security game where they shoot a rocket equivalent of a paintball at the airplane, and if it hits, they have to play dead.
the perps should be beaten with rubber hoses
You're all too kind. I'd rather beat these people with something a lot harder than a rubber hose. A hickory bat reinforced with a titanium rod core for example.... and if such a bat doesn't exist, one should be specially made just for that kind of activity.
Then again, forget that. I think if one has been proven beyond a doubt to have committed a crime, they and their entire list of their crimes should be announced to all the other jailed criminals. Child molesters and pedophiles would have a very short life expectancy. If we can raise a generation up on that knowledge, I'd bet that generation would be far more willing to 'stay clean' knowing the fate if they got caught.
It was a craze that was sweeping England last year as bored commuters arranged sexual encounters using Bluetooth-enabled cellphones.
On slashdot, this remains academic.
(Yes, I know the spyware will take over both proc's. Let me dream)
Just go into the task manager and set the affinity for all the spyware tasks to one processor. It won't stop them from running on the other, but hopefully it will help balance the load a bit.
What we REALLY need is a virus that recognizes and lowers the priority of all that spyware to the lowest level.
Does that mean I'll be able to fry two eggs at once ?
Or you'll be able to burn a single egg twice as fast.
I think we can all agree that Intel is on the right track.
Does that mean I can surf for porn at extreme speeds?
I'd also need a dedicated OC3 directly to the internet backbone for that.
Extreme edition could also mean extreme smoke generating just before it stops working altogether edition. Spin doctoring at its finest.
Namely, how many seconds does it take to compile the Linux kernel?
You mean without overheating and destroying itself?
If the processors that big how the heck will I fit it on my motherboard?!
Simple. You don't fit the processor on the motherboard, you fit the motherboard on the processor.
Just don't forget to reinforce the desk.
It seems to me they'll need the power management to keep it from melting itself
Don't forget the 50 Gigawatt power supply!
The processor alone consumes (last I heard) about 100 watts and if it's essentially two processors in one, will require a really really good power supply. That means to use this proc, you'll instantly need 100 extra watts out of your power supply.
If they have to have power management to keep it from meltdown, just how much more computing CAN you get out of it anyway? To me the second core would be running at about 20% duty cycle to keep it from catching on fire.
On the plus side, they could always mod the case to throw off that heat like a space heater. Coffee warmer in the summer, foot warmer in the winter.
can you say dead horse?
Just how tender do you want that meat?
Slashdot was ever normal? When did this happen and how many seconds did it last?
Normal is a subjective term and I meant normal for slashdot. As in returning to how it was a week ago, how it was a month ago, etc.
Running a story about how optimizing the idle loop for example can hardly be considered a joke, and even then, it's a pretty bad one.
Processors have have had for a very long time a HALT instruction that essentially disengages the cpu clock from the internals to conserve power, and since the computer is sitting idle waiting for something to happen, why chase its tail when it can go to sleep until a hardware interrupt wakes it up?
This is barely news. This is not even close to "being news for nerds, stuff that matters". .......and I have 5 moderator points I can use. At first I wasn't sure if slashdot was playing a prank on me or not. I'll just pretend I don't have points to use up until tomorrow, just to be safe.
Shouldn't be too long now before slashdot returns to normal.
Doctors need steady hands and for most things can use their own hands, but this could be a really good application for neurosurgeons who can't afford the slightest twitch.
Once the skull is opened, they could then switch to robotic 'arms' and do the delicate work by focusing on where the instruments have to be by simply thinking it.
50 addresses for every square foot
I stand corrected. It's been years since I even given IPv6 even a first though, I forgot all about it. The 50 addresses statement would be true if IPv6 had a 6 byte address (48 bits), not the actual 128 bits (ipv4 is coincidentally 4 bytes, ipv6 is version 6, not 6 bytes long, and as I've discovered, the version and bytes in IP addresses are not related).
So doing the math (this time entire earth surface area, not just land mass, as per equator diameter with something more manageable like square millimeters):
IPv6 addresses = 2^128 = 3.4 * 10^38
earth diameter = 12,760 km
radius = 6380km = 6380000000 mm
surface area = 4 * pi * r^2 = 5.1 * 10^20 sqr mm
address density = addresses / sqr mm = 6.7 * 10^ 17
They have this other thing called "NAT"
Well, that goes without saying. I'm pretty paranoid about my computer security and I hide behind 2 firewalls. The only way in is through an SSH connection tunnelled through my own homegrown encryption tunnel.
I run linux and have a standard user account, and I'm also pretty wary about what I run on said computer. If I ever did want my appliances on the net (which I don't), then I'd VPN into my home computer running 24/7 and control them from there.
I wanted to point out that not everyone is as paranoid as I am and security is an illusion. As to a NAT, hiding behind it is fine, but what's the point if you can't control it from outside? Some industries might feel compelled to convince us it's ok to do so and this is a don't let your guard down message. In even 10 years, it is entirely conceiveable to have 802.11 and/or ethernet jacks on the latest appliances. I say fine and all, just be careful.
I believe IPv6 has something like 50 addresses for every square foot of land on the earth.
That's amazing. Soon we'll be able to wire up our entire house and everything from the fridge to the alarmclock would be accessible from the internet.
I only hope if it gets to that, nobody can hack into my microwave when I'm cooking my dinner, or someone hacking into my alarm clock and messes with the settings.
If microsoft does good on their desire to control it all, they'd better finally have some reasonable measure of security. I wouldn't want to wake up to find out some low life got to my hot water heater and turned it off because of a buffer overflow vulnerability.
More and more ISPs who provide email services are starting to provide free email virus scans.
I receive frequent emails stating that the virus scanner was unable to clean the attachments of viruses, so the attachments have been deleted.
Microsoft might also have something to do with it by finally cluing in that auto-running attachments when you open an email is not necessarily a good thing, and they've taken the "can't save, can't run period" road as being the new default to outlook express, the chance of such a virus spreading this way is severely contained.
With enough publicity of email based virus writers being prosecuted, new would be virus writers might also be detered.
It also doesn't take too many stings for someone to become wary of blindly running attachments. You'd have to live in a vacuum not to see a connection between news reports about the next melissa, or the next netsky or the next beagle virus running rampent and the flood of emails in your inbox enticing you to run the attachment. So even if new viruses were created to propagate via email, the population is on guard.
These factors combined are probably what have caused the decline in self mail propagated malware. It will remain to be seen if the user community and the software provider community drop their guard to allow this stuff to flare up again.
With the drop in this type of malware, is it any wonder why now we are faced with browser exploited malware? I think the virus writers have simply moved on to greener pastures and when that shuts down will probably find yet another unforseen avenue of spreading their malware.
The email spread viruses have probably peaked, but factoring in all the new and creative ways for getting malware, it's just another drop in the bucket.
will track its progress and are able to communicate with the vehicle via satellite during the mission to change course
If they can change its course and affect its navigation, will they? I know it's not, but it almost seems to be bobbing around and riding the gulf stream to get to where it has to go.
It would be much more interesting to create a self propelled autonomous robot to swim upstream from the mouth of the ocean to a specific river or stream the same way fish return to spawn where they hatched, all without guidance. All it would know is where it has to go, but how it gets there it would have to be able to figure out on its own (avoid obstacles on its own, etc).
step
1 - Steal IP
2 - ???
3 - profit
Sorry, mod me down to redundant if you must. I couldn't help it. I saw content I liked and decided to tweak it and post it as my own....
BTW, does redundant burn karma?
Indeed, why only for games?
However, just to play devils advocate, not everyone can afford the most bad-ass computer, and XP although doesn't really choke on a 1GHz duron system, they do exist and, it is to some extent sluggish on those.
There are some mobos that have integrated video and are next to useless for anything but the basic 2d stuff. Asking those specific computers to have a CPU intensive experience by default beyond what might be normal for XP, would make them horribly slow.
What burns me is that microsoft changes their interface on every new version of their OS and makes that the default. It might rock on the latest hardware, but for a good many people who have slightly older systems, it starts to chug and choke. They have a 'classic' mode and you can switch off the CPU killing animations and whatnot, but why can't they have an applet in the display manager that lets you choose the performance sucking mode over a standard default fast, clean and simple looking UI which in my opinion should be the default.
If implemented sanely, it should use fewer CPU cycles and many more GPU cycles
Yeay, bring out them super-duper video cards. Radeon X800, not just for video games anymore.
I agree. There are only so many ways you can make a border, only so many ways you can make the X button that closes the window, etc.
To be constantly changing themes and having pointless window resize animations, etc, is to make it bloated beyond necessity and because of the extra code to make it that much more bloated, they're inviting more and more bugs, and more and more instability and more and more performance degradation.
Technially savvy people can likely work around these differences, but what about grandma jane whose breathing quickens because she's afraid to even turn the damn thing on. If people like this get put in front of longhorn, even though you could change the look to the 'classic' look that might by then be the luna interface of XP, will they even know how to do that? And if they can't, will the shiny eye candy not intimidate them further?
I really do believe sometimes microsoft changes things just because they can, not because they should.
In terms of what kind of GUI I like, in linux I prefer the original FVWM XWindow manager. It's about as appealing as the original windows 3.1 window decoration scheme, but it's classic and it's clean, and it's damn fast.
How many GHz of cpu cycles will it take just to maintain the UI in longhorn? So, while it's glitzy and sparkly, when the novelty wears off, it's just another interface and the performance hit will not justify it, so no, if I'm impressed now, after months of using it I would not be impressed anymore.
So based on what the promoter of this prize is saying is:
We'll give 25K to anyone who can write a virus that can infect any computer just like the ones we've set up. Without going after a specific computer, it's just another virus thrown out in the wild and stands very little chance of finding its way onto the target computer in question.
I think very few people here would say it's not irresponsible, but I don't see how this contest could work without specifically going after those boxes.
And if anyone did manage to break into those specific computers, then I could see making provisions for launching a "HELLO WORLD" program that at least in theory could be just as pernicious as a trojan or worm.