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Doom as a tool for system administration (1999)

cs.unm.edu

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Re: Doom as a tool for system administration (1999)

#5
The paper got accepted at CHI 2001, but never would make it today. It's a nice summary of what made CHI so great in the past, and how tedious it has become.

(For the paper to make it into CHI 2015, it'd probably need a part where the author surveys 50 people and asks them inane questions such as "on a scale from 1 to 5, how likely are you to use the software for your sysadmin needs", and then measures+plots mean time for each operation on the command line vs Doom, and ends with a 3 year timeline of proposed enhancements for the software that will require additional NSF funding)

Re: Doom as a tool for system administration (1999)

#6

One of the issues with this user interface was that you were going to kill the Doom process itself, eventually :-)

> 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.

Re: Doom as a tool for system administration (1999)

#8

One of the issues with this user interface was that you were going to kill the Doom process itself, eventually :-)

The solution to that problem is simple. Map the Doom process to doomguy. If you die, the process ends! :) You could even add a bit of code that sends a message to the head sysadmin so if a newbie keeps attacking a big nasty and dying as a result, the sysadmin would know to step over and tell the newbie to chill out.

This also raises an existential conundrum. If the sysadmin has god mode, what happens if they shoot init with a BFG? Kidding of course, but it is fun to imagine an invincible process stepping heroically through the ensuing wreckage of a kernel panic :D

Re: Doom as a tool for system administration (1999)

#10
post #7

Brilliant idea. With the Unix file systems, that show about everything of a computer, it should be possible to create a game, where the whole world is generated by that informations :D

This is a neat game that portrays that exact concept. It isn't really your system, but the idea is that the in game objects are supposed to visually represent data in a fictional system, and your job is to fix the corrupted bits to progress.

http://www.brokendimension.com/

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