Doom as a tool for system administration (1999) • Hacker News Board

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

#11

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Thu, Jan 08, 2015, 5:36 PM UTC

k__ wrote: 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

IIRC there was a graphical file manager on some systems like this, famously featured in Jurassic Park ("This is a UNIX system! I know this!")

Also, not quite the same, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus:_The_Game

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

#12

Post by larrydag » Thu, Jan 08, 2015, 5:41 PM UTC

I've thought about this before in context to Mechanical Turk. The theory is that you could put a game UI on top with a Mechanical Turk project in the background. Its much more fun to play the game interface then to do a monotonous job.

If anyone is interested in this idea let me know. I'm not a game developer but would enjoy working on this MT idea.

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

#13

Post by lsjroberts » Thu, Jan 08, 2015, 5:43 PM UTC

larrydag wrote: post #12

I've thought about this before in context to Mechanical Turk. The theory is that you could put a game UI on top with a Mechanical Turk project in the background. Its much more fun to play the game interface then to do a monotonous job. If anyone is interested in this idea let me know. I'm not a game developer but would enjoy working on this MT idea.

Well there's the folding protein game which along those lines - http://fold.it/portal/

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

#14

Post by chrisfarms » Thu, Jan 08, 2015, 5:44 PM UTC

UNIX groups could be handled by KeyCards, with the nice weird additional feature of User1 being able to let User2 into an area usually outside their permissions.

But really... idqd ... now bring on pid 1!

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

#15

Post by Rooster61 » Thu, Jan 08, 2015, 5:52 PM UTC

It would be fun to set off a forkbomb with a small sleep call in a system and watch it cause pandemonium. Shoot a couple of the rabbits so that they start infighting, and then watch the system slowly eat itself as legitimate processes enter the fray :)

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

#16

Post by ChrisArchitect » Thu, Jan 08, 2015, 5:56 PM UTC

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #11

k__ wrote: 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

IIRC there was a graphical file manager on some systems like this, famously featured in Jurassic Park ("This is a UNIX system! I know this!") Also, not quite the same, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus:_The_Game

http://jpos.jurassicpark.sk/

http://www.jurassicsystems.com/

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

#17

Post by kappaloris » Thu, Jan 08, 2015, 5:56 PM UTC

"In a cyberspace environment, the players are not omnipotent, so performing large actions takes time and effort."

Well... try to glue these operations on a OOT rom and wait for people to reverse bottle adventure your system.

http://www.zeldaspeedruns.com/oot/ba/reverse-bottle-adventur...

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

#18

Post by xrstf » Thu, Jan 08, 2015, 6:00 PM UTC

kappaloris wrote: post #17

"In a cyberspace environment, the players are not omnipotent, so performing large actions takes time and effort." Well... try to glue these operations on a OOT rom and wait for people to reverse bottle adventure your system. http://www.zeldaspeedruns.com/oot/ba/reverse-bottle-adventur...

Linux systems should boot with "-norba -noww" as kernel arguments ;-)

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

#19

Post by rhema » Thu, Jan 08, 2015, 6:02 PM UTC

GuiA wrote: post #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…

A modern version would make it to alt.chi. People present alt.chi papers (usually very though provoking) at the conference.

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

#20

Post by TrainedMonkey » Thu, Jan 08, 2015, 6:07 PM UTC

I think any real world environment in which this would be feasible would be served better by other tools. This is because in order to render a process that needs to be killed a system needs to know that it is a bad process. But if you know how to simply identify bad processes you would just write a script to kill it, which is widely done now.

What you are doing at best is converting textual information into visual one, I can't really see a way to do that without drastically increasing complexity of representation.