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"There's a poetry in the materials we use to construct our world of artifacts; it speaks of our long history as a technological species."
- William Gibson
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| Vivisector | ||
| A program that takes another computer program apart, while it's running, to see what it does. |
| Vivisector was an object program she'd borrowed from Tony just the other day... a tasty little routine going the rounds among young hackers that disassembled other programs and put them back together again without leaving a trace - even while those programs were running. Carefully, Clair sicked Vivisector on her mother's watchdog. Soon its guts were laid out across her inspection screen. |
| Technovelgy from Earth,
by David Brin. Published by Bantam in 1990 Additional resources -
|
Are there tools like this in existence now? It is somewhat similar to a decompiler, which seeks to reverse the process by which human-readable code is translated into machine-executable code.
This sounds to me like something I would like. I'd like to know every program that is running on my computer, and what it is actually doing, in graphically clear terms. I know there are utilities that will tell you what applications are running and how much processor time they use, but I don't think they are quite Vivisector.
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'He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain.'
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'The robant and the tiny old woman entered the control room slowly...'
'Guy named Otto Octavius winds up with eight limbs... What are the odds?'
'It is as you thought when you constructed the time crystal, my master Vaylan.'
'This was their world, their planet — this swift-traveling, yet seemingly moveless vessel.'
