Latest By
Category:
Armor
Artificial
Intelligence
Biology
Clothing
Communication
Computers
Culture
Data Storage
Displays
Engineering
Entertainment
Food
Input Devices
Lifestyle
Living Space
Manufacturing
Material
Media
Medical
Miscellaneous
Robotics
Security
Space Tech
Spacecraft
Surveillance
Transportation
Travel
Vehicle
Virtual
Person
Warfare
Weapon
Work
"I'm a farm boy. It's very interesting; you can detect self-starting characteristics in this society and they are strongest among people who have had some kind of rural upbringing and a very impressionable stage."
- Frank Herbert
 |
| 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. |
| 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.
Comment/Join this discussion (BACK ON!) ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This |
Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Earth
More Ideas
and Technology by David Brin
Tech news articles related to Earth
Tech news articles related to works by David Brin
| Fujitsu Touchscreen Mixes Real And Virtual Worlds |
| Nanowire Memristor Networks Form 'Brains' |
| US Census Will Be Online In 2020 |
| Wireless Brain-Computer Interface |
Want to Contribute an
Item?
It's easy:
Get the name of the item, a
quote, the book's name and the author's name, and Add
it here.
| <Previous | Next> |
|
|
|
Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
|
'The legs are long, curled way up to deliver power, like a cheetah's.'
'It rested among green parklands and... stood in total isolation, a glittering block of whites and flashing windows dotted with colors.'
'George Walt's corporate existence proved the workability of wholly mechanical organs...'
'This was the center of Interplanetary Communications.'
'... the Scarab [flying robot] buzzed into the great workroom as any intruding insect might...'
'When he had first built them, they had been crude indeed, flying mechanisms with little more than a reflex-response unit.'
