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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)

#61

Post by csixty4 »

GuiA wrote: post #59
syllogism wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What But this is valueless. It's a stupid idea, for obvious reasons. Okay it's sort of fun, but if a researcher wants to have fun, they should do it on their own time, or apply for funding from an arts council or something. Why should a taxpayer pay for this? Why should we want a conference to publish it?

1) please read the paper that was published ( http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html - the Discussion section is the meat of it) and don't base yourself solely on the webpage And then 2) please enlighten me as to the "obvious reasons" that make it a stupid idea, as I don't find them obvious at all.

It should also be considered in the context of its time. CPU clocks finally ran at hundreds of megahertz. Primitive GPUs made their way down to consumer hardware. There was literally a new dimension of computer interaction to explore. We were VR crazy in the mid-to late 90s.

Aside from games, researchers were exploring all sorts of uses for this new tech. Consider this a "low brow" version of the 3D IRIX file browser that appeared in Jurassic Park, and you didn't need a professional workstation to run it.

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

#62

Post by lifelongUU »

moron4hire wrote: post #25

I remember when this first came out. I was just about to start college. There was a sense at the time that anything related to Linux system administration was black magic, doubly so for anything involving game programming. So this was certainly only talked about in hushed whispers and euphemism.

I was actually a grad student at unm with Dennis Chao. Guy was bright, creative and knew how to tell a good joke. Interesting to see this still on the inter-tubes.

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

#63

Post by syllogism »

GuiA wrote: post #59
syllogism wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What But this is valueless. It's a stupid idea, for obvious reasons. Okay it's sort of fun, but if a researcher wants to have fun, they should do it on their own time, or apply for funding from an arts council or something. Why should a taxpayer pay for this? Why should we want a conference to publish it?

1) please read the paper that was published ( http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html - the Discussion section is the meat of it) and don't base yourself solely on the webpage And then 2) please enlighten me as to the "obvious reasons" that make it a stupid idea, as I don't find them obvious at all.

First of all, this assumes that it was someone's job to sit there watching top all day, manually intervening and killing processes. That's ridiculous. Sometimes a sysadmin needs to kill a process --- fine, they look at the load, often know something about who's running what and why, and make a decision. This takes less than a minute. When would they ever load this stupid GUI?

What's more, any information that you can encode into the GUI representation could easily be operationalised into fixed policies, instead. The reason you need a human to do these things is because there are aspects to the decision that can't be represented in this way --- whose job it is, what their deadline is, whether that job is running within its expected parameters or outside of them, etc.

So, all this sort of interface can do is get in the way --- it makes it harder for the sysadmin to dig more deeply, and find out what they need to know.

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