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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.
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.
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
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."
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
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.