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Kill -9 With a Doom Shotgun
Herschel Krustofsky writes "A researcher at the University of New Mexico has modified the Doom source to visualize processes and kill them! Finally you can really enjoy killing that Netscape process that just won't die!" Allright, I'm impressed.
"I can guarantee that I will be releasing the Quake source code, the only question is the timing. I don't intend to release it until all of the initial licensee projects have shipped. Anachronox looks to be the last one out, so pull for their completion..." - John Carmack
The only link I could find quickly was to a cached Google page and it's towards the bottom, but it matches what I've read other places.
Quake levels have to be designed to play well. If you have more than about ten complex models in view rendering slows down a lot. DOOM allows a hundred or more sprites in view without much impact. Not saying you're wrong, just that there *are* tradeoffs. :)
As far as I can tell, this is going to really change things if it ever gets used. It will make it easier for a hacker to destroy random processes if they can get in. I don't think anything like this will ever get mass-marketed, because people will be too paranoid to let it know their real address. These people don't like giving out their credit card number, they'll hate giving out their address. I dunno, maybe I'm just thinking too much. But no one ever lost money betting against the intelligence of the American public...
So there I was, between a rock and a hard place, when suddenly I think "Wait a minute. . . what am I doing on this side
Is this what we refer to as a killer app??
Load it up, and fight it out with the fractal dragon. You gotta be fast to save your machine.
t
> Not only that, but you have Fiends for Daemon models and Zombies for zombied processes!
Just think, axe 'em to hang 'em up, shoot lightning bolts to give 'em a kill -15, and a rocket or grenade for a kill -9.
---
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com." The purpose of that site was not known. -- MSNBC 10-26-1999 on MS crack
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Actually, this has the advantage of teaching a whole new generation of computer children. Most of us grew up in either a APPLE, COMMODORE, IBM Comp. world during the eighties and early nineties. We pretty much know whats going on from the ground up. But for others they need some kind of help in understanding computers.
The biggest complaint people have about UNIX based OSs is the commands and the layout. ITS JUST TO CONFUSING FOR THEM TO GRASP. Why should we teach this to our students if it confuses us the teachers say. Well this can be an educational tool for those wanting to understand UNIX and who learn best through visual association.
Wow, I beleive this to be a great concept. It helps to further develop the primary unserstanding of the world of UNIX. I can see it now, kids K-5 don't know how to battle complex mathmatical equations but they know the steps to take in putting down potential proccess riot led by the dreaded and notorious rouge procces known as XWINDOWS.
This opens up a whole newl world of fun for kids of all ages.
"Help me Obi-/.-Kenobi,your my only hope!" -$
The normal xdoom works for me, however the patched doesn't. A core dump reveals [root@nut xdoom]# gdb sxdoom core GNU gdb 4.18 Copyright 1998 Free Software Foundation, Inc. GDB is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License, and you are welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it under certain conditions. Type "show copying" to see the conditions. There is absolutely no warranty for GDB. Type "show warranty" for details. This GDB was configured as "i386-redhat-linux"... Core was generated by `./sxdoom'. Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation fault. Reading symbols from /usr/lib/libvga.so.1...done. Reading symbols from /lib/libm.so.6...done. Reading symbols from /lib/libc.so.6...done. Reading symbols from /lib/ld-linux.so.2...done. #0 _IO_fgets (buf=0xbffff874 "", n=255, fp=0x0) at iofgets.c:46 46 iofgets.c: No such file or directory. (gdb) bt #0 _IO_fgets (buf=0xbffff874 "", n=255, fp=0x0) at iofgets.c:46 #1 0x807c7ef in pr_poll () Cannot access memory at address 0x460. (gdb) that the problem is in pr_poll, specifically with fgets()
So is this the killer app that linux has been waiting for? sorry, someone had to say it.
Nope. It's a general computer thing. "Processes" are what you might call "tasks" or, more likely, "programs I have running". What this guy's written is a way to stop those processes-- or, in computer terminology, "kill them"-- by shooting up creatures corresponding to them in a modified version of DOOM. Has nothing to do with XFree86 (which, by the way, is only one of many X servers out there... NOT the only one, though practically the only one that won't cost you a bajillion bucks, and gives you the source), though you can probably run it under X.
:)
Since you seem so uberconfused, I'd like to strongly recommend that you get a few good computer books from O'Reilly and Associates and learn a bit.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Sysadmin NetHack!
The Netscape summons help! --More-- ...
The Netscape hits! --More--
The Netscape hits! --More--
The Netscape hits! --More--
You feel yourself slowing down. --More--
You kill -9 the csh! --More--
You feel wise. --More--
The sendmail breathes SPAM! --More--
You are hit by a blast of SPAM! --More--
But it reflects from your filter
Now where's that DevTeam when you need it...?
-- Arm yourself when the Frog God smiles.
hehe troll. Me thinks we will need to write a mod to take out rogue moderators.
I just wrote the code a couple of days ago and have not had a chance to try it in other environments. I was intending to post this doom thing to slashdot next week, but you just can't stop the speed of the internet. Nadeem Riaz made a suggestion that might fix the code on some platforms. I just changed my patch to reflect this. In response to some of the comments: The doom process itself is not in the game. I thought it would be too weird for the program to kill itself. However, I did not filter out other processes, so everything is fair game. Yes, the player can die, but this is to ensure that an over-eager sysadmin does not get in over her head. Dennis
I'm sorry. But the list of "potential benefits" don't sell it. It is a cute program, but it isn't useful to all but a few Sure I wouldn't use it to normal system adminstration. However, I would really liked to have that yesterday when I found 5 acroread-processes-that-wouldn't-die running on my machine taking 99% of the CPU time.
Nahh... more like, the little marines are running around mindlessly, going into the startx room, flipping on a switch that starts up netscape. But you always have that rogue marine that's trying to open (find the keycard to) the /root folder, other people's folders in /home, or playing around with executables that he should be playing around with in /sbin and /usr/sbin. What do we do then? We get some Combat Armor on, we find a grenade launcher and a bunch of grenades, and track him down (god bless Doom & it's automap) and pop him a few times, thus ending his noseyness.
Maybe perhaps level entrances will signify open ports -- and the doors will be open. If you see a marine that shouldn't be standing in the doorway of, say, port 139, then well you get out that damn double-barreled shotgun (doom 2), and blast his little ass off.
Just my [stock market crash] 1,739 cents.
for the record, quake1 does not require a 3d card, and it is quite playable on a low-end pentium system (i used to regularly abuse my coworkers using an amd k5-75 w/ 16 megs of ram, in win95 no less).
i wasnt aware of the quake1 source release. if true, that certainly help modifying it for this sort of task.
--Siva
Keyboard not found.
Keyboard not found.
Press F1 to continue.
"This is Unix. I know this."
I can see it: "I'm not playing games, boss, honest. I'm managing the loads on the servers!" (Accidentally killing init on the Power Management system while everything goes dark) In all seriousness, though, this guy has an idea that really rocks (I really could smell a patent here if he wanted to)
I don't expect to see any of the companies I've worked at installing this...but is the story complete fluff? No way.
Experiments such as this one are important steps to creating new interfaces. This article spawned many thoughts and creative ideas in a very short time here on Slashdot.
In other words, exercise your imagination a little like the guy that wrote this patch. You're missing out if you don't.
numb
?syntax error
su = iddqd
What I find interesting is all those wall panels that don't seem to serve any useful purpose. Wouldn't it be interesting if those panels could be xterms?
slashdot broke my sig
Anybody remember those toxic little barrels that cleared the room when shot?
Nuff said.
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"They misunderestimated me." --George W Bush, Nov. 6, 2000
Headcrash is a funny little book that takes technology, and extends it logically a bit. At one point, our hero, Pyle, was breaking into the place where he used to work via VR metaphors & the Internet.
;-)
Amazon listing of the book.
It's a good read, anyway. Hopefully people will take some ideas from it, and add it to the Doom. I'd love to be able to manipulate a proccess with goggles & gloves
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Of course, any other root level process can kill you too. Remember anyone wielding uid=0 is God.
The best use I can think of for this would be to have all network connections show up as monsters:
"Ah-ha! a portscan, huh? Say goodbye, caco-kiddie!"
Maybe connections to services on other machines could be shown as doors, like httpd would be a door with a big spider web bitmap (overdone cliches? yus!).
I need more coffee.
Why is it that many people who claim to support standards have such atrocious spelling and grammar?
The only problem, (if I recall correctly) is that in the doom .WAD, you can't have levels underneath each other. You have 2 variables, the ceiling height and the floor height. That makes it a little difficult to create multifloor buildings. Now if ID software could be pursuaded to release quake1 code...
>There's some times when you just need a
>bloody command prompt to do something.
Ohhhh... if that's not inspiration for
and Eterm theme I don't know what is. Where's
that dripping gore font I used to have...
garyr
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
How about using the descent 1 engine for stuff like this? It's got the full 6 degrees of freedom and the source is out there. I hear that some people have already done a playable OpenGL version, too.
But seriously, isn't limiting the user/world interaction to just "runnin' around, shootin' stuff" a bit... you know, limited? Killing processes isn't *that* common, even on large, multiuser systems. Pointing and clicking at objects to perform actions on them would be pretty cool, as would be the ability to socialize with other users on the system.
Either that or they're joking. Much like my Beowulf cluster of abacuses.
These are *MY* opinions.
They will not be *YOUR* opinions until the Orbital Mind Control Lasers are operati
I'm still getting used to this Linux thing, is this an Xfree86 thing?
Doesn't this look like exactly the kind of sysadmin tool that needs to be bundled with Jesux?
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
>>Folders would be rooms. Files are monsters >>that originate in the rooms. Symbolic links >>would be mapped as teleporters.
/vmlinuz :)
So wait, if you have a symbolic link to a file, wouldn't you then telefrag that file (monster) if you went through it? Uh-oh, time to remove all sym links to
>Now the interesting question is, what happens when they kill you?
A way to solve this with the "what happens when you kill the Doom process" question:
You are the Doom process. You die, the thing goes down, and takes X with it. You're left at the command prompt.
Ok, I usually don't reply to dumb things like this, but...
... how in the hell is this INSIGHTFUL??? Whoever moderated that one up should have their moderator privs revoked at once.
Yea it sure was... Bill Gates should be shot in the head or no, better yet in the lung so he will suffer instead of dying quickly. Yep... Linux ROOLZ DUDE! DOWN WITH THE EVIL EMPIRE!
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
now if he can add 3d card support, you can finally have a good(?!?) reason to ask your boss for a 3d card in your pc... and a sound card with good speakers... ;)
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
How long until Hollywood brings us a movie showing a system administrator using "DoomAdmin" to manage his/her processes? Wow, talk about hacking being glamorous!
"Prejudice is wrong; you should hate everyone the same."
So you don't accidentally kill your computer, you could make Init and csh into chain gunmen, or those goat-people... that way you couldn't accidentally kill them, well, unless you had the BFG ;-)
3d operating systems
There seems to be too much killing these days in slashdot. Perhaps if we didn't use so much violent language we could all get along.
setting up cron jobs:
:)
Simply walk through the directory structure to the executable and attach a little timer/detonator device to it. (You know, the type they use with C4 in your typical action movie.)
new users:
Couple ideas here. You could have one room set up as a cloning/genetic engineering lab. Or just cast a spell and watch the user appear out of nowhere, with the appropriate godly sound effects to go along with it. I'm thinking something along the lines of how you create imps in Dungeon Keeper.
installing software:
Simple. Your CD-ROM drive is represented in the environment as a docking bay. Just open the cargo door, and carry the package to the appropriate location.
Sendmail configuration would, of course, take place in a room that was heavily booby trapped with land mines and had no lights on whatsoever.
That's kinda cool, but Doom's really "yesterday." Do you think that we could do the same for Q3Test? And can I use the BFG to blast Netscape away?
Seriously, this could potentially bring a lot of fun to something that has been an annoying process.
Brad Johnson
Advisory Editor
Brad Johnson
What a fabulous idea!
;>
..
Reminds me of such things as the game Core Wars, and the movies
Tron and The Matrix (bots can kill rogue processes too...)
...I'm also reminded of the scene in National Lampoon's Vacation where the kids make Pacman eat the data off Chevy Chase's CoCo screen... That always annoyed me as another crummy example of computers in the movies - now it seems that life is imitating art
ANJ
everytime i go to load it up from the xdlaunch, it starts drawing the doom window in the upper left corner, then it just closes.... without the patch, doom runs fine... its got to be the patch, anyone else get this?
I love it!
I have been waiting for something like this forever! HEHEHE. Now, if we can just get this ported to another engine, say q2/q3test, throw in some Mesa, and we can have a really pointless interface to linux thast would be even more fun than hacking ~/.steprc files.
wolf31o2 Developer, Gentoo Linux Games Team
No, seriously...
Well, maybe not the Doom model, but something like Ultima.. Think about it. To change directories, you go to a different room. The objects in it are files. The 'people' are processes.
Killing a process is just the beginning. Imagine a man process that will have a conversation with you. Or a grep, that looks like a dog, which you send into a village to thrash around and bring back that file (scroll) that you forgot...
I like the fact that rm -Rf * is there when I need it, but a OO, interactive, VR interface to Unix (Linux) would be a Gates killer.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
:Certain processes are vital to the computer's operation and should not be killed. For example, :after I took the screenshot of myself being :attacked by csh, csh was shot by friendly fire from :behind, possibly by tcsh or xv, and my session was abruptly terminated.
The best laugh I've had all day 8-). Pass the BFG...
What was your username again? *Click-click* *BOOM!*
-- Arm yourself when the Frog God smiles.
Which would you choose???
Just imagine the horrific carnage of killing a parallel computation process on a Beowulf cluster!
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John 3:16 - God's Public License
Since some moderators don't seem to know - Romero's head on a stick screams at the end of Doom. (in doom2, idclev30 idclip, walk forward through the wall and then through the demon's face to see it)
You're right. IIRC, a local TV station showed off that interface when they got a new SGI.
Hilarious! I'm just sorry this didn't happen in time for that scene in Jurassic Park we all know and love. =)
The helldesk has got a bit too big for its boots, but the BOFH has a cunning plan to knock them down to size...
I'm sitting at my desk when the PFY looks up from his task of helping users with performance problems on the back-up server.
"Hey, the Kill-9 command isn't working."
"Yeah, I rewrote it with better signals. Ones with more meaning than words like hang up."
"Well what are they?"
"They're a mixed bag - everything a discerning system administrator needs."
"And they are?"
"Let's see, there's Kill-Godfather, which is a quick shot to the back of the process's header in a quiet corner of process space, and also, while it's at it, leaves a GIF of a horse's head in their screen-saver bitmap."
"Lovely, I'm sure."
"Then there's Kill-CIA, which kills the process and makes it look like natural causes."
"Uh-huh."
"Of course, further investigation of the core file reveals the words, 'grassy knoll,' which is sure to get the furry-toothed guys in research reaching for the dandelion tea."
"Yes..."
"Ahhhhh, Kill-shotgun, for when you can't remember the whole of the process's PID - it just kills anything in that vicinity. Kill-driveby, which knocks off one process on either side of the specified one, and so on."
"It's a little overboard isn't it?" the PFY asks mildly.
"No, Kill-overboard kills all processes, e-mails a nasty message to Bill Gates about how badly we're abusing our Microsoft licenses, then writes garbage all over the kernel causing the system to crash. Oh, and tampers with a couple of things on your desktop machine."
"Hey, the system's just gone down."
"Yeah -overboard is the default if your username is helpdesk. Installed SUID too, so they have the power they've been bleating about needing all this time."
The phone rings and something tells me it's the helpdesk wanting to complain. There's no pleasing some people.
~ Give me 101 plastic soldiers, and I will conquer the world.
Nah, they now have client-side bots for Quake now. Each process can be monitored by a central control program and the bots be apropriately dispatched (possibliy in an ugly select() call, but still feasable). Maybe perl could do it.
---
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com." The purpose of that site was not known. -- MSNBC 10-26-1999 on MS crack
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Interesting thought on Revenants. They respawn killed monsters, so would they respawn killed processes? Damnit, Netscape just won't die!!!
Maybe the Revenant shouldn't be linked to a process at all, just thrown in there to make an admin's life hell (or fun)
You could also use it for User visualization. Each user could only kill other logins of their own. Sysadmins could logout anybody (by blowing them to the moon of course). And there could be special AI to go kill a login that has been sitting there without activity for more than the designated amount of time. This last feature would be really useful for an ISP to logoff users that have been on for too long with no activity.
Linux Dashes, NT Crashes...
Even better, they could give certain processes more HP according to how hard they are to destroy.
:-)
For example:
Netscape would require 5 pistol shots (or equivalent) to destroy.
xclock would take 2 punches
- and -
Internet Explorer running under Wine would take 10 BFGs
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
OK, another idea on new users, inspired by one of my favorite BOFH quotes: "If you're too stupid to hack your way in, I don't want you on my system anyway." :)
:)
So how do we represent that sentiment visually? New hires are placed in front of a terminal with a guest account, and must EARN their own user account by collecting weapons and conquering a home directory. If they take over your home directory, you're fired.
Corporate politics will never be the same.
An eight year old could become the next system administrator of a company!
;-)
Yeah. Just like NT.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Most of you may not know a guy named Sergey Lukyanenko. Well he his a Russian SF author. A couple of years ago he wrote a tremendous blockbuster called Labirint of Reflections. I don't know if there is an english translation but
s 20.zip
I tell you the book is Hell!. Here in Russia it is a MUST to read it. For those who understand Russian:
http://sf.glasnet.ru/books/xussr_l/lukyas12.zip
http://sf.glasnet.ru/books/add-on/xussr_l/lukya
The book goes around a virtual world born mostly on our present technology and a strange hypnotic effect most people suffer by looking at a pattern of colors. This world is a world of programs, processes, networks turned to people, buildings and roads. A world much near to our Doom, Quake, Ultima and fantasies. A world where a financial transfer is turned into an 3D aberration of money running trough a funnel. A world where a security system turns into a gigantic cyclop. A world that started with a guy playing Doom through the night...
Well we still don't have the ill-famous "deep" - Enter sequence. But the Prophecy is fulfilled. Since Linus famous letter, this is the next Revolution.
Most of still don't realize that today is too different from yesterday...
Simple... just put god mode on...nothing to fear from even the nastiest processes! Lokust
Just kill their bash or whatever shell they're using. :)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
That fixed it for me. Thanks!
rename it to doom1.wad then put it in the data directory with the executable
how about Dungeon Keeper as a kewl process/network interface?
... corridors as network routes, doors as firewalls ...
... errant processes get dumped in the torture chamber ...
...
rooms as servers, monsters as processes
ahh... but the best bit
hehe... i see potential....
now if they'd release DK under the GPL sometime
all we need now is a version to blow up our old dos partitions as we convert to Linux :^)
In the spoon, there is no Soviet Russia!
The way to make this truly useful, and a new way to compute a la Neuromancer, is to not clamp down on the metaphor. Don't make rooms be processes or machines or any other fixed metaphor, and don't make "weapons" be tools from some vast and complicated "stateful" array.
Make each room you are in able to have it's own metaphor, and have the objects in the room be manipulable via some simple message passing tools in your hand.
So, starting with the kill processes room as described, make the doorways be "portals" to other rooms (but don't limit it...) which may contain other metaphors. So, I can enter the spreadsheets room where I can calculate, or I can enter the Beowulf maze where I can get performance stats, or I can enter the weather forecasting room which is just the metaphor for the processes that're running on the Beowulf cluster.
I.E., the "dungeon" is just your desktop as you know and love it, with a 3d-visual cartoon rendering whenever you roll your mouse somewhere and launch something. And make it be that easy: screw complicated maneuvering in favor of point-and-click only. Give the visual appearance of doing cool stuff, but make the user only point and click.
P.S. by the way, I proposed a similar scheme a while ago to some VRML vermin who were looking in a discussion group for "how to make VRML" more appealing to business users. The whole problem I saw with VRML was that it was visually cool, but too hard to use. Gamers may be familiar with lots of controls, but some of us aren't interested in that and they just create barriers to entry. Give me a point and click VRML UI with cool visuals, or an Id engine, and I can get people to click on your ads, guaranteed: Oooh! that tickles, stop it, you rascal!
-HUP would be a wedgie...
-WINCH might be changing his glasses..
-PIPE would have to either be a lead pipe, or, possibly, a bong ("Pass that over")
-PWR would need to be an electrocution level high voltage encounter, I want to see that animated...
-URG might be a bathroom break?
-TRAP of course, would be a bear trap.
I'm sure others more inventive than I can and will come up with better...
Processes attacking processes? Hmmmm, that's not new, Micro$oft has been doing that for over a decade!
Then again, isn't that what Linux does when it runs out of VM - randomly kill processes?
Suppose this is patched for network play... you run as root, and your life is tied to, say, all running processes.. If you die, everything is killed, and your machine goes bye-bye. So everyone's trying to crash each other's systems with a well-placed rocket...
That'd be some incentive to not suck.
(If you wanted to be a wuss about it you could tie it to shutdown, so if you die your machine goes down gracefully... but where's the carnage in that?)
Apply the following patch, and it should fix your segfault woes.. http://nut.dhs.org/pr_process.patch
Now what we need is a port to Quake so that our big, far away, headless boxen can run a dedicated Quake server and we can get down to some serious remote administration.
Next we need to place the processes belonging to a given user all in the same locked room. That way there's less chance of important processes dieing from 'friendly fire' if someone starts a fork-bomb. When the player^H^H^H^H^H^H user starts the administration session she should be automatically granted door keys commensurate with her rights as a user.
This is like a dream coming true...
Paul.
Sweeet, now all we need is a way to map users pictures to the processes they spawn. Take that vice president!
Although I think Duke 3D would have been a better 3d engine to use, but I'll take what I can get.
What? You mean 'crack code' doesn't work? Man. Last time I was hacking into the government's computers, the 'log in to government computer' kept telling me 'ACCESS DENIED'. Oh well. So much for my plan to take over the world... back to good old voodoo for me.
... just look for the process beating up on his buddies. Although, I'm afraid to see how the visualization of a virus "injecting" it's code into another process looks.
I agree that there is a strange significance here. The idea of visualizing computing in 3D isn't new. But relating actions to their realworld counterparts (kill --> death) in a 3D world is downright Gibson.
"ALLLLright, Microsoft lamers! Bring on yer Service Packs... I got a Linux box with a BFG here, an' I ain't afraid to use it! Bwahahahahaha!"
Sig broken, watch for
I logged in right after school today, and this was right at the top of the newspage. What a way to end the day. :P :P), this could make system administration much less stressful. One question though - will it work on lusers?
Seriously, though, with a bit of work (like making it difficult/impossible for vital processes to be killed - i.e. make init a Cyberdemon
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
Hmm, that sounds alot like when I was playing with Dehacked, trying to make a creature that would come back to life. Never got it any further than a 'ghost' that couldn't be killed, could walk through walls, and never stopped attacking you.
Ok Doom may not be perfect for all this but I'm putting here some ideas that could be used on it ;)
:) )
May look funny but some of these could be get some serious end...
You press a button and start a new process.
Each room is a user environment.
Shoot BFG in a room. All user's processes are killed.
The processes are shown in different "demons" according to several system parameters (ex. netscape as a Hell Baron
Every weapon you choose is equivalent to a kill signal.
The "architecture" of the level is based on a certain scheme "reflecting" the structure of demons, environments and users.
A lot of patches, several new objects for command and control and a whole new world. Funny? OF COURSE!! But not only. What will happen in a year or two if we start "playing" this new game?
Frankly when I saw the first Linux letters I thought that it was some funny but highly perspective kid's play. However I think that 95% of us would look at it the same way. So, let's do it?
set DOOMWADDIR=/usr/local/games/xdoom in your environment. Copy your old doom wad to that directory.
Simple... you had best be good with your rocketlauncher if you want to keep intruders at bay. Imagine a future scenario where the best deathmatchers are the best sysadmins because anyone who tries to hack into their system gets immediately 'shot down' Ok, farfetched, but it sounds amusing.
should not be there. If it is, that would be the first /. poll that covered all possible choices: just not allowed:)
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Actually the notion of process fighting back blows my mind. It actually frightens me a bit. As soon as you give any process a sense of self preservation, watch out, the terminator ain't too far behind. The implications of this have been played out in Sci-Fi circles for ages, and almost none of them paint a pretty picture.
man
"I'm a Genius!"*
*Not an actual Genius
Hmm, I keep getting this error when I do a make in the xdoomsrc directory: gcc -O3 -m486 -ffast-math -fomit-frame-pointer -Wall -DNORMALUNIX -DLINUX -DBUGFIXES -DPOLL_POINTER -DMUSSERV -I/usr/include/glide -c pr_process.c -o linux-x86/pr_process.o pr_process.c:23: parse error before `getpid' pr_process.c:23: warning: type defaults to `int' in declaration of `getpid' pr_process.c:23: warning: data definition has no type or storage class is it just me, or is there anyone else with a similar problem
Well, since were on the topic of Zoom modems, I'll add my 2 cents.
I don't like 'em (now). I liked my 33.6 Zoom modem for a while. It was great in tha 'doze, but once I started running Linux, it went dead slow. Probably would work at full speed again in windoze, but who cares about that. I'm pretty sure its a chipset thing, since other modems work just fine in that same Linux box... Oh well...
Hmm, I keep getting this error when I do a make in the xdoomsrc directory:
gcc -O3 -m486 -ffast-math -fomit-frame-pointer -Wall -DNORMALUNIX -DLINUX -DBUGFIXES -DPOLL_POINTER -DMUSSERV -I/usr/include/glide -c
pr_process.c -o linux-x86/pr_process.o
pr_process.c:23: parse error before `getpid' pr_process.c:23: warning: type defaults to `int' in declaration of `getpid'
pr_process.c:23: warning: data definition has no type or storage class
is it just me, or is there anyone else with a similar problem?
It needs to include a way to remove accounts of problem lusers, or at least to nuke the megabytes of pr0n and mp3s from their ~ when they come bugging for more disk space. since there are some messy legal issues involved with physically maiming/killing them, the next best thing is todo it virtually. .^
^.
this is a truly brilliant innovation ... it does open a very interesting line for future operating system/interface development, incorporating the 3D environment with process and file management alike; differing levels of control and access (above and beyond owner, group and all) through alternate tools (or weapons); coordination of system queues in a graphical and prehaps a more conceptual manner -- the possibilities and depth to which this could be taken is extraordinairy. The drawback in this I see being the hardware/processor intensive load which this method of interface may place on a system ... but then again, windows can do it :)
What about...
IDKFA?
And all those other fun commands? (So I didn't exactly play fair...)
Seems that if the codes are left enabled, the limitations placed on a newer/less experienced sysadmin would be pointless. What then? What happens when Joe Frathouse gets in, grabs a BFG-9000 and starts going after user sessions and kernels?
I know that he wouldn't be vulnerable, but his session would be... however, that wouldn't do much more than slow him down temporarily.
I hate being a wet blanket, for I really like this idea. I want it for Novell. I want to use this to kick off users when I have to load software... or patches... or reboot the server for it's monthly memory-leak cleaning... fun.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
How about a different room for each directory in the filesystem? New users could explore the filesystem that way.
The
This is cool
Don't throw your computer out the window, throw the Windows out of your computer!
Maybe Cult of the Dead Cow should take consider this a new "Administrator" interface to Back Orafice!! I can see it now... take down your entire Windoze network, and have fun doing it!!
> ~jawad, who gave up his moderation on this story to reply to this.
:-)
;-)
Thanks!
I do surf at -1, but I figure most people are using 0 or 1. This means there are occasionally good comments (not necessarialy the one in mention) that get missed by many people... That isn't fair. I have debated the -1 but don't remove approach before, and the biggest problem with putting a -1 on a good post is that it labels it bad. This gives the impression to new people that the information contained in that post is incorrect (not always the case), and labels the person "bad"... Plus it allows moderators to put too much of their feelings into the moderation score. Look at it this way, they don't put a score on the editorials submitted to newspapers because if they did, there would eventually be a -1 "Save the Children" post, because the moderator had a personal beef against the head of that foundation.
And as far as a "bad" looking post caused by a negative score, think of it this way, would you feel bad if there was someone who (as a long-time jerk) began moderating all your posts down on purpose (this _has_ happened. Look at MEEPT!!! for instance...)?
I decided to forgo moderation (and the slashdot account). I certainly could have had both, I've been surfing here before the time you needed an account to get your name and email on a post (Infact, I started checking out slashdot not too long before the post suggesting the Permedia 2 was awesome). I've posted (probably) 100 messages to slashdot. In my estimation, about 90% stay at 0 (since they are AC posts, few moderators are likely to moderate them to a 1. Although I'll admit I'm not a huge content poster.), about 5% go above 0, and about 5% go below 0 (most of that happened during the jon katz: star wars vs. star trek post, where moderators feelings went wild, and DID destroy the discussion. Check it out for yourself... I had hoped to bring some discussion into the problem in that forum [since that's where the problem was], but couldn't since I kept getting "bound and gagged" with a -1.).
As far as not having the account, I'm tired of another password. CmdrTaco's reason for not allowing you to enter your own info at post time didn't jive with me, and I never felt like having a username here. So I'm stuck as an AC. But not: mail me: uzer@hotmail.com
Rob's got better things to do than personally hear my opinion on moderation... I'd love to discuss it with him, but slashdot isn't perfect yet >;-)
I don't think moderators get harrassed normally, just when glaring errors are made. Another example that comes to mind: During a recent NYTIMES based story, a username/password combo was presented for public use to read the story (to make life easy). Someone's feelings must have gotten in the way, because it scored -1, offtopic even though it was the first post discussing passwords, and was certainly ontopic.
Why do I remember that stuff? I wish I knew...
What a long post. Well, just one final thing to mention while I have your attention.
Why do people think giving a -1 isn't censorship? If I decide to go out in public and say some crap people don't want to hear, I don't have to wear a big sign that says "Don't listen to me. -1, flamebait". That's what freedom is... The ability to say what you want without the fear of repression.
Hey it's not a rant, just my opinion... Now why did this get started again... Damn I've forgotten!
Have a nice day! (I kinda felt this downer of a rambling post needed that).
I can actually travel through my Linux box as if it were a world of its own. Hmmm. I wonder if I can travel through the network cable to the windows machine and hunt down and destroy the MPC^H^H^HWindows kernel.
Actually, I believe (although I may be mistaken) that the Jurassic Park thing was based on a very real interface that SGI was experimenting with. They never made it standard (good for them), but it was an option (which eventually flopped).
I am not an idiot. Please use my name to email me.
"That's right, I'm quoting myself."
-Upsilon
Since moderating moderators (censoring) becomes an infinite recursion, I figure the best solution is what we do in today's modern free society:
- Don't censor anyone or anything.
But hey, slashdot _is_ a private entity and will do whatever they damn well please (as long as it is legal).
Better idea -- Different rooms should represent directories, with processes being in the room that corresponds to their current directory. Then the overhead map becomes a map of your filesystem. Doors become subdirectories. And files can be represented by items laying on the ground!
Wow, this really could be used for system administration. :) DoomOS, anyone? :)
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Did you ever heard of Apple's ProjectX ? It was a bit like you said, you were flying thru some 3d File system, it was pretty cool... (Circa 1996)
yep, that fixed it. thanks for posting that.
now my problem is that only two monsters get spawned, they don't have any process id, and nothing dies when i kill them.
Lemmings style NUKE button, anyone?
For those of you that it seg faults, try
altering line 244 in the patch from
+ FILE *f = popen("ps", "rt");
to
+ FILE *f = popen("ps", "r");
and then patch and compile. At least it fixed it
for me.
I'd always envisioned that when I "grew up" and became a serious coder (I'm still not there yet) then it would be a great idea to torture the world with a virus sort of based on the principles of this interface.
Instead of processes though, you'd have files representing monsters and folders representing the rooms they were in. When you killed the monster, the corresponding file was deleted. You complete a level, and it just gets rid of the folder as well.
Bigger files got to be bigger monsters, and files that were in use would be stored in rooms many levels away (it just wouldn't due to have a user deleting the virus itself or the OS when there was plenty of other important stuff to kill).
Finally there's the big showdown with NTOSKRNL.EXE and by this time if you die you're screwed and if you win then you're doubly so. :)
I know, I'll build it and call it a system format utility!- =-=-
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Learnin' from each other's knowin,
...but It's only availible for Windows.
Anybody else have problems with Netscape 4.7 on /.?
FreeBSD or Linux constantly bombing out when
viewing
It happens often when I hit the "Back" button.
Hrmm....
Daemon Inside +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ www.freebsd.org +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
>> Login: Finally! We can have a giant 'ACCESS DENIED' when we're denied login! Alternately, you could see a locked door as in Doom. That would be nice, until someone discovers the devastating "noclip" -security hole :)
Well...you'd still need to use ps to get the pid number. But...background processes should be the pink demons, daemons the invisible pink demons, zombies those big fire things, etc. etc. Make it fun. And have them walk around...the non zombified ones...and make them resist (each shot attempts a kill -1 and then kill -15 etc. you get the idea.) Good use of doom...
Cool program! :)
Just a question. Is XDoom open sourced yet, i.e. GPL license? I heard the announcment for LxDOOM, but must have missed the one for XDoom.
they were one of three schools offering Doctorates in computer science in the US, that I could find.
Why that would be Peyote of course. Grows all over them ther desert hills and develups these tasty little buttons - sum call mezcal.
Adults are obsolete children. - Dr. Seuss
*snicker*
"And the top story in the news today is some scary AI process got loose from the pentagon earlier today. Whereas this could have disasterous effects to the world, the nerd community seems to be having a field day with it."
*cut to interview of geek playing Doom against Ultra-Big-Hairy-AI-Process (tm)*
"yea man, i havnt had this much fun since i was #3 in the Doom turnament over at PCExpo!"
*cut back to anchor*
"the government is rounding up the top 10 players as decided by those very turnaments. We will keep you posted as events unfold"
-confidential
AIM: confdntl98 ICQ: 150685 E-Mail: above... you can figure it out ^_~
I used to always laugh at hacker movies (especially "Hackers" and "The Net") that made destroying a server look like a video game. Now if some script kiddies get this thing working against another computer, their little friends will probably be REALLY impressed.
You were first - but see this post too...
when q3a goes gold, and the game source is freely available (that is the game.dll, not the engine code) it would be possible to make a virtual world for your entire os, file management, killing processes etc, and brainstorming, I came up with the idea of plugins and widgets, like someone could make a little component that makes it fun to do something or other, and you could pick and choose these little plugins to add functionality, and get really off the wall crazy in your custom environment. just my 2 cents
the doom AI will notice any wounding, and start all the rest of the processes fighting amongst themselves.
"Kill one of 'em, and let the rest of them sort it out."
First thing I noticed was there were only two processes, one of which didn't exist.
To rectify:
On line 46 of xdoomsrc/xdoom/pr_process.c, change
popen("ps", "r") to popen("ps x", "r")
Then, when in the game, "idkfa", "5", ""
.....
it killed my X session so badly I had to reconfigure E before it would restart
;)
but it got a good laugh around the office
--
bje
Just dl'd it and installed. Very neat! Thanks!
"Classic UFO's
Games have been taking bits of Windows down for YEARS!
Some of us (the same types that mv /bin/csh /usr/games) would argue that csh should be EASIER to kill, not harder. And shell scripts written in csh should be the easiest of all to kill!
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
This could be combined with a model of memory management, allowing you to more clearly map who's leaky.
Build memory wrappers around the whole system so you know who last touched what memory. Lay this memory out in 3d space, colored by who last touched'em.
I'm giddy.
Michael (A UNM CS student)
It might make an interesting test bed for a fault-tolerant system. If your monster/process can survive in the middle of Quake or Doom deathmatch, it'll survive anything!
My Netscape processes are quite adept at killing themselves, taking most of what I'm working on/with down at the same time. Just yesterday, the new 4.7, which I'd hope would be more stable, crashed and took out every open window on the system, leaving me looking at a bare desktop...
Oh my God, they killed init(8)! You bastards! -- my roommate, upon me telling him about this article
It has most, but regrettably it trails off in mid-1997, to say nothing of 1998 or 1999. Personally, I would love to see BOFH return in print. Sigh.
But we're getting off-topic :-)
So what happens if you kill the monster associated with the Doom pid? Quit? Something cool. Maybe spawning a daughter doom process, kinda like the splintered broom in Fantasia!
--
need a hereitc port so i can kill all those
zombie processes.
:)
Yeah! Then when you modify inetd.conf, you would have to go into the game, find the inetd monster, and give it slap!
me likes it!
Doom is great, but it's focused on destruction, not creation. A sim game might be more appropriate, with the goal being building an efficient city (optimizing the OS). The sim could be given a target efficiency to reach, and then be allowed to cut the budget, raise taxes, and reallocate resources as needed. It could research other cities (CPUs) to see how they handle their problems, and employ their techniques if applicable.
My guess is that the probability of either a mass murderer or a qualified sysadmin being produced by just playing a corridor shooter is about the same.
(perhaps a sysadmin is more likely. I know more of them that play Quake than I do murderers who play).
"And what the people but a herd confus'd,
A miscellaneous rabble, who extol
Never trust anyone over 90000.
-----------------------
Nicotine free Amish .sig.
Here is the definitive Bastard stuff, his own web site:
http://prime-mover.cc.waikato.ac.n z/Bastard.html
Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem
Isn't quake1 code coming out soon/just released?
IAAL,BIANLY
Since the Quake 1 code is coming out, it would be nice to see this using Quake. (I also thought about Duke Nukem, mainly for the inventory functions that are not present in Q1.)
Now, you can setup links as slip gates. Just add the RL teleport patch, and life gets very interesting.
If you wanted to jump back and forth from directory to directory, have a few temporary slip gates around. Just jump through, and your there, and turn around to go back.
Of course, we'd still need a nice console interface, but that can be done. Just imagine coming up behind some user logged in at a console, his back turned, completely unaware that the sysadmin is right behind him with the Lightning gun...
And yes, I would love to see netplay. It would have to be on a dedicated server, because one strategy would be to attack the network connections of other users to make them simply blink out of existence. (Of course, the ping of death did that before... now it's "legal" and part of the game...)
This is very thought provoking.
Try: `/usr/games/fortune -s`
It would make a great multiplayer game, methinks. Players would go around killing each other's processes, and each other (which would probably just kill the GUI if we were going for accuracy). This would be good during long marathon programming exercises ... you'd have to make sure that other people weren't going to kill emacs or gcc while you were working, and you could justify game-playing as you work!
I know that in some of my programming classes, the sysadmins would've *loved* to have something like this to kill all the runaway processes we were creating. Would've probably made tehm a little more polite to us about them, too.
And creating processes is easy ... instead of doing this for your whole environment, maybe just a sub-shell where you couldn't possibly kill anything important (although that could take away some of the fun).
I think I'm definitely going to have to give this hack a try.
time for all of you old doom mappers out there to ressurect that map of where you work, so you can easily know which machine you're about to shutdown with that BFG you're holding...
Actually, there is a product called Unicenter TNG from CA that provides 3d visualization of servers, networks, and applications. I do not know for sure that it lets you view and kill processes, but I would imagine that it does.
The innovation here is that you can find the shotgun.
Now I want to see him port this for a LAN version so we can finally duke it out in cyberspace -- windows vs. linux!!
Another older version is Inner Space, which is essentially an asteroids game that looks through the Windows filesystem for icons to use as rock.
It used a file browser to choose directories, which were then converted into levels. The number of rocks would depend on the number of files in the directory. Mindless? Yes. Boring? Yes.
But, certainly unique.
I was thinking along the similar lines of the official /. lightbulb joke:
/.er's does it take to change a lightbulb?
/. has dropped
Q: How many
A: 65
5 to say "First Bulb",
2 to propose hooking up lightbulbs into a Beowulf cluster,
3 to say that the lightbulb was already changed,
4 to say that the ability to change a lightbulb isn't new,
2 to say "Linux Rules"
3 to say "Linux Sux"
9 to say "What about XYZ OS?"
12 to complain about the how the quality of
23 Moderation complaints
And Rob & Hemos to change the bulb
Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem
The sysadmin's weapon needs many different settings:
1. BFG setting
2. Kill
3. Stun
4. Raise priority
5. Lower priority
6. Get info
7. Make unkillable
8. Make killable
Probably can think of more....
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
I once started something like this, using NetHack instead of Doom. Each directory is a "level", the stairs up ("") goes to .., and stairs down take you deeper into the directory tree. Files are items of various types. Never really got it developed very far though.
Can it be added to to remove users as well?
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Accually
it exist
But it only runs on IRIX.
- A COMPLETE system administration tool (nothing comes out to mind)?
- A file manager (like mc)?
- A desktop environment (like gnome or kde)?
- A so-called operating system (like emacs)?
No, I think that DOOM is a GAME, and must continue to be a GAME.Of course, I remember that, according to jwz's own experience, every enoughly [something I don't remember] program will grown without stopping until it can read mail (fourth degree of grown, like emacs).
Is that the beginning of some sort of a new era of system environments disguised as computer games, or the accomplishment of the prophecies said on Hollywood about 21st century technology?
I think it's already said on Slashdot, so I will press the Cancel Button... No Cancel button? What means this Submit button? I will press it to see what happens.
--
Sorry for the bad English.
--- Sueños del Sur - a webcomic about four young siblings
idspispopd hehehe i have a good memory.
Are you sure you want to reboot
take the red pill, you log out
take the blue pill, you stay logged in
I knew it I knew it would come true I just new it.
:)
Imagine the possibilities if it was used under NT or something where processes die an a regular basis... (naah - you'd need a body bag for all the dead admins)
On a more serious note, the idea of using a 3-D interface of some sort has been around for a long time. Using Doom (or any 1PS engine) as a front end is a fairly novel and potentially useful way to take advantage of 3-D for a limited set of tasks. I'm not sure how you'd -HUP a process (visually, that is), and there's other places the idea needs refining, but the idea is quite interesting.
I think you'd use Q3 to kill processes on someone else's machine, not your own, wouldn't you? After all, that's what "team play" is about, right?
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Why would anyone ever want processes to kill each other randomly? And why would you ever want a process to kill an administrator?
It says that you may have big monsters represent important processes. But if they are attacked, they still get reniced! I don't want init or kswapd to be put on a low priority. That's absurd.
The idea of being able to graphically move to different computers and kill processes is a good idea. Making the system into some kind of ecosystem probably isn't.
Lastly, is it really a good idea to be ripping a BFG shot onto your helpless little system. I don't want all of my processes dying suddenly.
Got HTML? Want LaTeX? Try html2latex
"I know this!"
Does Root get any sort of concussion grenade or something to wipe out whole batches of zombies at once :-) Ben pooploop, who forgot his pass
This is beyond cool, too bad it's a serious security hole but still a lot of fun :) I wish they could modify the source to send overvoltage to misbehaving devices to KILL them :) BTW Zoom 2949L the ones with the Lucent venus chipset ROCK HARD I went from 36-40k off my cirrus to 44-48k on the Zoom
...which says that in any Slashdot discussion reporting about something there will be at least one post claiming that this isn't really new.
Shall I break such a grand old tradition?
Of course not. There is a computer games called Virus which has a similar concept: you are fighting a virus infecting your computer inside a 3d visualization of your hard disk and you can see the virus destroying your own files and directories. The difference is that unlike this doom version the files aren't really deleted...
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Netscape already causes enough problems on my system, what would happen if it were a rocket-armed monster wandering around destroying processes? What would happen if it could defend itself from me??
-aiabx
Just this guy, you know?
Peaceful?! No way, we don't need no hippie lava lamps, we need to KILL!!! To take a big gun and blow something into little pieces! We're unix users damnit, we don't need more peace, we need more coffee and guns!
:)
Now. Go back to your MacOS, you hippie.
Greetings, programs!
::: jane
Probably can't be done, as I don't think QuakeC can interface to the system.
Quake2, OTOH, would work, as they use straight C and shared libs. System interfacing is frowned upon but possible.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
CPU hogs show up as that red ball thing. Regular processes show up as soldiers. Daemons as those floating skulls. Servers as those brown monsters. Key root tasks appear as the horned goat thing. And Netscape, of course, is that large walking brain thing.
Weapons include the whip, to make processes run at a 'nice'er level. Some sort of stun gun to suspend/resume processes. A soft kill pistol, and a kill -9 shotgun. The bazooka to mass kill blocks of processes (like fuser does). And of course, the BFG9000 to shut the system down.
Other rooms could house devices which themselves may be other worlds such as the filesystem, for example. Use the switches on the wall to mount/umount drives. The fsck gun (chainsaw) could then be used to check your drives for errors. Other guns can do chmods, rm, etc.
Man, there's just so much this could be expanded to do. The mind boggles.
It should be easy enough to change the doom source in such a way that the monsters no longer kill each other...and then if you put on god mode you don't have to worry about your processes killing you (now wouldn't *that* be weird...). I suppose you could also change the BFG to be like a killall command, the pistol to renice and the shotgun to kill -9...although you'll have to be carful where you point that thing :)
all in all this whole thing sound like a concept worthy of time and attention...
A group of networked computers, a few users logged into each computer. The computers are personified as forts or bases or something on a map.
The goal? Kill others' processes while defending your own. Lots of room for strategy by starting huge ones that whomp on intruding sysadmins, or surgically zapping shells to get rid of users. Each team can have a set number of weapons, which some mastermind distributes among his teammates.
Who wins? the last team with a working computer.
Finally, I virtual reality that is authentic, no silly games to run killing your friends. The actions in this Doom world have real consequences other than having to re-spawn. This is the stuff of the Future!
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
can't wait to try it.
reminds me of a compiler my brother wanted to write...like 7 years ago or so.
all the objects would be balloons in 3d space, and you would connect them like molecules, ie, the interfaces had to match up or they wouldn't fit together.
I hope some decent three d toolkits start maturing for linux so more of these great ideas can become reality.
yes. automap is dfinitely key.
"You want to kiss the sky? Better learn how to kneel." - U2
"It was like trying to herd cats..." - Robert A. Heinlein
Sig:
Barbeque is a noun. Not a verb.
...to make a process named Bill Gates :)
Okay, it wasn't funny...or was it?
Dan
now this could be really cool but its got some problems ie. 8.Try not to shoot the monster that represents your primary shell.
Way too much fun ;)
;)
Something like that would be best implemented in a game like descent, where the game itself and the shell running it are in a central core.
Enter the teleportation chamber. Say the dns of your neighbor's computer and push the button. Networking connection is automaticly established and it begins a network game on their box - something to that effect.
Way too much fun
It reminds of (ACK!) Hackers: the movie where penn (of penn and teller fame) was fighting off the 31337 haxors =)
"We hope you find fun and laughter in the new millenium" - Top half of fastfood gamepiece
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Of course, this sort of makes me regret there aren't any real viruses in Linux. This would be a cool tool to hunt them down with.
Finally, computer software starts to catch
up ridiculous Hollywood portrayals of computer
software. Now if I could just run a program
to let me break the world's toughest encryption
in 30 key strokes or less.
Those who can do. Those who can't sue.
be taken a step further to make a totally 3D interface for systems. Now is probably the best time in computing history to attempt such a project. Processors are pushing the gigahertz range and 3D accelerators are spitting out 1600x1200x32 resolutions at 30fps and up. A 3D interface would be a hundred times more intuitive than the desktop environment a majority of users have in front of them. It would be the REAL revolution in computing that's been promised for years by different people. This concept has a good deal of potential.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
5-day old process under NT? This must be a joke.
Image how a shutdown sequence would look with this environment...All the monsters in the room would start to kill themselves in a quiet orderley fashion until a screen comes up says
"Level Complete. Kills 32/32 Secret 1/10". Press Enter To Continue"
Hang on...NT already does that whole enter to continue thingy...I've changed my mind, that would actually be really anoying!
...by the work of a truly twisted genius.
Certain processes are vital to the computer's operation and should not be killed. For example, after I took the screenshot of myself being attacked by csh, csh was shot by friendly fire from behind, possibly by tcsh or xv, and my session was abruptly terminated.
Man, that is funny! I NEED to download now!
With a new breed of flashy interfaces on sysadmin/hacking tools, this makes the perfect answer to the earlier discussion about movies. Somebody doing some kind of hacking job could have it shown visually in the movie by having the person move in 3D through a room.
And it wouldn't give up anything in the way of realism.
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
What happens if the doom process manages to kill itself? Does it gracefully shut down, or does it gum up the works?
-----------
-----------
100% pure freak
You're right actually sounds like it used the rockwell RPI chipset which kinda works without windows but you lose compress and error correct.
Hehe...what happens when you shoot the 'init'-process?
:-)
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
If you used Unreal as the engine each user could have their own set of levels to define their space, you could go through a portal 'joining' their game and dynamicly download whatever level they were using. That way every user could have a custom environment and you wouldn't have to worry about having the correct *.wad file to see what they were doing.
Personally, I'd like to see more applications like that. Not a mandatory feature of an OS, but cool toys you can use to impress people. Stuff like:
Daemon processes: Visit the Infernal Realms (again, a la Doom) and meet your Daemons in person!
Login: Finally! We can have a giant 'ACCESS DENIED' when we're denied login! Alternately, you could see a locked door as in Doom.
Network architecture: Imagine being able to navigate your network as in all those Gibsonian worlds... In a Doom environment, no less. A room is a particular server, and doors are gateways. You get that moving skyline when you're about to go on the Internet.
Antivirus software: pump that shotgun with the latest shells, and go hunt for some bugs, as you navigate your file system and kill infected files!
Well, alright, that's humorous. But I still think there's plenty of potential with 'over-visualising' processes and commands. It's fun, and it helps the layman understand what's going on.
However:
Making it "mandatory" is just plain wrong. Microsoft is the champion in the over-visualisation. There's some times when you just need a bloody command prompt to do something. It's silly to always have graphics everywhere, and it bugs down your performance.
So... Cool toys, yes. Features? Please, no!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Be next on line to buy the new DOOM os. When users can accidently take out their hard drive by blasting away files represented as boxes in a store room. Wonder what would take the place of the blue screen of death? Seeing your own brains spattered on a wall as your computer keeps screaming death threats? I like it.
Someone please, PLEASE port this to NT.. I've got a five-day-old Java process that could use a few pounds of lead upside the head...
"Honey, it's not working out; I think we should make our relationship open-source."
No, that's the kind of research you would be doing, Spiny. :) I think it's called 'zoom,' of all the uncreative things out there. I dunno, and I'm too tired to look it up on the UNM CS website (too tired to even see if that's the right URL for the department). This is an interface project that's been going on for, like, 10 years now (I know they had a lot of work put in when I was in middle school). When I saw it running on an SGI Indigo back then, it was the coolest thing ever, aside from 'ant: the movie' running in the background. :)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
It's very easy to make all monsters that are not too close fail to attack by blinding them with a reject map for the level that is all ones.
:)
Monster and player states are stored in a mobj_s structure that includes pointers to other mobj_s structures: target, tracer, (and lastenemy if derived from BOOM.) These store the last monster that attacked, and by keeping these NULL, or ignoring them, monsters would not attack at all, so you wouldn't need degreelessness or a funny reject.
There were some strange bugs with these pointers in some versions of the original DOOM that allowed fireball throwing monsters to attack themselves or others of the same kind.
The killall command is a little tricky in DOOM 2. When you kill a pain elemental you have to remember it will spawn heads a few seconds later, and kill those too. Throwing in a pain elemental that spawned pain elementals (and processes) on being killed might be a memory virus
Not to rain on your parade, but there are a few problems :)
One is that with DoomOS you can only see the directory you're currently in. A GUI tree manager provides a better overview, spanning multiple directories. Still, map mode, if done creatively, might be able to make up for this. The lack of map mode in Quake might even be a reason to choose DOOM for this.
If you want to go somewhere that is six directories up then seven more down, it takes quite a while, assuming you don't get lost. It would be easier to pull up the map and click the directory you want to end up at.
You only have three verbs to interact with objects in DOOM, run over/against, shoot, and use/push. Run over/against and use/push are actions that are hard to modify. Shoot could be altered by which weapon, and where you aimed, but it's still a somewhat limited set of actions. Vertical aiming would allow you to shoot specific spots and the metaphor might have sufficient power. It would be more natural if you could move your arm and touch a specific spot on an object.
I think it has some definite applications as a super-intuitive interface to a limited environment for people with no computer experience. It would be a lot of fun to build a Doom development environment along these lines perhaps, and that would give it a good test.
I agree naming the processes would be a big step forward too.
..that nothing innovative comes out of the free software community? At least I've never heard of anything quite like this before..
However..
I'm not sure I exactly like the idea of my processes beating each other up. I already had the problem of processes dying for no apparent reason under Windows. Why would I want to relive one of its worst "features"?
~ Kish
Doom has entities like switches, buttons and computer screens that can display 2D images. Doom is not resource intensive by today's standards really. Perhaps with hacking X apps could be launched from switches and buttons and appear on screens in a kind of control room in which you the admin, are spawned and then conveniently snipe processes and users or get out in their midst for some carnage.
:) could be about as efficient as Enlightenment. This sounds extremely exciting to me. 3D file management would still be a chore though, but the possbilities for network integration and interaction are incredible - UNIX has always had commands like talk and irc - if the OS interface is 3D and users are always visualised as grunts (or 'avatars' as they say) - people will finally start to use VRML MUDs, because their entire environment will be 3D. And as graphics capabilities advance, possibilities for personalisation and self-expression will too. Making interfaces 3D will naturally usher in the fully immersive, inclusive cyberspace of Snow Crash, Neuromancer etc. - and *inclusive* is the emphasis - the problems I see with 3D MUDs is, noone uses them - what better is there to get the masses involved than through games software like Doom?
If xterms could be launched and displayed efficiently in the environment, the Doom Window Manager (maybe with a little 3D acceleration
...so basically I'm saying this is really cool!!
I had this idea of feeding all of my manpages into a local megahal to make a virtual UNIX guru...
Unfortunately, it ate up my 96M of ram before I could even interact. Perhaps this would work on one of those insane machines with gigs of ram and altogether too much processing power.
F0 07 C7 C8
I modified the Doom process-killing thingy to print the first 14 characters of the process' name to make em easier to spot: http://raq.linux-florida.com/users/chris/xdoomsrc- cshepher.tar.gz -Chris Shepherd
This is a perfect interface for those pesky programs that are incompatible with others or are just plain buggy.. don't the monsters in doom kill each other when they piss each other off?
Slartibartfast:"Is that your robot?"
Marvin:"No, I'm mine."
-----------------------
Nicotine free Amish .sig.
I think it was in early 1997 that the BOFH did this. Anyone remeber which one?
Of course the real fun in this would be to have a server that hosted other players' systems. You wouldn't just be playing to rack up frags, you'd be playing to protect your vital processes from being killed by other players!
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My idea a while back was to take a network probe output and have a tool to build a quake map from it, with targets or big glowing holes for various vulnerabilities. Maybe monsters too? Build the weaknesses into a big boss monster, then kick it's ass!
You could take down all the 95 users (grunts) with the rl, then blow away Cthon for root on the SGI!
Woo! If only I was 15 again with nothin but time...
Look, I'll explain what the point of this.
The first time I read this, I thought this was the funniest thing I'd heard in weeks.
But you gotta wonder -- in all seriousness -- if this isn't actually a pretty importent moment.
The idea of this -- us verus them, the users versus the processes they (could/should/ought to) control -- is metaphorically quite interesting.
I mean, the notion of allowing processes to fight back -- or wounding but not killing a process -- is pretty fascinating -- especially when everything is played out on a virtual battlefield.
It's quite frightening when you stop and think about it. Yeah, it's funny: but imagine somehow if artificial intelligence (on the part of the machines) is slipped in here and this whole thing is played out on a much larger scale -- on a much larger, much different sort of virtual battlefield.
It's funny, but the implications of this are pretty overwhelming.
Very cool.
Think how much fun it would be standing in the middle of a room with sprites representing all the different processes/threads of a high-volume web server. All those apache children constantly killing each other and re-spawning, plus DB, middleware, and OS threads all competing for resources. Be a much better way than 'top' to get a feel for what your machine is doing at the moment!
Can your IM do this?
Check out these, which pre-dates you by over a month.
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
--
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
That would be pretty cool, I wish someone would. There are some pretty fun things you could do with it.
You quaff a potion called "chmod 0
You are blind!
You read a scroll labelled "/etc/passwd"
This scroll is too hard to read!
Somebody wrote a full adventure shell back in the '80s. Each directory was a room, executable programs were monsters. To edit something, for example, you had to pick up the file, then throw it at the vi monster. As I recall, the author of the script said that he knew people who actually preferred using it to csh or sh.
DISLAIMER:
read
laugh
don't take this seriously
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
They should make the weapons different types of termination signals. SIGHUP sometimes won't do the trick for netscape, you have to switch to the BFG of signals, SIGTERM.
Let me grab my rollerblades right now.
You would have to use an FPS like half-life with scripted sequences. You get a doctor to follow you and when you kill a process he performs cpr on the carcass. Just like in the beginning of Half-Life where a doc recussetates a barney.
www.mp3.com/Undocumented
Sounds like something from the movie "Hackers" should I buy some RollerBlades??????
A company named sega-soft makes a program called "Web Vengence" that lets you trash websites. I think some kid won a thosand bucks last year for best use of Web Vengence. I think he tore up the IRS's website fairly badly.
I don't remember the URL right now (sorry). I used this thing once or twice, and with the food-fight addon pack, it can be quite fun.
Didn't MS try to launch an emasculated, ineffectual, and anoying flavor of this technology around 1995???
It's making me think of a scene Douglas Adams - specifically the last book 'Mostly Harmless', where Ford Prefect is running/thinking around in the depths of Infinidim's computer system in a beautiful 4D virtual reality accounting interface.
:-) multidimensional world just moving bits of it about to make it prettier and generally nicer/more elegant.
:-)
He says to himself something like 'So this is where accountants spend all their time. There's more to those guys than meets the eye.'
Imagine how much more appealing programming would look to the average Ford Prefect if we were all inside a spakling (bug-free
This is kind of how I think of programming anyway, and mathematics for that matter, but it's a little hard to explain to some people I know.
And colours are cool
"If Erythrina would only come, they might be able to stop him. Milliseconds separated him from the True Death. He looked desperately around. Where is she?
Military Status announced the discharge of an Orbital Weapons Laser. He cowered even as his quickened"
And then the cached version ends. AAAAAARRRRRRGGGHHHH. Anyone got a better mirror? I'M DESPERATE.
The page was really an exploration of an idea, not an advertisement for the program, which was a simple proof-of-concept. I wanted to see if the basic things could be done easily. And they can be! I also wanted to inspire people to implement cyberspace.
Advice for people who want to see this work on their machines:
- Make sure that the unpatched Doom source will compile on your machine, then add the patch. I hope that the port is portable with only minor adjustments necessary.
- I didn't change the Makefile, just the GNUmakefile. So if you are using the Makefile, add the object file "pr_process.o" to the dependencies.
- Look at lines near the markers "--pid--". These are the lines of code that I added. I hacked them into the code in a day. And it shows. You can do better!
I am surrounded by Debian Linux boxes, so I really can't help those who can't get stuff to compile. DennisI wonder if there will be a network version coming out as being the latest "game hacker tool, shoot other people's processes".
This is really too much; who said that Linux wasn't fun again?
Ok, so this seems like a viable option. Some modification is needed, but it is a work in progress.
Wasn't there a question in the Ask Carmack post about appllying quake code to cyberspace uses?
My question is, how does this translate into the security arena? Can the program be modified to detect/track users as well as processes?
Myabe each room defines a user's space. The user is a boss monster of some sort (depends on their user privledges), and all of their processes are soldiers in the room with them. The more privledges, the more access cards you have, and the bigger your avatar.
So, you would be able to track whatever users are on your system, and know if they should be there or not. Pretty much instantly you would know if an intruder is in your system. Becuase suddenly there's another root avatar running around. Much easier than looking through logs and other traces. And you can literally blow the guy away.
And maybe you could use the system to visually playback the actions taken by a user over the course of their login?
"You want to kiss the sky? Better learn how to kneel." - U2
"It was like trying to herd cats..." - Robert A. Heinlein
Sig:
Barbeque is a noun. Not a verb.
"the government is rounding up the top 10 players as decided by those very turnaments. We will keep you posted as events unfold"
Remember "The Last Starfighter"?
DennisSounds like fun, if for no other reason than the sheer impracticality of it :-).
When (if) the quake source code gets released, somebody should replace the console with an unix shell. All kernel error messages could then appear in the game. And there's more: instead of logging in, one would just join a multiplayer game and then launch whatever application he/she wanted in the console (like EMACS). And finally, what about running another quake session (with AALIB) in the quake console?!
but this would certainly add some drama to an exploit once you are in.- -------------
--------------------------------------------
Can anyone point me to another location of that short story mentioned, called "True Names"? It looks pretty cool, I would like to read it.
Jeff Knox
So let me get this straight...
If this would be fully developed, we would be able to control system administration through playing a souped up game of DOOM! Do you know what this means?
An eight year old could become the next system administrator of a company!
CEO: "Johnny, my computer locked up again, what do I do?"
Administrator: "Hold on a sec...gotta whip out my BFG for this one...DIE YOU ALIEN SCUM!!!"
The CPU would talk about it's childhood and everything (to figure out how this process was started)..
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
The computer scientist in me wonders if this guy got funding for this, and if so, I wonder about the state of affairs in research funding in the US!
:)
The other part of me, the 21 year old college CS student says "Who the F*CK cares about funding, this kicks!!!!!"
I just loved the blurb at the bottom about the problems - something along the lines of "Just when I was being attacked by csh, csh was killed by friendly fire from tcsh or xv...." I just KNEW those shells really hated each other!
Respecftully,
Kevin Christie
kwchri@maila.wm.edu
BTW that Actiontec and Multitec modems based on Lucent Venus chipset are PCI
Now _THAT_ is a good idea...
Now what would you need to remember things like... idsu -
Am I the only person reminded of the Disney movie "Tron"? - programs fighting it out...? Up the resolution, display the name of a process not just the number, and it would be even cooler!
has anyone tried running a fork bomb while while viewing your processes in doom? maybe with the chain gun you could shoot fast enough to keep the system from wedging. .^
^.
Is it just me or would it be a Bad Thing (tm) to let anyone wander around with a BFG in "process killing mode"? One itchy trigger finger and 75 processes bite the dust.
"Sorry I kill'd ya', Fidget." - Time Bandits
Yes this is cool. But with doom, this can pose a problem. Will the world accept it? Tomorrow when a psycho goes out and shoots people, They will blame it on intese training of killing processes with their computer. Now, we will have kids learning to use guns and such. No, don't get me wrong. I have no problem with that, but that is what the media, and parents will be saying. Nevertheless this is only a step to 3d interface.
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
Oh, you meant physical, not emotional age...
At http://ultracool.net/xdoom-proc-pnames.gz you'll find a patch that displays process names + pids instead of just the pids. Makes it a lot more fun :). It's a quick hack, but, hey - so was the original patch. Apply it after you applied the original patch, same method.
"Error: W_GetNumForName: SWITCHES not found!"
The code that prints this message is in w_wad.c:
int W_GetNumForName(char *name)
{
int i;
i = W_CheckNumForName(name);
if (i == -1)
I_Error("W_GetNumForName: %s not found!", name);
return i;
}
I'm sorry. But the list of "potential benefits" don't sell it. It is a cute program, but it isn't useful to all but a few.
Do all the processes look the same? Or do they have different sprites for different processes. init could be the head on a spike from the end of doom2, netscape would be a large mozilla monster. Demons for things like inetd and crond.
The number of hit points could be based on memory footprint. Processes that use more CPU could be more active, moving faster and shooting more. Multithreaded processes could be clusters of similar guys, or maybe one monster with those tracking fireballs floating around them. You could even look at activity on open file descriptors, have them shoot every time they send a packet out over the network for instance. Processes comminicating over a pipe would be trading rockets with each other for example.
>For Windows NT there is remote process control, but I don't know if there's an implementation on Linux.. Must check into it. Then you could, at least partially, kill NT processes remotely.. if BO2K doesnt already do that, someone's probably working on a plugin for it.
...up in a row....god I laughed for 3 minutes...anyone else get it? mattz
even when i try to kill it- it will not die!!!
Just imagine what this is going to be like when someone attaches it to back orifice... remotely dancing around inside a network shutting down processes and machines at random. It's only a matter of time.
--
RumorsDaily
Download Here
Joe.
to "zombie process".
... my quota's full so autosave stopped working, and someone kills xemacs after an all night coding session. "XEmacs was fragged by [31337 Cl4nn3r]"
this patch could conceivably be very dangerous. what if someone compromises root and gets a hold of a BFG ? or if someone took a chainsaw to your shell session. i'm getting queasy already.
they should send kill messages to owners of the killed processes. i could see it now
The real question here is what are they "researching" down there at the University if New Mexico?
Hotnutz.com
Okay, you asked for it, here it goes :) - last night I quickly hacked together a patch for the process.patched xdoom so that if you are root, it displays users instead of processes. If you wound a user, all her/his processes get reniced. If you kill a user, boom go her/his processes - *evil grin*.
Get the patch at http://ultracool.net/xdoom-userfun.patc h.gz. Apply it after you patched xdoom with xdoom-process.patch, in the same way. This includes my pnames patch btw, so don't apply it over that one if you have that (this also means that user/process-names are displayed in addition to the uid/pids).
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Wouldn't Quake be a better choice? Low on resources, runs w/o use of Mesa, and skinnable so you can ID by a floating number or by the armor skin. Say, anything that's a penquin is a kernel program you don't want to mess with...
Yeah, it can be done.
---
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com." The purpose of that site was not known. -- MSNBC 10-26-1999 on MS crack
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
I will post updates to the Doom project on the web page. I'll include new links and developments as well as responses to frequently asked questions.
DennisHmm, sysadmins "playing" each other thru the backbone...
The only drawback is needing a gamespy type program to find the games, um, systems....
See http://www.ece.utexas.edu/~litt/work.html. So I was bored.
A neat idea would be to build a file manager out of the doom source; each room would be a directory (tastefully decorated according to its use), with corridors connecting them as per the directory tree. All the files would be things lying around and you could implement other equipment besides guns to operate on them. Processes would show up as monsters in their working directory. Their using files would of course also be represented by them using the file objects.
/usr/bin and waking it up), give the file to it, and the contents will scroll across its belly (think teletubbies here).
No more 'mv' -- just pick that file up, walk to another room and drop it there! You want to read a text file? Just invoke the 'ls' monster (possibly by walking down to
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Now all we need is a client/server type setup, and a we'll be one big step closer to Neal STephenson's Metaverse.
http://www.yeraze.com http://www.vizworld.com
What I'd really like to see is not process management, but USER management. When some sniviler gets out of line, it's time to go sniping!
Brings a whole new meaning to:
"What's your user name again? *Clickity-click*"
--
Does narcissism count as a hobby? --Shawn Latimer
One interesting idea this leads to is the adoption of Doom as the basis for a 3-D visulaization interface for network and system management.
.WAD files represtenting network maps, zonefiles, LDAP directories, SNMP agents and so forth, and using a modified Doom interface to select and perform actions on objects.
.WAD design back in the day, but surely there are tools out there for turning architectural floorplans into .WADs, too.
Imagine extending things like Ganymede, Scotty and relational asset databases to auto-generate
I never got into
The big issues would be (1) the one-map-at-a-time design of Doom, which would make it hard to toggle between physical and logical views of networks, and (2) the fixed-target UI of Doom, which is good for the game, less good for this. Marathon, with its mouse-positioned gunsight, may not have been as good a game, but it would have made a bettern WAN visualization tool out of the box.
One time working on an O2 I accidentally kill -9'd the XWindow manager process instead of the errant Render process that had gotten bogged down. :)
That made my TA's day mighty interesting
All the more reason to look VERY carfully before you shoot yer processes!
PpoE
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Okay, now here's what we have to do...
:-)
:-)
Come up with a map structure to allow visualization of your network by the room layout (this would rock)..
Make the maps be dynamic, so that when other machines come on the network, other rooms can be added for those machines (this is probably the most important thing to do)..
Make important processes unkillable.. make processes that probably shouldn't be killed fight back harder..
Processes that die naturally should wink out of existance rather than dying.. Don't want to end up with bodies lying all over the place for no good reason..
Is there a way to kill a process remotely short of using ssh or something similar? No big deal if not. You could use something to the effect of when you open the door (that has the machine name written on it), it ssh's to that machine in order to give you process control or gives you "ACCESS DENIED" and shoots at you a few times if you don't have access...
Also, machines running windows would be represented by empty rooms with the Bill Gates Head in the middle (sort of like Romero's Head in Doom2).. Kill the head and the windows machine crashes..
For Windows NT there is remote process control, but I don't know if there's an implementation on Linux.. Must check into it. Then you could, at least partially, kill NT processes remotely..
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Well, if it were the Doom2 engine I suppose the Archvile could do it!
It might be, but not in the semi-paranoid manner you meant (e.g. runaway processes fighting back).
One of those predicitions for the future from a couple weeks ago included a revolutionary 3D user interface on Linux. This could potentially be the start of it. I'm not entirely sure that's what the creator of this little hack intended - he could have just intended to make something cool and not been thinking about the implications for the future.
Admittedly, Doom is a technologically dated engine, but this is where it'll start. Who knows, in 5-10 years, we might all be reminiscing about "that antique 2.5D 'kill -9' interface", all the while working in more realistic and fully realized 3D interfaces.
one question: Where do I put doom-1.8.wad?
I've downloaded the whole mess, and installed,
but xdlaunch can't find the IWAD.
Coolness...now I am trying to figure out how I can represent the objects in some of our apps in a virtual enviroment like this. Would be much more fun for the opertors then the field entry screens...hmmm interesting...need to change the state of a component blast it with this gun, change it back hit it with this gun...nothing new or revelutionary but this engine will surely make it easier for me to experiment with these ideas.
If you like doom processes, you might want to check out lavaps . It provides a somewhat more peaceful way to visualize processes, including how much memory and CPU they consume. (Just recently posted to freshmeat.)
This is way too funny.
Someone you trust is one of us.
You sir need to stop watching wargames and get back to work.. :)
someone make this for IRC, so when you shoot someone, it kickbans them from the channel. how amazing would that be. :)
Except the doom patch! Grrrr... fellow nerds, let me in!
Think of the possibilities! Cyberwar with actual blood and gore!
What I'd like to see is Quake (or Half-Life!) TF where you protect your processes from other guys trying to kill them. Yes, killing processes will actually kill the corresponding process on the host box.
Capturing the other guy's flag automatically makes his box reboot...
In any case, I'm downloading the patch. 8)
-W-
Is it all journey, or is there landfall?
--Ellison & van Vogt, 'The Human Operators'
This is the funniest thing to come down the pipe in a while. I esp. love the idea of different user access, with lower levels having lower (or no) weapon strengths. And the funniest part? "This work was funded by the National Science Foundation (without their knowledge) through a BIO Research Training Group in Ecological Complexity (NSF 9553623)."
I used to dismiss the idea of a navigable/immersive cyberspace as a workable metaphor as naive, but I'm beginning to think that Gibson et al were really on to something.
I can imagine encapsulating a wide number of functions into this sort of interface; if, ultimately, every aspect of a system, and the data that they host, is made accessible or inaccessible using these sort of metaphors, the Gibsonian vision of cyberspace might be viable.
(One of my favorite Gibson quotes is this reality check: "Cyberspace is where they keep your money.")
It was only a couple weeks after I dismissed the idea of 'virtual spaces' as hokum among my friends that I really started getting into multiplayer Quake - and even looking for friends on servers.
We'll all have a little egg on our face if the "Hollywood O.S." turns out to have a grain of prophetic truth to it, no?
Quite a few years ago I worked with an ISP that maintained most of it's admin information(non-server stuff) through BBS software.. we would each log into a terminal and spend the next half hour or so killing each others admin accts, changing passwds, creating new accounts to battle the others with, and so on..
_ _____________
I see this as a potential extension of that good ol' game.. could play something like a varient of Capture the General, where each player tries his damndest to protect his csh monster, while trying to kill the shell of every other player..or perhaps defending your network, attempting to take out the machines of the opposing network.. imagine that, your csh dies and POOF, you're gone..slide your chair over and jump onto the other machine before he hits that as well...
_______________________________________________
--
driph
As previously mentioned, I find the idea of processes killing one another somewhat unuseful, I truly wonder whether he intended that, or simply couldn't figure out how to change the monster AI code.
I'm also not sure how he represents how many resources the current process is taking.. He did mention a roomful of processes indicating a busy machine... but how do you know which one to shoot?
A proposed solution to both of these problems would be to have monsters only renice one another when they bump into each other, and have the amount of resources a process is taking being represented by that monster running around more quickly... Of course that also has the side effect of making harder to kill... =) But oh so much more rewarding..
kyle.
"101010 the simplest answer."
It doesn't seem to work here, the original xdoom src compiles and runs fine, but the patched version seems to segfault right after I pick th ee level I want to go to. Anyone gotten this to work?
Interesting possibilities:
:)
;-)
* Interface improvements: perhaps add a '?' command that identifies what you're aiming at.
* Changing it so you represent your current shell, or perhaps the Doom process itself... (or, alternately, Deathmatch -- and you've got to protect your own processes as well.
* Think _Doom II_. What happens with Arch-viles, and the cubes that spawn monsters?
* Perhaps different rooms could represent different priorities, or alternately UIDs. With the latter, keys can be used to limit power (lock the doors).
* Cyberdaemons with 10x rate-of-fire (and invisible rockets!) and hit points might be able to seek-and-destroy unauthorized processes on their own.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
This is a gas and brightned my day, but there are some other altercations that could be made for more fun.
/proc (processes) we moved out to /. or /home? Then we could easily create a monster for every file in the directory (or object, i.e. file/folder/link,etc.). Mapping DOOM actions out we would get some fun results
/usr/bin/X11/xterm from going into /home/httpd/cgi-bin/, etc.
(I haven't looked at the patch code so I don't know how this is implemented, so I am taking guesses in the meantime)
What if rather than viewing what is in
Hit points would be equivelent to the file size in K. Thus, you may need team help to kill off those leftover Oracle datafiles or real nasty core files.
Folders would be rooms. Files are monsters that originate in the rooms. Symbolic links would be mapped as teleporters. For extra bonus/worry let the file structure change if the monsters wander into the next room. You will have to heard the sheep, so to speak, to keep
As in the origional, map important files to bigger creatures. EX: make the "last boss" of DOOM mapped to vmlinux.
The only downside to this is that small files will eventually succumb to large ones (like core). But this is ok, because if you leave for a day your employer will realise just how much administration the system needs...
........
The point tweaks can be pointless once you have the tools to map an event in DOOM with a command line script. It's the initial work that is what is to be really commended. Thank you
- Sig
I would like to suggest that people consider these obvious improvements:
1. a list of process types that determines "monster type." For example "init" would be a Revenent while "ls" would be a zombie. Anything not in the list would be a zombie. Of course there is the confusion in that any process can become a "zombie" which leads me to another suggestion:
2. perhaps the Doom "pantheon", if you will, is not the most appropriate. Procs can be divided up between Kernal, daemons, shell and other processes. Obviously Kernal processes ought to be God Like or perhaps even Boss Monsters! Daemons are self obvious. Shells, well, obviously should be something fairly big as they launch a lot of other procs. I consider XWindows just a big fancy shell. Hmmm, a modified Beholder (or whatever the hell they called that beast), Instead of flaming skulls it would spit out other procs. Lowly things like "ls", "cat" should be harmless, easy to kill things. One should be open to using different monsters and models. I am sure one could find much to work with delving into "Little Gods" or "Hitchhiker's Guide" or "Poke'mon".
3. Friendly Fire on the behalf of the processes should be on a toggle. If you want the processes to determine how to rebalance the system you can toggle it on. Hopefully the kernal won't be too unlucky!
4. You should be in direct control of your XDoom process (i.e. that is YOU) and your immediate parent should not be visible to you or your bullets. This will prevent you from killing your own shell & GUI with the tool.
5. The weapon should be commesurate with the level of kill. Kill -1 = Pistol. Kill -9 = BFG. I am not sure we will want to continue to use the Area of Effect of things like the rocket launcher and BFG and Shotgun varients. Normally a Kill is only worked on one process at a time. Perhaps this is also a toggle.
6. Instead of Doom lets get them to give us the code to Daikatana and have a version of that ready to ship at the same time as the game (hopefully sooner than later). I'd much rather cut off the head of a process than just shoot it at range. There is more honor in that.
Imagine... a shot to the head is a -9, body shots are a SIGTERM, and if the selected weapon is your bare hands, well that's just a SIGHUP :-)
Andrew
Network architecture: Imagine being able to navigate your network as in all those Gibsonian worlds... In a Doom environment, no less. A room is a particular server, and doors are gateways. You get that moving skyline when you're about to go on the Internet.
"It's a UNIX system! I know this!!!"
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
This is actually a good point.
Imagine someeon somehow manages to write a virus / trojan which somehow infects this.
Suddenly a rogue process turns up, and it's invulnerable, and proceeds to randomly assasinate processes, and all you can do is sit there and watch it happen.
my application doeth still not work.
it dies a most horrible death
cries in the corner... "I want segfault to be becuase of my
Please
bain
Sanity is a majority vote.
Dunno....
Do not read this
I'm not sure if wounding processes or letting them kill each other is such a good idea, but this model does appear to have some interesting and potentially useful applications-- especially for large distributed systems (Beowulf clusters, etc.) or systems that are very dynamic (by dynamic, I essentially mean networks that have boxes entering and leaving the network regularly). For instance, let's say we have the latter situation and we've used our DoomUI (DUI? *grin*)to construct some sort of level (probably some sort of large central room with a bunch of corridors branching off of it) with a series of doors, one for each host. Then, when a host is online and open, the door that corresponds to the host will open for users allowing them to enter, use the resources (Consider the amusing image of marching distributed Beowulf processes into a compute node at gunpoint (or cattleprod or whatever)!) and then leave. (Continuing on the Beowulf vein, a queuing system could manifest itself as an entity in the main room and direct processes to the appropriate compute node, or if you had a Globus type of thing going on you could ship processes between nodes by marching them over-- this would, of course, require some good agent-style technology). Also, on multi-admin systems you could easily tell if another administrator was using a particular node if, say, you needed to reboot it or even the current user population for that matter.
:-)
At any rate, at least its entertaining
I would love to see a boss walk into a room where the sysadmin are using this. The conversation would be too funny.
I wonder what movies we'll see this in the future.
But seriously, can you extend this paradigm into all aspects of system administration? E.g. setting up cron jobs, new users, installing software, etc. If so I might just make the move from programmer to sysadm.
Hm. While i think it sounds kind of neat, in the article he mentions his csh getting killed by friendly fire from possibly tcsh.... What happens if you move this to Quake2 with scripted bots? And you get a csh that just doesn't feel like dying and camps out killing everything that walks in the door--including you! the admin! What if they start learning stuff--I mean the bot isn't _really_ the csh, it is just an inworld avatar for the csh and actually has no link with the csh process.
Hey--what happens when the process kills the admin anyways?
I think it'd be more useful if the interface was more like either Myst or some other non-combat oriented FP game. Where you can manipulate stuff around--like taking errant processes off the merry-go-round and putting them on the workbench to see what's wrong with them. Or maybe putting up a few dry eraser boards for processes to talk to each other. A big screen like the big board in the war room in Dr. Strangelove to show memory allocation. You get to see what other admins are doing just by watching their avatars.
My point being that the number of times I kill stuff vs. the number of other things I do tells me that Doom isn't really the interface to go with.
/will
Will this be a Bonobo component?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Now that is seriously cool.
Doesn't this remind anyone of Tron - one guy in the movie is an accounting program, for crying out loud, and he gets "killed". And when the main computer chooses to defend it's main processes from being scrapped, it beefs up it's security program (the scene at the end with the computer-lieutenant getting really huge). I'm surprised no one else has noticed this yet!
init: the boss at the end of the level, like the thing that kept spawing new monsters at the end of doom2.
other users processes in sectioned off areas?
Is netscape one of the tomato headed things that spit fire?
support gun control: take guns from cops
:)
Use Quake or Quake II; then for the command prompt you have the console.
If this werks in god mode, I am gonna kick some ass. (i don't have very good hand to eye coordination, and I would hate for rc.fw to burn me up, and log it!)
as soon as I get home I am going to start up some vmware sessions running windows NT, and BFG them into oblivion!!!!
I wonder what the windows monster would look like? Oh yeah... it would be a 50-ton blob called bad code that eats nothing but RAM. He also loses his balance and crashes onto the floor alot. He has to reboot to get back up and that takes a while. He is a very easy target
http://www.iinet.net.au/~bofh/
I think it has most of them. Do it, do it now!
InThane
Bash started to attack me! I was forced to kill it!
I guess that's what happens when you use that OpenSource stuff, huh?
Linux Myth: Bash, even though it sounds painful, is actually very safe.
Truth: Bash processes attack you when you don't expect it.
This message is copyright 1999 by Microsoft Corp. and paid for by Microsoft Corp. However, the research was conducted independantly by the Gartner Group.
I've downloaded all the files you need and put them up at
ftp://foof.org/pub
--
Ian Peters
Now, if this doesn't show how Open Source benefits, or at least unleashes pure creativity and imagination, then NOTHING will. You da man!
"We apologize for the inconvenience."
(Off-topic)
An anonymous coward writes:
Since moderating moderators (censoring) becomes an infinite recursion, I figure the best solution is what we do in today's modern free society: - Don't censor anyone or anything.
Arrrgh. The Slashdot method I believe is the best possible for moderating. -> No comments are deleted, not even those "LINUX SUX LINUX SUX" posts. If you don't agree with moderation, just set your threshhold at -1 and let the moderators do their jobs without being harrassed. If you disagree with moderation, just wait for that post to come around on M2. If you can't do that, then e-mail Rob or something. Just let the moderators do their job.
~jawad, who gave up his moderation on this story to reply to this.
i dont display scores, and my threshhold is -1. post accordingly.
Discuss
I think the games and "serious tools" have finally come full circle.
A much older gcc used to spawn nethack when it saw a programming construct that the authors didn't like. Now Doom spawns kill(1)/signal(2) when its users see a drooling, belching, fire-breathing construct that *they* don't like...
Ah, the great circle of life.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I got a similar idea in my head last March after being on a field trip with an SGI tech guy. After seeing him scroll through the various video demos they had using SGI Portalis, I nearly freaked. Using a Quake or DOOM interface to starting applications or viewing pictures would be GREAT!
Spirilis
the real at&t mix
But will I be able to dodge their bullets?
And what is that cute process in red dress?
-- ATTENTION: do not read this sig. It doesn't say much.