
xkcd - Network - nickb
http://xkcd.com/350/
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rms
xkcd continues to impress me with its immense cleverness. I saw Randall Monroe
speak at CMU a couple weeks ago.

First, I was surprised that he was 23. I assumed he was older. I also assumed
that the deep romanticism of some of xkcd's comics meant that he was in a
serious relationship of some kind -- he isn't, and implied that he always has
trouble with girls.

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koolmoe
"I also assumed that the deep romanticism of some of xkcd's comics meant that
he was in a serious relationship of some kind"

Funny, I assumed the opposite. A lot of his comics about relationships
resonate with the self image I had before I married.

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tocomment
I'm really tempted to try creating this. It really would make a cool
"aquarium" if you could figure out a way to visualize it.

~~~
brk
Well, the buncha windows instances running under a RAMd-up VMWARE server is
pretty easy to cover (if a bit costly).

You'd probably want to run a couple of different versions of virus and spyware
checkers (for variety) on the various Windows machines (not being much a
Windows guy, I couldn't make any great suggestions here, but Norton, McAfee,
etc come to mind).

The next part would be some sort of client to report back to a monitoring
server the infection status of each box. You'd have to come up with a scale to
determine level of infection, and (ideally) how the infection got there. From
that point, you display everything on an NMS system of sorts. His graphic
reminded me a lot of the OpenView screens we used to watch back in the late
90's, mostly for the randomness of the machine layouts and the interconnected
lines.

After that, it's just a matter of how/where you display the NMS screen.

Could this whole thing be hosted in something like the Amazon S3 environment,
allowing for many people to view the screen remotely?

~~~
idea
> After that, it's just a matter of how/where you display the NMS screen.

The most appropriate device would be Microsoft's Big Ass Table.
(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY>)

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kajecounterhack
Yeah xkcd is just too funny. I love his physics jokes, cause it just so
happens I'm learning physics atm and they make sense.

My favorite is his comic about naming his kid

Robert'); DROP TABLE STUDENTS; --

lmao. I'm so naming my kid

Timmy'); Drop Table *; --

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maurycy
I wish I can filter the xkcd. :(

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albertcardona
Some researchers have implemented in software toy ecosystems which eventually
developed viruses and parasites and prey-predator cycles and what not. The
very first one, by the way, was implemented in Lisp (cited and commented upon
in the book "Complexity" by Roger Lewin.)

Now doing it with Windows machines adds a sarcastic/sadistic tone to the whole
thing.

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noahlt
Do you have any online references for this virus-ecosystem? A name, at least?

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jonp
Not sure if it's the one albertcardona was referring to; but this sounds like
Thomas Ray's Tierra simulator. Details at
<http://www.nis.atr.jp/~ray/pubs/tierra/tierrahtml.html>

From his abstract: "Digital organisms have been synthesized based on a
computer metaphor of organic life in which CPU time is the 'energy' resource
and memory is the 'material' resource. Memory is organized into informational
'genetic' patterns that exploit CPU time for self-replication. Mutation
generates new forms, and evolution proceeds by natural selection as different
'genotypes' compete for CPU time and memory space. In addition, new genotypes
appear which exploit other 'creatures' for informational or energetic
resources."

