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http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/

psDooM is a process monitor and manager for *nix systems. It could be considered a graphical interface to the 'ps', 'renice', and 'kill' commands. psDooM is based on XDoom, which is based on id Software's 'Doom'.

See Also: http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/

Xroaches just lost a lot of value.

Oh, I know -- it's hard for me to believe, too, since I live at 10,000 feet and feel the effects heavily.
Here are a bunch of reports about flocks of birds at 25,000-27,000 feet (including flocks of migrating geese.)
I can't find an easily linkable cite to the 37,000 foot case, but here's a pdf, from which I quote:
"Collision between a vulture and an aircraft at an altitude of 37,000 feet. -- On 29 November 1973, a Ruppell's Griffon (Gyps rueppellii) collided with a commercial aircraft at 37,000 feet ofer Abijan, Ivory Coast, western Africa. The altitude is that recorded by teh pilot shortly after the impact, wichh damaged one of the aircraft's engines and caused it to be shut down. The plane landed safely at Abijian without further incident. The remains of the vulture consisted of five complete and 15 partial feathers from the wings (secondaries, lesser, and underwing coverts), tail, neck and breast."

It goes on to cite other over-25,000 ft collisions and observations.

> And kill -9 won't kill a zombie.
True, but the kill implementation of Doom can:
http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html

Hasn't everyone seen ``Doom as a tool for system administration''?

http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/

William

Yep. With the way the economy is going, the user interface will be a rifle or shotgun.

As depicted by Doom as a tool for system administration

Even better, play PSDoom where you might be able to kill UAC inside a UAC base.

not only is there an option to turn off blood, but you can turn off the web server too!

Somebody apparently threw in the psdoom code too...

You missed your calling. You wanted ``Doom as a Tool for System Administration'':

http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/

William

Mathematica 7 has launched, as noted in Stephen Wolfram's blog post. Among the new features are huge equation typesetting, transcendental roots, and discrete calculus. Looking back at the version 6 discussion, it's perhaps inevitable that comparisons will be made to CAR, CGsuite, GAP, Geogebra, Geometer's Sketchpad, Geometry Expressions, Geonext, LaTeX, Magma, Maple, Matlab, nauty, noneuclid, Pari, Sage, or SeifertView. In other news, the Wolfram Demonstrations project now has over 4000 interactive math demos.

A similar technology is DNA stem-loop logic gates. Theye were used to make MAYA and MAYA II, a DNA computer that could play tic-tac-toe.

Ugh, so much wrongness...where do I begin. Here is a little disclaimer: I'm an indie game developer myself and I know a little bit about indie games. This is one of the games I've made.

http://www.unm.edu/~jkellogg/

It's not portal, but I challenge you to come up with something better by yourself in 3 months.

Gaming has NOT gotten too mature for innovation. One word, Portal. 8 students with help from Valve for polish.

Techinacally, Portal is basically a rip off of Narbancular Drop which those 8 students developed first. Why didn't anyone hear of ND before Valve got of hold of it? I would imagine becaue it just isn't the quality of game we would see from a company like Valve or Blizzard. So you really can't even count Portal as an innovative game. And the innovators got lucky they got picked up by Valve, otherwise they're creation wouldn't have gone anywhere.

Also, for every Portal there are literally thousands of innovative/indie games that just plain suck ass. They might be original ideas but originality does move things off the shelf. Long past are the days we will see new game genres, just different ways of blending mutliples (like Spore etc).

What happened to Ghost? They're a mortal, fallible company just like every other one on the company.

They realized that the game sucked, and had the balls to yank it because they didn't want to ruin their reputation of making quality games. The fact they admitted to themselves that they are a "moral, infallible" company shows just how dedicated to making a good game Blizzard is.

Actually wait to release things? The release of WoW? Paladins didn't have talents at launch. Server disconnects were rampant. Server crashes were rampant.

Are you a programmer? You don't sound like one. However, if you have the ability to predict the future and anticipate how many people will use your servers, and then develop the most optimal server backbone for those numbers, you should seriously put your resume out for lead fucking db programmer of the universe. I don't think I've played an MMO that hasn't had some kinks during it launch or at some point. Maintaining servers for an MMO is a extremely complicated task and Blizzard resovled these issues in a timely manner. Could they have done it better/faster? Probably, but their response made MMO's like SWG seem like a joke.

Listen, if Blizzard games aren't your cup of tea, that's understandable. Hell, I could only stomach so much WoW and War3 before i got bored. But you have to admit, they are a very patient company that only release games that are acceptable to their high standards. Very few game companies do that anymore these days as they succomb to the will of their publishers. You have to give Blizzard credit for resisting that. If you can't see all of the many things that Blizzard does right, then I suggest you play some other games, and seriously take a step back and judge them.

Right.

It looks as if the judge simple doesn't understand 17-117a1. It says "essential part of utilizing", and not "... as the author wished".

I'm sure JK Rowling didn't intend people to read HP upside down looking for satanic messages, but she couldn't prevent that.

Neither, really, can Blizzard. That some people use their software an an MMO client doesn't change that I see it and feel I can write a sysadmin tool with it. (See Doom Sysadmin Tool http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/). Or, a cheat tool. (Has anyone pointed this out to the lawyers involved?)

Depends. Can you delete files by shooting them?

A teacher of mine has decided to do the same thing. Andrew Landahl will have us do the same for a course in Quantum Information instead of a final exam. Pick a topic we've seen during the lecture and write an article on it for Wikipedia, assuming it doesn't already exist.

It's certainly a different approach. Considering the article will cover some obscure aspect of quantum info, to be seen mostly by people that know far more about it than we do, I can't say I'm not a bit uneasy about this project.

A teacher of mine has decided to do the same thing. Andrew Landahl will have us do the same for a course in Quantum Information instead of a final exam. Pick a topic we've seen during the lecture and write an article on it for Wikipedia, assuming it doesn't already exist.

It's certainly a different approach. Considering the article will cover some obscure aspect of quantum info, to be seen mostly by people that know far more about it than we do, I can't say I'm not a bit uneasy about this project.

perhaps you mean this: http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/

These systems are hyperbolic PDE's, solvable by C, C++, or MATLAB scripts. You need to satisfy the Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy condition for convergence, which is related to the speed of the fastest waves in the system and the granularity of your model. Your order of accuracy can easily reach 100% error for 2nd order difference methods unless you have a fair number of points per wavelength, like 30 or so. Modelling large systems can quickly lead to running out of RAM unless you have access to a supercomputer, thats why they teach classes about these equations at high performance computing centers. Check out this page for a 1 and 2 spatial dimension matlab implementation of the leap-frog difference method. Hope it helps!

Anyone else remember the Doom based sysadmin front end? :)

Extra points to whoever makes an xkill clone that has configurable sound when you shoot the app,

That was done eight years ago: Doom as a tool for system administration. I like the creative ideas, like giving new sys admins puny weapons, and making them think hard before they run into a room full of processes and killing them at random. Or that "wounding" a process translates into renicing it.

Well, since I am in the fortunate position of not having to formulate detailed public policy, and since my original statement was more of a throw away than an 'advocation', I wasn't intending to present a thorough and detailed argument.

However, since we are getting all deep and meaningful about this, I will respond. I'll try to keep the hand waving and generalisations to a minimum, but I'm afraid it is that sort of debate.

First to address the points you raised.

I can't refute the anecdotal evidence relating to your circumstances but, yes, I would say it has to do with social factors. Social factors are significant indicators for all sorts of things, like rates of crime, literacy, employment, education, health, drug use, etc, etc.

The additional evidence you provide shows that half the kids reaching sexual maturity are *not* abstaining. That is a pretty big proportion.

You then go on to assert that teenage parenthood is no big problem, which kind of eats into your abstinence argument. If it is no problem to raise a kid at 17/18 then why are 'near-100%' of the kids around your area too scared of parenthood to have sex? Can it be that they understand that having children is a massive and serious commitment and should, ideally, be undertaken in stable and economically viable circumstances.

Previous, middle class, generations could complete their education and find employment by their late teens. Consequentially they were in a stable position to settle and have a family early in life. Times have changed and these days very few people have completed their education and generally finished stuffing around before they are 21. Also having a child is a somewhat more serious undertaking than getting legally drunk. Anyway, it is a traditional number.

And to clarify my position:

I feel that teenage pregnancy and the propagation of STDs are bad things. Abstinence has the benefit of addressing both problems but unfortunately, as shown by your link, does not work for half the population. So other solutions are required and, apart from condoms, different solutions are required for the different problems. Disease control can be undertaken by education, treatment, vaccination (HPV) and the use of condoms. It is a multifaceted immunological problem. Birth control has drug, education and social control options. I am happy to admit that my 'proposal' is an extreme, and impractical, solution, but has the benefit of being 100% effective.

I'm not much interested in government intervention for the sake of it. But I am a firm believer of the Social Contract. If someone's actions are not going to impact other people, then I have no interest in what they get up to in their spare time. Nor do I think the government should care. However if someone's actions are going to make society in general poorer or less safe then I do care.

Well, that is too much response entirely. Apologies for the wall of text. You may rebut as you see fit, but I will close my remarks here.

Some additional information:

Health costs for the mother:
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/2117

Economic costs for the mother:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/2kp7x4

Economic costs for society
http://gandini.unm.edu/research/Papers/RevisedCost s2006Paper.pdf

[quote]
Social and Economic Consequences of Early Childbearing
For young women just beginning their adult lives, the risks of childbearing do not end with delivery. Compared with a woman who delays childbearing until her 20s, the woman who has her first child before age 20 is more likely to:

* Obtain less education,
* Have fewer job possibilities and lower income,
* Be divorced or separated from her partner (405, 450), and
* Live in poverty.
[/quote]

http://www.infoforhealth.org/pr/j41/j41chap2_5.sht ml

For the purpose of top and other job monitoring tools we can replace a process's "NICE" score with a "VIOLENCE" score -- an aggregate of their armor, accuracy, rampage tendencies and current ammo supply. We can rename the renice utility to medicate. The important thing about medication is that it eventually wears off, unless you specify the -l (lobotomize) option, which turns the process into a harmless drooling vegetable. Its companion utilities are aim and armor, which tune a job's accuracy and armor class, respectively.

Of course, with such a scheduler, something like the Doom system administration tool (perhaps more like Quake where you can aim vertically as well as horizontally) will become the preferred method of managing the processes on a system.

For one thing, the processes will obviously shoot back, as the process manager itself (which you see as yourself when running it) is a running process, and thus subject to being fired upon by the other processes.

Secondly, a headshot obviously gets you a "lobotomize" effect. This could pose a problem if one of the other processes hits you with a headshot...

Finally, the application of a medpack to an injured process invokes the "medicate" action.

There are a few possible problems with this, of course:

1. When you have two or more system administrators, all running the process manager, the system itself becomes a warzone with innocent processes being killed by the dozen as the administrators go on rampages in their attempts to kill each other for supreme control of the system.
2. Certain weapons, such as the BFG, are powerful enough to take out all but the most heavily armored processes, and since some of them are area effect weapons, a lot of innocent processes will bite the dust as a result of their usage.
3. Lightly-armored processes will need additional protection in the form of fast reflexes to avoid being hit.
4. Eventually the administrators will begin using aimbots and the like. One can see where the resulting arms race will go. Obviously the aimbots will have to run on a different system since otherwise they'll be potential targets.
5. "Spawn camping" takes on a whole new meaning. Newly created processes become very vulnerable compared with running under earlier versions of Linux. Normal users will have an increasingly difficult time starting tasks like OpenOffice and will start to migrate back to Windows or other OSes with clearly inferior schedulers.
6. Due to all of the above, the system will eventually become unusable by anyone but the system administrators. The sysadmins will, of course, say that this is how it should be.

In short, Linux will quickly become the must-have operating system for gamers, but at the expense of the general purpose desktop.

Just throw this into the kernel and we are good to go.

I'm glad they're time-like dimentions! I'd hate to find out they're orthogonal directions, and suddenly have to worry about all my organs spilling out into the v and w dimensions. Or start filling a glass with water, only to discover I have to keep pouring until I had 1/8pi*r^4*height units of water. It'd just be inconvenient!

I found some paper where someone worked out how to trap a creatures that can move in a fourth spatial dimension should they visit our universe.

http://www.cs.unm.edu/~kwiley/mindWanderings.html# capture4thDimCreature

Which you probably don't need to know, but if you skip this comment and are pestered fourth dimensional creatures, you will really kick yourself. Also, if you find flatland, don't stick your finger into it - you're not completely invulnerable.

Ahem, http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.h tml

This paper explores a novel interface to a system administration task. Instead of creating an interface de novo for the task, the author modified a popular computer game, Doom, to perform useful work. The game was chosen for its appeal to the target audience of system administrators. The implementation described is not a mature application, but it illustrates important points about user interfaces and our relationship with computers. The application relies on a computer game vernacular rather than the simulations of physical reality found in typical navigable virtual environments. Using a computer game vocabulary may broaden an application's audience by providing an intuitive environment for children and non-technical users. In addition, the application highlights the adversarial relationships that exist in a computer and suggests a new resource allocation scheme.

"LEAVE THE FUCKING BASEMENT!"

I know this was meant to be funny, but to be serious for a moment. Those who still live in the basement have more serious issues beyond WoW my friend, clinical depression and possible abuse being one of them.

The psychological rewards caused by natural selection can be ruined if a minimum of some of maslow's hierarchy of needs cannot be maintained. Because some serious exterinal or biological factors interfere with social and occupational functioning, causing unnatural stress and agitation on a persons nerves to the degree the wish to cease to exist to escape the cage constant stress and agitation they find themselves in. "Depression" does not in any way capture what a clinically depressed person physically feels. Anyone interested in understanding some of the evolutionary aspects of depression better can go here - http://biology.unm.edu/Biology/pwatson/public_html /dp1.htm

I've experienced clinical depression all my life, I shit you not, it's not a fun thing to know that for your entire life you do not experience life like everyone else, you do not enjoy things other people enjoy, and even the things you should enjoy... eating, sex, social life, company, take a back seat when you are clinically depressed.

The below is taken from Altruists.org :

Is Depression (i.e. and its consequences like addiction, etc) a Healthy reaction to a Sick Society?

"To demand that our children feel well in the world which we leave them is an insult to their dignity." Ivan Illich

The World Health Organisation defines depression as a 'disorder that presents with depressed mood, loss of interest or pleasure, feelings of guilt or low self-worth, disturbed sleep or appetite, low energy, and poor concentration'. It declares that it is the leading cause of disability, worldwide, and by 2020 it will be the second most important disease worldwide.

WHO goes on to say that in most cases, drugs are an effective treatment. This reflects a materialistic worldview that focusses on symptoms, not root causes. A multinational drug company has claimed that "depression is caused by an imbalance of brain chemicals", but this fails to explain why it is more widespread than ever before, (9.5% of US adults suffer from a depressive disorder in any one year) and why it is still spreading. Depression is not just another disease. If it is not caused by pathogens, how can it spread?

Maslow's hierarchy of needs predicts that if securely fed and housed, people's well-being depends less on material goods, more on factors such as good relationships with and love of others. However, most people are in the thrall of an economic system that ignores this fact, punishes generosity but rewards unnatural selfishness. This results in cognitive dissonance, because people feel forced to do things of which they disapprove, leaving them feeling guilty, disempowered and depressed. This would seem to explain why depression is booming even amidst materially prospering populations. Although a human tragedy, this epidemic of depression is a boon for the economy, since consumer culture feeds off people's low self-esteem by encouraging self-indulgence and escapism, resulting in a vicious circle of increasing consumption and decreasing well-being.

We believe many depressive symptoms are a natural response of the mind to an unhealthy, unsustainable, diseased and generally distressed society. Many of those who dismiss it as being an 'illness' of the brain, are sadly mistaken, others cynically exploiting it for their own benefit. Among the chief causes are the priority given to the competitive money system which discourages healthy human relationships to the point where, starved of friendship, some people even question the validity of loving others. Altruism is a side-effect free, natural way to cope with depressive symptoms and to live a longer, healthier and happier life.

reminds me of my dream of using the quake engine to replacee xplorer.

Been done (a long time ago).
http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/

Well at least in The Last Crusade, Jones explains that more archaelogy is in classrooms, etc... and X never marks the spot :)

Probably the best thing that has come close to hollywood's computer portrayl's is the Doom mod that let you hunt down and kill Unix processes: http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/

I was at a conference last weel (http://www.ieee.org/organizations/society/leos/LE OSCONF/GFP2006/index.html) were this was presented by John Bowers. As they explain briefly in the article, they are bonding InP to Silicon wafers. The silicon provides the waveguiding, and enough of the mode is in the InP to give them gain. They achieved an optically pumped laser, and were still working on an electrically pumped one. I wonder if this announcement will mean that they achieved electrically pumped lasing.

It's good work, but I'm not sure if the bonding process will ever be suitable for monolithography integrated CMOS and photonics. I was more impressed by the work done in Huffaker's lab (http://www.chtm.unm.edu/huffaker/index.html) where they are working on growing III-V materials directly on silicon. However, the work by Bowers is more mature and will lead to devices sooner.

According to this it relies on special processes to isolate user data. Something I would have thought was de rigur for any moderm Operating System. In the context of the quote I don't see why you need alternative OS. Couldn't something similar be added to the current OSs. Better than that is to embed such functionality directly into the hardware. It's a good idea but hardly a paradigm shift in OS design. Yet another abuse of the I word.

" Asbestos .. provides novel labeling and isolation mechanisms that help contain the effects of exploitable software flaws .. A new event process abstraction provides lightweight, isolated contexts within a single process, allowing the same process to act on behalf of multiple users while preventing it from leaking any single user's data to any other user"

In additional you could innoculate the system against exploits by uniquely scrambling the microcode table and randomly loading data into memory.

For those who don't know: http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/

Meteors are bits of dust or rock that plunge into the Earth's atmosphere and burn up, making bright streaks in the sky.

In addition to the Plan 9 papers, here's some nice reads:
http://www.cs.unm.edu/~fastos/05meeting/PLAN9NOTDE ADYET.pdf
http://www.collyer.net/who/geoff/9book.html

Did you know that some guy actually made Doom into a sysadmin tool?

"What I'd like to know is whether anyone has analyzed the situation using the same approach that an epidemiologist would apply to a biological epidemic."

People have. The parent poster is talking out of her ass, and has no clue how and why computer viruses spread. It's amazing the amount of horseshit that gets modded up here on slashdot.

Don't forget Plan 9. We are...err...still alive.

I'll bet it's not long before the USRP/GnuRadio people hook up with the graphics card as a compute engine folks. Graphics cards are well suited for high-speed signal processing, and would give you the ability to process high-bandwidth signals in realtime even on an ordinary PC.

GPGPU: General-Purpose computation on GPUs
The FFT on a GPU
GPU-FFTlib - Graphics Card based Implementation of the Fast Fourier Transform

--Pat

While I do enjoy someone writing a think piece on the idea of the dangers of a mono-culture. This work has been throughly research by Stephanie Forrest ( http://www.cs.unm.edu/~forrest/ ) at the university of new mexico via the sante fe institue and the complex systems program at the University of Michigan. For anyone that wants to acutally learn more about the application of immunization models to computer security, I suggest you check out her research.

I apologize for the comment about the native american language. If it's fairly common in the local area, include it. Blame the thought on my public school education.

The only concern I'd have remaining is that the written form of it is very recent, according to this site

RISE is resilient against brute force attacks because the attacker's work is exponential in the shortest code sequence that will make an externally detectable difference if it is unscrambled properly. We can be optimistic because most IA32 attack codes are at least dozens of bytes long, but if a software flaw existed that was exploitable with, say, a single one-byte opcode, then RISE would be vulnerable, although the process of guessing even a one byte representation would cause system crashes easily detectable by an administrator.

It goes on to explain that almost all of the time, the non-scrambled injected binary code, after being scrambled by RISE's unscrambler, causes an immediate crash, or a no-op, or an infinite loop. The point is that it won't execute.

And yes, it covers a number of both known attacks and theoretical ones.

And yes, it also covers the techniques they used to protect the RISE code itself; and relates RISE's techniques to those used in PaX, stack-smashing protectors (PointGuard et al), etcetera, etcetera. All in all an interesting read: not enough by itself but might make a useful additional layer.

How about just fixing the Memory Management Unit so as it don't get buffer overflows etc. And don't say it ain't possible.

As for the above I recall reading something similar about scrambling the microcode table and the opcodes in the actual program residing on disk. Since each processor would have its own unique instruction set viruses/trojans would be stopped in their tracks. And what's more you don't have to learn Calculus

There is something similar that goes around the road in Europe. It has the same length as the width of a SUV.

SMART car

Jamie Childress jamie.childress@boeing.com of Boeing Phantom works is giveng a talk at:

Jamie is speaking at STAIF (The Space Technology and Applications International Forum) http://www.unm.edu/~isnps/staif/2006/

His talk is about:
"Childress, Jamie/Boeing Phantom Works: 019/Parallel Path Magnetic Technology for High Efficiency Power Generators and Motor Drives"

We must ask Jamie and all Phantom folks if this stuff is on the fast path!!

If you visit the STAIF 2006 website you will see that Boeing was presenting on this technology. I doubt that Boeing would be involved if it was complete bunk. On the same note I doubt that we will see it in our server rooms anytime soon because Boeing is involved. From what I hear they have a tendancy to take their time with things like these.
http://www.unm.edu/~isnps/staif/2006/

Once again, NASA comes up with the high cost, over-engineered solution to a simple problem...

1. Wrap food carefully, and completely, in foil.
2. Place food parcel carefully on engine block; secure with wire if necessary.
3. Drive home.

For the average commuter, your dinner is now cooked.

...an accounting program expressed in FPS terms. Like DoomAdmin only more useful. Auditing in big spiked, armoured boots.

Hmm, that's not quite right. It would also require a projection of current and future birth rates, would it not?

At any rate, it is a flawed argument. One common analogy to the Doomsday Argument goes this way: Two urns contain 10 and 100 balls each, and the balls in each urn are numbered with sequential integers starting at one. I select an urn, pull out a ball at random, and show it to you. It has the number 7. You calculate -- correctly -- that the ball has a 10/11 chance of being from the urn with 10 balls. When this analogy is stretched to fit the Doomsday Argument, the number on the ball is analogous to your birth number, and the number of balls in the urn is analogous the total population of the human race for all time. So if your birth number is 10 billion, the chances that the total number of humans that ever have lived or will live ever reaching, say, 10 trillion must be very small. Or so goes the argument, anyway.

But suppose I take the urn with 10 balls and dump it into the urn with 100 balls. Assume the 10 balls from the first urn are black, and the 100 balls from the second urn are white. After thoroughly mixing the balls together in the second urn, I reach in and pull out a ball at random, and read the number to you (but don't allow you to see its color). It has the number 4. What are the chances the ball is black? (Hint: The answer is not 10/11!)

The validity of the DA comes down to this: If we do the urn experiment, and I don't tell you whether I am drawing from a single urn or from two urns, why would you expect the balls to be presorted by color into separate containers? Or why, when you are assigned a birth number, do you expect the same probability that your birth number will be assigned to you from a large pool of birth numbers as from a small pool of birth numbers? A birth number pool represents a sentient species. There may be millions of sentient species in the universe, and if we assume that the frequency of species with (total for all time) population N is the same as the frequency of species with (total for all time) population 1000*N, then you are 1000 times as likely to be a member of the second species as you are likely to be a member of the first. This changes your prior distribution in a very significant way. Assuming you can justify your prior (uniform or otherwise) in the first place.

As for the Gott argument, please read Carlton Caves's rebuttal.

Here's a better form of process control for venting rage.